Mark Bell's Power Project - EP 267 - Dr. Ken Berry Author of Lies My Doctor Told Me

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Dr. Ken Berry is a family physician out of Camden, TN which is listed as the unhealthiest county in the unhealthiest state in the USA. Dr. Berry is known for using the ketogenic diet to help patients live happy and healthier lives. Dr. Berry is the author of the book, “Lies My Doctor Told Me”, which centers around much of the misinformation well-meaning doctors give to their patients. Dr. Berry is the host of his own YouTube channel, KenDBerryMD, where he brings together credible research and common sense to discuss nutrition and health. Subscribe to the Podcast on all platforms: ➢https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

I think something that's really cool about Quest Nutrition is that it just started out as an idea and it started out with Ron Penna's wife making some protein bars for some people in their office when Ron had a job in a tech business. Everybody in the office actually really liked him a lot and then it just kind of took off from there and the rest is kind of history. But when they came out with their protein powder a few years ago, I thought it was brilliant that they made it and they designed it specifically so that you can cook with it. So yeah, you can mix it up in a shake and have a good protein shake,

but now you can bake with it and you can make cookies and brownies and all kinds of cool things. So I think that's a pretty interesting side of it. I can't wait for my girlfriend to give that a shot because she loves to bake and I have no skill baking, so it's going to be good. I don't know how to bake either. It's like complex. It's a lot of measuring right? I don't know anything about any of that.

Andrew what do you got over there buddy? If you guys want to get your hands on some of these awesome flavored proteins you know get all crazy in the kitchen make up your own little thingamajig. What can I call it? Concoction. Make your own concoctions. Head over to questnutrition.com. Enter promo code Mark's Quest at checkout to receive 20% off

everything at questnutrition.com. All right. So Mark, how lean did you get in your bodybuilding show? I got as lean as I could. I was trying to be lean and tender. Not all of us can be tall, dark and handsome. Some of us can be. You can tan. But did you eat a lot of lean meat when you were getting ready for show? I did. And you don't want to know what else is lean and tender? What? Piedmontese beef. Tell me more. You better believe that. You know, the Piedmontese beef, what I think separates it out from a lot of the other companies is the fact that they somehow have the meat taste really tender and still have a lot of the other companies is the fact that they somehow have the meat taste really tender and still have a lot of flavor. But it's the fat reduction is amazing. It's unbelievable

how much less fat is in the Piedmontese beef versus some of the other companies. You look at their ribeye, right? Their USDA prime ribeye is normally 30 grams of fat. Piedmontese is 10. Saturated fat normally 14.5. Piedmontese is 4.5. They literally cut it in, what, it's a third of the amount of fat? Yeah, are these cows jacked and tan or what? Yeah, and the protein's more. Like it usually has 24 grams of protein in Piedmontese,

and your normal USD prime has 19. That, I literally don't understand how these crazy scientists make this happen. Are these natty cows? I think these are natty cows from Nebraska, which makes sense because everything's bigger and better in Nebraska. Or maybe that's Texas. I think that's Texas. But Nebraska too, I guess. Andrew, where can they find out more about Piedmontese beef?

All right. You guys can get lean just like Mark Bell and head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com. Enter the promo code POWERPROJECT. E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com. Enter the promo code POWERPROJECT. That's all one word for 25% off your order, along with free two-day shipping on all orders of $99 and above. All right.

So, yo, Mark, how'd you hear about these Perfect Keto Bars? Well, I've been stuffing them in my face. That's one way I've been hearing about them. Yay. You know, I've been in contact with the Perfect Keto Company for a little while. They make some really good products. They have some good ketone products. And actually, probably maybe like over a year ago, I tried one of their ketone products, and it didn't taste that good.

But the good news is they updated and created new flavors, and they did a better job the second time around. They didn't give up, and they made a better job the second time around. They didn't give up and they made a much better tasting ketone product. But these bars, even right off the get-go, the bars were perfect. You know, they made a really good bar. They made a bar that's not going to, you know, knock you out of ketosis, which is kind of hard to find. A lot of the bars have sugar or they have a lot of, you know, hidden junk in them that can knock you out of ketosis. These bars have a good amount of fat in them. So they give you some good energy. And on top of that, they taste good. I've been kind of addicted. I got to admit to the chocolate chip cookie dough. Yeah. That's your favorite. That's my favorite one. About second

one. I like the salted caramels pretty good, but one of them has macadamia nut in it, and I don't know which one that is, but that one's really good. And they made a new one. They made a cinnamon roll one, and that one's really good. That sounds good. Yeah, you guys got to try it. Andrew would be eating the crap out of those cinnamon roll ones, I know. I know for sure.

That sounds good. So if anybody wants to check out any of the bars from perfect keto, you can head over to perfect keto.com slash power project and use promo code power project. All one word for 15% off all perfect keto products. Yeah. Great to have you on the show today. Appreciate you coming on.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot for having me, Mark. Tell Chris, I said, Hey, what's up? I will for sure. Eat some meat. That's right. Uh, you know, it'd be great to dive in on, on, um, on the topic of, of meat because when I make posts, you know, I, I primarily do a carnivorous diet. I still eat. Um, I still eat some vegetables here and there. And obviously, just like most

people, I go off my diet here and there and I'll eat ice cream or something like that on occasion. But for the most part, I eat meat and I eat eggs. But the question I get asked the most is always about cholesterol. Like, what about your cholesterol? Aren't you concerned about your cholesterol? And what do you think are the main, like, perpetrators of not just cholesterol necessarily, but maybe, you know, in causing elevated cholesterol levels that are alarming people? And then also, like, you know, is cholesterol, having cholesterol

skewed, is that even, like, a bad thing? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Sure. So, in, when I first started practicing almost 20 years ago, if your total cholesterol was elevated, then that concerned a doctor greatly that you were at increased risk of heart attack and stroke. And so we would tell you things like, you know, stop eating so much saturated fat, jog, eat more whole grains and fruits, and take a statin like Zocor, Lipitor, Crestor. But as time has gone on, more and more research has come out. And so basically, if anyone listening, if your doctor is worried that your total cholesterol is high and that that is a risk factor for heart attack and stroke, then your doctor is at least 10 years behind in his or her reading. Total cholesterol has not been a, elevated total cholesterol has not been a

marker of concern in many years. And so don't worry about your total cholesterol, whether it's normal, whether it's high. I might worry about it really low, but I don't care what your total cholesterol is. And no informed healthcare provider should care about your total cholesterol. Now, LDL is a little bit different animal. Low density lipoprotein cholesterol still worries many doctors and obviously still worries the American cardiology, you know, gurus. But there's more and more emerging research coming out every day and also suppressed research and research from huge studies that just wasn't published because it really didn't toe the party line back then, that LDL is also either not a marker of elevated cardiac risk or is a very minor marker. And so if you have your cholesterol,

your lipid panel numbers, we could definitely go over one by one. But I'm much more concerned as a primary care provider what your glucose metabolism is and what your insulin metabolism is and what your markersin levels are because all the research is pointing to the fact that it's all about being hyperinsulinemic, being hyperglycemic, and being inflamed. Those are actually the things that cause the damage to the arteries in your heart and in your brain that lead to the buildup. And so basically, your body's using cholesterol as kind of spackle. So when the inflammation and when the chronic elevations of all these markers causes damage to your artery, your body then uses cholesterol kind of spackle to try to patch over the damage in that artery. And so we really shouldn't be looking at cholesterol as the marker because it's really not. Cholesterol is just your body's attempt to heal the damage that was done by the chronically elevated blood sugar, serum insulin, and inflammation. That makes a lot of sense. Do you think that

it's mainly like sugar or overeating? What do you think is causing people's arteries to get clogged? is causing people's arteries to get clogged. Well, it's coming from eating a highly processed, nutrient-depleted diet. That's for the average person in Western society. That's the problem is you're eating lots of whole grains because you thought they were good for you because your doctor lied to you about that. You're eating lots of fruits, and you're eating lots of honey and agave nectar either because your doctor lied to you about that and told you that was healthy or you know your whatever health guru du jour that you happen to be following lately told you to stop eating sugar and start eating honey because it's got magical properties in it or start eating

a organic non-gmo agave nectar because that's a gift from the creator and there's no way that could hurt you. But in reality, what we really need to be focused on is what spikes your blood sugar because anything that does that, and an occasional spike, I don't think is probably a big deal. And we can get back to your ice cream binges in a minute if you want to. But I think that's ancestrally quite appropriate to occasionally have a glucose spike. But the problem is when people have daily glucose and insulin spikes, or when they have, you know, glucose and insulin spikes multiple times a day, that's what leads to all of the damage that we're talking about here. And then if you're eating things that the human body really isn't evolved to eat,

like grains, like sugar, like industrial seed oils, then you're going to be chronically inflamed. And in some people, that'll show up as gut symptoms. In some people, that'll show up as joint symptoms. In other people, it can actually show up as mental symptoms, like depression, anxiety, OCD, and things like that. You know, I think when people hear industrial seed oil, they might think like, what the heck's that? I don't even think I eat that. But it's in like 80% of our foods or something like that, isn't it?

Yeah, if you eat any processed food, and when I say processed food, basically any food that comes in a plastic bag or a cardboard box, it has industrial seed oil in it almost without exception. And so the industrial seed oils that I think are one of the most prominent poisons in modern society would include things like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, soybean oil. I don't know if I said that or not. And then canola. I think canola is probably the biggest one of all. But any oil that comes from a seed that has to be sent to a factory and chemicals and heat used to extract it

and then deodorants and detergent used to clean it up and make it so that it doesn't stink and that it doesn't have much of a taste. Those are industrial seed oils. Now you can get oil out of some fruit seeds like coconuts and avocados and olives. You can get oil from those pretty naturally. And we've been doing that for thousands of years, but no one ever got seed from a, I mean, oil from a cotton seed or a rape seed or even a sunflower seed until just really less than 100 years ago. And so there's no way that you can think that the human body has evolved to be able to use that as a real nutritional food within the last 50 years. It's just not possible. The human body does, however, know

exactly what to do with natural oils like tallow, beef, bacon grease, chicken suet, any kind of animal fat. We've been eating that for millions of years. So we know exactly what to do with that. What exactly, like just real quick, what problems are those vegetable oils actually causing? I don't know. Did we, that, like the issues that they're actually giving us? Yeah, I think our body doesn't really know what to do with them. And so you really wind up with two problems with them. All of the vegetable seed oils or industrial seed oils like canola, cotton seed oil, and people don't realize that Crisco and I can't believe it not, butter, margarine, vegetable shortening, all these things are artificially created in a factory. They call it vegetable oil, but there ain't no vegetables in there, right? It's oil that's

extracted from these seeds that are not oily by nature, and they did that because there's no saturated fat in them, and so back in the, you know, 60s, 70s, and 80s, we thought that's where good health was, was trying to avoid saturated fat. So I think the two problems you wind up with is you wind up with inflammation in the gut, which can then be translated to any different part of your body. But also we have to remember that every cell in our body has a cell membrane, right? Can't function without a good cell membrane. And so that cell membrane is made up of a phospholipid bilayer. And so it's got fat coming and going. It's actually

two molecules stuck tail to tail. That's what protects that cell from the outside environment. If you're not eating enough good saturated fat, getting enough cholesterol, then you're going to have improper fats become a part of that cell membrane, which leads to cell either malfunction or dysfunction or just lack of function. And so you basically got a crippled cell that's made of fats that we shouldn't be eating in the first place that our body doesn't even really know what to do with. But when you overload the body with these fats from these industrial seed oils then you get malformed cell member cell membranes this also happens in another very important cell organelle you guys might have heard of called

mitochondria mitochondria actually have two of these phospholipid bilayers it has an outer membrane and an inner membrane and i I mean, it's very common knowledge these days in people who are like trying to be the healthiest they can be, that mitochondrial health is huge. You have to have healthy, vibrant, vigorous mitochondria, or you're not going to have energy, you're not going to be able to build muscle. So if you're building your outer and inner mitochondrial membranes with the wrong kinds of fats, then you're going to have mitochondrial dysfunction. And it might be minor, it might be major, but you're going to have short-lived mitochondria and mitochondria that don't function at the optimal level. That's going to affect you in the gym and in every other part of your life.

that's going to affect you in the gym and in every other part of your life. And so with that, I think those are the two big things is the inflammation, because it's kind of a foreign product to our bodies. But then when your body goes like, okay, I got to build some outer membranes for all these mitochondria. I need some fat. And you're eating a very low saturated, low animal fat diet. Your body's forced to use these less than perfect fats to build those organelles with. And that's not a good thing in the long term, I don't think.

A great example of this is when somebody has been eating the standard American diet, full of these processed industrial seed oils, then they start eating keto or carnivore. Over the course of six to 12 months, one of the things that they'll notice, and thousands of people have told me this online, is that you can stay in the sun longer without getting a sunburn. And when you first hear that, you're like, what? That's nuts. There's no way that's true.

And when I was first starting keto, like I'm as white a boy as you can get, okay? I'm a redneck. I am as white a boy as you can get okay i'm a redneck i'm as white as a white guy and i could stay i literally used to say hey siri wake me up in seven minutes when we were at the beach and so i would have to flip after seven minutes i'm sorry i just woke up my tablet saying that uh but and so then after seven more minutes on the other side i had i was the guy sitting under the umbrella the rest of the day because I would not get a tan. I would burn. But after six, I don't know, six, nine months on keto, I noticed I could stay in the sun a lot longer.

And back then, before I really knew what was going on, I attributed it to all the colorful vegetables in my keto diet, the dark leafy greens, all the reds and yellows and purples. diet, the dark leafy greens, all the reds and yellows and purples. But then I've been carnivore for about 19 or 20 months. And I can stay in the sun now and tan better now than I have ever been able to in my life. And I'm not eating any of those colorful vegetables. So it can't be that. And so what we're basically left with is that my skin cells and the mitochondria in those skin cells are now made of the proper fats from what I consider to be the proper human diet that I'm now eating for me. I can stay in the sun four times longer, if not more, than I've ever been able to stay in the sun in my life. And I think that's just one example that medical science at some point, you know, where's the American Academy of Dermatology on this? They need to be investigating

this because this is a big deal. But I think that's just one example of many that I could talk about where when you build your cells with the proper fat and build your mitochondria with the proper fat in their phospholipid bilayer, everything works better and approaches optimal function. Yeah. And you can fix a lot of skin problems with going on a ketogenic style diet or carnivore diet. Sometimes I see somebody that's got some skin issues and I'm like, and I wish that person knew, like I wish, cause you can solve a lot of these issues. So I don't know at what point Mark, it's going to become not rude in a restaurant to just walk over to somebody's table and say, dude, I don't know you, but man,

let me tell you, you should try this out. I can tell you're suffering. You should try this out. Is that still considered rude? Right. And so basically, you know, with this knowledge that we're gathering of these industrial seed oils, it appears that they are just as bad as sugar, I guess you'd say, right? It's not always great to position things as good or bad, but in these cases we have enough evidence to where it's appearing that, like I always say with sugar, I don't have a problem, people wanting to eat some sugar and enjoy it here and there. But I'm on board with you.

Like we shouldn't be spiking our blood glucose levels all day long. And then sugar a lot of times brings in the opportunity of us overeating. And that's what these seed oils are doing as well. It's a big old fat mixture of it's a big old combination of things that make things really tasty. And then we end up, uh, overeating. Do you think in your opinion, if we simply just, if we, you know, maybe have some exercise, have some decent, healthy habits, if we just don't overeat, uh, how impactful is what we eat, uh, matter on the diet? how impactful is what we eat matter on the diet? I think what we eat matters 100%.

I really am trying to move away from the concepts of overeating or, you know, trying to stay in a calorie deficit because of the following. Anytime you say, oh, you got to stop overeating, of the following. Anytime you say, oh, you got to stop overeating, that's an immediate moral judgment on the person you said that to, right? You're calling them a glutton. You're calling them a sloth. I mean, you're literally accusing them of two of the seven cardinal sins. Immediately, emotions get involved, right? Now, how come we never have to go to Africa out on the savanna or the plain and tell lions, hey, you know, you wouldn't be such a fat ass if you just stop overeating. How come there are no fat lions? And you can't say, oh, well, it's because, you know, food's so scarce. No, there are hundreds of thousands of ruminant animals that they can choose from

every single day of their life. If they wanted to, they could definitely overeat. I don't think overeating is the problem. I don't think that's the underlying foundational problem. And I think that clouds the water when we talk about stuff like that. And so what I really try to focus on is telling people to eat the proper things and avoid the improper things. Because I think that just like our taste for salt, that's hardwired. You've got to have salt to function optimally. If you don't have salt, you'll die. So we crave salt. That's not a sign of weakness.

That's not a sign of gluttony. That's a sign that you need that. Now, we crave sugar and other things because we now have a diet that's completely improper when you look at the diet we ate 100,000 years ago. And so I don't think talking about overeating is really helpful for the average person who's obese or who's type 2 diabetic or has fatty liver. I think that just clouds the water and you kind of throw some judgment on them, which makes them immediately emotional and defensive. And so I truly think that when you start eating the proper human diet, whether that's keto or carnivore,

the overeating just kind of naturally goes away because you're not eating those addictive things. You're not eating those things that trigger your old addictive behavior. You're not eating things that have been literally formulated in a lab by food scientists to hit the sweet spot. It's kind of called the bliss point. And that's why Doritos or Lay's potato chips, they're proud of it. It's like, you can't just eat one. I dare you. And you can't because they've spent a million dollars paying food scientists to find the bliss point,

the perfect blend of salty, crunchy, a little bit of sweet thrown in there because they have sugar too. A lot of people don't know that. But when you start eating ribeye and liver and maybe some broccoli and Brussels sprouts, there's no food scientist has been paid a million dollars to make that get your bliss point. It's just real food. And so I've yet to meet anybody who gained weight and became obese eating ribeye and bacon and butter and liver. I've yet to meet that person. You know, Ken, I'm curious about this because like you, you've done keto and you got into great shape doing keto. Then you moved into carnivore and now you're feeling much better. What pushed you over the edge to go carnivore? And then secondly, you know, we do have a lot

of listeners and even myself, like I'm not like full keto or anything. I still have like carbs included in terms of his phone because his phone alarm, I still do have carbs included. I don't eat as many as I used to in the past. Like I used to be able to, I used to eat like, you know, 350, 400 grams a day. And because I exercised so much, right, I didn't get really, really fat. But even now, much less, I feel much better. So for the listener that does include carbohydrates in their diet and they do feel that they're in good health listening to this. Why do you think that they should consider that also? Well, if they're doing a vegetable heavy ketogenic diet and they're doing

great, they're losing fat, they're making gains in the gym, they feel great, they sleep great, you know, the sleep is great in the bedroom and everything else in the bedroom is great as well, then they should keep doing what they're doing. 100%. I think there are probably some people who a a vegetable heavy ketogenic diet with some fatty meat is the perfect diet for them at this point in their journey right so i started the carnivore diet 1920 21 months ago for no good reason whatsoever i i had i've got a pretty big facebook page and i thought you know i've seen this crazy Paul Saladino guy out there. And Sean Baker, he's nuts. I mean, eating meat.

And I thought, I don't know, it would be interesting to try it as an experiment. And so I issued a 30-day carnivore challenge on my Facebook page and said, hey, let's eat meat for a month and just see what happens. And so I'll just tell you a little bit of backstory. Back when I was eating standard American diet, paleo ancestral, I had severe heartburn every day. And I had a bustling medical practice. And every time the Nexium drug rep came with samples, the patients didn't get those. I got those. They went to my work cubby because I took two of those a day. I had severe heartburn every single day of my adult life. When I went keto, that got 80% better. Everything else got almost completely better, but that didn't go completely away. And I thought, well, you know,

I think I may have a little small hiatal hernia. I guess that's just, I'm just going to have that. And so I would take a Nexium maybe once a week, Tums here and there, but it was much, much better on keto. So here comes this carnivore challenge that I issued. At the end of that 30 days, I thought for a second, I thought, you know, I haven't had heartburn a single time this month. What the hell is that all about? Right? And I thought, and actually I'd lost four or five, more pounds than I had lost with keto. Felt good. I was doing, you know, I was trying to work out a little bit and I don't, don't hate me guys, but I just don't love to work out. I don't love it like you guys love it, you know? And so I'll do it because I know exercise is good for me, but it's not like something I'll look forward

to every day. But I noticed that I could lift a little heavier. And I'm like, very interesting. You know, I think I'll do this another month. And so I let everybody on my page off the hook, and they went back to their keto. I suspect some didn't because they had the same kind of benefits I did. So I did another month and the end of that month, still no heartburn. I'm like, and if anybody listening has ever had severe heartburn, it sucks ass. It is not good at all. I mean, I used to have the nurses hook me up to the EKG machine, convinced I was having a heart attack. It was just heartburn.

It was just reflux. And so that's why I decided I'm just going to stay carnivore until something goes wrong. And I'm checking my labs. I'm watching how I feel, how I sleep, my energy. And so I'm 20 months in, still feeling good, no heartburn. And yeah, that's why I became a carnivore. And until something changes, I don't see any reason for me to go back to lots of vegetables. And so for me personally, the proper human diet for me is just a fatty meat heavy carnivore diet.

And I do include liver I do include heart if I can get some brain I include that that's kind of hard to get but I think that's the proper diet for my DNA do you think that um just simply by eating more of the proper foods that you tend to eat less because you're getting more nutrients and just over a period of time you start to eat a lot less exactly right I think you you you and i don't even want to call it eating less i want to say you just don't overeat anymore because there are none of the old triggers there uh i still had a little bit of carbohydrate craving on keto and that's another thing carnivore completely cured i could care less it used to my go-to dessert if I was about to smash something stupid that I

shouldn't was hot fudge cake right I mean with that hot fudge on there and that ice cream and that cake holy crap right but literally now Chris if you set the best one in the world in front of me right now I'd be like nah have you seen the video of the dog when they're trying to feed him a piece of impossible burger and he's just like why are you putting that in my face i don't want that that's how i would be with that hot fudge cake now and so i think that you just stop getting any of the triggers to improperly overeat right so let's go back to that lion on the savannah. When he kills a 400-pound wildebeest, does he just eat a palm-sized portion of the lean part of that wildebeest and then leave the rest for the hyenas? No. He gorges on that, right?

And so what I tell people is do some intermittent fasting every day. And then for two to four hours a day, I want you to feast. I don't want you to eat a palm-sized portion of anything. you to feast. I don't want you to eat a palm-sized portion of anything. I want you to eat until you're comfortably stuffed, because I think for the length of time we've been on this planet as humans, that's what we did. When you found food, you ate until you were comfortably stuffed, and then you might not eat again until the next day or for several days. But I think overeating is an artificial concept that's come from us being fed unnatural, improper foods for the last hundred years. We are mammals, just like the lion and just like the antelope.

And I think we would have to try to become obese if we were eating the proper human diet. So I think it just removes all the triggers to overeat. And when you find the proper human diet for you, whether that's keto all the triggers to overeat. And when you find the proper human diet for you, whether that's keto or carnivore, you just stop overeating. And it's not going to happen overnight. It's just like if you were drinking a fifth of vodka a day, right? I mean, if you wean that down over three to six months, you would feel great at the end of that time. You just wouldn't have that addiction anymore. And you would know, I can't ever go back there. I can't ever eat that hot fudge cake again, or I'm going to be in trouble. I'm going to feel like crap. And I'll also probably be a carb addict

again. But I think when you find the proper human diet for you, all those triggers go away. In all the people that you've worked with over the years, you know, I think a lot of times people have a tendency to view someone who's heavy as being lazy. And I've been, I've been sharing this message with a lot of people. I'm like, look, I know a lot of people in my life that are heavy. Uh, these people have excessive amounts of body fat on their body, but they're not lazy. These are people that are, that go to work every day. They work really hard. They have a lot of great discipline, um, in, in other areas of their life.

It's just, when it comes to food, uh, food's really got a, got a good stranglehold of them on them. Where, where should someone, where should someone start? Um, because they do have some inner discipline, they got some inner drive and they obviously can start to make some changes. In your opinion, where would someone start? Because they're like, man, I got to ditch carbs? Are you kidding me? So first of all, you've got to come to terms with the fact that you're a carb addict. You've been improperly trained as a human about how to eat,

and you've also been misled by huge corporations who have billions of dollars of profit in the process here they have they don't care they want you to be obese because you'll eat more they want you to sit and watch TV and eat all day big food wants you to do that big farmer wants you to do that I don't think there's a conspiracy I just think that's where the profits are. Like you said earlier, you can make anything from a jelly donut to a pizza crust with sugar grains and industrial seed oils that have a shelf life of anywhere from one to seven years. It'll sit on the shelf forever. So you got profit coming if people are eating that

stuff. So when people realize, Hey, I'm a human animal and there is a proper diet for me and this stuff ain't part of it. So that's number one. Number two is you got to stop blaming yourself. You are not a glutton. You are not a sloth, right? I could take a wolf in the wild and I could get him addicted to crack cocaine if I put it in meat, right? Does that make him a – is he a morally bad wolf now that he's a crack addict? No, I tricked him.

He didn't know better. He thought it was just meat and he ate it. Now he's addicted to crack. That's what's happened to all the human animals on this planet. They've been tricked by big food into thinking that the food-like products that big food sells them is real food, but it's not. It's an addictive food-like product that they make billions of dollars off of. So first of all, stop blaming yourself.

You're not a glutton. You're not a sloth. You're an animal. And when you find the proper diet for the species of animal you are, all that crap's going to tend to go back to normal. And so for somebody who has no idea what keto or carnivore means, step one is stop eating all sugar in any form, whether processed or whether natural in fruits and honey and agave nectar.

Stop all the sugar. Now, if you're a carb addict, if you're a sugar addict, you're going to have withdrawal symptoms. That doesn't mean that going keto is bad for you. That means you're a carb addict, and you're going to have to to break that addiction and that's going to suck for three to 10 days. Anybody that stopped smoking or stopped drinking alcohol, you will be familiar with these withdrawal symptoms. They are the classic withdrawal symptoms from headache to insomnia to irritability to nausea to just feeling like crap in general. You got to break that addiction. The second step

is you got to stop all grains, whether it's wheat, oats, rice, corn, millet, quinoa, amaranth, rye. There is no grain that human beings have eaten for more than 15,000 years. And 15,000 years is just a blip of time compared to how long we've been on this planet. Grains are wonderful if you're trying not starve to death. They will keep you alive, right? They're also wonderful if you're an emperor and you've got thousands or millions of subjects that you need to feed as cheaply as possible. Grains rock. If you're a general in the army and you've got to feed a bunch of troops and keep them from dying until they get to battle, grains work great. But if you're an individual human who's trying to optimize your health and reclaim your health, grains are going to inflame you. And when you start to chew up a slice of whole grain,

non-GMO, organic stone ground brown bread, you have an enzyme in your mouth called amylase, which immediately starts to break that bread down into glucose and fructose, right? And the reality is that any carbohydrate you eat will break down ultimately into glucose and fructose. There is no exception to that. There's no argument can be made. That's settled science, as our vegan buddies like to say, right? But it is settled science. That's what happens to carbohydrates in the human body. We break them down to glucose and fructose. And so stop all grains. You don't need them.

There's nothing in them that you ever need to eat again. Step three is to stop all the industrial seed oils we talked about earlier. For the average guy walking the street who's overweight, got a belly, got some man boobs, and has no energy, the couch is the best-looking thing in the house to him, that guy's going to immediately start to feel better when he does those three steps. And then he can be watching my Keto 101 video series on my YouTube channel and learning the other ins and outs of keto while he's doing those three steps going through the carbohydrate withdrawal. I think that's how even the most

morbidly obese person who's the most metabolically ill, severe uncontrolled type two diabetes on insulin, that's the first three steps. You got to realize you're a human animal. Secondly, forgive yourself because it's not your fault. You've been tricked. And maybe your mama and maybe your wife were in on it, but they didn't mean to be. But they were because they were tricked as well. And then step one, two, and three, remove the sugar, remove the grains, remove the industrial seed oils. You know, Ken, when you say all of that, I know a lot of people listening are probably thinking, well, then how about my fiber? people listening are probably thinking, well, then how about like my fiber? Because you're, you're fed and you're, you see all the studies and how fiber is said to prevent all cause

mortality. Just eat some fiber and you'll, you'll die less early. How do you respond to that? So there's actually pretty substantial research that shows that fiber in your diet, if you have any kind of gut issue like irritable bowel, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, your symptoms get worse the more fiber you eat. So we'll call that evidence of article number one. Number two is that exclusively breastfed babies get zero fiber in their diet for sometimes two years, but they poop like a champ. Anybody who's ever had an exclusively breastfed baby in the house, you know, they shit like a

champion. So you don't need fiber to poop. You just don't. You don't need fiber for gut health. And so when we talk about colon cancer and fiber which is that kind of their last bastion of hope to try to get you to eat vegetables uh it's all observational data it's all based on the food frequency questionnaires that that i and a lot of my colleagues have been talking about for years it's just atrocious science if any other branch of science if engineering or genetics or even medicine if we use the same level of evidence that nutritional science currently uses we'd be fired or drum drummed out of business you it's just terrible science and so then then i would say the next article of evidence would be let's talk about carnivores who've been carnivore

for 20 months like me i have no problem in the in the restaurant's talk about carnivores who've been carnivore for 20 months like me. I have no problem in the, in the restaurant, right? There are carnivores who have been exclusively carnivore for 20 years. They, they haven't died. They look great. They look 10 years younger than their chronological age and they have no problem in the bathroom. So it's kind of dumb to say that you, and so first of all, if you still believe in fiber, then eat lots of leafy greens and bright colored vegetables that are full of fiber. You don't need grains to get fiber. Seems like a lot of disease would be eradicated if people just stopped eating carbohydrates. Yeah, a lot of diseases would be eradicated and a lot of fortunes would be lost.

Exactly right. When it comes to the carnivore diet, those that are against it and even those that are for it, like our boy Paul Saladino, everybody always talks about the charring the meat and grilling the meat and the carcinogens and the risks that are or the lack thereof risks, right, after reading your book. Is there any merit to some of those concerns? Perhaps, but probably not. And so let me start this by paraphrasing Carl Sagan. He said, if you come to me with an extraordinary claim, then you also need to have extraordinary evidence to back that up. That makes sense, right? And so I don't think anybody would argue the fact that human beings have been eating charred meat since we've

been in control of fire, since we first learned how to make a fire and learned that if you hold your meat on it over it, it smells good and it tastes a lot damn better than raw meat. We've been cooking our meat. And I don't know if any of you guys have ever tried to cook a hunk of meat over an open fire, but there's going to be some char. There's just no way around that. They didn't have aluminum foil back then. And they didn't have water baths and sous vide and all this other crap that people were trying to make money on. They just stuck it on a stick and held it over the fire. It's going to get charred. And so we've been eating charred meat since we've been a species on this planet at least 250,000 years. We've been doing that.

And so you've come to me with this extraordinary claim, oh, charred meat's bad for you. It'll cause cancer. You better have some damn good evidence to back that up since we've been doing it for a quarter of a million years, right? And so then let's look at that evidence. And again, they talk about specific compounds, PAH, acrylamides, you know, and all that stuff. Okay, yeah, it's in there. There's no doubt about it. It's also in toast if it gets brown. If you grow vegetables or cook vegetables, it's also in there. So what are we supposed to do? Just all eat boiled meat and boiled vegetables based on your half-assed evidence? No, I don't think so. I think we should do what our ancestors have been doing for a quarter of a million years and cook our meat over an open flame we love a little char on our meat, and I think that's completely ancestrally appropriate. And if you're going to come to me with the extraordinary claim that what we've been doing for a quarter of a million years is dangerous, then you better have some damn good evidence to back that up. What are ketones doing in our body? Just to kind of explain it for some people that maybe are unaware.

So there's a couple of schools of thought about this. Some people think that ketones are magical, that they do magical things in the human body. And a lot of people will say, well, glucose is our primary fuel source and ketones are kind of our backup fuel source. fuel source and ketones are kind of our backup fuel source. There's so much mud in the water and smoke in the air that I don't think we really know exactly what's going on here. I think that 50,000 years ago, if you just grabbed a random human and tested them, they would have been in ketosis for almost every single day of their life, actually. Maybe during the late summer and fall when the fruit and berries got ripe, they might be out of ketosis, burning what I would consider to be their secondary fuel source, which would be glucose. I think primarily we were made to burn ketones and fatty acids for fuel.

And so when you eat a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet, you're in this state called ketosis, which means your body's primarily burning ketones and fatty acids for fuel. And I think that's the way we were designed or evolved, and I think that's what we're supposed to do. In times of famine, when we have to eat plant matter, we can burn glucose, but I don't think that's optimally what we should be doing. And so all the benefits that accrue from a ketogenic diet that you guys have all experienced and everybody who's, you know, started an Instagram account just to tell the world about this magical keto diet, because it's changed their life. Those are the things that ketones do for you. Your brain functions better. I think ultimately when you're fat adapted, your muscles function better. Everything functions better from the gym to the boardroom to the bedroom. And I don't think that there's anything magical about the ketogenic

diet. I don't think it makes you, I think it makes you human again, right? And so that depressed, miserable, inflamed, fat-ass self-viewers that you either currently possess or used to possess, that's not what it means to be a human. What it means to be a human is to look like Mark Bell and think like I do and feel like Paul Saladino. I don't know if he ever sleeps, right? That's what normal humans are supposed to look like. The average guy walking the street right now is not a human, normal human. That is a depressed, drugged, addicted, miserable human. That's a sick human. That's not what we're supposed to be like.

What we're supposed to be like on an average daily basis is what the average person on a ketogenic diet is like. That's what we are as a species. And then I think probably the ultimate, the penultimate would be the carnivore diet. And some of these guys who are breaking records at 52 years of age, like Sean Baker does almost on a daily basis, makes me look bad. But I think that's, and so it's almost, I mean, I don't know, people need to understand we are the alpha species on this planet for a reason, not because we're sick, fat, depressed, gluttons and sloths, but because we're kind of like superhero material if you feed us correctly. diet, I do think they're magical because it does make things disappear. You know, it's, I mean, it can make type two diabetes disappear, which is like, you know, that's, that's a huge,

has a huge negative impact on our society. People are like losing limbs and stuff like that from being, you know, having type two diabetes. And then there's been a lot of strong links between type two diabetes and heart disease. So I a lot of strong links between type 2 diabetes and heart disease. So I actually do feel that these diets are magical, and I feel that they give us what we're really lacking, what we really need, and that's some control and some self-discipline. And then what you'll often hear on a ketogenic diet, when I've prescribed it to people, they'll say, you know what? I had, you know, two eggs in the morning and two slices of bacon. And they're like, my next meal was at like four o'clock.

And then they're like, I had a small dinner and I was good. And they do that repeatedly over and over again. They get themselves in this state where they're no longer consuming calories 12, 15, 16 times a day, which we do through all of our food and snacks and beverages. And to me, it ends up being, you know, a magical thing. There's been some evidence that's starting to point to ketones might perhaps fight against cancer. Like, what is your take on some of that? Yeah. And so if you're eating the proper human diet and you have what I consider to be a normal amount of ketones in your bloodstream, yeah, definitely that's going to suppress your risk of cancer. And so one of the big things I'm doing, Mark, I don't talk a lot about this, but I think you guys will understand this.

What I'm trying to do is shift the paradigm of Western society in total about food. That doesn't sound like a big deal at all. I could probably have that done by lunch. So when we call the keto diet magical, that creates room for products to be produced, right? That creates a false market. It's what what it does and that's why i'd much rather talk about the the the opposite way of saying that and we're talking about the same thing but we're just describing it with different terms so if i if i came to mark do you have a dog yep great okay if i started surreptitiously coming to your house and poisoning your dog every time your dog ate i'd put a little rat poison in his food.

Not enough to kill him, just a little bit. And your dog was sick and had the shits and just couldn't get around, just slept all day. You'd be like, I don't know, something's wrong with my dog. What if I'd been doing that the entire dog's life, right? Just keeping him sick all the time with just a touch of rat poison. And then you found out I was doing that, right? And you kicked my ass and had me arrested.

And then the dog stopped being poisoned. Looking at your dog from your perspective, the transformation in your dog would appear to be magical, wouldn't it? He would get healthy. He'd be running around. He'd be hiking his leg again instead of squatting. He'd be running around. He'd be hiking his leg again instead of squatting. He'd be sleeping a normal amount of time. He'd be humping the neighbor's dog. He'd be a normal dog again. But from your perspective, and maybe even from your dog's

perspective, you had done something magical. But in reality, all you'd done is just stop poisoning the damn dog. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. That's what we're all doing here together. We're all bumping around in the dark, trying to remove all the poisons that big food and big pharma are happy to serve us because they make billions of dollars. And when you stop poisoning the human animal with the slow poison that is the standard American diet, it looks like magic. Stuff that we thought was just a normal part of human existence like obesity, fatigue, insomnia, impotence, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, hypertension, early heart attack, early stroke, all that shit goes away

because you stopped poisoning the damn dog. You know, Dr. Ken, for people listening that don't know your background, in your book you talked about when you were younger, right? And you used to get away with eating a lot of stuff because you even mentioned your metabolism was better. First off, I know there are a lot of 20-somethings that are in that situation that they can eat a lot of stuff because they're not gaining weight. But you had a shift where you blew up to 300 pounds. Can you talk about that a little bit? And then also, can you explain what that shift is and why that happens? Because a lot of people, that is exactly what happens. 33, boom, they gain a bunch of weight. Yep. What happens to all of us without exception is we get more insulin resistant as we get older. Now, that's not pathology. That's not bad.

That's normal, and that's okay. If you're eating the proper human diet, then that doesn't have any negative health consequences on you, okay? But if you're eating the standard American diet, just the standard garbage, then as you get more and more insulin resistant, and some people that happens when they're 15 they're 15 some people it happens when they're 25 for me it was about 35 i had always been uh you know i'm six foot three and when i graduated high school i weighed 185

pounds i'm so and i was very slender i could never put on any muscle and uh you know i just that just was my metabolism at that time, because I think I was very insulin sensitive, I just couldn't gain weight, I couldn't put on any weight. About 35, that started to change. And so I was still eating the standard American diet, and I ballooned up to 297 pounds. My A1C was 6.1. I was pre diabetic. All my inflammatory markers are through the roof. I felt like crap every single day. And that happens to almost everyone at some point in their life. You become more insulin resistant. And the reason I know that insulin resistance is not necessarily a

pathological condition is because women, when they get pregnant, they become more insulin resistant. And it's because their body wants them to put on five or 10 pounds of fat to protect that pregnancy. In case there's a famine, you've got 10 pounds of fat you can live on and you can go ahead and bring that baby to term and deliver that baby. It is a protective mechanism. And so, you know, 50,000 years ago, when the danger of famine was very, very real, it was actually very beneficial for an older animal to become more insulin resistant. So you could put on two or three pounds of fat, because you know, it's the young bucks that's going to get the food and you'll get the scraps.

And so in order to live longer and become a useful grandfather or grandmother figure in the tribe, you had to become more insulin resistant. And I think it's just a natural evolutionary process. But if you're eating too many carbohydrates, then it turns into pathology. And that's what happened to me. And so I had to drastically cut my carbohydrate consumption. And currently, I eat less than five grams of total carbohydrates every single day of my life. of total carbohydrates every single day of my life. And I feel better now at 50 than I felt when I was 35. And if anybody can say that about Weight Watchers, I'd love to see you post it on your story because I don't think that happens

with other calorie restriction diets. But the keto and the carnivore diet can give you that statement. It can make you say, I feel better at this age than I felt a decade ago, and it's because I stopped poisoning myself. Yeah, for myself, you know, going on a ketogenic style diet has helped with, I used to have heartburn. I used to have edema, you know, just holding a lot of, holding a ton of water, um, sleep apnea. Um, you mentioned, uh, pre-diabetes,

my A1C was through the roof as well. Um, and it's just, it's helped with the sleep apnea as well. And I think, you know, helping with sleep, helping somebody just get better sleep, you know, is, is a huge, uh, is a huge step forward towards, uh, being healthier. What have you seen in terms of, uh, we talk quite a bit on this podcast about sleep. Uh, what have you seen in terms of, uh, maybe helping your own sleep coming down from being 300 pounds? Oh, absolutely. So as a carnivore now, first of all, I need, I feel like I need less sleep now, less total hours to function optimally and to have perfect energy. I don't need the eight hours of sleep that I used to need. I think we all need to try to get as much sleep as we need.

I think that's vital. But when I was inflamed and miserable, first of all, I snored like a grizzly bear when I was 297, right? Because when you fall asleep, all of the muscle control goes in your throat and your oral pharynx. And so all that tissue just falls back. So first of all, there's more tissue. Secondly, that tissue is inflamed because I used to have chronic allergies, chronic recurrence sinusitis and all that stuff. So all of my airways were always inflamed and then I was grossly overweight. And so I'm sure I had sleep apnea then, but I, you know, doctors are the worst patients. So I wasn't going to go have a sleep study, but now that I'm just, I'm two 35 right now at six foot three, I snore a little, which I think is normal, but I don't, I don't,

you know, like wake the neighbors up anymore. And I sleep much deeper and much more restfully than I've ever slept in my life. And yeah, I think eating the proper diet is hugely important for sleep. And then also watching any kind of stimulant like caffeine and nicotine around bedtime is also hugely important to get the deep levels of sleep that you need for your glymphatic system in your brain to kick in and clean your brain out and also for the rest of your body to just, you know, renew and rejuvenate. Do you take any supplements? Off and on, Mark. I'm terrible at remembering to do anything on a daily basis. When I think about it, I'll take, since I'm 50, I'll take some coenzyme Q10

because people who study this know that the coQ10 levels go down as you get older. Every now and then I'll take some vitamin D3 in olive oil. Every now and then I'll take some DHEA. I'll take some of that or some 7-keto DHEA because that also naturally goes down as you get older. And keep in mind, we know these things go down as we get older, but we don't know if they do or how much they do in a carnivore because all of that research was done on carbohydrate poison sick individuals.

And so we really don't know. And I think over the next decade or two, we'll be going back to the bench and starting over and saying, hey, let's find 100 carnivores and let's check their levels and see what that does. Because science doesn't know. We don't know what happens. I make sure I get plenty of salt because that's vital for human health. I get a little iodine every day. I use a little 2% Lugol's because that's huge for human health.

Magnesium and potassium, that's about it. I don't really take any other supplements and I don't think anybody else needs any other supplements. Why is iodine important? So when you say iodine, everybody thinks about thyroid and that's all they think about, right? But actually, every cell in your body, Mark, has a sodium iodide symporter, which means that it pushes sodium out so it can pull iodine in. That requires work. That requires an ATP or two. The human cells don't do any work unless it benefits a cell, right? That makes sense.

Cells are very efficient. So there's no reason your cell will be doing that unless it needs that iodine. So it's not just your thyroid. Every cell in your body has these sodium iodine simporters. You need iodine for every cell in your body to function optimally. Every gland in our body, from your thyroid to your pancreas to your testicles, concentrates iodine. Now, they wouldn't do that. Again, that requires ATP or energy to do.

They would not do that if it didn't somehow help that gland function better and indeed the mammary glands in women a lot of women have something called fibrocystic breast disease which would be quite painful when they start making sure they get enough iodine either from eating seafood in their diet or from using an iodine supplement the pain goes completely away and the lumps go completely away. Their breast tissue returns to normal. So there's actually some research that shows that levels of breast cancer probably decrease if you get enough iodine in your diet. And I just posted a video about breast cancer prevention on my YouTube channel. If anybody

wants to check that out, I go into a lot more detail. But yeah, absolutely. Iodine is vital for every cell to function optimally. And that's why I always, I don't eat a lot of seafood. I love it. I like it, but I don't love it. So I just use a little iodine supplement. I put a drop in my coffee every day. Going back to the thicker version of you, the 300 pound doctor, the common person would be listening to this thinking like, wow, if a doctor's 300 pounds and they want to lose weight, they can just go back to their education that they've received. And they're going to, out of all the people on the planet, they're going to be the ones that know what to do. When you did set out to try to lose some weight, what happened initially?

Yeah. And this is why I say, and this triggers a lot of healthcare providers, but I really don't care because they need to hear it. Do not take nutrition advice from a fat doctor. Don't. That's like taking car advice from a mechanic who, you know, has to take the bus to work because his car won't start. That's idiotic. Do not do that. Back when I was a fat doctor, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about when it came to human nutrition. And I'm happy to admit that now. And so you're right, exactly what I did. I went up in the attic and I found my nutrition notes. We had a nutrition class my second year of med school, I think it was one day a week for half a semester. That's how important they thought human nutrition was in my med school. was in my med school. And I got all my nutrition notes down in the textbook. And so the textbook was about half inch thick and all my notes were about a half inch thick. So that's it. So I got all that down and went through it again. And I can sum it up for you guys. It was three things. First of all, avoid all saturated fat. Secondly, eat more whole grains. And third, jog. That was

literally the totality of my nutrition education when it came to the care and feeding of a human being that was on the street now if you were in the icu or you'd been in a terrible house fire and had third degree burns they taught us very well how to calculate your fluid and nutrient needs while you were in the icu and i was having to feed you through an iv i could well they they taught us very well. But when it came to the feeding of a normal human being, right, somebody who just had a job and a dog and a spouse and just lived their life, that's the three things they taught us. Avoid saturated fat, eat lots of whole grain and jog. So I did that. I did that for two months and I gained 10 more pounds.

And that was my epiphany. Dude, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. That's the conversation I had in the mirror with myself. And I had to go back to the drawing board. And so I discovered Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint, Lauren Cordain's Paleo Diet, and Dr. Robert Atkins, the giant on whose shoulders we all stand, the Atkins Diet Revolution. I read those three books. I got Atkins' books. I got his book for 50 cents at a rummage sale and read it. And I thought, well, everything these guys are saying is exactly upside down and backwards, everything I've ever been taught. But I just applied everything I've been taught for two months and I got fatter and sicker. So obviously they may be right. And the other thing people may not realize is that doctors always suspect that

patients are being noncompliant. Right. And so if I had given a patient that advice, you got to cut out the bacon dude and you gotta, gotta eat whole grain multiple times a day and eat lots of fruits and vegetables and you got to jog every day. And then they had come back in two months and said, Dr.

Berry, I did what you said and I've gained 10 pounds. I would think they were full of shit. I'll be like, yeah, you're noncompliant. You did not do what I said. You sit on the couch and ate Cheetos. I know you did. That's what you did.

But I couldn't say that about me because I live with me. I knew what I had been doing. And that was the watershed moment when I said, either I'm a unique snowflake or I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. And that's the watershed moment when I said, either I'm a unique snowflake, or I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. And that's when I discovered eating high fat and low carbs, what Mark calls the magic of that was because what I was teaching people didn't work. I would tell you immediately, Mark, join Weight Watchers and join the gym. Eat less, burn more. Duh, it's simple, right? But when I applied that to me,

did not work at all. And it also doesn't work for millions of other people, but that's the advice they're getting from people they trust. You know, in your book and like, yeah, throughout the whole book, you talk about people need to like be their own advocates. They need to try and learn the stuff on their own. They need to look at the research, but you also talked about in the book, you know, there's been so much research done on red meat, that red meat causes cancer. And people will pull that up so much because there's so many papers on it. And then you address the healthy user bias. Now, a lot of listeners are going to go and look at research. And I want you to kind of help us explain what is the healthy user bias

and what do people need to look for? Because you could find a study that can tell you what you wanted to say to feed your own belief. How do we need to look at that? I just tweeted the other day that normal people shouldn't even know what a P-value or a relative risk ratio is. risk ratio is, but because of the shitty state of nutrition research right now, people have to know what that stuff is in order to know if this study I just pulled up about red meat or about whole grains actually means anything or not. People shouldn't have to do that, and people shouldn't even have to know the term healthy user bias, but we currently have to because nutrition research is so terrible. So healthy user bias is basically when we, if we're going to do a big observational nutritional

study and we get 100,000 people and we're going to give them a food frequency questionnaire that maybe has 30 or 100 questions on it, multiple choice questions like how many cups of ribs have you eaten in the last 12 months? First of all, it's a stupid question. Who can answer that, right? But that's actually one of the questions on Walter Willett's food frequency questionnaires. How many ribs have you eaten in the last whatever amount of time? So anybody who is trying to be healthy, they're going to be doing everything that they think is the method to get healthy. And so they're not going to be smoking. They're not going to be drinking too much alcohol.

They're going to be trying to stay very active. They're going to be trying to think about their sleep. And so if that person happens to be eating not as much red meat, right? Because they think that's not healthy. They've been taught that if they watch TV. Now we've got this other guy over here who don't give a damn about his health, right? He smokes, he drinks a six pack of beer a day while he's sitting in his recliner every waking minute of the day that he's not at work, right? He doesn't think about what he eats. When he eats that red meat, he also eats the bun and the supersized fries and drinks the root 44 Coke along with it. When you look at these two people, yeah, that guy eats more meat. And so if you just said, oh, there you go.

Look, he had a heart attack at 50. Red meat causes heart disease. That's the healthy user bias because this other guy over here who's starving himself and who's jogging and who's not smoking, not drinking, and he doesn't even own a recliner, he's going to look healthier because he's doing all these other healthy things. Could you imagine somebody being obese just eating meat? No, I don't think it's possible, and I would like to use your platform to issue a challenge to all of our vegan brothers and sisters out there whom I love, to all of the plant-based people out there, I defy you to do a one-month challenge. I want you

to eat as much beef, butter, bacon, and eggs as you can hold as many times a day as you can. I want you to document this, and I want you to be honest, and I want you to document this and I want you to be honest and I want you to prove me wrong because I don't think it's possible to become obese by eating just fatty meat. And I want you to use the fattiest cuts of meat you can find and try to, because you believe that eating saturated fat makes you fat. I want you to go out of your way to cook everything in butter and bacon grease. And I want you to prove me wrong. I want you to go out of your way to cook everything in butter and bacon grease. And I want you to prove me wrong. I want you to make yourself gain a substantial amount of fat, not weight, because you're actually going to put on some muscle naturally if you eat that diet.

Can't count that. I want to know what your body fat percentage is before and your body fat percentage is after, because what's going to happen is your body fat percentage is going to go down and your lean mass is going to go up. And you're welcome in advance for that, but it's going to prove your theory wrong. Yeah, it's like too satiating to overeat. You got too much protein and too much fat in it too. And then even after like three or four days, you know, how many times have you been out and had like a giant steak dinner?

Like I have a pretty good appetite, but the next day until like noon, you're like, I'm, this is like kind of before I knew anything about fasting and stuff like that. You'd have a big old steak dinner and the next day would go by and like, Oh,

I haven't really even eaten anything. It's because you don't feel like you need anything. And on top of that, when we start to put in the pieces of the puzzle, when we start to get in the pieces of the puzzle and we start to get in the nutrients that we need, then your body has less like wants and less cravings. Yeah, absolutely. That's 100% correct. The other night, Nisha and I were out on the town, the ketonist, Kim Howerton came into town and we all went to a meat house. I had a couple of gin

and sodas, which I don't drink much at all, but alcohol gives me the munchies. It's an appetite trigger for me, like I think it is for a lot of people. And so I had a rack of ribs. And then I also had a double hamburger with double bacon. That was my dinner because I hadn't eaten that day. So that was my feast, right? But then I had those two gin and sodas with a little drop of lime and that triggered my hunger and I'm like I'm freaking still hungry you guys hungry and they're like no and I like and so I ordered another rack of wreaths and I ate them and I ate them all true story right and so the next morning I got up and I thought man I bet I put on some pounds last night got on the scale and I was

a pound down from the day before and if and i know i know i know i know people out there going back to impossible there's no way that's physiologically possible first thought law thermodynamics and all that shit right i got you i hear you do my challenge prove me wrong please i actually wanted i want to do that challenge. Sounds wonderful. It sounds great. Exactly right. But what happens is, is your, your body's metabolism is, is in constant flux. Your body has no problem raising your body temp a half a degree or lowering it half a degree. And over the course of a 24 hour period, that's going to burn a ton of calories, right? And so when you, when you eat in within your proper human diet and you are fat adapted, I don't think you can gain weight by eating fatty meat. I just don't think it's possible,

but I'm happy to be proven wrong and I'm happy to learn. And I know that there are some diligent, earnest vegans out there who are going to take this challenge and prove me wrong with the 30 day fatty meat challenge. I made a post the other day about, I just posted like a hot dog and like, of course, everybody got inflammatory about the hot dog. What can you tell us about processed meats? Yeah. So once again, the research that processed meat is bad for you or will increase your risk of cancer is crap research. It's all based on the observational data and the food frequency questionnaires, and it has the healthy user bias built in. Also, all the researchers who worked on those research projects believed in a plant-based diet. These studies were not blinded, and so the

researchers' biases can go right into the research. And let me explain this a little bit. This does not mean that these researchers are bad people. It does not mean they're dishonest. It does not mean that there's conspiracy. This is human nature. If Mark and I did a research study and we were not blinded, we would be biased. That means good for you. And if we were not very careful to design our research study properly, our bias would almost unconsciously slip into the results of that research. That is human nature. That's why we invented the scientific method, which nutritional research does not honor or follow. Because of that, it's human nature. Even if you're a good researcher and you're honest as the day is long,

your bias is going to slip in. And so all the research about processed meat has healthy user Because of that, it's human nature. Even if you're a good researcher and you're honest as the day is long, your bias is going to slip in. And so all the research about processed meat has healthy user bias. It has food frequency questionnaire bullshit answers, and it has the bias of all these plant-based loving researchers built into it. It's all crap. It's meaningless, right? There's more nitrates in a stalk of celery than there is in a whole pack of hot dogs. So if it's nitrates, you can forget that.

If we start talking about all the other stuff that I talk about in that chapter of the book, there's more of that in other plants. A piece of toast has more, all that stuff. And so the research about processed meat is dumb. Now, I know there are a lot of purists out there in the carnivore community who will get triggered by this. They're like, no, by God, you have to eat $22 an ounce ribeye or you're going to hell and you're going to get cancer. No, I'm sorry. There is no research that backs that up. I think probably it's a little less bad if you eat grass-fed, grass-finished, panda-massaged beef.

That's probably a little better for you, maybe 5% better for you than eating the cheapest hot dogs you can get from China Mart. It's probably a little better. Yes, I totally agree. But is it worth $22 a pound? No. Not if you're broke as a joke like I used to be. Or not if you're one paycheck from the bill collector coming to knock on your door. Eat the best quality meat that you can afford.

And if that's those cheap red hot dogs that ain't kosher and ain't no telling what's in them, that's way the hell better than buying a family-sized bag of Doritos. Seems like the main thing here is just to not eat carbs and to avoid seed and vegetable oil. That's it. I mean, literally. It's pretty much that simple. It's not very sexy, and there's no products that you can make a million dollars off of, Mark. I'm sorry, but there's no market here for us.

Basically, just stop poisoning yourself. Stop eating crap. Eat things that we've eaten for at least 250,000 years. And magically, you'll get healthy and you'll lose the excess fat. And in addition, we might be able to be less depressed, might be able to get rid of things like ADHD. Absolutely. Maybe some, you know, some other types of diseases, right? Yeah, absolutely.

I'm working on a YouTube video right now about carnitine. You guys know, you guys love meat, so you know about carnitine. You get it from eating meat, but you also can manufacture it in your body. Looks like that up to 20% of kids with autism, boys with autism, have a defect in their carnitine manufacturing pathway. So they can't make it or they can't make it efficiently enough to get enough of it for their brain, which it's absolutely vital for proper brain function. So if you take that young baby boy who has this defect and you, you know, he's on formula for the first six months of his life and then you start to wean him off formula onto rice cereal and all this this bullshit garbage that we think

is baby food if it's got if it says the word gerber on it you can consider that baby poison not baby food okay it's not going to kill your baby today but it's a slow poison it's gonna it's gonna lead diabetes and obesity it's just going to you, so that, that little baby boy weans off plant-based formula onto plant-based solid foods, he's not getting any carnitine. And so about six to nine months of age, you start to notice your beautiful baby boy. He was very bright and alert. Stop making eye contact and stop doing this. Stop hitting his milestones. It looks like up to 20% of autism in boys may be from this carnitine pathway defect. And I'm working on a YouTube video about it right now, but that'd be huge. Wouldn't it? If we could,

if we could help 20% of the boys with autism and it's predominantly a male problem anyway, right? Like 95% males who have autism. What if we could just magically, as Mark said, make that autism spectrum just kind of go away? That'd be earth-shaking, wouldn't it? Or did we just stop poisoning that baby boy and give him the meat that he needed to fuel his brain? I don't know. It's a very complicated thing too, because with autistic children, it's so hard, or just in children in general, complicated thing too, because with autistic children, it's so hard or just in children in general, but then with autistic children and the parent, you know, feeling so bad, this child has

this disorder that their parents are, you know, trying to give them whatever will keep the kid happy. You know, they're trying to give mac and cheese and, you know, whatever, whatever will keep the kid satisfied. So that whole thing gets to be really, really difficult. But yeah, that would be amazing if we had more research in that field. And then we could say, hey, look, I know it's really, really hard to try to feed your child some steak instead of the mac and cheese, but we got to figure out a way to do this. Absolutely. And I'm sure you guys have seen the movie called The Magic Pill, but you can watch the the it's not even evolution it's just they stopped poisoning their sweet little girl she had severe autism right and couldn't even couldn't

hold a spoon couldn't speak two words together at the beginning of the movie and by the time they had gotten the the the cheez-its and the rich crackers and the goldfish crackers out of her mouth and actually put some real food by the end of the movie, she's holding a spoon and putting four or five, six words together. That's the kind of almost miraculous benefit that we can expect when we feed any human, the proper human diet. Now, if that, if that human is sick and, and very susceptible to the poison of the, of the standard American diet, then they're going to be sicker. And it's going to be more miraculous when you stop poisoning that child. But all of us are going to reap some kind of benefits when we eat the proper human diet. You know, on the subject of kids, since we're talking about that, there are a lot of parents listening, right? And you mentioned that as you

get older, insulin resistance increases, you know, in your 20s, 30s, whatever. Now for kids who can probably handle carbohydrates better than their adult counterparts, how should parents be thinking about their nutrition for their kids? Should they consider a carnivore kid or should they give their kids fruits, vegetables, no processed foods, et cetera? What should they think about there? Yeah. When we're younger, we can tolerate a lot more garbage. And so how many of you guys had a friend who could drink you under the table, who could drink a fifth of vodka and still show up to work and do a great job? They can tolerate, right?

There are people who are like that. There are kids who appear to be optimally healthy eating garbage. And I used to play basketball with a guy. He lived on Pepsi and Cheetos, and he could stomp my ass on the court. And I was trying my best to eat healthy. I didn't know how then, but I was trying. He wasn't even trying. He was living on Cheetos and kicking my ass on the court.

So there's that range of normal for kids. Now, do I think it's the end of the world to feed kids berries and some fruit? No, I think that's totally fine. They're much more capable of tolerating it than we are. But what we cannot deny is that human beings are facultative carnivores. We need fatty meat for optimal function. And that goes for your six month old, as well as it does for your six year old and your 16 year old. They may do fine on the diet they're eating, but what could they be doing if they were eating the proper human diet? You guys may not know, my wife Nisha is nine months pregnant, and she's been eating mainly keto through the entire pregnancy. And when little boy

Barry is born, he's going to be exclusively breastfed. And when he's five, six, seven months of age, when he starts reaching for food, the first foods that go in his mouth are going to be scrambled eggs and liver and meat. That's going to be his first food because I don't want him to develop autism at six to nine months of age. I want him to develop a beautiful, high IQ brain. And I want him to develop a body that, that will put white men can't jump back on the, the, the, the to watch list movies, right?

Because we can all do these magical things when we eat the proper human diet. And so, uh, yeah, you know, keto and pregnancy, a hundred percent safe. My wife's doing it right now.

Keto for, for babies, a hundred percent safe. My son's going to do it. Keto for toddlers, keto for adolescents, keto for teens. Yes,'s going to do it. Keto for toddlers, keto for adolescents, keto for teens. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It is the proper human diet for all human beings, regardless of age.

Somebody, you know, maybe listening right now has a child that's already, you know, several years old, maybe a teenager or maybe 10 years old or something like that. And they want to try to make some changes with their children. How have you handled that, you know, in having patients come to you and say, hey, like I'd love to incorporate this with my children. You know, they're getting a little heavier than they want to be or something like that. Yeah. So my main advice to parents is you love your kids. You want the best for them. But also you don't want to fight.

You don't want this to be a huge where you put your foot down and you made immediate. It doesn't have to be that way. Because remember, I just said, kids are much more metabolically resilient because they're much more insulin sensitive when they're younger. You don't have to do this change overnight. You can do this very slowly and very lovingly over three to six months. And so a great strategy is to when you go to the grocery, because I'm assuming your young child does not have car keys and does not have a credit card. They don't buy the groceries you do. So you're in charge of that. But that doesn't mean you need to be a keto Nazi and just say, that's it, by God, this is a keto house. There's never going to, no, don't do that. You don't have to do that. That's just going to make your family life less enjoyable. Every time you go to the grocery, forget one slow poison food and bring home some keto alternatives that you know your kid's going to like. So you'd be like, oh man, Jimmy, I forgot the Doritos, but I got you some blueberries.

Right? And if Jimmy ain't hungry, he can take his ass outside and play until he gets hungry. And when he gets hungry enough, you'll love those blueberries and boom, you just, you'll never buy the Doritos again. Every time you go forget some other stupid, slow poison food like product and buy more real keto or carnivore friendly foods.

And so over the course of six months, your kitchen can become a keto kitchen that every single member of your family eats, except maybe for your husband. He's all he knows how to eat is, you know, chicken strips and ketchup. I don't know what to tell you. He's a grown man. Uh, but, but for your kids, you can do this transition almost so enough that they don't even notice that you're doing it. You don't have to ever say, no, honey, that's not keto. You don't have to ever say, no, honey, that's too high in carbs.

You don't have to say those things. Just stop buying them slowly but surely. I like what you're saying there because I mentioned this before on the podcast. When people do have a child, they childproof their home. They cover up the electric sockets, and they might put like a little fence-type thing near the stairs so the kid can't climb or go down the stairs. And I think that this is what people need to do when it comes to obesity and it comes to some of these diseases. We need to, like, fat-proof our home. Yeah, and you don't yell at your kid when they go near the electrical outlet

because you're an electrical outlet Nazi. You don't smack their hand when they start to stick their finger in there because you're, you know, the electrical outlet police. You do that because you love them and you want to protect them. That's why you should also fill your kitchen with proper human diet foods. Not because you're the keto police, but you're some kind of fanatical keto cult member, but because you know that's the proper human diet and you love your kids and you want the best for them. Same exact logic applies.

What are the biggest lies that people are being told by their doctors? The biggest lies they're probably currently being told is that saturated fat is very, very bad for you to lead to heart disease or stroke. Whole wheat is very good for you. It'll protect you from diabetes. There are actually out there, people out there who say that whole wheat grains will lower your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Yeah, there's a little heart and there's all the information on the oatmeal boxes and everything. Yeah, and every older person in the world is eating that.

Yeah, it makes no sense whatsoever. But so then again, the healthy user bias comes into that because if somebody's eating whole grain bread, they're probably trying to be healthy in all these other ways. That doesn't prove anything. That just means you didn't do good research. Another great lie. And so everybody, when they say you should eat more fruits and vegetables, right? I don't know if that rolls off the tongue easier, but I mean, if you want to eat more vegetables, have at it. Be my guest. Paul Saladino might disagree, but they've been crossbred for the last hundred or 200 years to be these big sacks of sugar. That's what they are. There's no doubt about that.

If anybody out there, if you're a type two diabetic and you don't believe me, eat three bananas, wait an hour and check your blood sugar, see what it did. Then you'll never do that again. You'll learn. Same goes for my oatmeal challenge. If you think steel cut non-GMO oats is a good breakfast, check your blood sugar, eat a big bowl of those oats, and then check your blood sugar an hour later. You'll never touch oatmeal again because now you're woke. Now you heard the bell

ring. But so many doctors, so many endocrinologists who specialize in type 2 diabetes care will tell these poor type 2 diabetics, you should stop eating bacon and eggs, too much saturated fat, like somehow that's going to have an effect on your blood sugar. No. They'll say you should eat steel cut oats and a banana and some whole wheat toast and have a glass of orange juice and maybe a glass of skim milk. All you diabetics out there, check your blood sugar, eat that diet,

eat that breakfast, and then check your blood sugar an hour later. And then you'll look at you'll look around and go, what the hell's going on here? Is this a Twilight Zone episode? Why did that spike my blood sugar? This specialist, whose entire career is to help me with my type two diabetes told me to eat that diet. The dietician told me to eat that. The nutritionist said to eat that and it quadrupled my blood sugar. How's that make sense? You know, I'm curious about this because in your book, I didn't, I don't think I saw anything about fasting, but you've been talking about fasting for a while on this podcast and a lot of the videos I've seen of you in recent months, you've been mentioning the benefits of fasting. When did you start doing that? months, you've been mentioning the benefits of fasting. When did you start doing that?

What do you feel is the benefit? And then lastly, you know, we talked to a few guests on this podcast because both Mark and I fast. I love it. It changed my, the way I look at food and my appetite. But some people have been saying that fasting is detrimental to women. So can you, can you go in on that for us a little bit? Yeah, all the opinionated gurus out there who say that women need carbs or women shouldn't fast. So again, they're making an extraordinary claim. Because if we went back in time to our little tribe 50,000 years ago, if there wasn't any food around, I mean, was there a stash of goldfish crackers that the women ate if there was no food? Or did they fast along with everybody else? They fasted.

If they made a kill, they got specific organs that women need to eat. There was no carbs on that animal. So what did they do? They ate fatty meat. So, you know, it's, I don't know. I don't know if it's a get out of jail free card. Like, oh, I'm a woman. I need some carbs and I'm not being sexist here. I'm just saying that's what they say.

There are a lot of people in the hypothyroidism or Hashimoto's sphere of influence who will say you've got a carb cycle or carb up or have so many grams of carbs in your diet or your thyroid condition will get worse. Your thyroid condition will get worse. There is zero meaningful research that backs that up in any way. And again, when we go back in time and look at our ancestors, there were no carbs. So where did they get those? How come that gene didn't die out because they couldn't reproduce because there were no goldfish crackers for them to eat to carb up with? It's foolishness on its face. But what it does is it gives these gurus a space to make some money, but also it gives big food a chance to make,

you can make a hypothybar when you need to carb up every Monday or that, you know, one week out of the month, you can eat our hypothybar, it's full of carbs. There's, I mean, it's just human nature to try to make a buck off everything. And I don't, that's not evil. That's just who we are. We try to improve our lot in life, but there not evil. That's just who we are. We try to, we try to improve our lot in life, but there's no research to back any of that up. My wife has Hashimoto's and she was

eating the standard American diet when we met and I was experimenting with paleo and I'm like, you should try this. She tried it. Didn't get it. She didn't feel any better because our paleo diet was full of quinoa and sweet potatoes. Right. Then she went, and so she hates to admit I'm right. And so that's how we know this is scientifically valid. So she went, she finally tried keto for a month. And her Hashimoto's symptoms, it was like a light switch went on. When she cut the carbs and started eating a fatty meat heavy keto, she was like a different human.

And she's like, see, this is what I was telling you. I haven't always been this person because when she got her breast implants, that's when her Hashimoto's went nuts. And I had, I didn't meet her before then. So I didn't know her. And I would, I mean, we were having marital problems. Like you kind of suck. I don't know. You keep telling me you're this person, but then that's not what I'm seeing here. When she went keto and she went back to the old Nisha, how she used to feel and the energy she used to have and the gumption and the get up and go, she was that woman that she'd been telling me that she was. And I was like, there you are.

It's good to meet you because I didn't think you existed. I thought you were mythical, right? And so her Hashimoto's, not only did her symptoms get drastically better when she slashed her carbohydrate intake, her numbers got better. Her TPO antibodies and her TG antibodies both drastically decreased when she slashed the carbohydrates out of her diet. And so that is an N of one, but we've had hundreds of women and a few men reach out and say, Hey, I've got Hashimoto's and all these carb cycling and carb ups and eat so many carbs. They're full of shit because I have never felt better than when I'm eating under 20 grams a day of total carbs. How about fasting? Yeah. So the fasting, I kind of came to it naturally. It wasn't something I talked about a lot when I wrote the book. I mean, I knew that human beings had fasted forever. Back, you know, 50,000 years ago, you would call fasting starving

because you couldn't find no food. But now we actually call it a thing and we do it, you know, we choose to do it. And I think that it's very ancestrally appropriate. And I think that there are multiple physiological mechanisms that come into play that help improve your health when you fast, either daily, which is what I do typically. Every now and then I'll do a 72-hour fast, but usually I just don't eat for 20 to 22 hours every day, and then I'll feast during that two to four-hour window. When you do that, the rate of autophagy increases. And what that means is for people who don't know, your body has the ability to break down old cells or damaged cells. Remember those skin cells that were made with the wrong kind of fat that we talked about early? Your body can break those down and replace them with new

cells. But if you're eating constantly and keeping your blood sugar and your serum insulin levels chronically elevated, you don't have much autophagy going on other than just the baseline level. We always have autophagy going on 24-7. But if you want to increase the rate of that, then you fast. That's one of the ways to do it. One of the reasons that the ketogenic diet works so well is it is a fasting mimicking diet. And so all of the hormones go in the right direction, autophagy increases on keto. But then when you don't eat for hours or days, the rate of autophagy can really increase dramatically. And that's why a lot of people when they lose 150 pounds on keto, they don't have all

this redundant skin that they have to then go see the plastic surgeon to have chopped off. Like if you starve yourself with Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or Flexitarian or Biggest Loser Diet, you've got to go see the plastic surgeon and get all those flaps of tissue cut off. Like if you starve yourself with Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or Flexitarian or Biggest Loser Diet, you've got to go see the plastic surgeon and get all those flaps of tissue cut off. If you lose the weight with keto and fasting, you might have some redundant skin, but you're not going to have that apron of skin. That's what we call it, a pannus, right? That actually hangs down like an apron. You're just not going to have that because autophagy is going to be eating up those unnecessary skin cells and using the building blocks in other places. It also helps keep your glucose levels and your insulin levels at the low normal level. Your liver can make glucose if some of your cells need it, but you're never going to have a glucose spike when you're

fasting. That's another great benefit is it keeps your insulin and your glucose levels low normal, which is the, that is the optimal place for them to be. It also lowers your levels of inflammation because you're not eating anything that's inflammatory. You're not eating. And so the fasting is very, very powerful tool that anybody can use to help optimize their health, even over and above a ketogenic or a carnivore diet. What dietary carbohydrates are essential for people? None. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There is no such thing as an essential starch. There is no essential thing as a, what is it? What do they call it? Reverse starch?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Resistant starch. Yeah. Resistant starch, reverse starch yeah oh yeah resistant starch yeah resistant starch reverse starch all that's bullshit you don't need any of that if i if i kidnapped mark bell and locked him in my barn and fed him nothing but zero carb fatty meat for the rest of his life sounds great live to be a very a very old sl muscular man. Cause I got a weight set in there. Um, and he would, he would never develop any kind of deficient carbohydrate deficiency or vitamin or mineral deficiency for that matter. He would live to be very old and healthy. And when he broke out, he would totally kick my ass cause he's in great shape because he's eating the proper human diet. Have you done much like looking into in terms of like sunlight and people like getting outside more, et cetera?

Because, I mean, a lot of people spend most of their time indoor nowadays. And you were talking a lot about mitochondria. I want to know if you like mess with anything or see any links between the two. Oh, yeah. Sunlight is vital for human existence. Anytime something is preserved in all vertebrates, that means it's very, very important to life on this planet. Okay. Iodine is one of those. Every single vertebrate on the planet needs and uses iodine. Same goes for salt. Same goes for melatonin, right? Same goes

for vitamin D. All mammals, and I think all vertebrates manufacture vitamin D in some method. Chickens do with their feathers. Some animals do with their feet. And some animals, they lick their and when they preen, they get the vitamin D that they make from the sun. The sun is vital for human life. OK. And there's actually a chapter in the book about this to say that the sun, even though we've been playing in it naked for a million years, now it's bad for us. You've just brought me an extraordinary claim, haven't you? I hope you got some bad-ass evidence to back that up. Oh, wait, you don't. A lot of the research that was done in, in dermatology to show that

sunlight is bad or causes cancer was done on donated foreskins. Okay, and I actually talked about that in the book. So when all the little boys would get their circumcision, they would collect this dead tissue that came off the end of their penis, and then they would do in vitro experiments with ultraviolet light, and they would show, oh, look, this certain chemical went up in this dead tissue in a Petri dish. It's not even living human tissue anymore. But yet then they're going to say, oh, well, therefore the sun is dangerous. You should use SPF 200 and then also live in a cave and never go out in the sun because it will cause skin cancer. Even if it's just shining through a window, you should still use sunscreen.

That's some of that idiotic advice that you, I mean, the research is, oh, if you just read it, it's awful. It's terrible. It's embarrassing that doctors actually say that out loud based on that research. And I actually issue a challenge in the book. I say, I want you to send an email to the American Academy of Dermatology and say, I want you to send an email to the American Academy of Dermatology and say, show me the research. Send me a copy of the research. I want to read it myself. And I think if enough people do that, I actually put their email address in the book because I want people to say, show me all this research that proves that this sun that we've been in for millions of years is now bad for me. Show me how that happens.

It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, right? Right, exactly, right. And so have I proven that the sun doesn't cause cancer? No, I haven't, but it's not my place to prove that. I didn't make the extraordinary claim. All I'm saying is as humans have played naked in the sun for a million years, therefore it's probably healthy and natural and normal, right? That's common sense. And so if you're going to come at me and say, hey, your common sense is wrong, people will get

skin cancer and die if they play in the sun. Then I do a little bit of half-assed research and say, look, there you go. I proved it. No, that doesn't work that way. Not in science, not in the real world, not in the big picture. Not when we look at this. We go in the future 50 years and look back at the state of nutrition and dermatology research. People will laugh. People will use that as examples in medical school of how not to practice medicine 50 years from now. You feel like fasting was a natural progression for you

because you got on a keto diet and then did a carnivore diet. Maybe like us, we didn't really believe in fasting. We thought it was dumb for a while. Then we started eating more meat. Once we cut out junk, and this is really hard to explain to people, but once you cut out junk, you really crave the more valuable foods, the foods that are more valuable to our body. It's not hard at all. So I think sometimes people hear like an 18-hour fast or 20-hour fast and like, oh my God, there's no chance in hell that I could ever even try that, even just for a day. And they think it's so difficult, but it actually becomes very easy, right? Oh, it's very easy. And that's actually when I detected as a doctor that I didn't know a damn

thing about human nutrition. I was obviously reading just stacks of books trying to figure it out. And I was kind of morphing from paleo ancestral to keto. And I would just forget to eat. I would forget to eat breakfast. I'd be like, I'm busy. I'm working on this. And then I'd look up and it's 2 p.m. and I haven't eaten yet. So I kind of naturally fell into it. But about that same time, I read Dr. Jason Fung's excellent book about fasting. And then I was like, oh, so this is actually something people could do on purpose. It's not that keto helps me not have to eat every two hours. Actually, I want to not eat every two hours.

Ah, so that shifted my paradigm a little bit. I'm like, okay, so I should try to slowly increase my fasting window. And so when I was first eating keto, I'd probably fast 12 hours a day. And so, you know, for eight hours, I'm asleep. And then for two hours before and after bedtime, I wouldn't eat. But then I started saying, I'm going to try to go 16 hours, I'm going to try to go 18 hours. Then I did my first 24 hour fast after I'd read Dr. Fung's book. And it was like, Hey, I didn't die. And that was the first time in my entire life. And I'm not joking. I did say that because never in my existence on this planet had I went for more than four hours without eating. It had never occurred to me to do that. Right? It's like, why, why would I do

that? I don't understand. You know, people would fast for religious reasons. I'd be like, well, I'm never going to do that. But then I thought, wow, it's almost like it's a new thing. It's a new power I've got. I don't have to eat. If you, you know, if you, if you did something to me and I didn't eat for two days, first of all, I wouldn't die. And I didn't know that. Secondly, I might actually get stronger. I might actually get more mentally acute and be able to escape whatever it is you were trying to do to me at the 48 hour mark of not eating. I would actually be more aware and my senses would be heightened. And then it occurred to me that that's perfect. That makes perfect ancestral sense, doesn't it? Because, you know, if you fell in a hole or you didn't eat for three days,

you didn't get progressively weaker. You got progressively smarter and you got progressively more efficient because if you didn't, you're going to die in a week or two. And so I think that that we kind of developed that ability to fast, but then we forgot about it because big food was so busy showing us, you know, commercials of frosted plates and all this other crap. And, you know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And so we forgot about the power of fasting. Can you go, you know, because you've mentioned the ancestral aspect of the diet, you know, many times in this. aspect of the diet, you know, many times in this and many individuals on the other side of your, I guess, uh, debate here kind of say, Oh, you know, okay. Our ancestors did it. Does that mean, why is that so important? That doesn't mean that we need to do this. That doesn't mean we need to

do that. This, you know, we're developing this because we want to be more better than our ancestors. Right. So why, and how can you explain to individuals why this is so important? right so why and how can you explain to individuals why this is so important so two concepts here you need to understand first of all for the last about a hundred years as a species we have been in love we've been infatuated with technology and progress and and the new new is always better than the old crisco used to use that in their ads. You don't want to cook with lard like your grandmama did, do you? You want to cook on this new modern stove with this new modern stuff. And so big corporations have been able to use that infatuation with progress and modernity. They've been able to use that against us to make billions of dollars.

Now, I'm not anti-technology. I embrace technology. I'm talking to you on my iPhone 10, whatever the hell, almost the newest one. I love technology, but we cannot forget that we're animals. We are a specific species of animal. And so then that brings me to step two is let's talk about cats, felines. Felines are obligate carnivores. They have a diet that they've been eating for millions of years as felines on this planet. When you stop feeding them that diet, which they've evolved to eat and to thrive on, and you start feeding them a diet full of lots of grains and vegetables,

then if I'm right, they would start to develop disease, wouldn't they? They would stop being healthy, vigorous felines and they'd start to be fat diabetic felines where there's actually an epidemic of feline type two diabetes and obesity that veterinarians are trying to deal with right now. And they're doing everything in the world to try to figure out why cats are getting fat and diabetic. And it's because you're ignoring their species specific diet. There, I just read the other day, an article that said your cat can absolutely be vegan. You just have to make sure they eat. I'm not joking. It was a vegan veterinarian. And he's like, No, I formulated this specific Oh, look, you got a product yourself. Look at that. If you'll buy my cat food, they can eat this and they won't get fat and they

won't get diabetes. And so that's obviously ignorant, right? These, these felines are obligate carnivores. And so he adds taurine and carnitine to that or the cats would just die because they have to have those things or they'll die they can't make them theirself they have a broken pathway so but as soon as you start to feed that cat the proper cat diet again which is meat they immediately lose the weight and reverse their type 2 diabetes the same goes for us we we are modern alpha species on this planet we we went to the space and we're going to go to mars and we're going to do all this great stuff. Elon Musk is going to take us into the solar system. But we're still this primitive man.

Our DNA has not changed one iota in the last 100,000 years. We've developed the ability to tolerate some things. Like some people who are Caucasian can tolerate dairy better than some people who are African or Asian descent. But that doesn't mean it's good for us. That just means we can tolerate it and use it not to starve to death. But there's still a proper human diet for all of us. And it ain't the standard American diet. And so that's why I think we can be modern and we can have spaceships and iPhones and electric cars. That's great.

But at the same time, we have to remember we're just animals that stood up and lost our hair and put clothes on. We've got to eat the diet that's right for our species of animal or we will suffer to some degree. Along with that, I'm really curious about this. And I saw you in an interview, you talked about your 23andMe and how you said that you have 97 more percent Neanderthal DNA than a majority of the other customers, correct? Well, I have 99% less Neanderthal DNA than the rest of the customers. I have one variant, correct? Now, I'm curious about this because you mentioned that, for example, Asians and African-Americans, because of where they're based, don't handle dairy as well as other populations. Do you know

anything of there being any sort of difference between certain populations and how they handle certain foods or how they handle maybe carbohydrates better potentially or not? Do you know about that? Oh, absolutely. And so the question of whether human beings should eat meat, what did we 50,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago? That question's already been answered by anthropology. Okay. There's this thing called carbon and nitrogen isotope labeling. We can do this with the bones of a human who died an hour ago or 100,000 years ago,

and we can tell you very specifically and precisely what percentage of their diet was meat, what percentage of their diet was veg. Did they eat more seafood or did they eat more ruminants or did they eat? We can tell all that stuff. This is known in the anthropology community, but the problem with modern technology is that it sequesters all of us in our little sphere of expertise. And so no doctor ever reads anything about anthropology. So he doesn't know that. So a well-meaning doctor can recommend a plant-based diet, not understanding that that is the definition of ignorance because you don't know what's known in the anthropology community. So Neanderthals were hyper carnivores.

They actually ate more fatty meat than Arctic foxes. And we can tell by the nitrogen levels and the carbon levels in their bones. It's known. It's right there. And so not only did they eat lots of fatty meat, but they actually ate carnivores who ate meat. So they were hyper carnivores. They were the carnivores that ate carnivores. Human beings, if you go back in time, and so I was watching an anthropology lecture the other day, and the lady, who I guarantee is a plant-based diet person, her paradigm hasn't shifted yet. She said, now we we tested these bones.

And the nitrogen levels, we're sure that they ate plants. But the nitrogen levels in the bones are so high that it washed out the carbon. So we can't really tell. And it's like, whoa, what did you just say? Hold on. What you just said was, is they ate almost exclusively meat. That's what you just said. But her plant-based ideology wouldn't let her hear what she just said. Now, was she being dishonest?

No. She just believes what she believes, and she honestly believes that. But she said in front of this lecture hall that the carbon levels were so high that it washed out the nitrogen. So we can't really tell, or the opposite of that. The nitrogen levels were so high, we couldn't really get a reading on the carbon. That means that that human that she tested their bones was a carnivore. That's what that means. They didn't eat enough plants for it to even show up in the carbon in their bones. And so, I mean, it's, this is it. So if every doctor

out there who believes that the plant-based diet is the proper human diet for humans, just get an intro to anthropology textbook and read about carbon and nitrogen isotope labeling. And you'll know immediately you're wrong. You were earnest. You were sincere. You were well-meaning. But you were just wrong. Humans are built to eat lots of fatty meat, maybe a little veg. That's it. The end.

Is there enough meat for all of us if we all went carnivore? Oh, that's a very, very good question. And are we leaving a bad carbon footprint if we do so? Yeah. And so I love the quote from Dr. Peter Ballerstedt. He said that, you know, if you eat a diet that makes you healthier, then by definition, that makes our planet healthier as well. And I think that's a very, very powerful quote. Is there currently enough meat on the planet to feed all of us? No, because we're so busy monocropping millions of acres with soybean, with corn, with wheat, with oats, right?

Yeah, we've taken up all the pasture land to grow these monocrops. In the process, we're killing millions of animals to try to protect one or two animals, which is what most of us would eat in a year. You would eat two big cows in a year, but we're killing millions of tiny animals. I guess their soul doesn't matter as much as bigger animal souls. I'm not sure. But yeah, if you stopped all the monocropping and turned all that back into prairie land and pasture land,

I think there'd be, and then if you did animal husbandry right, like we used to do it, I think there'd be animals for all of us. Yeah. Awesome. It's great having you on the show today. We can probably talk about this forever because you're a wealth of knowledge, but hopefully we'll just get you on the podcast again and get some more of that great knowledge. Where can people find out more about you and where can people find out more about your book? So I have a little YouTube channel that I try to

put up a new video once a week. If you just go to YouTube and search Dr. Berry, I think you'll find me. I've got a little Facebook page I play around on. If you search Dr. Berry, I think you'll find me. I also got a Twitter. I got an Instagram. I got a Pharaoh.

I got a gab. I got a tick tock. Yeah, I'm on tick tock. I don't know. I just, I heard Gary Vee said all the kids are there. So I'm trying to reach the kids and protect them from type two diabetes and fatty liver. So I'm on Tik TOK making dumb ass Tik TOK videos,

trying to help the kids before they get fat. But the, the book lies. My doctor told me is available wherever books are sold and there's now an audible version. So if you're listening to this as you drive, you can actually listen to lies. My doctor told me on audible.

Awesome. And what's your Instagram handle? It's my Facebook and Instagram handle is KenDBerry.md. And then my handle everywhere else is KenDBerryMD. Great. Thank you so much. Have a good rest of your day. Thanks a lot, guys. I'll see you next time. Yeah, take care. Man. Super cool, man. thanks a lot guys I'll see you next time yeah take care man super cool man he hit us with a lot of good information and you know some of that can get

you know kind of technical and stuff but it was like you know when you really just break it down if people can get rid of their carbs and watch out for some of those oils sounds like they're on their way to a pretty healthy lifestyle. Yeah. That's what I love about his book is it's broken down so simple. I mean,

he has the, uh, the lie that the doctors told us why they tell us that the truth and then what he does and what you should do. It's, it's broken down so simple. Yeah. It's broken down simple. And then it's also like, he gives you the resources to look at these things for yourself. Right. Like it'd be different as he's just saying, oh, this says this and this says this and this says this. But he's like, look this shit up. Look it up. If you take the energy to look it up, you'll see that what I'm saying is actually correct here.

And then if you do, you'll actually find that out. So, I mean, that's why like, you know, we had that podcast about vegan than stand. Right. There are a lot of studies you can you can just look up that are going to, you know, they're going to back up your bias. So you can't always just rely on a study. I mean, it obviously shows there's so many things to look for. You can't trust everything you hear. You got to be your own advocate.

I love that, that he encourages people to do that, that he's helping people take it into their own hands. Yeah. And I think people are well-meaning when they go on my Instagram. They're like, aren't you worried about your cholesterol? Because that's their question. That's their way of asking, if I was to try this, I would be concerned about my cholesterol. But again, it's like start to look stuff up. And again, I think the main perpetrator of everything is just gaining a lot of weight. You know, once you start to gain a lot of weight, I think it starts to cause a lot of problems in your body.

That's when insulin resistance starts. Pre-diabetes starts. Starts a cascade of things happening in your body that aren't supposed to happen. It interrupts your sleep. your body that aren't supposed to happen. It interrupts your sleep. It could later on, you know, cause like stressors and maybe lead to like heart disease and all kinds of different things. Once you start to gain weight and then it's like, how do you figure out a diet that doesn't allow you to gain excess amounts of body fat? And then you can get into it deeper and you can say like, well, I think this is, I think this

way specifically is healthier for me, keto or carnivore. But you don't have to do those things if you can simply gain control over your diet and you can, cause like I disagreed with him on a couple of things. I think that, um, I think that like potatoes and I think fruits and stuff like that, I think are fine for people. And I really don't think that people are getting fat off of those things. However, where I do agree with them is there's a lot of fake health being perpetrated out there. And so there's people that are like,

I'm gonna have a couple of sliced oranges tomorrow morning with my oatmeal and with my slice of toast and my cup of coffee. And it's like, well, that's still not great because you're eating that in the morning thinking that's doing something like pro for yourself. And then later on that day, you're probably eating things that are still unhealthy for you. You're not cleaning up other practices in your life. And most of the time, I think that food, I think that food is like, uh, it's, it's

when you eat like meat, I don't think that eating meat is necessarily like a positive. I think it's like a net of zero, although it does give you protein, which can help you gain more muscle and stuff. But I think, you know, it's like a net of zero. And when you when you eat something that's that's not great for you, I think it's like a net of a double negative. And so like you're not really necessarily gaining points by, by eating healthy all the time, but what you're doing is making sure that you're not doing anything shitty to yourself. Cause I think that not eating is actually like a positive and that more people need to try to spend more time not eating than they do eating because we've spent so much time making ourselves unhealthy and making ourselves sick.

I really like the, the thing I really want people to pay attention to there, especially like people around like my age, 20 somethings is, you know, we can get away with certain eating habits right now really well. You know, we can look like, and we're in great shape. We can feel all right, you know, eating things that most people would crap, but it'll creep up on you later. And the reason is like, he even talked about it. Insulin resistance gets worse as you get older. And then you wonder why you're eating the same things as you were when you were 18, 19, 20, but you're so much fatter. There's, there's a reason behind that. So it would be really great if like, you know, you're 20, 21, 22, start trying to make a few

changes now, make a few habit changes that are going to yield when you're in your thirties and your forties and you'll feel better. Even John Berardi mentioned it in his podcast. The higher carb intake that he had when he was much younger does not work well for him anymore. He changed as he got older. So I think that's pretty important for people to realize. I remember a few years ago we were at a family gathering and one of my, one of our relatives was asking like, hey, you know, here's what we have for food and, you know, here's what we're, you know, here's what we got. And explaining that there was like, I think, I can't even remember if it's like

a chili or something. There was one form of chili that just didn't have a lot of carbohydrates or maybe it was like a meat and pasta thing. I't remember but one one option was like didn't have any carbs the other one had carbs and she was like getting bowls of this for everybody and um she was like oh you probably want the one that doesn't have you know carbs and i was like sure and my brother-in-law was like he's like carbs don't matter for me you know and he just like waved his hand like that and i was like they fucking matter to everybody dude like you you can pretend not to waved his hand like that and i was like they fucking matter to everybody dude like you you can pretend not to count them but they still count and they still count as points against you in a way and like nowadays he's a lot heavier and it's like man he

he just hasn't been paying attention to that and like one day he's gonna unfortunately you know i love him and care about him very much but like one day day he's going to be faced with that. He's going to go to the doctor and the doctor is going to say, hey, man, you know what? You're pre-diabetic or you're type two diabetic and you need to fix this. And here's the here's this sheet of information or here's this book you can go check out, you know. And it's like, man, you could have you could have took some precaution because you know, no one gets a free pass on that. You don't get a free pass on it. You don't, you don't get to wave your hand at it.

It doesn't work that way. Yeah. And if you, if you guys are listening, grab this book, just, just go, go grab that book.

Seriously. Like we talked about a lot on this podcast with him, but like he goes in depth on a lot of the stuff that we talked about in the book, fiber, red meat, you know, um,

whole grains. He goes talked about in the book, fiber, red meat, whole grains. He goes into that in the book. And then the great thing that I was mentioning to Mark and Andrew about the book is that he'll mention a lot of other resources in other books that you can go to to learn more and even go more in depth on these subjects. So you can really arm yourself with a good amount of information. So it's an awesome read with a lot of great info. Let's also break the cycle of not continuing your education. And I think that can be a big factor with some doctors is that we've mentioned before, they have families,

they have other places to be, they have a life outside of being a doctor. And once they become a doctor, they become extremely busy. And so all they really might learn or advance on is maybe more experience on how to deal with patients, maybe how to deal with more patients so they can make more money. Again, not a knock on them. That's just like that's their business. That's a business that they're in. And for us, you know, as patients, we can continue to educate ourselves

and we can continue to read and listen to podcasts. And that's one thing that I thought was great from Dr. Berry is something I heard him say was that once he became a doctor, he stopped learning. He stopped educating himself. And that was a huge mistake he made. And he said, I'll never make that again. Once he got real heavy, that's when he's like, I better look into this. I better educate myself. I think the same thing happens with our general public. I think the same thing happens with a lot of people as soon as they get a job. You know, once somebody goes to the education system, they do all this learning that they may or may not want to do. And then maybe they, maybe they choose to go to college or whatever, and they get a

little bit more of their learn going. Right. And then once they, once they get a job though, going. Right. And then once they, uh, once they get a job though, it's like work relationship, TV repeat, you know, for the next 10 years and you don't really, you don't really progress. So let's try to stop that cycle. I don't love to read, but it is something that I should be doing. Um, but I do always educate myself. I work really hard on, uh, trying to learn more information and trying to be able to, you know, put that into action. Andrew, where can people find you, buddy? You guys can hit me up at I am Andrew Z on Instagram. Natty professor, hopefully not sneezing all over the place over there. My Instagram is not Natty professor anymore. I am Natty, but it's not the Natty professor. It is

at Nsema, E-I-N-S-I-M-A-I-N-Y-A-M-G. And by the way, Mark, I know you say you don't read, but you listen to a fuck ton of stuff in books. So you don't. You still open a book, but you're taking a ton of good information. So that's huge. All the time. I mean, most of my day is spent with headphones on.

I'm listening to something. I mean, again, I've talked about it before it's like to the point where like i don't want to do it anymore like i i make myself exhausted from i'm like oh my god why am i doing this and i'll just put on you know let's put on music when you put on music though you're just like oh shit this sounds so good yeah meanwhile like other people that don't listen they're just like i can't ever find anything good on rate like whatever you know but when you what's that new song I've been listening to? I don't even know what it's called.

I've just been putting it on repeat. But it's Ozzy Osbourne. Some new. God damn. Ozzy Osbourne? Like that dude from the show? This dude's super famous. If one of the.

Hold on. It's like a hip hop guy-ish. I'm terrible. I should know this name. It's like pop culture stuff. I should know I'm terrible. I should know this name. It's like pop culture stuff. I should know more about this. Be happy that you don't. Oh God, be happy that you don't.

Yeah, that might be true. I have no idea. The only Ozzy Osbourne I know is the English guy. That guy, right? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. My sister used to watch that show when we were younger.

That show was great. This is what the song's doing though. This other artist is putting Ozzy in front of like millions of kids that have no idea who he was. Ah, okay. I have no idea what the song's called. That's sick. I need to listen to it.

I don't even know what the song is. Since you're not the natty professor anymore, does that just mean that you're no longer like teaching classes about being natty since like the professor side you you've like kind of stepped away from that yeah no i got tenure so like i no longer need to teach the courses on you know being natural um i can now teach people how to teach the courses on being natural so i no longer need that anymore tenure is is great yeah i don't know how to use my phone apparently. It's like I updated it and it's all weird. From bad to worse.

You said my phone's going to blow up if I update it and look what happens. Yeah. I don't know. God damn it. I should know this person's name. It's going to drive me crazy. Someone's going to post it in the comments.

This is where I'm going to... Oh, here we go. Take what you want. And it's Ozzy Osbourne and Travis Scott? Is that right? Oh, wow. Travis Scott. Okay. And it says Post Malone. He had a pretty good documentary on Netflix.

Yeah. That's who that is. There we go. Travis Scott. Alright right we got it solved I'm at Mark Smellybell on Instagram strength is never weakness weakness is never strength catch y'all later