Mark Bell's Power Project - “Humans Are Optimal on a Carnivorous Diet” - Dr. Anthony Chaffee || MBPP Ep. 897

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the incredible benefits of following a strict carnivore diet.  Follow Dr. Chaffee on IG: https://www.instagram.com/anthonychaffeemd/ Subscribe to Dr. Chaffee on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzoRyR_nlesKZuOlEjWRXQQ New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

But, you know, I did. So then maybe you know Joel Jameson? I don't know if I know Joel Jameson. Maybe it was later on. You know Josh Barnett? Yeah, absolutely. So I trained with him. We were sparring partners when I was like 17, when he was still amateur.

And just before he went professional, that's when I stopped training at AMC. So a long time ago. But I started at AMC in 94. I started at AMC in 94 and UFC 3 when Shamrock and Kimo fought in a super fight. That's great. I started a few months before that and Kimo was training at AMC. So I was training with Kimo and things like that. How old are you?

43. Oh, what? Okay. Okay. You look great for 43. Yeah. I was like, wait, 94? I was too – okay yeah that's cool that's uh that's back when like um things were still like uh i guess like here in the united states they were

sort of like united because there wasn't it didn't branch out yet it didn't branch out to like more schools and uh matt hume you mentioned was uh yeah on the gym that you went to maybe or was one of the coaches? Yeah, yeah. So AMC Kickboxing in Kirkland, Washington. And I believe – I don't think he founded it. There was a guy named Haru. I can't recall his last name. Great guy though.

But he coached kickboxing and trained a lot of world champion kickboxers like Matt. Matt was a world champion kickboxer and um and uh and then matt was you know the main main trainer there for the professional fighters and doing the all the pancreation and and uh kickboxing stuff like haru did a lot of the kickboxing but matt also did kickboxing but he obviously always did all the the grappling stuff and so yeah they were the two main guys and i think haru that had a place in like hawaii and also in japan so i think he went off to Hawaii or something like that and then Matt just was the main guy there for a long time. What got you interested in fighting? Bruce Lee movies when I was a kid.

I just always thought that it was just awesome. It'd be great to be able to know how to fight and just be that sort of athlete. I was always very interested in martial arts in general. And ever since I was a kid, I was hounding my parents to get me karate lessons and things like that. Bruce Lee could beat up many people at the same time. That was the best part about it. He could handle one guy and then the next guy and the next guy.

He could trick them into going one at a time, though. Yeah, yeah. They would wait their turn. That's how good he was. Yeah, that's a mind game. And funny enough, Matt Hume's dad was one of Bruce Lee's original students in Seattle. Yeah, that's a mind game. And funny enough, like Matt Hume's dad was one of Bruce Lee's original students

in Seattle. Oh, wow. Yeah, because Bruce Lee went to UW, University of Washington in Seattle. So he had a bunch of,

a lot of weird connections. But yeah, so I was just really interested in martial arts. My parents were, you know, didn't want me to get into it

and I just kept hounding him, hounding him, hounding him. And so finally, I heard about, you know, hounding him, hounding him. And so finally I heard about Matt Hume. There's this great gym there through the wrestling guys because I wrestled

since I was 12, I guess. And so Matt was actually the high school wrestling coach as well. And so a lot of the high school wrestlers would train at AMC as well. And so you just hear through the grapevine about this. And I was like, right, that's what I'm going as well. And so you just hear through the grapevine about this. And I was like, right, that's what I'm going to do.

And so for my 14th birthday, I got, you know, some birthday money. I was like, this is what I want. I want a membership to this gym. And so, yeah, so I went there. Like just every hour of every day was open. Like I was there. So it opened sort of like 4 o'clock. I'd finish school at like 2.30, come home.

I'd generally take a nap, like pass out on the couch. And then I'd either run or bike down to the gym. And I'd be there until I closed at like 10 o'clock, like every single day. When did your fascination with like diet start? Did it start around that time too? Because you had so much movement going on? Yeah, well, exactly.

And I played rugby as well. And I was always interested in being a doctor. And I was studying biology and just liked learning about the body and how it worked. And as an athlete, I wanted to put the right fuel in my body for myself. And so that was just a natural thing for me to study. I took classes in nutrition and things like that in college and obviously a lot of biology as well. So that was something I was interested in early on.

And what really had me switch dramatically of what I was eating is what I mentioned to you before was when I was taking cancer biology at the University of Washington in Seattle in my undergrad. Our professor of cancer biology was talking about all these different sorts of things that we eat in our normal diet that can actually be contributory to cancer. And studying botany, I knew this, but he was saying that plants are living organisms. They like to stay living organisms, and so they have natural defenses. And one of those defenses is a chemical defense. So they can actually poison animals or insects trying to eat them.

And we know this inherently, right? When you get lost in the woods, you run out of food, you can't just eat any random plant, right? Most of them will make you very, very sick or even kill you. And that's true of spinach just as it's true of hemlock. It's just we have more defenses against the toxins in spinach. But there are things that spinach will kill if they eat it, right? So we were learning at this from a cancer perspective, and he was telling us about all the different known carcinogens

that have been identified in just normal produce. So one of them was like Brussels sprouts, and he said that there were 136 naturally occurring carcinogens just in Brussels sprouts, over 100 mushrooms, but all spinach, kale, lettuce, celery, cabbage, broccoli, cucumbers, everything, had dozens and dozens of carcinogens that had already been identified. And we were just given lists of these things. And we were quite taken aback by this.

And I remember everyone was just looking around wildly like this is a joke. Someone's in on this and like someone's smiling. And no one was. And I remember thinking to myself, I was like, but vegetables are still good for you though, right? And just at that time, it was perfect timing. He just looked at us and he just said, I don't eat salad. I don't eat vegetables. I don't let my kids eat vegetables.

Plants are trying to kill you. I was like, right, forget plants. And I went to the grocery store that day, walked around. I was like, well, what the hell am I supposed to eat? Like everything has plants in it. And I just came by like eggs and meat. And I was just like, great, those don't come from plants. So I was just eat eggs and meat. And I was just like, great, those don't come from plants. So I was just eat eggs and meat. And, you know, the first couple of weeks was a bit weird because I was looking

around all the things that I couldn't eat. And then after that, I just felt so good. I didn't even, I didn't even care anymore. I just, I just felt amazing. And, and I just got better and better and better. My athletic performance just went through the roof. I was doing very well in school. I had tons of energy, slept really well. My back didn't hurt for the first time in years. I mean, when I was 15 years old, I used to joke that I had the back of a 60-year-old man and now no back pain, no anything. And so I also stopped drinking at that same time during the rugby season. I just decided just to see what it would be like for a season, just not drinking. I'm not a really heavy drinker, but it would be like for a season, just not drinking.

I'm not a really heavy drinker, but it would just be like after games we'd go out and drink. And that was it. And then just skipping that Saturday session just made a big difference as well. But that was also coincided with when I just stopped eating plants entirely. And so I just felt absolutely amazing and never played or felt better. Let me ask you this, like before you went full carnivore, because now there are some people who like, for example, Paul Saladino, he went carnivore. He was pure carnivore a few years ago. Now he has honey and fruits, et cetera. Um, what do you remember? Like what was in your diet

that was actually giving you issues at the time? Let me ask that first. Well, that's the thing. I didn't even think of it in that way. I didn't even realize how much of an impact that dropping the plants had on me. I equated it to the alcohol because that made such a big difference. Yeah, it does. And so I always thought that that's what it was.

I'm like, my God, I'm just feeling amazing. But it coincided with that. I didn't see at the time how big of a difference it made. Looking back, how I could tell was when I was in England playing rugby, five years later, I was like 25 at the time. It was harder to get the same kind of meat that I was getting before. And it was, the same kind of meat that I was getting before. And it was, I don't know why, but I just, it just wasn't, yeah, well, it just didn't cook right. I don't know what the hell it is with the meat over there. But like I tried to cook a steak and it would just like, it was just gray.

I could never get it to brown. And like, so it'd be like cooked well done and just gray on both sides and sweaty looking. I'm like, oh, that's horrible. So it wasn't a it wasn't it wasn't very appealing and so some of the my workaround was getting like pre-cooked uh meats but it but half the time it was like breaded so they have like like you know breadcrumbs or something like that on like the chicken i was like it isn't that big a deal you know you know dose makes the poison all that sort of stuff so it was like maybe just a little bit. And so, you know, you can convince yourself of anything.

And so I convinced myself of that. And I remember just like a couple months in to playing over in England, I was like, you know, why don't I feel as just superhuman amazing as I normally do? Am I not pushing myself? Am I not working as hard? I'm 25 now. Am I just over the hump? Am I dying now?

And I just like thought, you know, my body's just breaking down. I didn't know. But I was getting like these little injuries and just over the hump. Am I dying now? And I just like thought, my body's just breaking down. I didn't know. But I was getting like these, this old, you know, these little injuries and just nagging injuries and like pulled muscles and just sore. I was just like,

this is not like me. This is not normal. Like normally I was, I just, you know, just felt literally superhuman all the time. And now I wasn't. And so that was,

that was the point that I started reincorporating just whole food plants. I wasn't eating junk, you know, but that little slip off of just like, well, isn't that big a deal having breaded meat was that sort of the crack in the dam where now I wasn't just like, I'm not eating any plants, absolutely not.

It was, well, it's not that big a deal. And then there was a big plant-based push after that. Dr. I think it was Joel Fuhrman came out with the GOMES diet. Did you ever go down that rabbit hole for yourself? Like did you ever go plant-based for a while? Oh, no, God, no. But my brother was really into that. And at first, Fuhrman wasn't saying, oh, don't eat meat at all, but just make salad the focus.

But it was a front for just the whole raw food vegan sort of thing, which is what he espouses now from the sounds of it. But my brother got really into that and he read his book and he's like, wow, this guy makes a lot of sense. And he was talking about his anti-VEGF in mushrooms and this is good against cancer. And I remember thinking, I was like, yeah, but mushrooms have carcinogens in them. So it has this thing that's good against cancer, but it has things that can cause cancer. So on balance, is it a benefit? And then also it has anti-VEGF, which is something that we use to treat cancer and certain cancers in certain situations. But it's chemo.

And like chemo, other chemo, like you don't take it unless you have cancer, right? So it's like, oh, well, have these mushrooms. They're good at fighting cancer. It's like, right. Do you have cancer? Then why are you taking chemo? And so, you know, that sort of felt a bit weird for me at the time. But, you know, you just get inundated from all sides about these

things. So I was like, okay, well, I guess I'll have a bit of mushrooms. I guess I'll have some spinach and all that sort of stuff. But it was all whole foods and I was still predominantly eating meat. And then sort of, what is it, five years ago now, six years ago now, that Dr. Sean Baker was on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about carnivore diet. And my brother saw that and he was really excited by it. And he said, you know, hey, there's this American doctor and he played professional rugby and he's talking about how you can get all your nutrients from eating just meat. And, you know, and instantly you just sort of pull back from that and saying, oh, how can that be? That can't be possible.

But then the voice of reason in the back of my head just said, well, I mean I basically did that for five years in my early 20s. And that was the period of my life I've never felt better. So like, well, give it a try and watch it. And as soon as I watched it, I was like, this guy is bang on. I mean there's just like – and it added into the different things that I knew because there was new research coming out that showing that saturated fat and cholesterol were absolutely not the problem that we blamed them on, blame them for. And, you know, the fructose had come out with Dr. Robert Lustig's work from UCSF showing that fructose was quite damaging metabolically and likely a contributor or causative factor for a lot of the diseases and problems that we were blaming fat cholesterol for. And the whole, you know,

plants are trying to kill you thing. So I was like, right, I knew it. I knew plants were trying to kill me, get rid of these stupid things. And I just went back full into it. And then I started really digging into the research and trying to say, okay, what do we know? What can we prove? And what do we still need to find out? And asking questions and trying to say, okay, what do we know? What can we prove? And what do we still need to find out? And asking questions and trying to check in the literature, like, okay, if meat's really good for you, you should see difference between vegan and other populations. I was thinking maybe sugar, fructose was contributory

to maybe possibly autism, looking at the rates of autism. And they all went up at the same time. All these other chronic diseases went up. Because when we stopped eating meat and fat and things like that and started switching over to more plant-based in the 80s since the USDA declaration in 1977 saying that cholesterol causes heart disease, so stop it. We listened. We reduced red meat by over 33% since the 1970s, reduced our cholesterol and saturated fat intake roughly the same amount. We replaced a lot of that with chicken. A lot of people ate more like lean chicken and things like that.

But red meat came down significantly. And we increased the amount of fruits and vegetables we ate, increased the seed oils, increased the high fructose corn syrup, things like that. high fructose corn syrup, things like that. And the results were, I think, quite telling because the obesity rate tripled, heart disease tripled, stroke rates tripled, cancer rates tripled, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and even neurodevelopmental delays such as autism

all increased exponentially. They almost didn't exist before then. Now they're like the only thing we treat. And people say, well, we probably had the same rates of autism. We just didn't notice it because, you know, just everyone was stupid in the seventies. Just no one got it.

I'm like, come on, you know what I mean? We weren't testing for it. Yeah. Well, they didn't have a name for it. Yeah,

sure. Whatever they want to say. And that's, and that's fine. Maybe, maybe that's true. Maybe we're calling things autism that we just call like, wow,

they're just special. You know, they go on the, on the short bus or something like that. And it's just, they don't have a name for it. But now we have a name for it. Now we have diagnoses.

And it's still going up. It's going up decade after decade. Autism rates are going up. So I mean we've been paying attention for the last 30 years. So why are those rates going up? So it's not just that this is a stable state, nothing to see here. I don't believe that. But a quick question that, because there's a bunch of things here. Like when we're looking at, for example, rates of obesity, autism, and other things that you're mentioning,

it's not just obviously because like increase in vegetables and stuff like that. It's like there's the standard American diet has a lot of just like processed foods and a lot of overconsumption. There's a lot of things going on. There's some studies where people will reference and they'll say red meat is a problem, but it's like there's a lot of other factors along with it. So when we're talking about this, it's not just because the reduction of red meat, right? No, no, no. Yeah. A hundred percent. So 100%. So yeah, there's many, many things that go involved in that. The point I'm making with that is that you can't say that red meat causes obesity and heart disease and diabetes if you reduce the amount of red meat we're eating and all those

things increase dramatically. That's the point I'm making. And maybe, look, an argument could be made that maybe red meat does contribute to that sort of thing, but these other things contributed more and all that sort of stuff as well. But I don't think it's a one-to-one. But that's what people blame it on. They blame saturated fat, cholesterol, red meat. This is the problem. Nothing else to see kind of the thing we saw like on tv time and time again the thing you always kind of heard growing up is that dad loves steak you know but he shouldn't eat steak

because it's not good for his heart yes and i think it wasn't so much necessarily the steak but it was the steak along with probably other things that they were eating along with just a not a great lifestyle because you know in the 70s and 80s, it was really popular to smoke. You watch a show like Mad Men and the guys are always drinking. They always have like whiskey. And I'm not saying that every household was doing all those things. But usually when we think of dad, we think of somebody who's a little bit overweight and they're eating an enormous steak.

And so they're eating a large portion of food. Maybe they don't have that much movement in their life. And maybe the steak is part of the cause because it has so many calories, but it's also along with their lifestyle, what else they're eating and the lack of movement probably. Oh, absolutely.

And I think that, you know, that that's exactly it. You know, it's the potatoes and other things were more of a problem. Smoking, obviously. You can't eat a potato without some butter on there. A lot of butter. And just get some sour cream on there.

Yeah. You can never seem to salt them quite enough either, right? Some bacon would be perfect. And a little bit of cheese would make it pretty good. Actually, that'd be a fucking hell of a potato. And then you would need more stuff on there still. I think all of that without the potato sounds great. Yeah, now we're talking about something, right?

Nice. Pepper, how's your family? How's it going? Now, we talk about meat a lot on this podcast, which is why we've partnered with Piedmontese and have for years now because they have some of the best beef on the planet. All right. Piedmontese beef has cuts that are fattier in terms of their ribeyes, and they have also cuts that are leaner in terms of their flat irons. But you can get cuts for no matter what diet you're on. Andrew, how they get their hands on it yeah head over to piedmontese.com that's p-i-e-d-m-o-n-t-e-s-e.com check out enter promo code power for 25 off your entire order and if

your order is 150 or more you get free two-day shipping links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I want everybody listening, and it might already be too late. You might have lost here already because you might have gotten mad and you might have left. But I want people to Bruce Lee this topic a little bit. Empty your minds. Do the best you possibly can to empty your mind and just to try to be open because I think that we're going to share a lot of information today that can be really, really useful to you, whether you decide that you're going to go all in and only eat meat or whether you just decide, hey, it'd be a good idea for me to eat more protein. Maybe I should give meat more of an

opportunity. Maybe I should change my diet to eat more meat. The three of us, we eat a lot of meat. We also will eat fruits and we'll eat things that have plants in it. We drink coffee quite a bit. I have two or three cups every day. I like kratom. That's another plant. So I have plants there in my life. I bounced them out before. I personally have never noticed a large difference in shifting from going like, you know, going full carnivore and getting rid of those things. Other than the disciplinary action of feeling really good that you're making a move like that, that, of course, kind of always feels good when you get into a routine. But I never really – I don't know if I have issues eating spinach or issues eating vegetables.

I personally have never recognized them within myself. They could be there. But anyway, I want people to have an open mind for today so that they can extract some of the information we're going to give today, because I guarantee you there's going to be a lot of good stuff in here today that is going to help make some changes in your day to day. What are some of the things that you have? I mean, it's, we can get caught up in the science and things like that. And we can talk about, you know, evolution and all these different things. But what have you personally been seeing? Because I know you, you actually work with a lot of people. You are suggesting

this diet to a lot of people. Are you actually like coaching people with this diet and stuff like that too? And what have you seen the diet do in lot of people. Are you actually like coaching people with this diet and stuff like that too? And what have you seen the diet do in your opinion that it's actually doing for people? Yeah, well, so I do have a practice outside. So I'm a neurosurgical resident and so that takes up a lot of my time. But when I do have a free sort of day, weekend or what have you, I work in a private practice in a functional medicine metabolic health clinic. And so we have a lot of lifestyle interventions as part of our treatment. We're trying to get people off of medications. We're trying to get them well so they don't need all

the interventions and surgeries and medications and things like that. And we're quite successful at that. And diet is a major, major part of that diet and lifestyle exercise, things like that. Fasting sometimes for dependent on the situation. But I found that getting people obviously on a whole foods diet is going to improve things a lot. I find that getting people onto, when we can get them onto a carnivore diet, they help their health dramatically. We have a lot of obese patients that come in and need, need help with that. And this, this is very helpful, uh, for weight control and reducing excess body fat, feeling better in general. Um, and then we have a lot of people that just come in because they're just, they're just not feeling great. They're just not, they, they know something's

off, but they don't have, they're not bad enough to have just a diagnosed, like this person has this disease, you know. And so generally, you know, endocrinologists, you know, you either have absolutely, you know, no cortisol and you have Addison's or you have way too much and you have Cushing's. Anything between is normal, whatever. I don't want to deal with it. And so obviously you can be very unwell and not feeling great if that's slightly off. And so those are the people that

we end up catching up because they're like, look, something's wrong. My doctor's telling me I'm fine, but I know I'm not fine. And then they'll come to us and we'll see, actually, like, this is a little off and this is a little off and this is a little off. And you're sort of borderline on all these sorts of things. And we try to help them out and optimize their health in those sorts of ways. And it does help. And I find that just a carnivore diet or at least a meat heavy diet where we're sort of eliminating out a lot of other things is certainly eliminating out processed foods and a lot of carbs like even just trying to do a ketogenic meat-based diet is very helpful we have a lot of patients with autoimmune diseases I have yet to see an autoimmune condition not

benefit dramatically from from this sort of elimination diet. And you can think of it as – Even without 100 percent adherence? Yes. Like if someone is like 80, 90? It will help. A lot of the autoimmune patients though, they need to be a little more strict. And so I think you guys are all familiar with like Michaela Peterson,

how she really has to be very strict. She can't even have some meats like pork will set her off and give her a flare-up. And I think it probably has a lot to do with what the animal is being fed more than the meat itself. But for whatever reason, they have a problem with that. So people with autoimmune issues, certainly getting rid of all the processed stuff and a lot of the carbs and even a lot of the plants, and certainly for people with gut issues like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, getting rid of the fiber is actually very helpful. There actually are studies in the current literature

showing that. There was a study looking at people with Crohn's disease, which is, if people don't know, it's very, very, very difficult to deal with. You get a lot of inflammation in your gut from your mouth to your anus and it can affect you anywhere. And you get these bleeding sores and blisters inside and it's painful.

And so people have bloody diarrhea 15, 20 times a day and it's very harmful. And so you put them on corticosteroids like prednisone or prednisolone and that has to calm it down. You have all these big heavy biological medications that will keep them in suppression like immune suppressant sort of drugs.

And they're very expensive and they're quite toxic in very real ways. They have a lot of side effects. But that's the only sort of way these guys can function sometimes. But there was a study looking at – well, there's two studies. One was looking at an elemental diet, which is like a pure elimination diet. It gets you down to this. It's very highly processed, these elemental things. It's just in a can, and it just has all the macro and micronutrients

that you might need. It has nothing else, right? And they find that putting people on that elimination diet, that elemental diet, and just removing all the other stuff is a better treatment to get people out of an acute flare-up of Crohn's than the steroids like prednisone, right? And that's the best treatment is putting them on prednisone. It just really stops it pretty quick.

Just not eating that stuff was better than taking the steroids. It had all the side effects. There's another study that compared two groups, looking at ketogenic no-fiber, no-carb group and comparing that with people who just ate whatever, they ate carbs and fiber. The group that eliminated carbohydrates and fiber, this is again for Crohn's disease,

found that they kept people in remission on average 51 months, okay, so for years, right? Compared that to the group that was eating carbs and fiber, they stayed in remission on average zero months, right? So it's a very big contrast. And so what does that tell me? That tells me that there's something in the food that we're eating that is triggering these diseases. And that's sort of my thesis here is that a lot of these chronic diseases that we're treating these days, like autoimmune diseases, like Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, that these are not diseases per se. It's not something you can catch from

somebody. But this is an exposure relationship, right? We're being exposed to something that's causing an effect, right? So you have lead pipes, you get lead poisoning. You know, in ancient Rome, they had this problem. People were getting sick. They didn't realize what was going on. So you had generations of people just being a little off and then they figured it out, right? And so I think we're living in our period with lead pipes. We're getting exposed to a lot of things that our bodies aren't used to

or not capable of dealing with in such volume. And we're getting the effects of that. So I really think that these chronic diseases are not diseases per se, but toxicities and malnutrition, toxic buildup of a species-inappropriate diet, eating things that we're not biologically adapted for and can't process properly. And so we get these problems.

And also a lack of species-specific nutrition. We're not getting enough of what we need. Namely, we're eating a lot of plants that we don't actually have the proper mechanisms to break down safely in the volume that we're eating them. And we're not getting enough meat. Because I think that's where we get all of our primary nutrition. And so I think of steak as that elemental diet. That has all the our primary nutrition. And so I think of a steak as that elemental diet that has all the nutrients you need. I don't think that it has anything that you don't need or don't want. I don't believe that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you. In fact, I think that they're

quite good for you. And I think that's what the literature shows. And so if you're eating just a steak, an unadulterated steak, That is that elemental diet. You're just getting the core nutrients that you need and nothing else. And that's exactly what I see in practice is that you see these people come in and they have all these problems. You eliminate out all of these other things. They're just eating meat and generally red meat and water is what they work best on. And they just go away. All of my patients with Crohn's specifically will improve significantly symptomatically within a couple of weeks. And they'll just keep getting better. Every single one so far, after about three months, they'll get a biopsy on colonoscopy. I have yet to see someone not have complete remission of Crohn's or ulcerative colitis by three months on carnivore diet.

I think something that you're talking about here is – and we've seen it a lot just because we recommend protein a lot to people. People end up with like protein displacement because they eat other foods instead of, and people are snacking throughout the day. And I remember it wasn't too long ago that I heard a stat that people were eating, I think like 12 times a day or something like that. And then I heard something even more recently where they said that people are consuming calories up to like 20 times a day. And then, so now we have, you know, a lot of information coming out about like fasting

and intermittent fasting. And these things probably really – when you're fasting for six or eight hours, they probably shouldn't even really be referred to as fasting. But in modern times, because we have – we're eating so much and consuming calories so often, it feels like death. Death is on your doorstep if you're not used to fasting for just even like a handful of hours. Where do you think some people should just start? Like, let's say somebody just kind of has a shit diet. Do you think there's a reason just to go like carnivore all the way or does it make more sense to baby step into this thing and maybe just try to eat some natural foods? Yeah.

Well, I think that's a big first step is just eating whole foods, natural foods. You know, I mean, I don't like to be dogmatic and say this is the only way of doing it. This is the way I do it because I feel the best on it. And when other little things slip in, like, you know, seasonings or something would mix in with a meal at the restaurant or something. And you just cry. Yeah. Freak out in the corner. Yeah, just throw the plates and abuse the waiter.

No, I just noticed that there's a bit of a difference, and it's not a difference that I like. I like feeling optimal. I like feeling the best that I can. I think that our optimal nutrition is just meat and water. I think that that's biologically what we're set up for. But I don't begrudge anyone eating any way they want. It's just I just sort of tell people what I'm doing and why I'm doing that and sort of what I'm basing that on and let people make their own decisions.

But I think that cutting out all the processed foods, cooking for yourself, cooking whole foods, and just not being afraid of meat, not being afraid of animal fats. It makes a big, big, big difference in people's lives. And so even just focusing on meat. So like Furman said, you know, make salad the focus. I would say make meat your focus, you know, and don't be scared of the fat. And, you know, eat other things if you want, but like whole foods is, I think that's 80%

of the problem right there. But after that, really getting rid of alcohol, getting rid of carbohydrates, getting rid of sugar. I think those are probably the main things to get rid of. And then after that, if you're on like a keto diet, meat-heavy, then you just start eliminating out the more bad stuff like nightshades. Potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers. They're just a bit, you know, more inflammatory, more toxic because of the solanine content in them. And also we don't prepare these things the same way. You know, the original pasta sauces, they would take vine ripen tomatoes, which makes a difference. There are studies showing that the toxins that are in green tomatoes,

there's always thought like the folk wisdom was that green tomatoes were poisonous. They are. They're just not – maybe not will kill you poisonous but they have more toxins in them, more solanine in them. And by vine ripening them, the plant pulls out a lot of those toxins. Not all of them but a lot more than if you just box ripen them. But what the people did originally hundreds of years ago, they'd take that vine ripened tomato, they'd blanch it in boiling water, they'd take the skin off,

and then they'd take the seeds out. Those are the most toxic parts. Those are where the highest concentration of these chemicals are. And then they'd just use the rest of that to make pasta sauce. That's a very different thing than what we're seeing today. We're getting box ripen tomatoes. We're using the skin and using the seeds as well because people say, well, that's where all the nutrients

are. That's where all the vitamins are. It's like, right, well, that's all the salinia is there too. And so this is why we used to peel potatoes until now they said, oh, well, that's where all the nutrients are. It's like, guys, there was a reason we did this for centuries, you know? So I would say that, you know, just sort of – you can do it in a stepwise progression like that. And then different plants have different toxins. You know, there's a professor of botany from Cambridge who actually – I can't remember the video in 2011. I just found this the last few months. Just talking about all the different ways that plants defend themselves, saying, look, 99% of the life on earth are plants.

This is the dominant life form on Earth. And they're under a constant assault by animals and insects. So they can't be defenseless. And he's going through all the defenses they have, you know, a major one being all the toxins, saying there was about a million known toxins in all the different plants around the world used to poison animals and insects to stop them from eating them. And so he was saying, he's like, okay, so what do we eat as humans? So what are we supposed to eat? You know, we don't want to, if you want to eat real food and,

and not get all these toxic chemicals, you know, and he just goes, he like swipes off, you know, a bunch of produce from the table and some plots of chicken in front of him. He's like, become a carnival. And so there are around a million different toxins, but they're not all in one plant, right? They're all different toxins in different plants. And so what you can do is you just vary it. I would say eat a low level of it, but you just eat different things. So if you have spinach one day, don't have it the next.

You just mix it up. And so if you mix up the different sorts of vegetables, if you want to include that in your diet, that's what I would do is just sort of mix it up every day. Some people do better that way. They don't like the – like, look, I just can't get my head around just jumping straight into this. And that's fine. For me, that was very easy. It was like plants are trying to kill me, right? Don't want anything to do with these stupid things and get rid of them. And that was fine for me.

And then when I saw Dr. Baker's podcast with Joe Rogan, I was basically just doing keto. I wasn't doing keto, but I wasn't eating carbohydrates. I was just eating whole foods, just meat, small amounts, lean meat. I was trying to slim down. I just got back from doing humanitarian work in Bangladesh, and so I was out of shape, and I was trying to get back into shape to play rugby. And so I was trying to do this thing.

I was like, okay, well, I'll eat a bunch of plants, a bunch of spinach, kale, and broccoli, juice them up in the—well, not juice it, but blend it up so it had all the fiber and things like that. It tasted just awful. It was so bitter. It was so gross, which is what I think is a warning sign, right? You have these bitter tastes. That is your tongue and your brain, which are sophisticated machines, telling you, hey, there's something in here that's bad for you.

Don't drink this. It's just like a Mr. Yuck sticker. Spit it out. And this is naturally telling you don't eat this. You know, it's just like a Mr. Yuck sticker, spit it out, you know, and this is naturally telling you don't eat this. And, and we ignore this because, oh no, this is, this is what we're supposed to eat. And, um, and so I was doing that. I was choking that stuff down and not enjoying it, not feeling great. And then I saw Baker and, um, and then I was like, right, I knew it. I knew plants were trying to kill me, get rid of these stupid vegetables. And I just dropped them. And I started eating a lot more meat and I stopped eating all the vegetables.

And I lost 23 pounds in 10 days. And then I just started, my body just composition just started transforming. I can show you pictures at some point, but I did not look like I do now. And I was working out daily then. You know, I haven't worked out in three months now because my schedule is very difficult. Except for today. Except for today. It was great to get back.

And so that's the thing. My body just dramatically changed. I was eating a lot more. I was eating a lot more calories too because now I was not afraid of the fat. I was not afraid of the meat. I was eating as much fatty meat as I cared to. So I was eating rib- more calories too because now I was not afraid of the fat. I was not afraid of the meat. I was eating as much fatty meat as I cared to. So I was eating ribeyes every day. So I was eating like two, three pounds of ribeye a day, like fatty ribeye.

And I just ate until I was satiated and that was it. And so my body just started transforming. I didn't lose weight after that. I lost that initial 23 pounds. I think a lot of that was going to be water weight as well. But definitely my shape changed as well. And then I remember after that I was 243 pounds every single day for the next like three months. It didn't change a pound.

But visibly I was absolutely transforming. And so it just made a massive, massive, massive difference for me. And so at that point I was just like, right, I'm just going to just dig in to the literature and just try to learn as much as I could. You know, when you're mentioning all of this, when he made the switch to pure carnivore, you wouldn't have known how all these other foods were affecting you if you never did make that switch. Right. So the thing is, it's like, I know there's some people who are like, well, I'm feeling great right now with my diet. And potentially for them, they don't know if they could feel better if they did go pure carnivore. But then there's another thing where, because I've done pure carnivore before, I felt pretty good.

But when I added some whole carbohydrates back in like rice or potato or even fruits, I didn't feel worse. So one thing I think would be beneficial for people is trying it out and seeing, because there's a period of time when you do get rid of carbohydrates that you feel like shit. At least it was for me. Like I had a few, I had some lax days old days and then I started feeling pretty good. But again, bringing it back in, I noticed, okay, I don't handle this food badly. I don't handle these different foods badly. It doesn't affect my performance, but I don't eat nearly as much carbohydrates as I did in maybe 2014, 15. So there is a residual change in the longterm

that lends to being more meat-based. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that because I mean, I even have friends that like, they eat red meat and they're like, fuck, I can't digest this shit well. And I've never experienced that. So there is individual variability within this. Well, I think too, you know, people are like, say I can't digest it. What do they mean by that? When you eat different things, if you

eat a mixed diet, then you actually process things differently as well. You know, the fiber will actually slow down your absorption and actually block the absorption and actually breakdown of the food that you're eating. It's a physical barrier. It gets in the way of the enzyme getting to the food to break it down. It's also another physical barrier between those broken down nutrients and the lumen of your intestine to then be absorbed. So it actually delays things. And that's actually the argument that some people would make for eating fruit

was that it actually delays and stops your body from absorbing all the sugar that's in it. So it's okay. You're still going to absorb some of it. So I'm not in that camp, but I do think that it's better. But that's the argument is it delays and prevents the absorption of all of the nutrients available. So if you're eating a steak and you're eating that with a salad and fiber and things like that, that's going to change how your body digests that meat. But I think that people get certain feelings and they're like, oh, this is because I'm not digesting meat.

I don't know if that's necessarily the case because you absorb about 98% of the meat that you eat if you're not eating fiber. And there's other things too that disrupt your digestion as well like protease inhibitors and wheat and soy that that stop the enzymatic breakdown of protein in your gut as well so you know that that can be a problem as well if you're having you know meat with weed or like a sandwich or something like that that will actually prevent you from digesting all the wheat meat that you have all the protein that you have even if it's. Yeah, if you go to like Chipotle and you try to just eat no carbs, like good luck digesting some of that. Because it's going to have like a bunch of oils and stuff with it too. So I think sometimes people's interpretation or what they think is what you're talking about might be completely different. Yeah, and the thing is that you cannot physically break down fiber at all, right?

No vertebrate animal has the ability to break down fiber. So like herbivores that eat fiber, it's actually the bacteria in their gut that eat the fiber and they excrete short chain fatty acids, which are just saturated fats. And then they die off and that's a protein. So if the animal's absorbing the fat and protein that the bacteria produced, they can't actually break down the fiber. So we don't break down the fiber. We don't have appendixes that big. That used to be a four-foot-long cecum,

and in other primates, that's where fiber packs in and breaks down into the short-chain fatty acids and the protein. So we lost that ability. We haven't done that in millions of years. I think that's, you know, through comparative anatomy, that's one of the points of evidence to show that like we had this herbivorous past, but we have been out of that for quite some time. So we don't break that down at all. So people say, oh, I just can't

digest red meat. It's like, no, no, you can't digest fiber. You physically can't digest fiber. And people say that, well, there's a thing. It's just like these rumors that go around and they just get repeated and repeated. And then people just think that's the case. Oh, you eat meat, it takes 10 years to break down red meat. How? This is a tube. It goes one way.

Ouch. I haven't heard somebody say that in a while. Yeah. I've heard that before though. Yeah. But that's the thing. I saw that first when I was a kid. I think it was, I swear to God. It was on Beverly Hills Cop.

They just spit it out. And that Judd Ronhold guy was like, oh, did you know that by the time you're 30, you have 25 pounds of undigested meat in your gut? And I was like, how would that actually work? You don't have just like out pouches and pockets just sitting there. I think sometimes what people are maybe talking about too, like if it's someone that exercises, I think sometimes they're thinking like if I eat meat in between my morning walk and my lifting later on in the day or if I eat meat after work before I go to the gym, it just doesn't digest very well because it may take a while. But some of that is true. Like meat might take a while, right? Because if you're eating like a ribeye or something like that, I mean, first of all,

it's going to be delicious. It's going to be hard to stop eating, right? So while it would be maybe not a bad idea to eat a small amount of food, a lot of times we just choose not to eat at all because you're like, I don't want those meat and eggs like kind of sitting in my stomach during my workout. So that does take a while to break down, correct? Well, it does, but you'll break it down quicker than other stuff. It will feel a lot different than if you ate like a Rice Krispie treat or something. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

And the thing is too is that it's very satisfying. It's very satiating. And so you go into like a rest and digest mode because our biology isn't set up for our workday workout schedule. We're set up to go hunt, get a kill, eat, and rest. And that's what our physiology is set up for. So when we get a big meal of meat and fat and our body goes, right, this is what we need, why are you expending energy?

Shut it down, conserve energy, store all this stuff, rest, rebuild the damage, and then we'll go do it again. It's not saying, you know, so it's going to actually, it's also diverting a lot of blood to your digestive tract, right? So you're just going to be a bit more tired. And that's very natural to get a bit lethargic. You know, like a lion takes down a gazelle, they eat and then they sleep for 16 hours, right? And that's normal.

takes down a gazelle, they eat and then they sleep for 16 hours, right? And that's normal. And so it's not, you know, so physiologically, you eat that, you're not geared up to then go and hunt more. So your body's saying like, hey, take it easy. We got what we needed. The point of this was eating and then resting. So I've always felt better on working out on empty stomach and playing on empty stomach. I've always played rugby games on an empty stomach. I've always competed on an empty stomach. Even if it's like a night game or something like that, I just won't eat that whole day. And that's just how I've always naturally felt better. And during the day, I've noticed too, like if I'm working out more, my body will just need more meat.

And so I'll find that one big meal a day at night isn't really enough, so I need to eat throughout the day. But if I eat like a big meal in the day, I'm just tired the rest of the day. But I think that's more from a nutrition standpoint. Your body's satiated saying, hey, we don't need to expend energy anymore. We've got what we need.

Take it easy. Your point about the contrast between people, that's a very good point. I talk to a lot of people and say, well, I feel pretty good. I don't need to do this. I think this is just a way for people to reverse disease or if they're obese or something like that. And I always sort of just joke with them and say, you don't even know how bad you feel, because it's normal. We have this sort of baseline level that we feel good or bad. And we, we base that on how we felt the rest of our life. And so it's sort of, you know, this is sort of taking this average and I feel better or worse, you know, as compared to myself. Um,

but I think that that's sort of just a baseline level of awful that we feel because we don't realize how much better we could feel. I remember when I got all this stuff out of my system five years ago and started just eating just normal. I wasn't drinking at the time, wasn't doing anything. So it was just really, that was the change. No vegetables, a lot more meat. That was the only change. And I remember just feeling so much better and looking back on my life and realizing I felt like crap my entire life. And now I'm only feeling the way I'm supposed to. And I felt robbed. I was like, I should have felt like this every single day of my life. And I was really upset that I wasn't. And so that's what I try to

tell people. Like you say, like, give it a try. See how it affects you. Some people will be more affected. I don't have autoimmune issues. I could tolerate these things, but I like feeling just unbelievably amazing every single day. And so that contrast is something that, yeah, you have to experience it to know exactly what it is. And people may not even realize that they haven't felt as great. A good example of this, there's a lady that I've worked with. And I do some coaching. We have like a carnivore group, a challenge group, a 30-day challenge to say, hey, why don't you just try just meat and water, not even spices, not even anything. Just see.

Just get to a baseline like pure elimination, pure elemental diet. You're only getting in these nutrients. You're not taking in anything else and see what it does to you. You want to start adding things back in? Fine. See how they affect you and if that effect isn't something that you mind or if it provides you benefit in other ways just by pure enjoyment, then by all means.

But just see. Just take a look. There's a lady. She's Native American from Canada and Inuit heritage and they just culturally ate a lot of meat. And her daughter had a lot of food allergies and sensitivities as a kid. So they basically eliminated everything except meat

for the last 40 years. So she's in her, I think she's in her 60s now. She looks like she's 45. And she's just been eating meat for the last 40 years, but she uses spices. And she would use a lot of different spices in her cooking, but it was meat is what they ate. She had four autoimmune diseases. And she came to me and said that she couldn't possibly imagine there was just the spices doing this.

But she's like, you know what? I'll give it a try. She just cut out the spices, just went to just meat and salt and water. And within two months, like her autoimmune disorder were in remission. So just for her, she was much more sensitive to these things. And so even spices were a problem. I don't have that. I don't have that at all, but it still makes a big enough difference to me that I just, I don't want anything to do with it. I think for – Even though it doesn't necessarily – at least you don't feel when you add spices to food, you don't feel the difference, right?

I do feel a little difference. You do? Yeah. Okay. With some spices, especially like hot sauces and things like that. I remember I had some wings. Within 20 minutes, my face started getting itchy. My nose started getting stuffy.

I felt like I was getting a bit of an asthma tickle. Nothing major. Wings are worth it though. Yeah. They're worth the sickness. Yeah. And I loved wings. And that's been a problem.

But yeah, I noticed that within 20 minutes. And it didn't last that long. But it just sort of, you know, for the next couple of hours, it just felt a bit off, you know. And so is that the end of the world? No, I still felt amazing. But I noticed that difference. And so it's like, okay, well, that's doing something to me.

And if I do that every single day, that's just going to build up and compound. And then I'll start, you know, not feeling great anymore. And so for me, I just really like having nothing, nothing, nothing else. And I do notice a difference. It's not even that big. It's not like I get bloody diarrhea or something like that, which some people do. But it's enough for me to just be like, yeah, I don't need that. And because I know conceptually what these things are doing to me and the problems that. I just, I just don't want anything to do with them on principle.

And so, so for me, it's, it's more academic. Like I just like that has stuff, harmful things in it. I don't want it, you know, and that, that's, that's enough for me. Um, I was also going to say, you were talking about, uh, you're feeling sort of crappy, you know, when you drop the cards and things like that. Yeah. Transitioning to pure carnivore. Yeah, so you can get a period of fat adaptation.

Not everyone gets it. I didn't really experience it myself. But it is definitely something, a known phenomenon. Professor Tim Noakes out of South Africa, a really bright guy, he was one of these big exercise physiologists guys for like 30 years. He was all about you need to eat carbs for high-performance training you need to eat carbs to burn carbs that was he he was that guy wrote numerous books on it so everything like that and then like you know what 10 years ago or something like that he just realized he's like i i got it wrong and so he's just he says yeah i

feel like i've been lying to people for the last 30 years. And so he's done a lot of research on this and looking at training, high-performance training. He found that you can get the same output whether you're on carbs or off carbs because obviously you do make carbohydrates. You make glycogen when you're not eating it, when you're not taking it in. And so he had actually – it was a pretty cool study. It was a randomized controlled trial. We had two groups and one would get fat adapted. And they actually gave them 42 days to get fat adapted. But they found that in their other studies that actually maximum about three weeks, generally two to three weeks.

But they found that no one took longer than three weeks to get fat adapted. So once they were all fat adapted, then they put them on the treadmill, give them these exercise tests and things like that. And they found that both groups could put out the same amount of effort. They were able to work out just as hard. And then they switched groups. So the group that were eating carbs

were now not eating carbs and vice versa. And they gave them another 42 days, checked it, output performance was exactly the same. And so that was interesting. So some people say like, well, I need the carbs to get a better workout to be able to push myself. And in fact, these studies show that you don't. I've certainly noticed that in my own performance. I felt fantastic being able to do this.

The advantage of going without carbs is that you will continually make carbohydrates, you'll make blood sugar and glycogen and ketones, and you'll constantly be replenishing these things. So you're tapping into your fat stores as opposed to just your glycogen stores from carbo-loading. And you'll run out of glycogen in your liver and your muscles in about two hours of very heavy training, which not everyone gets to, right? So it's not necessarily affecting everyone. But when you're going on your fat, I mean, we've all got weeks of energy available. So you can really go, you can put the same output, but you can just keep going.

And so that I think is a big advantage. I've heard you mention something about soreness for you. Like, uh, you were talking about how, um, you, you, I think it was actually, you were talking about, I don't know if it was caffeine or if it was coffee, it was coffee. Um, there was a few things that you mentioned, but you mentioned like you could just continue working out and not get sore. What, what happened? Do you know what happened to you there? Because that, that was really interesting. Yeah. It's, um, I think, I think it's multifactorial. I've noticed it just even, even when I was in that keto bit, when I was still eating vegetables and a little bit of meat, I just wasn't getting sore. And I was like, this is really weird. And then I have a bit of carbs or whatever would get sore.

One reason is that being in ketosis and just having higher levels of ketones actually reduces inflammation. Just having higher ketones does that. But I think there's also, as part of these defense chemicals that plants have as a deterrent, they're going to cause more inflammation, cause more pain and discomfort. So an animal eats that and all of a sudden they're feeling achy and sore and gross. They're like, okay, well, I'm not eating that again. And so I think that's the plant's way of telling you to back off. Don't eat me.

I'll hurt you if you do. And so I noticed that and I was able to – well, how I tested it was I did a big leg workout. I was like, I'm just not sore after this. I was like, I should though, because I just got back from Bangladesh. I hadn't been working out. This is my first big leg day. And I really actually overdid it. I probably did, you know, a bigger leg session than I should have given that I hadn't worked out in so long and I just wasn't sore. And I was like, okay, well, you know, I didn't walk out of there just jello leg, just like, you know, like a baby deer, just sort of stumbling out of there. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe I just didn't push myself as much.

But, you know, I did 12 sets to failure, you know. And so normally that would be a good workout. Yeah. And so I was like, all right, next leg day, you know, a few days later, I was like, well, I'll just do that same 12 sets to failure. And then I'll just do squats. And I'll just keep doing squats until I run out of gas. And I ended up doing those 12 sets. And then I ended up doing another 20 sets of squats.

And given enough break, I was giving myself decent rest, like four or five minutes between sets. I could do the same reps every single set. And I was just listening to like, you know, a book on tape and I was just sort of, you know, just, just sitting there. And then all of a sudden I realized I'm like, okay, I've done like 32 sets of stuff. And, um, I was like, all right, well, and I realized I was like, my legs aren't that bad. I, on my first set of those squats, I did 15, On my first set of those squats, I did 15 reps to failure. And then the last set I did 13. So it really wasn't much of a – I was taking big rests.

I was taking a full rest until I was fully rested. But I found that if I did that, I could just keep going. I was like, okay, I can probably keep doing this the rest of the night. But I was like, I've been here for four hours and I got shit to do. So I get out of here. And also I was a bit worried because I've done, I've way overdone like days before. I've just been crippled for weeks.

And so I was like, I thought that might be exactly what was going to happen. And I had a friend of mine and they called me and they were like, oh, hey, do you want to go hiking up this mountain tomorrow? It's like a big three-hour hike. It's straight up. It's awful. And I was like, easy. I may have just done something very stupid here.

I like to see how I feel in the morning. I may not be walking for the next month. Woke up the next morning. I was fine. I had no soreness. I was going up the stairs, and I was just like didn't feel anything. Took two at a time, and I was just like, okay, yeah, I can feel it. My hamstrings are – there's something going on there that I put in some work. I was like, all right, let's go hiking.

Felt great on the hike. And I was like, right, time to go to rugby. And so I went to rugby that night, trained with Seattle Seawolves who were just their first preseason. Well, no, that was just into the season there in the first inaugural year of the Major League Rugby. And I was like, all right,

let's really push myself, really see how hard I can go. I was just pushing myself maximally the whole time. It felt great. I hadn't run in months, and the next day I still wasn't sore. I was like, this is crazy. And two days after that, I still wasn't sore, but my hamstrings were just like, okay, yeah,

you should probably let us rest here. You could keep doing this, but eventually you're going to tear something. That was sort of the impression I got. And I met a friend of mine for coffee. I was like, all right, well, it's been a few weeks since I've had coffee or anything like that. Let's see what I can do. Can I have coffee on this carnivore sort of thing? What does that do to me? I had one cup of black coffee, and within 20 minutes, my back and my hammies and my legs were getting stiff and sore i was like oh what is happening i could feel it in real time getting worse ended up being sore for two days after that and so i was like right no coffee but i found that taking caffeine pills

didn't do that you know so there was something in the coffee and there's 150 000 other chemicals in coffee yeah besides the caffeine and so obviously something else was in there that was causing that. And so that's why I just like, okay, not doing that. What are your thoughts about the idea of hormesis, getting like a little bit of bad, a little bit of poison being good for you? And maybe these plants, I don't know, maybe they kind of hurt your stomach. Maybe they are trying to kill you, but maybe some of this is good for us. So you mentioned the fiber kind of like not being broken down, but kind of feeding the gut.

And our friend Joel Green talks quite a bit about you're not really feeding yourself, but you're feeding them, as he'll kind of say. Like you're feeding your cells, you're feeding your gut microbiome and things like that. What do you think about any of that kind of conjecture? Yeah, so great, absolutely great points. I'll answer the second question first. So, as far as the gut microbiome goes, that's a very interesting topic. That's something that, but I think it's something we need a lot more information on. And I do talk to, there are some people out there, the microbiome experts that are really big fans of carnivore diet because you get a lot of very good diversity in the, in your microbiome and you, and you're seeing, seem to get the kinds of microbes that are

associated with, with good health in one way or the other. One of the reasons, and I don't know his full arguments for this, but some of the, some of the arguments that people make is that your, your gut biome. I'll just mention quickly, Joel has kind of pointed out that almost every single person that has been on a carnivore diet has to kind of like walk it back. And he talks about Paul Saladino and something. Joel's not, Joel's not inflammatory. Like he's not, he really wants to get a good message out to people and he's not trying to like fight people. So he's not like doing dirty shit like that. But in general, that's his main conjecture against the carnivore diet is that he doesn't think it should be done in like perpetuity.

He thinks that plants have like a place in the human diet and a big place. Well, and that's fine. But I would argue that I've been doing this a lot longer than Paul Saladino has. Dr. Baker has been doing it a lot longer than Paul Saladino has. We've never had any of these problems. That lady, the Inuit lady, she's been doing this for 40 years. She actually got better at taking off the spices. All of her people historically before the introduction of Western diets, they ate meat.

And then the closer you got to the Arctic Circle, the less plants were available anyway. The original sort of settlers in New England, I remember reading an account when I was – I think it was in high school. The more southern people in sort of southern Canada, northern America, Northeast America. They were like, look, these guys are living up basically in the snow all the time. I get it that they eat meat during that time. But for three months out of the year when things thaw, surely they could live off the land. But they don't. They just eat meat.

So I think you can, obviously. And our ancestors during the Ice Ages were, were right there aren't many plants and fruit growing during ice ages right and so i think and i think that you know so i so i think that that's that is definitely the case you can absolutely subsist solely on meat in perpetuity there are entire civilizations that have been doing that generationally. And you can't do that generation after generation after generation in good health unless you have everything you need. And you're not going to survive in the Arctic North or during an ice age unless you're in very good health. You either thrive or die in those conditions. So another argument that people make with fiber is that sometimes that will get broken down slightly into, you know, like butyrate, butyric acid. That feeds your enterocytes and that's good for your gut lining.

But that's actually one of the major ketone bodies that you make when you're in ketosis. So you're going to have a lot of that available to you. You don't need to get it from your gut. You get it through your bloodstream as well. Butter gets its name from its high butyric acid content. That's how it gets its name. So there's plenty of that around. And so, yes, you can get that from having some fiber, but there's plenty of other sources as well. As far as hormesis is concerned it's possible but what is the hormetic effect alcohol gives us a hormetic effect

in the sense that we build up a tolerance to alcohol but does that provide a benefit anywhere else but that is a hormetic effect we're building up a tolerance I would say probably because is alcohol all negative I don't know I would say probably because like is alcohol all negative? I don't know.

I think a lot of it is. Some of it's probably positive. And at very low doses, it probably could be. I mean at very, very low doses, arsenic has actually been shown to be beneficial. So I definitely agree

with the idea of hormesis to an extent. I don't think that necessarily every harmful chemical is hormetic. I don't know why it would be. I mean there's just millions of these things out there. But maybe. But what are the doses? I mean that's one thing that when you talk to people that are plant-based,

they say, oh, well, yes, there are these plant toxins. But there's this hormetic effect. But I haven't actually seen anyone study that. I've actually seen say, hey, in spinach, these things cause harm. But in this dose, if you have three leaves under these conditions, you get this hormetic effect. So what doses? Which chemicals are hormetic? At what level are they hormetic?

Are they providing an actual overall benefit? Or is it just you're getting a tolerance to these toxins just like alcohol and that's the only thing you're getting? There's more than one toxin in these plants. There can be hundreds, if not thousands, in some of these things. And so you somehow got it right that the amount of salad you're eating gives you the exact dose of hormetic effect from this one chemical and spinach and all the other things you're eating. But what about the other chemicals in there?

Are they all hormetic? Are they all hormetic? Are they all hormetic at that exact same dose? Do you even know what the dose is? These plants are not making these chemicals to benefit us. They are not making these chemicals to be hormetic. We are not in the Garden of Eden. So they are doing this to deter us, to poison us, because they don't want to be eaten.

You can make an argument for fruit, because the plant wants that seed moved. But it doesn't necessarily – so it wants something to eat it to move that seed. But it doesn't necessarily want us to eat it. A lot of these fruits and berries actually co-evolve with birds. So the birds would eat them and they'd pass these seeds around. In fact, there are a number of examples where those seeds will only germinate in the guts of certain birds. So like a cassowary bird, they just eat fruit. There's about 150 different fruits that they eat in the tropics.

Every single one will kill you dead because the plant wants the cassowary bird to eat the fruit, not anything else, because those seeds will only germinate in the gut of a cassowary bird. So if the cassowary bird leaves an area, those plants die out, right? And so, or if you eat that fruit, that seed is not going to turn into a plant. So it needs to protect its baby, right? And so a lot of berries, a lot of fruit are actually still quite toxic. Even citrus, they have something called franocoumarins, which are toxic. And this is why you don't take grapefruit with certain medications because there are these franocoumarins, which our liver has to detox. And some of the liver enzymes that detoxify the franocoumarins

are what metabolize certain medications like statins and other heart drugs. And so there are certain medications that say don't eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice if you take this medication. That's why all citrus have franacumarins. Some of the franacumarins will be light sensitive, so they will irreversibly bind to protein and DNA and cause permanent damage. And so people have actually gotten, it makes them very light sensitive, right? On that same topic, do you think that some of these things might be less, it might have less of a negative impact on us if it's in accordance to light, cold, heat, seasonal? Because we're not, we shouldn't really necessarily, I guess shouldn't is a weird word, but we didn't used to have access to all these carbohydrates, to all this fruit, to all this stuff.

You know, thousands of years ago, 365, but there was times a year where we walked by a bush and it would have fucking berries on it and be like, oh, it looks delicious. We tasted and probably tasted amazing to find stuff like that. There are examples of that, like the Plains Indians who just ate buffalo. They'd chase a group of buffalo over a cliff when the season, when they come through seasonally and they'd

die, they'd preserve them, dry them, make pemmican, and that's what they eat throughout the year. And that's predominantly what they ate. They were high-fat carnivores, and they were thriving. I mean, they were very, very healthy. And a lot of them were actually quite tall. There was a meeting between Jefferson, then President Jefferson, and some of these Plains Indians, or maybe they were up by Minnesota. Anyway, so they came over and so Jefferson was like 6'2", 6'3". And he describes these guys as giants.

He said these people were giants. They were probably pushing seven feet tall. They were just absolute monsters. So these were big, strong people, predominantly just ate meat, but they sometimes incorporated berries and sometimes they would, for like ceremonies, like a wedding or something like special occasion, they would make pemmican

with some berries mixed in. So that did happen. You know, I'm not, I'm not saying that that didn't happen, but I, but I just point out that just because it's a fruit doesn't mean it's good for you, you know? And because there are a lot of fruits that will just kill you. There's a lot of berries that are, they're very toxic. You know, that, that's good for you, you know, because there are a lot of fruits that will just kill you. There's a lot of berries that are very toxic. You know, that's sort of a traditional tribal thing. It's like, don't eat the red berries, you know, and that's why. So some of these things

can be toxic. Also, I think that just the sugar content is harmful. You know, when you're, like you're saying, seasonally. This only comes around every now and then. Yeah, like right now, in this area, strawberries aren't in season, but if you were to get a strawberry it's like this big it's like the size of this water bottle and you're like how did they make this thing and like half it half the thing is like white and then the rest of it's like bright red yeah it was so these things are

like bioengineered i mean you know when the plains indians were eating this stuff and our ancestors elsewhere a little tiny berry get like a little sweetness on your teeth and you probably be like wow that's amazing. And the Inuit people say, oh, well, they had berries and things like that. Well, first of all, they're seasonal. Second of all, they're like these little lingonberries. They're just sour as hell. It's not exactly sweet.

And so a lot of these things, they've been cultivated to be much, much more sweet. If you look at the historical ancestor of a banana, it's a very different plant, big old seeds, and mangoes as well. Those are just very tough, very fibrous, massive seed and not much sugar there. But we've cultivated these things to be much, much more sweet. And so that's not, if we're talking strictly natural, what we were eating when we evolved or, natural what we were eating when we evolved or, you know, humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, have been very, very genetically conserved for about the last 300,000 years. Obviously,

there's some, you know, differences, you know, people with, have access or had exposure to agriculture, you know, from agricultural revolution around, you know, 8,000, 10,000 years ago have made some adaptations to that sort of – those toxins. I think we have built up a bit of an immunity to that. And then you have, say, like the Native Americans or even Native Australians where I'm living now are much more sensitive to these things. So that lady who was Native American, she couldn't even deal with spices, right? That's how sensitive she is because she, her, you know, her people have only been exposed to this stuff

in the last few hundred years, you know, whereas like our ancestors would have been 10,000 years, you know, so there's a difference there. Native Australians, Aboriginals, again, only the last few hundred years they've been exposed to a Western diet. And this is actually what it used to be called. They used to call just the normal, like now we call them chronic diseases, chronic illnesses. They used to call them the diseases of the West, right? Because only these Western cultures would get these things.

They go to Australia. They go to Native America or go to North America, South America. They find these people just weren't getting these diseases. So they called them the diseases of the West. I remember hearing when I was a kid, just on like a news program, that when eating a Western diet, Native Americans were four times as likely to get obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and all the rest. And I remember thinking at the time, I was like, well, doesn't that mean the food is causing the disease? Because if they don't eat the food, they don't get the disease. When we eat the food and we get the disease, we just get it at a lower rate.

And I was like, okay, what's a Western diet as compared to what they're eating? What's a non-Western diet? And I didn't know it at the time, but they were just eating meat, predominantly meat. Obviously, they could have some other things, but that's what they were eating. So I think that that's indicative of those plant toxins causing this toxicity, this exposure relationship. They're exposed to a toxin, their body's not able to deal with it, and they get these manifestations of ill health. The natural state of humanity is healthy, but right now no one is healthy. I think something like 88% of Americans have at least one metabolic illness. 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. That is not the natural state. So

something is happening in our environment. Something is happening to us. That is not our genetic heritage. Our genetic heritage is to thrive and be healthy. Are there any toxins in meat cooked raw or otherwise? In meat itself, I would argue no. People can make an argument, well, if it gets down to your microbiome and then this bacteria get at it, maybe that can increase mTOR, that could do this, that could do that.

These are all theoreticals. First of all, you're going to absorb 98% of the meat that you eat in your small intestine, so I'm going to get to your colon. If you're eating a bunch of fiber and you're eating a bunch of protease inhibitors and things like that from wheat and soy,

yeah, maybe that'll disrupt that. That can get down to your colon. And then maybe then you can get exposed to these, it can get exposed to the microbiome and maybe cause us bad things. I don't think we have any hard evidence of that. It's still a theoretical. But if you're only eating meat

and you're not eating the rest of it, it's a moot point because it's not getting to your colon anyway, right? Cookie meat, you can get different carcinogenic factors that are called carcinogenic. The studies that looked at that though were animal models. So, you know, can that translate over to people maybe maybe not but um but also they they had they gave these mice like mega doses they're like you know 20 000 times the amount of of these chemicals that you're going to get from like a burnt steak you know if you also look uh from from the fossil record we have pretty good evidence that we've been cooking meat, even in like oven technology, for about 790,000 years, right? So 500,000 years, half a million years before Homo sapiens even existed, our ancestors have been cooking meat at least.

And some people argue maybe like 1.5 million years ago. Either way, it's a long time. So we've been cooking meat for a very long time. Whatever's going to show up in that, if it's harmful or whatever, I think we've adapted to it. I think we'd be just fine with it. You know, just like eventually,

if we just keep eating plants and keep exposing to plants, we'll probably get more and more adapted to eating plants. It's going to take hundreds of thousands of years to be, you know, to get to a point where we're really good at it. It's not going to happen in our lifetime.

Can't. Our genes are not going to change in our own lifetime. But like the people that have been exposed to agriculture for 10,000 years, they have an easier time with it than the people who have been exposed for 200 years. And so I think that we've been exposed to cooked meat for at least 800,000 years. So I think that that's okay. Pat Brodger family, how's it going? Hope you're enjoying the episode. And this episode is brought to you by Merrick Health, the premium telehealth clinic from Derek from More Plates, More Dates. Now, if you've been wanting to get your blood work done, or if you wanted to get your blood

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$101 off of that entire panel. Links to them and all the information down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. And the way that we have access to so much food is actually only within like the last 50 years. Yeah, absolutely. Something for people to think about. Andrew, you got something over there? Yeah, I wanted to bring up the argument from Lane Norton about plants wanting to kill us. You know, he gets pretty animated, so it's pretty funny to bring him up. But he posted it as like, well, well damn they sure are playing the long game right

because if i eat spinach and let's just say i do have a weird reaction to it i'm not gonna die you know it's that's not gonna kill me so uh what's your rebuttal to that yo i think you nailed it on the head they are playing the long game slow poison is still poison you know we're genetically we are we are designed to live 120 years. So why are we dying in our 60s and 70s? That's literally middle age, right? So if you die 50 years early from this garbage that you're doing to your body, you're still being poisoned, right? Slow poison is still poison. So that's exactly what it is. Just because something doesn't give you an acute phase reaction that you dropped dead on the spot does not mean it's not poisonous it just means that it's not deadly poisonous right so that's

the thing so um you know it i think he's just missing that and um you know the you know the the plant's trying to kill you thing i mean all you have to do is is study botany and you'll see this is the fact i mean there are these chemicals in there most plants will kill most animals even animals that eat exclusively plant material they can only eat very specific plants because they're they're physiologically set up to you know break down and detoxify the specific poisons in that specific plant but they eat other plants outside of that they actually get very sick or they die there's set up to break down and detoxify the specific poisons in that specific plant. But the other plants outside of that, they actually get very sick or they die.

There's an entire field of veterinary medicine, livestock medicine, where you look at all these different sorts of disorders or diseases that are purely from eating the wrong thing. So you may have names for them, big head, limp neck, crazy cow syndrome. All of these come from eating the wrong plant. Now, this normally doesn't happen in nature because, you know, they can get the food that they're eating. But in a pasture, if you have, you know, it's walled off, fenced off, it's going to, you know, you're going to be eliminated if they don't have enough, you know, of, you know, forage or they don't have enough feed. They're going to start eating things that they're not supposed to and they'll get sick. So we already have names for these

sorts of things. We already know this happens. And so, you know, the idea that just like, oh, no, no, you know, plants don't have any of these points. Well, that's just simply not the case. Nutritional, human nutrition is a very soft science. I mean, that's just simply not the case. Nutritional – human nutrition is a very soft science. I mean it's just because it's all epidemiological. There are some studies that you can sort of have an interventional trial. But by nature, they have to be sort of shorter lived and it's harder to control all the variables. Animal nutrition is very, very robust. to control all the variables.

Animal nutrition is very, very robust. You can take thousands of head of cattle or thousands of sheep and you can subject them to similar, almost identical conditions and just change one variable. That's a very robust field. And this is something that's well, well, well established that if you do not feed that animal exactly what it's supposed to eat, it's a problem. And people know about this and they care about this because it costs them money. They're not getting the poundage. They're not getting the right product and their animals are dying. They're getting sick. They're paying more vet bills. So it matters. Humans are, we're not worth anything. So people, they're not spending

too much time on this. But so that's the idea. know i think that that just comes from you know just not really thinking about i mean he even said oh they're playing the long yeah that that that's exactly right you know we do have some defenses against these things but that doesn't mean we have perfect defenses that doesn't mean that that doesn't cost us you know and so you know just like you know the romans are getting sort of low-grade lead poisoning you know there's some arguments that it was probably probably pretty low grade because, you know, the water in some way sort of like, you know, wasn't sort of stripping off as much lead as you would expect. And so they could get away with it longer. But that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been better off without them, you know.

And so, you know, yes, you know, is spinach – can you live on it? Can you survive on it? Yeah, absolutely. I'm not arguing that. I'm not arguing that you're going to die in a year. I'm not going to argue that you're going to die in 10 years. I'm arguing that it's not optimal. You don't need it.

You don't have to have it. It's not providing you any benefit past what meat would give you. And there are things in it that can be detrimental. And if you eat a lot of it, it will build up. There's tons of oxalates in these things. Oxalates have been well-established to cause serious problems. I mean, there's a much higher prevalence of kidney stones in people who eat a lot of oxalates. So he's talking about spinach. Yeah. I mean, that's something that has a strong association with kidney stones

and that can damage your kidneys and you can get actual, you know, fulminant kidney damage and end up, you know, really, really damaging your health long-term by eating all these high oxalate containing foods. So yeah, you know, it is a longer game. It does take a long time. And that's

why people aren't noticing it. And that's why it's important to point out. I think that's exactly why, you know, it's important to point out because it's not as obvious as if you go out and you eat something in the woods, you're like, okay, and this guy ends up in the hospital, you eat half a leaf of hemlock, we'll kill you, right? So, you know, that's why it has to be pointed out because it's not self-evident. It's something that does take a long time to manifest. I don't even know if this would be a question that can be answered. Maybe it can.

But like the plant-based crowd will say saturated fat is going to destroy you. Cholesterol is going to kill you. But then the meat-based side will say, hey, no, saturated fat is really good for you. It's that unsaturated stuff that's going to get you. And I welcome cholesterol because I want high test levels and it's okay, that sort of thing. How is it that there is such a crazy contrast between both camps when it comes to cholesterol and unsaturated saturated fat? Yeah, so it is purely from you know the the the muddy literature yeah and in the scientific literature is very uh divergent in this but the the reason is all a lot of the

original studies showing or at least claiming that saturated fat and cholesterol cause a problem was all industry research it was all funded by the sugar companies. And actually they didn't disclose that. They didn't disclose their sources and their funding, which is not ethical or legal, but they did it. And so people like Ancel Keys were paid off by the sugar companies. He put out the Seven Nations Study, which is pretty well established now. He doctored the evidence. He withheld, he cherry-picked the certain ones that fit the graphs and made it look like more cholesterol equaled more heart disease.

And again, that's associative study. It's epidemiology. You can only show association. You can never show causation, right, with an association. And, you know, I talk to people sometimes. They're like, well, no, it's such a strong – all these correlative studies prove causation. Okay, so this is someone who's never studied statistics because you can never prove causation from correlation. You cannot by definition. But if you prove or show that there is no correlation,

that proves there is no causation, right? Because if there's no association, obviously one's not causing the other. So his own studies took out a number of countries that had very high cholesterol and saturated fat intake and very low heart disease. And other ones that had very low saturated fat and cholesterol intake and very high heart disease, right? So it really showed a very different picture. It really showed a very different picture. So he doctored his own research because he was paid off and was a bit of a crook. Some people will still say, well, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. He actually did a lot of good research and we should at least still accept that. I'm like, I don't know.

I mean we thought that was good research too. We found out it was compromised. So what else was compromised? I don't think we can trust really anything that guy did. And then the UCSF, University of California, San Francisco Medical School, they published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016, one of the top medical journals in the world, actual internal memos from the sugar companies back in like the 50s and 60s detailing how they paid off three Harvard professors to falsify data and publish fraudulent studies to make it appear as if cholesterol was causing heart disease when actually there was a lot of studies actually showing a very strong association between sugar and heart disease, right? And one of those professors was named

head of the USDA and he was the one who authored and published the 1977 USDA declaration saying that cholesterol causes heart disease, saturated fat increases cholesterol, stop eating both. And that changed the world. And then after that, we're like, well, we know that cholesterol causes heart disease. We know that saturated fat increases cholesterol, therefore they're bad. And then you started looking at things, how can this reduce cholesterol? Because we know reducing cholesterol is good, right? So all you have to do is look at, does it reduce cholesterol? But then some bright spot said, well, what is it actually doing? You're reducing cholesterol, but is that actually good? Is that actually coming out

with the outcomes that you want? So there are studies showing that when you replace saturated fat with linoleic acid, that yes, that will reduce your LDL cholesterol and cardiac deaths go up, right? So that's not really helpful, right? Because the point is not to fight cholesterol. The point was to fight heart disease. And we found that that intervention did reduce cholesterol, but actually increased heart disease. And there have been a number of studies,

really in the last decade, with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people showing that higher LDL cholesterol is actually beneficial. So people over the age of 65 with higher levels of LDL cholesterol live longer, live longer independently. So they're not going to nursing homes, they're not getting dementia. It's protective against Alzheimer's, protective against Parkinson's and other forms of dementia.

Higher LDL cholesterol. Yeah, it's protective. Your brain is made out of cholesterol. Your's and other forms of dementia. Higher LDL cholesterol. Yeah, it's protective. Your brain is made out of cholesterol. Your brain is made out of fat. 70% of the solid matter in your brain is fat. 20% of that is DHA, EPA. That only comes from animal sources. You can't get those from plants.

We make it, but not much. You need more of it. That cholesterol, your axons, which is like the fiber optic wires coming down from your neurons connect with the rest of your body. Those are insulated like any sort of wires would be. And with what's called a myelin sheath, and that helps the connectivity that makes the signal go faster. So you get demyelination, you get demyelinating diseases like multiple sclerosis, and that manifests with multiple neurological problems. That just comes from damaging that

myelin sheath. Well, that myelin sheath is made out of fat and cholesterol, right? You need all these things. These things are very important. In fact, just being on a ketogenic diet is very beneficial too because the ketones can cross the blood-brain barrier and then reconstitute into fats. And that actually helps build the physical structures and maintain the physical structures of the brain. So when we take a deeper look into this, A, historically, a lot of these studies were now known to be fraudulent and compromised. They were bought and paid for by the sugar companies. That was not disclosed. We even have their contracts.

We know what these Harvard professors were paid. They were paid $6,500. It's equivalent to about 50 grand now. That's it. That's what their souls were worth. They bought a Camry. They got that and it just absolutely destroyed

the health of the world. And we know since that declaration people have gotten a lot worse. The obesity rate after World War II was 6%. And in 1980, it was 8%. Now it's like over 24%, something like that. 70% of people are overweight or obese in America. UK was 6%, 6%. Now it's like closer to 30%.

So we've tripled, quadrupled our obesity rates, right? And all the other chronic diseases have gone along with that. There's another one. I learned about the Framingham study, major, major, major study, sort of a hallmark, landmark case, study

in heart disease and cholesterol. Followed these people in, was it Framingham, Massachusetts for, I think it was like 30 years, looked at all these different sorts of markers and looked at what sort of problems they were getting and see what sort of associations they could draw. And I was taught in medical school that this showed that the more cholesterol that you had, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol you had, the higher your heart disease rates were. It was just sort of this direct correlation. Okay.

Again, correlation, not causation. The problem with that is what's taught to – like I said, you get these things. You just get repeat and repeat and repeat and they just end up being, oh, everyone knows that. But you look back to the source and you find they're like, okay, what's that based on? So that was based on the AHA, their interpretation of the Framingham study, not the Framingham study itself. So the American Heart Association actually published two years after the Framingham study that more cholesterol equaled more heart disease.

What the Framingham study actually showed was that more cholesterol, less heart disease. That's what they found. So they completely misreported the actual findings of the Framingham study. actual findings of the Framingham study. So this all goes back to this fraud that was perpetrated first onto the American public and then later onto the world because we were obviously very influential in other policies around the world. Like we made that declaration in 1977. UK followed suit in 1983.

And the same results happened to them as happened to us. And then Australia and the rest of the world have all been taking these. And these are ways just to increase selling processed foods most likely and monocrop farming and whatever else you want to throw into the mix. That's it because this is all industry research that we didn't know. So the only thing you can tell from industry research is that whatever the industry is funding, that study will support that industry, that product. And in fact, studies that come out that industry supports

that don't support their product, they don't get published. So they might find this and go like, that didn't show what we want to show. We'll just tuck this under the rug. I actually spoke with a doctor down in Perth, Australia, where I live now, and he was involved in research for probiotics. And he didn't tell me the name of the company or anything like that. But so it was a major probiotic company and they had a small study with sort of like six people, which is nothing, showing that there was some benefit to these probiotics.

And that's to say, oh, this is clinically proven to show benefit, six people. And so they wanted a bigger study because they believed in their product and that's fair enough. So they say, okay, great. Let's do this bigger study and let's really get some hard evidence to show that our product is great. So they did this bigger study. It was run in Perth, Australia. And they found that actually it wasn't that good. It actually maybe was detrimental.

And so they were getting ready to publish it and they got letters from the lawyers saying like you published that thing, we'll sue you. And so you can't publish it. So they were like they weren't allowed to publish their results because it was funded by them. And so the abstract is still available. That's available and people can read the abstract. But the full study itself is not allowed to be published. And so that's what happens with industry research. So a lot of the stuff that's saying that cholesterol causes heart disease, at least the foundational studies that everyone's based everything off of afterwards subsequently uh was industry research

search a lot of these things there were actually randomized controlled trials back in that era as well because there was this was hotly debated you go back into the literature and and read the studies and the papers and the position papers um you know in the journal american medical association 1956 there was a position that came out um that i read that said you know, in the Journal of American Medical Association, 1956, there was a position that came out that I read that said, you know, it's basically accepted now that cholesterol is a driving factor in heart disease. But this is really based on really bad evidence. These studies that people talk about, they're flawed for all these different reasons. They just went through for like 12 pages just excoriating all of the so-called evidence that cholesterol caused heart disease. So this was hotly debated. And all the way through the 70s and then 1977, that declaration came out and it was just like, it was appealing to

authorities. Well, you know, teacher said so, so no, you're wrong. And there was no argument after that. And it actually ruined the reputations and careers of all these people like Dr. Yudkin in the UK. They were just like, no, no, no, no. It's sugar, sugars. There's a direct correlation. In every country, when refined sugar consumption goes up, heart disease tracks, you know, like 20 years after that, almost perfectly. Same with seed oils. Seed oils track really well with heart disease as well. Red meat does not. Animal fats do not. Saturated fat do not. They actually have an inverse relationship. If you look through the 20th century, as animal fat, saturated fat is going down, heart disease is going up. And so not the same with seed oils and sugar. So I don't think

you can argue that saturated fat and cholesterol are causing that because we're reducing all of those things and we have all these studies that show the opposite so there were actual randomized controlled trials again there's like that intervention trial that I said with linoleic acid they replaced saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, and they got worse outcomes. They had people getting more heart attacks, more cardiac events, even though their cholesterol was lowered. And now there's more and more and more studies and evidence showing that LDL cholesterol is actually really good for you.

It's natural. We make it. First of all, there's hundreds of particulates. So LDL is not just one molecule. There's just dozens of these things. And they can be damaged and they can be destroyed. And so I think it's more of a surrogate marker of other sorts of damage and disruption when you get these bad LDL things. We call them bad. I don't think they are bad themselves. LDL itself is not bad. LDL itself is very good. bad themselves. LDL itself is not bad. LDL itself is very good. You can think of Dr. Ken Berry says that LDL cholesterol is the good cholesterol. LDL is the other good cholesterol. They're both good. They're both beneficial. Through oxidation, glycation, having a lot of carbohydrates in your diet, high carbohydrates or just carbohydrates in your diet in general is not optimal, I don't think, because when your blood sugar goes up, then this can actually cause direct damage in your body.

Those glucose molecules can actually physically fuse to other molecules in your body and permanently damage them. It's called glycation. So it's a non-enzymatic binding of that glucose molecule or a sugar molecule to other molecules. This is what you might hear like an HbA1c. This is what diabetics talk about. That's a direct glycation end product from glucose sticking to hemoglobin. But the other carbohydrates do this as well. Fructose does this as well, but in different ways. It doesn't show up on an HbA1c. But they'll have other sorts of glycation byproducts. So that causes direct damage.

But when you say permanently, what do you mean? Yeah, so it'll bind there. It'll damage that molecule and our body can't fix that. So it has to just recycle it, right? fix that. So it has to just recycle it, right? So HbA1c is a marker of how much your blood sugar level has been for the last three months because you'll turn over your red blood cells and all your hemoglobin in those red blood cells every three months, right? So once they get a bit dodgy, your spleen will, there's little tiny little tubules that they go through and they have to fold in half and go around these little corners. And if they sort of get stuck and

pause or something like that, they can't manipulate that. The spleen will pluck them up and eat them and recycle them. So you sort of constant turnover of your red blood cells about every three months. And so you can see this turnover in your hemoglobin as well. And you can see how damaged it's been. And that's sort of a marker of the rest of the damage that's going on in your body. And so that happens to other things. So this is what kills diabetics. It's just this chronic, elevated blood sugar. And as Lane Norton would say, well, high blood sugar is really playing the long game, isn't it? That diabetes is a bit of a joke, right? No, this causes damage and it builds up over decades, right?

And so that's what we see. And this is what damages diabetics and kills diabetics is this chronically high blood sugar. So that is also damaging other things in your body like LDL cholesterol. is also damaging other things in your body like LDL cholesterol. So high blood sugar can damage what's called APOB100, which is a receptor on your LDL cholesterol, which your liver recognizes and sucks it and pulls it into your liver. That's what LDL is doing.

It's transporting fat cholesterol around your body and it's going to your liver and your liver is using it. And if your liver can't recognize it, it's not going to be able to pull it in. It's not going to be able to utilize this. Now you have more and more and more of this stuff floating around your bloodstream. And where does it go? Well, the only things that can sort of recognize these things

and suck them up are your macrophages. They have these scavenger receptors that can basically get anything. And so they start sucking these things up. And sometimes people have heard of these foam cells that you have all this LDL cholesterol and your body doesn't know what to do with it, that your macrophages just suck all these things up and they grow and grow and grow. They almost have an unlimited capacity to suck these things up. So they grow into these massive foam cells and they think that's, then these macrophages go to these areas of damage in your artery walls and then they try to repair that because that's, then these macrophages go to these areas of damage in your artery walls

and then they try to repair that because that's their job and then they get stuck there. That's the thought. That's what people think might be happening. So they say, oh, if you have high LDL cholesterol, then you'll develop these foam cells. No, you won't develop those foam cells if you don't damage your LDL cholesterol first. And that comes from that, you know, high levels of blood sugar and possibly seed oils and other sorts of pro-inflammatory things as well could do that. So you can look at your LDL and actually get particulate studies. And it's just literally dozens, if not over a hundred, you know,

different kinds of LDL damaged and undamaged and things like that. So I think those damaged LDL cholesterols, I still don't think those are causing the disease. They might be taken up by these foam cells. Those foam cells may get stuck in your arterial walls. I don't think we've really proven that one way or the other. There's other theories to do with the origin of heart disease. But either way, that LDL, that damaged LDL isn't causing the problem. It's just being taken up in this larger inflammatory disease process. So I think it's more of a surrogate marker like HbA1c for the rest of the damage that's going on in your body. And that's the thing too.

LDL cholesterol is very weakly associated with heart disease. Those damaged LDL cholesterol particulate, like called SDLDL, small dense LDL, large buoyant LDL, they're not even associated with heart disease at all. They're just good for you. Well, you know, according to most sources. SDLDL, small dense LDL,

those are the damaged LDL that have been, you know, screwed around by the glycation and oxidation. That has a stronger association with heart disease, but it's really only like 1.5 times more association. So it's still quite a weak association. Diabetes is 10 times increased risk for heart disease, right? So it's a massive, massive difference, right? So your HbA1c is actually a stronger indicator of your risk for heart disease than your LDL is, even your SD-LDL, right? Metabolic syndrome.

Someone has metabolic syndrome, not full-blown diabetes. They're six times more likely to develop heart disease. LDL is really, you know, just even SD-LDL is really not what we should be focusing on. We should be focusing on reducing inflammation, reducing our carbohydrates, our HbA1c, our diabetes.

And there are clinical trials by Professor Steve Finney showing that you can fully reverse type 2 diabetes by putting people on a ketogenic diet. Get them off of medication, get them off insulin. And I've seen that in practice. I've seen it with my own mom when she went on a carnivore diet. She was a type 2 diabetic for 25 years. She was on three different oral medications and was on a high dose of insulin. Within two months, she came off all her oral medications and down to a minimal dose of insulin. And her doctor and her HbA1c went from, you know, nine, which is very high, down to 6.1, which is, you know, high normal for a non-diabetic. And her doctor looked at her and just said, how the hell did you do this? What the hell did you do? You know, diabetes is a progressive

disease. It only gets worse. You know, we can mitigate it and slow it down with diet, lifestyle, medications, and so on, but it only gets worse. It never just gets, it never just reverses like this. What the hell did you do? And so she told her about what I was doing and my thoughts on what we should be eating. And she was like, you know, I'd really like to, you know, to see his research and have a chat. So we, you know, we talked for like an hour and a half. She's a very bright lady. You know, she's an MD, PhD from Harvard, has a PhD in biochemistry from Harvard. Your mom? Her doctor.

Her doctor, okay. And so I was explaining to her. I was like, look, I think we're looking at biochemistry all wrong. We're calling this a fed state, this a fasting state. I don't think that's right. I think our so-called fasting state is our primary metabolic state. That's where all of our heavy machinery come to bear. And just talking about the different biomechanics to do with our biochemistry and diabetes. And she's just like, yeah, right. Well, okay. Getting

off these medications when I do this. So she just really revamped her whole practice based on that as well. And that has been borne out by the literature. I mean, there are published studies, intervention trials showing you can reverse type 2 diabetes and get people off insulin and their medications by just putting on a ketogenic diet, not even a full-blown carnivore diet, just ketogenic. And so that's where we should be looking. We should be looking at reversing diabetes and metabolic syndrome and all those sorts of things as opposed to focusing on these tiny little subset of LDL particulates,

which probably are just more the smoke, not the fire. How do you tell if you have the right particulates? Well, you can get particulate studies and you can dig down that rabbit hole. Or you can just look at your HDL and your triglycerides. If your HDL is in normal range and triglycerides are in a normal range, you're okay. The higher your HDL is compared to your triglycerides, the better you are. So if your HDL and your triglycerides are sort of one-to-one, so HDL to triglyceride ratio, and your triglycerides are sort of one-to-one, this whole HDL to triglycerides ratio,

then you're in very good stead. You're likely, you know, well, you're low likelihood of developing heart disease. The better that gets, the higher LDL gets. So like two-to-one HDL to triglycerides, you're in very, very low risk of getting heart disease. We know that if you stop eating carbohydrates, stop eating sugar, stop drinking alcohol, your triglycerides will go down. We know if you eat meat and you eat saturated fat,

your HDL goes up. When you're working out, lifting weights, that increases your HDL as well. So when I checked my bloods a few years ago, so it was after sort of two, three years of being full-on high-fat carnivore, my HDL to triglyceride ratio was three to one, which is, I mean, I have very low risk of developing heart disease so I think we're just looking at these things a bit wrong also I think we're just looking at diseases wrong

we're looking at diabetes as a disease heart disease as a disease Crohn's as a disease really what they are is exposures we're being exposed to things that are causing us harm and the treatment for an exposure is removing the exposure. You don't treat lead poisoning by just giving them a chelating agent. That's part of it.

But you also get rid of the lead pipes. And you swap out their pipes and you make sure the exposure goes away. So you need to remove the toxicity. You need to remove that toxic exposure and then let your body get on with it and then there could be medications that can help you along the way but the main treatment is getting that thing away from you so what should we do with the um cholesterol reference ranges um i asked because i got my labs done at the beginning of the year. Everything is super green except for the LDL cholesterol, you know, big bright red thing. Like, so should we ignore these reference ranges?

Like, is a lot of cholesterol, like, too much? Like, what should we do there? Yeah, I think we do have to sort of relook at all of these things. You know, these reference ranges have come about at a time when we were looking at LDL as if this was this big, bad monster. And it's not. You know, I think that the evidence has really shown that. There are a number of papers that are coming out more recently. There's one with Dr. David Diamond, Dr. Paul Mason,

and Professor Ben Bickman that went through all the literature and basically concluded and argued that if your HDL is high and triglycerides are low, and you're on a ketogenic diet, you do not need to be on a statin. You don't need to worry about your LDL cholesterol. And I would sort of be in that camp as well. You know, my cholesterol, 3 to 1 HDL to triglyceride ratio, right? My HDL was, or my LDL was slightly high. I couldn't care less I just I just really couldn't because my LDL the LDL that I have and there's again dozens of different kinds of LDL that you

can have is all healthy it's all good for me it's all good it's all gonna be these large buoyant LDL molecules so the only thing that would matter is if you had sort of like the SDLDL and the other sort of particulates LDL that were, you know, more of an indication that you could have other things going on. But I really do think that this is more smoke, not fire. I don't think that even that SDLDL is causing a problem. I think it's more being caught up in the mix and just being blamed for something, right? You know, some people say that, you know, it's like, you know, you see at these fires, you see all these firemen. So like these damn firemen, we got to get rid of them so we can get rid of these fires,

right? Well, they're associated with that, but they're not the cause of it, right? Even familial hypertension. So in fact, I saw a presentation from David Diamond at Low Carb Denver just this past weekend. Anyway, through all this, and some people say, well, familial hypercholesterolemia, you have these massive, massive, massive levels of cholesterol. And they're like, oh, look at these guys. These guys get more heart disease. And actually look at the numbers.

It actually doesn't square out that evenly. As you get older, younger, sometimes you have slightly higher risk of, if I remember correctly, slightly higher risk of heart disease, heart attacks early on. And then as you actually get older, it's exactly the same. So even though I have massively elevated LDL levels, they don't actually get heart disease in a worse ratio. Also, I mean, they have more LDL to damage if you're doing if you're eating a whole bunch of stuff that's bad for you. So maybe there's something to do there. But I think it was like in the age group

of like 60 to 70 or 70 to 80, it was actually lower levels. It was actually beneficial in that category. And he found that a lot of these guys with familial hypercholesterolemia actually had another thing wrong with them that actually made them more hypercoagulable, so they clot more easily. And then when you separate these things out,

and different studies have separated those two out, just the cholesterol and the clotting factor, there's really just the clotting factor that increased their risk of heart disease, not the LDL. And that's another – Dr. Paul Mason argues that heart disease is actually a disease of clotting. You get damage to the wall of your artery like you can from smoking. It's a major cause of heart disease in general and causes this damage. And then it clots. And it clots and scars over it clots and scars over and clots and scars over and clots and scars over. And that's how you get this thickened wall.

It's this damage and scarring. I say, well, there's cholesterol in there. But as he points out, every single cell in your body is cholesterol. The cell membrane in every single cell we have is made out of cholesterol, right? It's a bilipid layer. What are those lipids? It's cholesterol. And so these red blood cells are going in there. These cells are going in there. They're damaged. They're clotting and they're scarring. And just the cholesterol is left over just from the parts of the cell that were made out of cholesterol.

That's what he would argue. And there are other points of evidence like that, hypercholesterolemia, familial hypercholesterolemia study, pairing those things out that it was really the clotting issues that were more of a problem than the LDL issues. So it's one of those things we don't really actually have a very good – well, we don't have a definitive cause and reason for heart disease yet. But I don't think that you can argue in any way, shape, or form that it's cholesterol in, heart disease out. That does not bear out by the evidence. In fact, there are studies showing that there's a study with 140,000 people in America, so a big study, who all had heart attacks. And they found that literally it was 50-50 at high cholesterol, low cholesterol.

So it wasn't even an association one way or the other, right? And so again, like if you don't even have an association, that shows that there's no causation, right? You can't prove causation from association. But if there's no association, there's definitely no causation. no association, there's definitely no causation. And those numbers being flagged on his blood work is also part of a, you know, a giant money machine of being able to prescribe prescription drugs. Even when it comes to your blood glucose levels, for example, you know, they keep moving, they keep moving the field goalposts for stuff like that all the time so that they can prescribe

it to more and more people. And I'm not saying that things aren't helpful they could they could definitely be really helpful but they uh you know the more people that they can issue these drugs to uh the more money they can make and may and again maybe they believe you know maybe some of the people behind it believe that this is going to be a healthier way because they're not looking into it maybe as deeply as some other people but uh it's definitely it's definitely frustrating because then you know you see like a red thing on your score sheet there when you have your blood work and then you talk to stan efforting or talk to someone like yourself and like ah it's like kind of a trifecta of things there's like four or five things we need to look at and you start to

learn it's a it's a rabbit hole and that you can't it's hard to know this stuff uh yourself and it's hard to even worse if you're just your average consumer just trying to get some blood work done because you keep hearing people talk about blood work and you're like i should get some done it'd be great to look under the hood you look under the hood and you get all these red markers everywhere and you're like what's the fuck and maybe they're not even necessarily high maybe in his case maybe the cholesterol is not even necessarily high but they keep moving that field goal post so that they can prescribe drugs yeah and you know statins are the most um they're the most profitable drugs that's ever been made you know and so that was the thing you know they they established or they said they established

that cholesterol was bad and so the only thing is this cholesterol up heart disease up right so you see all these studies from you know from keys and all the other guys who go as cholesterol goes up heart disease goes up okay so the only thing that matters is bringing cholesterol down and so that's what statins are so they're bringing cholesterol down and they do that. And they might provide other benefits, sort of an anti-inflammatory sort of benefit like aspirin. You know, that's why aspirin is sort of beneficial. And that's actually what people think is more likely to be the benefit from these statins is that it's sort of this mild anti-inflammatory effect, which will probably get a much better effect just from taking aspirin and you're not getting a lot of the side effects as

well. But there have been studies, I think in 2015, it was like 60,000 people over the age of 65. And again, they found that higher LDL cholesterol, these people were having less cardiac events, less heart attacks, less strokes. People with lower LDL cholesterol were having a worse time of this. The ones that did the worst were low LDL cholesterol and statins. And so – but this was sort of – it wasn't like super strong. It wasn't like they were just massively dying off or anything like that. It was like it's either sort of about dead even or maybe a slight – slightly worse. And so the argument – the conclusion, the argument from the authors was like, hey, we really need to rethink statins and cholesterol here because from this study, it shows that statins are really not

doing anything by either neutral and not giving a benefit or even possibly causing detriment. And so why are we doing this? These things have side effects. These things have a cost. And so, you know, that's something we should think about. It's certainly not, you know, you're reducing these cholesterol and it's just a massive bonus in health. The Journal of the American College of Cardiology – so this isn't just my opinion. The Journal of the American College of Cardiology published in 2020 a position paper from people who had formerly been very anti-saturated fat. fat. And these same authors then published to say, actually, we did this massive literature review of all the data and there is really no upper limit on the amount of saturated fat you can eat. It is not associated with heart disease, full stop. More than that, so not full stop,

they actually found there's an inverse relationship between saturated fat and stroke. So the more saturated fat people consumed, the lower their stroke rate. The less saturated fat they consumed, the higher their stroke rate. And no association with heart disease. That's the position of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology right now. What about in terms of keto and seizures? You were mentioning that a little bit earlier. I think that's really interesting.

Yeah, so that's something that's very, very well established in the literature going back nearly 100 years, that putting people on a ketogenic diet, especially for pediatric epilepsy, that's what it's been most studied in, but certainly would help in anyone suffering from epilepsy. Being on a ketogenic diet significantly suppresses seizures. And in fact, just having higher ketones is very helpful. You know, I learned in biochemistry, what, 23 years ago now, that our brain's primary fuel source is ketones or our ketones. And the argument for that was that, you know, I argue that our fed state and fasting state are flipped. I don't think that's right or not flipped, but just incorrectly named that our so-called fasting state or ketogenic

state, I think that's our natural metabolic state. But either way, whatever state you're in, whether you're eating carbs or not eating carbs, your brain always runs on ketones. It's just that in the so-called fed state, when you're eating a lot of carbohydrates, it's mostly running on glucose. So that's what people say. Well, that's our fed state. That's our normal state. So that's our brain's primary resource. However, it always runs on ketones, some ketones. And when your ketone level gets up to a certain point, even if you have an abundance of glucose, it actually switches solely to running on ketones. There are parts of your brain that will still run on glucose,

but the majority of it, once you get enough ketones for your brain to run on it, it will just run on ketones. So I think that that means it prefers that, right? Because there's more glucose available, but it's choosing to go on the ketones. There is something to do with that higher level of ketones that seems to help suppress seizures. So there's something to do. What is a seizure? A seizure is overexcitation of your neurons and that propagates this electrical signal across a larger area of your brain that just makes everything activate. And you just go into a seizure. And so that can be quite harmful. It can be life-threatening.

Even just having a seizure and falling over, hitting your head while you're driving a car, you can have an accident that's fatal. But the seizure itself can permanently damage your brain or even kill you. So they're very, very dangerous. And for hundreds of years, the only treatment for seizures was fasting. They just got them to stop eating. And then about a hundred years ago, they figured out actually if you just don't eat carbs, you'll get the same benefit. And so there have been decades and decades and decades and decades of work on that showing that a ketogenic diet is very beneficial to people suffering from seizures.

And this is something that actually is still used today, especially in pediatrics. But it's been largely replaced by pharmacology just because it's easier. It's easier to just say, here's a pill, get out of my office, than actually sit down and talk about diet, nutrition, lifestyle because that takes longer and you may have to convince people. But it works and I think it's going to benefit their life

in a lot of other ways as well. Somebody can be more sensitive to these things and have epilepsy and develop seizures, but it's doing other things to their body as well. It's just they're much more sensitive to that. And I think that as a doctor, you are obligated to try to do the right thing for your patient, even if it takes you more time, even if it's less convenient, even if it makes you less money. I think that's just ridiculous that you'd

do anything else. And so I try to have longer conversations with people, even though I'm strapped for time, I'm trying to see a lot of people. I'm like, okay, this is important to go over this. And I have a lot of people saying, it's like, yeah, no one's ever explained this to me like it before. It's like, well, they really should have, this is important stuff. And I think that as doctors, okay, they say, well, it's very difficult to get people to adhere to a ketogenic diet and to stop eating carbs. They like eating carbs. But it's like, okay, but you at least try. I mean this is something that is safe, it's effective, and it has 100 years of established research and benefit, right?

And so you at least try and you say, hey, this is a good idea. If they're not able to do it, then okay, then you move on to pharmacology. But right now the starting point for many neurologists is just the medication. They say, oh, well, this is hard. We're having on three different medications now. Well, what about dropping carbs? Maybe see if you can do that. I think that's backwards.

I think you start with getting rid of carbohydrates and then move on to the pharmacology if you need to. But a lot of people are rediscovering this and rediscovering this fact that being in ketosis, being on a ketogenic diet can be very, very helpful even when medications may not be. So thankfully, even though it's not coming from the source it should, it should be coming from the medical establishment. It should be coming from doctors. At least it is getting out there that this can help people. And more and more people are coming to it and getting their seizures under control and getting off medication, which is amazing. How's it going? You guys probably have watched a lot of Mark's lifting videos and some of my lifting videos.

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Head over to Viori.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash Power Project to receive 20% off your first order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. So outside of this, I just want to understand your position on carnivore a bit better. So outside of this, I just want to understand your position on carnivore a bit better. Not just individuals who are sedentary or they're overweight or they have bad dietary practices, but individuals who are athletes, high-performance athletes, people who are runners. They will perform better off of a purely carnivorous diet without whole food carbohydrates also. And the reason I want to ask you this is because we can tell that there are some athletes,

especially those who do a lot of different activity, who can store glycogen better, who can eat carbohydrates and utilize that immediately, versus the sedentary individual. But in your opinion, and from everything that you've read and learned, those individuals would still also do better on a purely carnivorous diet. I think they would. I mean, obviously, you can have amazing athletic performance and get an amazing physique by eating carbs and eating young things too.

I mean most athletes and people are doing that now. I mean I did that. I was from 25 to 30. I was still playing high-level rugby and I was eating carbs, all whole foods. And I was – in season I was in very good shape. I was very carbs, all whole foods. And I was, you know, in season, I was, you know, very good shape. I was very lean and muscular. Outside of that, I would start putting on weight and I had to work out to keep that physique.

Now I don't. You know, I don't work out and I still stay fairly lean. I'm not as lean or I'm certainly not as muscular as I would be if I was working out and not as lean, but I still maintain a fairly good physique. As far as your athletic performance is concerned, I think that, you know, the studies from Professor Noakes shows that you're not losing anything by stopping eating carbs or maybe not even from eating carbs in the short run. But I think the benefit comes just purely carbohydrates from the fact that you can keep going longer because you're tapping into your fat stores.

And so you can just keep going. You're not going to hit the wall, right? If you're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing, and then you hit the wall and you're just like, oh, my God, I'm done. What I think is going on there biochemically, right? Well, some people say you hit the wall and then if you keep pushing, you keep pushing, you break through the wall, you get your second wind, you get your runners high, you just feel amazing. You can just keep going. What I think is happening there biochemically is that you're eating carbohydrates, you're carbo-loading, you run your marathon or whatever

you're doing, and then you run out of glycogen and you hit the wall. Because insulin, when you eat carbohydrates, your insulin goes up. That blocks proteolysis. That blocks lipolysis. So now your fat stores are pretty much cut off. When your insulin is low, you can actually mobilize your fat stores and you can replenish your liver glycogen, muscle glycogen, ketones constantly, perpetually. So when you hit the wall, that's because you've been eating carbohydrates. Your insulin's up. So you're not able to access your fat stores and you run out of your glycogen. So you feel awful. Most people stop there and they rest and recover and all that. But if you keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing, eventually you'll force your body to

start mobilizing energy from your fat stores or you'll just die. So your body has to be able to click back over. Normally it takes about 24 hours for your insulin to come back down to a more normal level. It can take even longer than that, but usually around 24, it's taught in biochemistry, 24 hours. But if you're pushing, pushing, pushing, then you force your body to start mobilizing these fat stores and then you start making your glycogen and blood sugar and ketones and then you feel amazing and you just have all this energy and you have your second wind you have your runner's high

okay well when you're on a ketogenic diet or you're fat adapted on a carnivore diet you live in your second wind you're always in your runner's high so you the harder you push yourself the more energy you're going to produce and your body's just going to respond so you're not going to hit the wall because you're not going to ever run out of your fat store unless you're extremely emaciated. You're not going to run out of your fat store. So all of us here will have a couple weeks where we wouldn't eat at all. We wouldn't actually die because we do have fat stores enough. So however long your workout is, you're not going to run out of your fat stores. But you will run out of glycogen.

So I think that that's a significant advantage. I also think that there are other things that come with those carbs that can cause inflammation, that can cause other sorts of problems and disrupt your biochemistry and your physiology from working as well as they could. If we're talking about peak performance athletes, you want your body running absolutely perfect. And so even just a small grain of sand in the watch gears is going to cause a disruption. For me, playing high-level rugby,

it was just night and day difference. So when I came back to – so that first five years, that was just insane. I've just never been, I never have been or will be in better shape than I was in that period. And I, I've, I've literally couldn't get tired. I was like, I could like sprint marathons. It was just crazy how in shape I was because I really pushed myself and I was feeding my body something that was quite optimal. And then at 38, when I came on, well, 37, 38, when I saw Dr. Baker came back on carnivore, I again felt like I did in my early 20s. I felt better at 38, fat and out of shape.

Well, fat for me and out of shape. Then I did at 27, playing rugby at a very high level. And so it made a massive, massive difference for me. So I think that it does make a huge difference. I think that we're talking about optimal. I mean, there's a lot of different ways of doing things. And you can eat a lot of different things and be in very good shape and get very good performance. But I would just argue that you'd be better off optimizing that, just getting just the perfect nutrition that you need, not having anything else that could slow you down.

Maybe it slows you down a little bit. Maybe you don't even notice that big of a difference. But I think that there's enough there that it's not optimal, that it's not giving you exactly what you need and absolutely nothing that you don't. So how do you handle like if an athlete does come to you and they, let's say they do something like rugby or they do, let's say they even do something like bodybuilding, how would you handle that person in terms of what types of foods they should eat as far as meat? Is it just pure ribeyes?

Do you have them include organs? Do you have them include any type of supplementation or how do you have them handle that? Yeah, generally just meat. So I think ribeye is a good balance of meat and fat. So like Sean Baker is just like, he just eats meat. So you're the same way, just meat. Yeah, I just eat meat. 99% of what I use is beef and fatty beef,

like New York's or ribeyes. I'll make a brisket every now and then. Very rarely I'll have some pork belly if I want to increase the fat content. I do like getting enough fat. I think that fat's an important nutrient. I don't think it's just calories. There are essential nutrients that are in fat like fat-soluble vitamins, but also just the fat itself.

Fat itself, cholesterol itself are essential nutrients. And so I want to get enough fat. I want to get enough protein. I want to get enough of all the things that my body needs. So I think starting with that, just fatty meat is very good. If you're not getting enough fat, maybe add in some grass-fed tallow or something like that. Butter, if you can tolerate it.

Not everyone is good with dairy. I seem to be okay. So sometimes I'll melt some butter into a steak if I'm eating that. And then just eating intuitively. I don't think you have to have organs. I don't really eat organs. Every now and then I'll have some liver. I think I've had liver three times in the last decade.

The Inuit didn't really eat organs. That was something that the polar explorers found, like Wilhelmer Stefansson, who was a professor at Harvard in ethnology and lived with the Inuit for like 10 years, 12 years. Learned their language, learned their culture, and lived as a carnivore with them. And he was saying, like,

we didn't eat anything except meat and fish. And you had to get the fat with the meat and that made perfect nutrition that gave a complete diet. And they even asked him, there's old black and white interviews with him. He's like, okay, what about organs? You have to get organs to get all these nutrients. And he's like, nope, that's a myth. You don't need organs. The Inuit don't eat organs. We didn't eat organs. I think if you're coming from a nutritionally deficient state or you're eating like a standard diet, organs are great because they're very nutrient dense and they're going to catch you up. You know, like taking a supplement to try to bolster your levels back up. But I think if you're in a steady state where your levels are good, that you will maintain proper health and vitamin and mineral levels appropriately with just skeletal muscle,

meat, and fat. So I just tell them, get rid of absolutely everything besides meat and water. And don't be shy of the fat. Eat enough fat. How do you know if you're eating enough fat? Well, your body has a limited capacity for absorbing fat. You make bile from your liver that's stored in your gallbladder, and then that's secreted when you're eating fat. You have to emulsify the fat with the bile in order to absorb it. You can't really absorb fat otherwise. You can absorb a little bit, but only like some medium chain fatty acids and things like that. But if you look at the percentage of what's coming out, it's actually pretty low percentage gets absorbed without bile. So I think that your body is doing that for a reason.

I think your body is making an amount of bile because it wants that much fat in return. Your body is very, very efficient. It's not just going to make a random amount of bile. I don't believe that. Everything else is so tightly regulated and controlled that it just wouldn't make sense to me that that was the one thing that it just said, oh yeah, whatever, just make whatever you want. So either way, when you run out of bile, you're not really going to absorb fat. And so it goes out. And I think that's what keeps your stool soft in a carnivore diet. You don't need fiber for that. It keeps it

soft because you have a bit of excess fat that goes in and keeps it fat. And so I think that's how you tell if you're just eating meat and only drinking, only eating, only eating meat and fat and only drinking water, not drinking coffee or artificial sweeteners that can act as laxatives, then, uh, then you can just look at your stool. So if you're having dry, hard stools, that means your body's absorbing basically every ounce of fat that your body's eating. None's getting out to keep your stool soft. So increase the amount of fat that you're eating. You said dry, hard stools? Yeah, yeah. So like Rocky.

You like it dry and hard? You know what's so funny? I have my dogs eating a visionary pet food, the one from Ron Pena that's like keto, and their shit changed to dry, hard stools. I love picking up their poop and showing them, girl, because I'll be like, feel this.

This is good poop. So humans should be pooping the same way is what you're saying. Or somewhere in between. Yeah. So if it's very dry, hard, or like rocky,

pebbly sort of stuff, I think that means that your body should just want every ounce of fat. It's not normal to go through a roll of toilet paper.

What do you mean? You shouldn't have to wipe a lot. You should be able to have a nice clean break if you've got good food in there. But if you eat pizza or something, I don't know if you guys ever noticed this, but I notice if I eat shitty foods, then I'm wiping my ass a lot.

Yeah, the grease goes right through you, it seems like. At least in my opinion. You have different experiences, dog. That's true. He's got lubed up pipes over there. You got to get a bidet. That's the thing too. Yeah, that helps a lot too.

Yeah, some people get like, you know, like Joe Rogan talks about this when he goes on carnivores. Oh yeah. He gets disaster pants for, you know, three weeks or something like that.

I think that's from eating a lot more fat that your body can absorb. Right? So if you... And maybe even for some people might be new to eat

that much protein. Yeah. We sometimes forget that like because we're such meatheads, we forget that sometimes people are going from having like 50 to 100 grams of protein a day to now they might be having 200 or 300. So there's a huge change and then the fat on top of that. Yeah, and it was actually funny you mentioned that. Like what we're talking about is Wilhelmer Stefansson.

He came back from living with the Inuits and he discovered actually a lot of big areas in northern Canada. And he was telling people, hey, guys, like just eat meat. This is much better for your health. People are like, you're out of your damn mind. And so he was – they actually – they were sort of ruining his reputation. Basically, we've got to throw this guy out as a nut and so in order to sort of defend his reputation

he subjected himself to an experiment at Bellevue Hospital in New York he and a partner of his one of his polar explorer partners and they said okay we'll check ourselves into Bellevue Hospital you think we're full of it, fine

we'll live in the hospital for a year you control what we eat, we'll check ourselves into Bellevue Hospital. You think we're full of it. Fine. We'll live in the hospital for a year. You control what we eat. We'll only eat meat and you'll see. We're not going to die of scurvy. And so it was all under doctor supervision, everything like that. They did it for an entire year and they were fine. They didn't get scurvy. So like, damn it.

Okay. And that's when people started to pay attention to him and he sort of saved his reputation. Wrote a book called The Fat of the land where he talked about all this. And one of the things that they did was the doctor was just like, all right, well, what happens if we just don't give you fat? Right. We just give you like lean meat. And, uh, they started getting like quite unwell and they started getting just like torrential diarrhea. So that was one of the things they got. And, um, and then they started giving him fat again and everything normalized. But going to the opposite extreme, again, you can only absorb a certain amount of fat.

If you get a little bit more than your body can absorb, I think that keeps it nice and soft so you have comfortable stools. If you get a lot more fat than your body can absorb, it's going to come out quite dramatically, right? Because you have a lot of this liquidy stuff that needs to come out. So you're going to have liquidy stools. There's a saying that I heard when I was a kid, you know, it's like quicker than fat through a goose, right? You give a piece of goose fat to a goose and just shift it right out, you know? And that's why, you know, you really can't absorb it very well. It just shoots right out. And so that can happen to us. So if you're eating a lot more fat than your body can absorb, then that's going to come out. Eventually, I think that it's likely that having not eaten a lot of fat for a long time, that your body's probably not creating a lot of bile. It's like, look, we're just not getting this in return, so we're not going to create a lot of bile.

And eventually when you're eating a lot of fat, your body goes, oh, okay, and maybe increase the amount of bile. So maybe that's offsetting that. You're eating the same amount, but now you don't have loose stools. Also, a lot of people, when they're doing carnivore, most people drink coffee. And when they go on a carnivore, they keep drinking coffee. Coffee is a laxative. You know, it does act as a laxative. And when you're eating a bunch of fiber and things like that, you know, it has less of an effect because it has a lot more bulk to move through your intestines.

But again, 98% of the meat that you eat, if you're not eating it with anything else, you will absorb in your small intestine. So there's really not much there. So the effects of coffee or artificial sweeteners will be much more dramatic and so you'll get loose stools there. That's 95% of people with loose stools who go on a carnivore diet. That's what I see. They're either still drinking coffee, still using artificial sweeteners, usually in coffee,

or they're eating a lot more fat than their body can absorb. And it also just might take a couple days to resolve itself. Yeah. Or you sort of look at those three things. Am I drinking coffee? Okay, maybe pull back on the coffee.

Not use these sweeteners. Does that help it? No, it's still a problem. Okay, pull back on the fat. And that's sweeteners. Does that help it? No, it's still a problem. Okay, pull back on the fat. And that's what I would do. And eventually I think your body will probably start making more bile. What about something like eat some rice or eat a couple apples or something like that to see if you can kind of stiffen up that stool a little bit? Yeah, and you could.

And it probably would help. I mean I think that there are other ways of doing it and especially if you wanted to avoid those sorts of things, you could just sort of troubleshoot in those other ways as well. But yeah, I mean there are other ways to do it. I mean I think if you did have a bit of fiber, Dr. Pran Yoganathan, who's a gastroenterologist, hepatologist in Sydney. He's very meat-based. He's not 100% carnivore, but he even says that actually when he's doing just straight meat, he always feels his best. But he does incorporate other things. And I know that in his patients, he does a lot of diet and lifestyle interventions as well. that when they're having problems with loose stools, giving them some soluble fiber and things like that seems to help.

So I think there's other things that can help. There's other things to work around. But I think that, again, like 95% of loose stools on carnivore will come from coffee, artificial sweeteners, or just way too much fat. And I think if you, if you sort of correct for those, it will help most people and sort things out. I do want to ask this. I know you probably mentioned it, but since we're kind of talking about fiber here, obviously like Lane Norton does love fiber and he talks about the benefits that it's going to have long-term because he references the research that always shows that fiber has a

positive effect on all cause mortality and when you take it out it's like it's there's there's a negative effect to no fiber so when you when you hear those people continue to reference the long term studies when it comes to fiber it makes you wonder damn well should i just at least keep a little bit of it in just to be safe since i don't know like if long-term carnivore is the better idea like do you do you think that there's any argument for keeping a little bit of it in your diet just in case um that was the same argument for cholesterol and and sugar actually that was what Angela Keyes said was that you know well you know whether or not cholesterol causes a problem you know what's the big deal?

What's the harm? Why don't you just cut it out? Replace it with sugar. Replace these calories because you need these calories. So what do you replace fat calories with? You replace them with carb and sugar calories. That was the argument since like the 50s. It was like, hmm, cholesterol is bad.

Replace that with sugar. That was the argument. And they said, what's the harm? Why don't you just do it just in case? And he convinced a lot of people to do that. I always have a problem with this whole all-cause mortality thing because it doesn't matter what you ate for breakfast if you died in a plane crash, right?

So, I mean, that's a bit funny. And when you look at epidemiological studies, there are so many different factors that come in. They're called confounding factors. So many different things that could influence all these different outcomes, right? So someone who eats more fiber is someone who – that's a different group of people. I specifically won't eat that. Most of the time, people that are not eating fiber are eating a bunch of processed garbage that doesn't have fiber because you can't freeze processed foods with fiber in it.

It gets all mushy and mealy and doesn't work out. So if you're freezing and refrigerating all these processed garbage that's just going out, these ready-made meals, they often don't have a lot of fiber. So you're comparing apples and oranges because you're comparing a group that eats more whole foods. You think it's more of a healthy user bias? 100%. But also, you know, you have to compare like to like because we're not comparing. Those studies compare people eating a standard diet, which is arguably crap. I don't think anybody disagrees with that, with someone who's eating something else, anything else.

I think anything else is probably going to be better, right? It is not comparing an animal-based low-fiber diet with a whatever high-fiber diet. That is not the comparison. So it's comparing apples and oranges. I don't think that you can make that comparison. Also, there's a ton of other factors that go into this. Dr. Baker talks about this, but a lot of these studies that show – that suggest that meat was harmful. It's like, oh, these people ate more meat and they had higher all-cause mortality.

Okay, well, people have been told for the last 40 years that red meat is going to kill you. And there are certain people, usually guys, just say, you know what, screw it. I like steak. I'm going to eat it. The people that have the well, screw it attitude with steak are more likely to have a well, screw it attitude with cigarettes and drinking, driving fast. They're more likely to die in a car accident. They're more likely to die in extreme sports. So that contributes to your all-cause mortality. Is that because they ate a steak that morning or is that because they jumped out of an airplane? I don't know. I think it's probably the airplane, right?

And so there's all those factors that come into it. I think that you have to look at things in comparing like to like. things, you know, in, in compare, you know, comparing like to like, you know, we don't have these epidemiological studies, even, even epidemiological studies that compare, you know, a whole food plant-based diet and a whole food meat-based diet. We just don't have those, right? We do have, I'll talk about two studies on fiber and I'll remember this one. You got to think too, like our ancestors probably didn't have, you know, IBS, Crohn's disease, gluten intolerances, you know, or any of these things. People like, you know, from thousands of years ago when they primarily were living on meat.

So I find it interesting in today's world that we have to find proof that we could eat that way when clearly we have eaten that way very many many times throughout history very very good point and that and that's what some i heard another clinician say we've always been eating meat that's that's the standard we know that's good plant-based that's the new intervention you need to prove that's better we've already established meats good yeah you need to prove that plants better. We've already established meat's good. You need to prove that plants are better. So we don't have to, oh, well, you have to prove that meat is – no, no, no, no. That's established.

You're the new guy. As far as fiber, there is one interventional trial that we really know about. It's not a great – so this is an actual interventional trial. This is not just epidemiological study that can have a lot of different flaws in it. Some can be done very well. Others, when they correct for these factors. And that's another thing. Sorry, with the epidemiological studies looking at red meat, a lot of these, or meat in general, they look at, they

call different things meat that just are not meat. So they say that, well, since pizza toppings can sometimes be meat, therefore pizza's meat. So you say, oh, I since pizza toppings can sometimes be meat, therefore pizza is meat. So you say, oh, I eat pizza three times a week. You eat pizza three times – you eat meat three times a week. Like not really. And so these people are just playing games really. And so there's an interventional trial with fiber.

Seventy-five people, not a big study, but it's like the only interventional study we have on fiber. And they split them up into four groups. They all had GI issues. They all had sort of problems with their gut and their bowels and things like that. Not as far as like Crohn's and things like that, but they all had problems. And they split them up into groups that like, you know, stayed the same, same amount of fiber, increased the fiber or reduced the fiber and then eliminated fiber. So those four groups. And wouldn't you know it, the more fiber people had, the worse their gut issues got. The less fiber they had, the better the gut issues got. And the people that eliminated fiber completely, completely resolved their gut issues. Small study, but it was an interventional

trial that actually showed some actual data. So, you know, I mentioned that we don't have these epidemiological comparisons of whole food plant-based, whole food meat-based. But what we do have is a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, again, JAMA, published in 1931, looking at two African tribes that conveniently had nearly polar opposite diets and live right next to each other. And so they intermarried. And so they were genetically very similar. One was the Maasai, which people know eat a lot of meat, drink milk, and drink blood. no, eat a lot of meat, drink milk, and drink blood.

And the other one was the Akikiyu, who had been displaced from their land and weren't able to really eat what they traditionally did, and they actually went to a more plant-based diet. So this is a vegan's dream, right? This is the middle of Africa. There's no pesticides. There's no industry sort of farming. This is whole food plants and tubers and very little meat.

And they compared and looked at the difference. They found massive health differences and developmental differences between the two groups. The Maasai adult men were on average five inches taller than the Aki-Kiyu, much more muscular, had better bone development, better teeth development. The Aki- Kiyu had multiple different problems with their development, bone density. They had different vitamin and mineral deficiencies, iron deficiencies. They were more likely to be anemic. They got sick much more

easily. And they found a number of different sort of blood markers that were deficient. Masai, They did not. They were very, very healthy. Did not really get sick. Didn't have these developmental issues. Didn't get cavities. Didn't have crowded teeth and smaller jaws, which the Akiki Yu did, which actually was shown to be purely nutritional, really.

It's just nutritional deficiencies. Your jaw and teeth don't develop properly. And they tried interventions as well. And they tried supplementing because like vegan vegetarians will say, well, you can get all the nutrients you need. You don't have to kill animals. Well, but you have to take supplements. And that's a fine argument. But then they go further to say, well, actually, this is beneficial.

This is the best way to eat. This is what we're supposed to be. It was like, well, you can't even get basic nutrition from a vegan diet. Like, there's simply nutrients that don't exist in plants, and so you have to supplement. If you have to supplement, then by definition, your diet is deficient, and that's obviously not what we evolved on. So they found that supplementation actually wasn't good enough either. They supplemented all these, you know, these missing things that they were deficient in. And they found that that didn't actually resolve their health issues.

But when they started feeding them meat, it did. So there's more to it than just these vitamins and minerals. There's a lot of micronutrients, if you want to call it, that we haven't really even discovered yet that are in meat that we absolutely have to have, that we don't necessarily have a blood test for yet. And so this was comparing like to like. This was comparing whole food, plant-based, whole food, meat-based, and there was a stark contrast.

That's the only study we have. And I'm happy to do more. I think it's important to do more. I don't hang my hat on epidemiological studies that compare a plant-based intervention with a standard processed food garbage lifestyle. All you can compare, all you can get from that is what it shows. You have whole food diet is better than than the standard diet i agree with that that's there's no problem there but that doesn't translate to you know a plant-based diet versus a meat-based diet whole foods on each that that does not prove anything in that direction you

ever watch the show alone you ever heard of it? They're just like out in the wilderness and they're like, you know, they got to survive. And it's like a survival show. And this isn't like proof of anything, but it's not like they set those people up with Metamucil. You know what I mean? Like they don't have fiber. They don't have access to it. They have fibrous stuff. They can get a hold of berries and things like that. But the complaint and the reason why they get kicked off the show is because they lose too high of a percentage of their body weight. They're only allowed to lose a certain amount of percentage and then it gets to be too dangerous and the weather gets cold and stuff like that. And they can find – they find less and less food and they don't want people to starve and die from this TV show. So they'll helicopter them out of there when the time is appropriate, but

they're not, you know, they're losing the body weight because they can't find the two things that we really need that humans live off of, which is protein and fats. Yeah. They just can't find animals anymore. Yeah. And they can get berries and they get access to some stuff, but that stuff's not going to keep them alive. Yeah. That's, I remember actually seeing a couple episodes of that and, and a lot of them did say that it was just like you need fat. Like this is really high fat. I'm going to store this in this jar and that's really what's going to keep me as I get this fat. And like some guy I think had like a Wolverine or something that broke into his stores and just ate all the fat stores that he had, just went straight for the fat.

We see this in other sorts of things. The guy ended up killing the Wolverine, by the way. Which is like the coolest part of the show. Absolutely. He got him like a couple days later. He's like, I think this is the same one, son of a bitch. Shut it up. That was the thing too.

If you look at the accounts of Lewis and Clark going across America hundreds of years ago, they talk about that. They talk about how important fat was. You had to get enough fat. So they were eating. They were hunting and fishing They talk about that. They talk about how important fat was, that you had to get enough fat. So they were eating, they were hunting and fishing and things like that, but they were saying that, and they fed all those sort of the organs

and leaner cuts to the dogs, and it was really important for the people to have the fat. That's what kept them surviving. The people that weren't able to get enough fat, those are the guys who died. Fiber has to be like a pretty new thing, especially in the amount and the tune that they, I think it's what suggested that they say

you get like 20 to 30 grams of fiber a day or something like that. It's like, how in the fuck would anyone ever get that? Yeah, I just eat some sticks, you know? I mean like, oh, I mean that's what fiber is, right? It's cellulose. And that's how they increase the fiber content in processed foods. They actually add sawdust to it. So there's dozens of products that just have added sawdust to it. And apparently this is an essential nutrient. Essential meaning that you will die without it. When did that happen? It's essential how? First of all, it's not a nutrient because we cannot break it down. We cannot get anything from it. So we're not getting any nutrition from it. So it cannot be a nutrient. So already right there if that's essential, then that doesn't work. The Maasai, the Inuit, the native Australians, obviously all these peoples can incorporate into Western society and eat the same garbage we are. But traditionally, that's not what they ate.

And people would say that, well, the Maasai, maybe they're eating some tubers. Maybe the Australian Aborigines or maybe they're eating some stuff as well. A lot of accounts will actually say that it's only when they're starving is when they eat that stuff. And when they have meat, they just eat meat. But you can't really argue with people living in the North Pole what they're eating because there's no tubers on these ice shelves that are just floating around the North Pole. They don't even have access to it. They don't have fiber. They poop just fine, you know? And people say, well, you know, their average life expectancy is lower, like in the size, like 60 years. I was like, yeah, do you know what their

infant mortality rate is outside of a hospital? It's pretty high, right? So your average life expectancy from birth is going to go down if three out of five of your kids are dying in infancy, obviously. That doesn't speak to how old people live when they die of old age, right? They're fighting lions with sticks and winning half the time, right? So these guys are living in a very different atmosphere than we are. And they're doing extraordinarily well. You cannot survive in those those, you cannot survive in those conditions if you're not thriving. You have to be extremely strong and robust.

And they're doing very well without fiber. Fiber is not, you know, it's, again, we cannot break down fiber. We cannot process fiber. All animals that consume fibrous plants have the ability to, through the bacteria in their guts, break down fiber into fat and protein. The animal kingdom runs on fat and protein. Carnivores, because they eat animals with fat and they go for the fat first. But also herbivores, because again, that's what they're absorbing. They're eating a bunch of fiber, but what they're absorbing is fat and protein. So a gorilla or a cow that's just eating leaves and grass, they still get 70% to 80% of their calories from fat,

from the saturated fat that the bacteria are secreting as a byproduct of the fiber that they're eating. So the animal kingdom runs on fat and protein. And we are the only ones that have lost that. I forget the guy's name, but he said that humans are the only animals smart enough to make our own food and the only ones dumb enough to eat it.

That's a great quote to end on. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. Sure thing. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Please drop those comments down below. that's a great quote to end on Andrew take us on out of here buddy sure thing thank you everybody for checking out today's episode please drop those comments down below make sure you guys let us know what you think about

today's conversation hit that like button and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already follow the podcast at mbpowerproject all over the place and make sure you hit up

powerproject.live for everything podcast related my Instagram is at I am Andrew Z and Seema where you at? Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube? SEMA in Yang on Instagram, YouTube and SEMA Yin Yang on Tik TOK and Twitter.

Anthony, where can people find you? Uh, yeah. So it's Anthony Chafee MD on Instagram. Uh, Anthony underscore Chafee on Twitter. And then my YouTube channel is Anthony Chafee MD as well.

And I have a podcast just called the plant free MD as a, I expect. All right, Lane Norton. Hopefully we gave you some, you're welcome. Strength is never a weaknessorton. Hopefully we gave you some topics. You're welcome. Strength is never a weakness.

Weakness is never a strength. I'm at Mark Smiley Bell. Catch you guys later. Bye.