Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 658 - Meat Creates Vitality At Any Age ft. Shawn Baker & Stan Efferding

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

A whole lot of meat on today's podcast. Shawn Baker is the one responsible for making the Carnivore Diet as popular as it is and Stan The Rhino Efferding is the one responsible for making rice and meat popular with his Monster Mash and Vertical Diet. Both are here to discuss World Carnivore Month and the benefits of eating meat. Follow Shawn on IG: https://www.instagram.com/shawnbaker1967/ Follow Stan on IG: https://www.instagram.com/stanefferding/ #WorldCarnivoreMonth #ShawnBaker #StanEfferding Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Vertical Diet Meals: https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for free shipping and two free meals + a Kooler Sport when you order 16 meals or more! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS! 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 "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ 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

it's just going to be a calorie surplus in protein, my friend. That's too simple. I had a guy when I was in the Air Force, and we would go out and get drunk and go to Denny's at 2 o'clock in the morning. I had a guy who was skinny complaining about that. I mean, he was whining about it, and I was drunk. I said, Kyle, just fucking shut up and eat. That was my solution.

That is. And I was screaming at him to eat his damn pancakes or whatever. It's helpful. 2 o'clock in the morning. Just try to stay a little closer to the old microphone there. I'll try. Don't knock over Jesus or anything like that. Because John Cena and Jesus and the dog, punching dog.

Yep. Balboa. Yeah. That's his name. Yeah. Balboa. Nice. There we go.

Stan, what are you doing? Texting people? Looking at porn. Oh. Gets him in the mood. Free porn or you pay for it? We don't pay for porn. Oh. Gets him in the mood. Free porn or do you pay for it? We don't pay for porn. Come on now.

Free? Right off of Sean's website. I forgot. Stan's very cheap. Is that off my website? That's right off your website. Is that off my website? That's where I get all my information.

What are we going to talk about today? The hazard ratios. Oh, yeah, yeah. When did I put that? I put that up about six months ago. I bet. Or something like that. That study came out in January.

I copy and paste. I got a file of stuff here. Are we signing with some twats? Some twats, yeah, we can. Some tweets? Oh, tweets. Yes, tweets. Let me find it. Where'd it go? Where'd it go?

Oh, here we go. I'll have Nsema read these off because i can't read that for this is about i'm assuming this is about sean because it's from a vegan jp this guy is pure cancer it blows my mind that he was ever a doctor he talks like an eighth grader and gives health advice that hurts people absolute abomination of a human being that's's the fan club there. Awesome. Yeah, that's nice. So we. Wow. Damn, Sean.

How does that make you feel? I feel, you know, believe it or not, I often go home at night and cry. Cry myself to sleep. Do the same? I do the same. Somehow I doubt that. No, yeah, it's interesting. You know, I mean, it's kind of funny that, you know about that hurts people, and yet all I see is people getting healthier.

And so I'm just unclear where the hurting is coming from. Maybe I hurt his feelings, perhaps. That might be more appropriate. When I first met Sean, it's been a few years ago now. I think it was at Mark's Powerlifting Meter. Was it prior to that? I thanked him. I said, Sean, I said, you're the guy who has cleared the way for the rest of us now to get in

and continue to make the recommendations that we've always felt as though were the best recommendations. I actually silently behind the scenes for many, many years would tell parents to have their kids eat more red meat and eggs and dairy. But you couldn't say that publicly because the prevailing wisdom at the time was that that would cause cancer or heart disease. But Sean was the guy who forged the way. All of us have come into his wake now, the Dr. Gabrielle Lyons and the rest of us, and been able now to speak more boldly about the benefits of red meat because he's been the one that's taken all of this abuse on our behalf.

I mean, I've taken some arrows for sure. But I mean, like I said, at the end of the day, this is the sticks and stones. They break my bones stuff. This is the word stuff. So it doesn't really. That's right. I mean, literally, it's just humorous. What is that?

Who is Sean Baker? The guy who started the carnivore diet movement. Some twat. Some twat. From vegan level five. I don't know. There seems to be a pattern here with the insult. There seems to be like, I don't know what it is.

What could it be? That's why we say we're glad you're leading the way, Sean. I guess you could have a more terrifying group of haters than vegans i suppose yeah i'm sure you feel physically are there things that actually bother you though like like if somebody because sometimes like someone will say something uh like on a post that i make and i can get annoyed not so much because they like hurt my feelings but more so just because they're inaccurate like uh for, if someone's like eating all that meat is destroying the universe or destroying our planet, do you kind of like feel the urge to like want to correct them and say, well, actually, it depends on how the, you know, do you get into that or you stay away from it? I mean, you know, early on, you know, when I was first and I, you know, I didn't do this to piss people off.

I was just like, hey, I'm feeling healthy eating meat, and I've seen a lot of people that have done that. And then, of course, I went on Joe Rogan's podcast, and then all of a sudden I've got all these daggers pointing at me. And so initially I tried to engage with these people, and then I would always come to this sort of turning point where I said, hey, look, whatever your ethics are, whatever your beliefs are, if there was a situation where your health or the health of your family depended upon getting better, eating meat, would you do that? And then they would say no. And then I said I'm not dealing with a rational person, so I can't have this conversation. So it became where it was a waste of my energy. Now, I've put out so much information, and I mean I'm trying to get research done. In fact, I've helped some of the research actually be performed.

I'm not here to say that I know it all. I'm just saying this is something we should look at because there's just too many people that are getting healthy by eating a meat-based diet, whether it's a vertical diet or a keto diet or a carnivore diet. There's something there, and we need to not just dismiss it outright and say, we need to study this stuff. And some of that's happening. But does anything really bother me? Not particularly. I mean, I had some people go after some of my family occasionally.

That kind of annoys you a little bit. That's weird. But yeah, I mean, it is kind of weird to think of that stuff. But I mean, what really, the vegan stuff I kind of laugh about. What kind of gets me is sometimes when people tell me what I'm allowed to talk about. That really pisses me off. Like, stay in your lane and you're only going to talk about this. I'm like, look, I'm a surgeon.

I was a military guy. I'm an athlete. I'm a father. I care deeply about a lot of issues. And those things kind of annoy me. And I just tell people I'll talk about whatever the fuck I want to talk about. And that sort of thing is more what upsets me than the vegan stuff because the vegan stuff is just – I don't blame them. And in many cases, you can be on a vegan diet and you can be perfectly healthy and that works.

But to sort of impose your dietary strategy and your beliefs on everybody else, like Stan pointed out, I never said carnivore is the only way or the best way, and everybody should do this. I mean, I just say, look, this is an option. It seems to work. Why not take somebody who's suffering from Crohn's disease and has been 10 years suffering, and medicines are only doing so well. Let's try this and see what happens. And more often than not, they get off their medicines.

They get healthy. That's cool to me. That's really neat. We should be celebrating that, not demonizing it because of some misguided beliefs about animal ethics or environmental stuff, which we can talk about. I mean, I've looked at this. I've been to ranches. I've talked to ranches. I've talked to the leading people in the world on this stuff. I'm educating myself. I know more about ranching and the cattle industry than I ever thought, compared to

most doctors out there that don't get into this stuff. You referenced Dr. Mitlauner's research with respect to environment. And you can also very quickly dispel the myth that there is even such a thing as a vegan diet. Millions and millions and millions of animals die for growing vegetables as well. So those are difficult challenges. People present to me, I have vegan clients, and they present to me if they have health problems, sometimes I have to try and navigate just how far they're willing to go to remedy

those health problems, which I think are caused by a diet, the deficiency in the diet. And we have to have those discussions. Look, you're not saving lives, okay? Rabbits and foxes and birds, they're animals too. And you're not saving the environment. And we look at arable land and methane production and with respect to Mitlauner's research. So there have been times I've engaged into those conversations, but only with people who are kind of willing to take auner's research. So there have been times I've engaged into those conversations, but only with people who are kind of willing to take a broader look at it. Folks who are dogmatic or religious about their choice and our virtue signaling.

It's really not worth the cost of the voice. This, okay, so from Vegan Level 5, a returning guest. This man has the testosterone level of a female and has given himself diabetes, yet they still shout, meat heals, every 60 seconds. Interesting. Yeah, so I mean, this is a really interesting topic. And so when I was here about three or four years ago, I had a hard workout. Two days later, I tested my testosterone.

I tested low. It was like 400 or something. No, it was lower. It was like 240. Oh, okay. I had it retested a week later. It was like 400 or something? No, it was lower. It was like 240. Oh, okay. I had it retested a week later. It was 100 points higher. I've tested it subsequently several times higher, and it's been mid-normal range.

It's not something I really care that much about because I'm like, when I look at testosterone function, I'm saying, what can you physically do? I mean, if you're lean, you're muscular, you're strong, you're mentally checked in, I mean, if you're lean, you're muscular, you're strong, you're mentally checked in, if your sexual function works well, then those numbers, anybody that knows anything about testosterone knows it fluctuates throughout the day. I mean, it changes dramatically. When you wake up first thing at 5 o'clock in the morning with an erection, which you should still be even in your 50s.

It's TMI, Doug. Well, sorry. But anyway, that's when your testosterone peaks. So if you check it at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it's going to be lower, and it's going to be, like IMI, Doug. Well, sorry. But anyway, that's when your testosterone peaks. So if you check it at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it's going to be lower and it's going to be, like I said,

a hard workout or something. If you're over-trained, there's so many reasons why your testosterone can be variable. And so people say, one day in your life you had low testosterone,

therefore you're like an old grandma. And anybody who looks at me is like, if I'm an old grandma, there's some pretty strong grandmas out there. It's kind of a funny type of thing.

And then as far as the other comment on diabetes, one of the things, and over the years I've been pretty conscious about looking at my blood glucose. When I exercise very intently, as it should, my blood glucose goes up. When I was training for world records in the rowing, I was doing, first thing in the morning, I was going out there and just killing it. First thing in the morning, that shoots your blood glucose up. And I had this anticipatory response. Like every day my body knew, hey, he's going to get up and do something stupid. So I need, the liver needs to start ramping up glycogenolysis. And so we're seeing that.

And so now what I do is like the training we did today, we went for a nice walk afterwards, a nice cool down. What you see is, you know, for most of us, when we exercise, particularly high intense exercise, we see a acute rise. Your liver can put out, uh, you, it can increase its glucose output by 15 fold during, during action, acute, acute exercise. You'll see that spike, but then if you follow it up with a cool down, you bring it back down. And I wasn't doing that. So that's part of that. But I mean, again, this whole one-day snapshot lab test is not an indication of who you are

and what you are. And like I said, this always makes me laugh because half the time they're accusing me of low testosterone, half the time they're accusing me of taking steroids. You know, it's like, well, what's it going to be, guys? It's a really interesting thing, though, because one, especially seeing your work capacity, how strong you are, how explosive you are, won't expect your testosterone to be higher, especially with how popular TRT is nowadays. People would just expect you to be walking around at like 800 or some shit. Well, I mean, this is, you know, Stu Phillips did a nice study in 2018 looking at, and again, this is not augmented.

This is just natural physiologic range. It doesn't matter if it's 300 or 800 with regard to muscle gain. It had to do more with the androgen receptor density. And so whether you're at 300 or 800, and again, this was a study done on young college, you know, strength training athletes. What they found, it didn't matter if it was free testosterone, bound testosterone, sex hormone, binding globulin. None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was angio-receptor density and sensitivity.

That's what controlled it. Now, when you get into augmentation, you know, clearly anybody that's been on performance-enhancing drugs, enhancing drugs, including testosterone, you see an increase in your strength. I mean that's pretty clear. But that's often not within the normal physiologic range that you see that. So for an average unsupplemented guy, that's kind of nonsense, that argument there. So anyway. All right. Next one. Okay. supplemented guy that that's kind of nonsense that argument there so anyway all right next one okay he sells his carnivore diet plan to uneducated victims the reason he opposes veganism so much is because they go against his primary method of making money you'd learn

bullshit it's hosted by our ex-doc master bakercotted this craziness from High Fruit Trinity. I love that. I'm seeing, again, I'm seeing the pattern with a lot of vegans that are just, you know, again, this is something that it upsets their worldview that, you know, you've got people that are clearly getting healthy. I mean, I basically share stories. I basically share stories. I mean, we've got a podcast of literally hundreds and hundreds of people talking about going on the diet, and they lose weight. They come off medications. They cure their autoimmune issues. Their depression goes away.

Many of them, by the way, are ex-vegans. And we have literally thousands of ex-vegans that have gone that and changed the story. And so if I wanted to make more money, like I said, I'm a licensed physician. I can go back and do surgery. I can make more money than I make now in that regard. Now, hopefully, to be honest, hopefully we'll continue to be successful financially and continue to make money so we can continue to scale this so we can bring this to not the thousands of people that we're doing now but eventually millions of people. And I think it's something that while I'm known for a carnivore diet, I'm for a diet that works for people. And I think meat is a part of that diet. And I think that's a very important concept.

And I think people that ideologically adhere to veganism for whatever reason, you know, and I'm not going to blame somebody for that, but basically a lot of what they said, like Stan alluded to, you know, if you think you're saving the animals, you're not. You know, there's studies out of Australia showing that, you know, to get, you know, five kilograms of wheat, you kill 25 times more animals than if you were to get five kilos of meat. So, I mean, the animal density, now they're smaller animals, they're not as cute,

maybe they're not as cute as a cow, but they are, as Stan pointed out, they're mice, they're rabbits, they're foxes and deer. Well, rabbits are kind of cute. Well, and they even shoot thousands of kangaroo, and they shoot a lot of deer, too, to prevent them from eating the cow.

Not in Australia, but here in the States. And the assumption is, well, that's all unintentional. And I say, well, what do you think of pesticide? What does the name pesticide mean to you? When you break it down, it's something designed to kill pests. That's not unintentional. They do that with the very intention to kill every single animal. When they grow these crops, they don't want anything else to live there.

Nothing else can live in that environment. It's a dead ecosystem except for that one specific crop. So they kill every worm, every mouse, every rabbit. Everything is dead. How damaging is just agriculture? You hear people talking about like the cow farts, stuff like that being a real problem. Is that really an actual thing?

Well, I mean- Or the practices of these farms, is that really an actual thing? Well, I mean – Or the practices of these farms, is that really an actual thing? Right. I mean, so, you know, let's face it. We all have to eat, and there's an impact to that, right? The damage is what they say is going on is over-exaggerated to sell – you know, I mean, there's reasons that they want to do that. But, I mean, you know, if we look at, for instance, you know, you often hear that, you know, I mean, there's reasons that they want to do that. But I mean, you know, if we look at, for instance, you know, you often hear that, you know, animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gases than anything in the world.

There was a documentary called Cowspiracy that came out, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. And they quoted 51% of all greenhouse gases come from animal agriculture. That was clearly a lot. They had to rescind that. They rescinded that down to 18%, partly in the work of Dr. Frank Mittleiner, who we brought up. And then they subsequently changed that to 14%. So 14% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions are from animal agriculture. But that's assuming it's a life cycle assessment.

So that's like it's not just the fart. It's technically the burps. It's not just the burps. But they count everything. They count when they drive the beef to the grocery store. They count that as emissions. When they grow some of the crops, they count that as the emissions. When they package and produce the plastic to make the wrap, they count that in their admissions.

They didn't do that for auto, for transportation. They just said, well, it comes out the tailpipe. So if you want tailpipe versus cow burp, cow burps are basically 5% worldwide emissions. So again, it's a threefold exaggeration. And the other thing you have to realize is, you know, you have to talk about where you are. So if I'm looking at the United States, for instance, and we have very good data from the EPA showing that cows are responsible for roughly 2% of our greenhouse gas emissions. I keep saying emissions because we're not talking about carbon sequestration, which is also occurring, which lowers those emissions.

But if I compare the United States to, say, someplace like Somalia, where they don't have a huge industry infrastructure, they don't have a huge transportation sector. They don't have a big energy sector. Their emissions are going to be something like 30 or 40 percent from annual agriculture. So when you're looking at those parts of the world and you're making a worldwide average, you have to remember we're talking about third world countries where they have nothing else. So why wouldn't, you know, like if you roll the clock back 150 years in the United States, almost all of our greenhouse gas emissions would have been down to agriculture and forestry because we didn't do anything else. And now when we're looking at what are the targets we're going to go after, and again, there's arguments to say if we should bother at all, you know, it's fossil fuels for sure. Methane, which is the biggest thing that animal agriculture does, and it's like 28 times more

global warming potential, and depending on if you're looking at a 20-year or 100-year cycle, it's a flow gas. And so everything that goes up comes right back down. So it's at a static state. It's not increasing in the atmosphere. In fact, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab did isotopic sampling of the atmosphere. And they said, where is the methane coming from? Or where are the greenhouse gases coming from?

And it wasn't from cows. And so what they say is they can measure it, they can take a cow and they can put a mask on and say, how much do you burp? And then they multiply it by 1.3 billion cows and say, this is a cow output. And they measure a few other things. But what they're finding is with, particularly with methane, every single year, they're finding new methane sources. And so that cow contribution gets smaller and smaller and smaller, but they're not recognizing that. And so when they look at what's actually in the atmosphere, almost none of it's coming from cows. So that's the interesting thing. We had in 1978 or 1980 or so, the world cow

population was at its maximum. It was like, there was like an extra 100 million cows than there are today. So we actually have less cows. In the United States in particular, 1977, we had 130 million head of cattle in the United States. Now we're down to 95 million. So the cow numbers have gone down. And producing twice as much. And we're producing more milk and more meat because we're more efficient. But the cows have actually gone down. Our meat consumption has gone down.

And yet what's going on? We have more greenhouse gas exposure. We have more obesity and more disease. So why would that happen if it's going the other way, if it's driving that? It doesn't make sense, and it's not the case. Some efficiencies can be had. Obviously, the United States is far better at the economy. India, for instance, probably has 10 times as many cows for the same milk.

Well, India, yeah yeah so it's interesting India has either the largest or second largest herd of cattle in the world they have 220 million or 250 million head of cattle compared to the U.S. is 90 million from the dairy side it takes them almost 20 times as long to produce the same amount of milk as we do in the United States. So they're very inefficient there. And so really, if you wanted to talk about how do we go forward with the plant, you know, and most of the cows in India are pretty disease-ridden.

They're covered in, they're loaded with parasites because they just roam and eat garbage. I mean, that's what they do. They're not really managed very well. And so these guys are very inefficient. But in the United States where we all live, you're not saving the planet by going vegan. You're not really managed very well. And so these guys are very inefficient. But in the United States where we all live, you're not saving the planet by going vegan. You're not doing anything. You're basically-

There's an amazing site on Instagram, and I hope I remember the name of it that I think everybody should tune into because this guy's incredible at delivering this information. And he's an actual, I think he's a third generation dairy farmer. Is it Iowa Dairy Farmer?

Is that- Yeah, Dan VanTyker. I've interviewed him. He's great. Oh, he's amazing. Yeah, yeah, great site. Go on there and just start watching some of his Instagram posts. But he talks about all this.

And he has a very efficient milk farm where he raises dairy cattle and has for three generations. And I think he's got an agricultural degree from Iowa, is my understanding. Yeah, smart guy. Yeah, I mean, what he does, this is really nice. There's all this vegan propaganda about how dairy farmers are abusing the animals. And he just says, look, here's a camera. This is exactly what we do. What you're saying is complete bullshit.

And he destroys it. And he gets so much pushback. They sleep in beds of sand. They go and milk themselves. They have an automatic milker, and the cows walk through it themselves. They're not steered through there. They're fed at their will all day long, and they have these automatic systems that clean up all of the cow waste. It's pretty amazing.

They'll continue to pull videos, though, of those cows being tortured because there are those videos, right? Yeah, of course. Most of those videos that were shown in some of these documentaries are out of the country, and it's certainly, you know, obviously intolerable that that's happening. In the U.S., it's less and less of that. Like Sean said, you become, as a dairy farmer, you're going to want your cows to produce,

and the better you take care of them. I grew up in Portland, Oregon. We used to go out to Tillamook all the time. Tillamook cheese was delicious. It's good cheese. Dairy Josie is a proprietor of a dairy farm out there. Yeah. It's another farmer.

The way they take care of their cows there is phenomenal. They're dairy cows there. I mean, they're brushing them, and they lay in these beds of sand or hay. They're treated like kings there. Or queens, I should say. Let's switch gears for a moment. You're not going to beat up on me anymore. Yeah, yeah.

It'd probably just be a little bit more of the same. the same. We were talking earlier about carbohydrates and kind of how they can help with, you know, I guess somebody making their diet more optimal for performance and things like that. And so you were kind of mentioning that, you know, to have it having good amount of protein in your diet is something that is going to help with protein synthesis and stuff like that. So I'd like to open up some dialogue and talk about this a little bit more because there are people that, like, if I say, like, war on carbs, if I say, like, I like eating meat or it's World Carnivore Month, people are like, well, why don't you just eat carbs? And for me, it's not necessarily that the carbs are going to do anything bad. I don't believe that they're going to make me fat. It just throws my diet off. I like to be kind of locked in on my diet and it's World Carnivore

Month. So I'm taking it as a challenge as well. How well can people perform on a diet that doesn't really have hardly any carbohydrates and what happens to the body when we're not eating carbs? You were mentioning you're like, I think you were mentioning your glucose goes up, but how does your glucose go up when you don't eat any carbs? Yeah, well, I mean, our body is very good at defending and leaving us in a homeostatic place.

It doesn't matter what our sodium intake is. We tightly regulate our acid base amounts. It's tightly regulated. And even though I don't eat carbohydrates or any appreciable amount of it, my blood glucose never goes to zero i mean it's you just can't exist i want it to where i want it to i mean it can get pretty low and there's some interesting studies cahill did in the 60s where he starved people got him like you know starving where their blood glucose was 40 you know milligrams per deciliter and then he would give them insulin on top of

that and then they'd be down to 10. And normally that would kill most people, but because they were compensating, they did well with that. But I mean, because I eat a lot of protein and to some degree fat, I eat plenty of calories. There's something called gluconeogenesis, most of us are aware of. You can turn amino acids into glucose, and you can turn the glycerol from triglycerides into glucose and that stores in your liver and, you know, you just have it and you become very efficient at that. And, you know, there's also your muscle glycogen is refilled, maybe not to the extent that you would with, you know, carbohydrates. But I mean, again, how much do you actually need to perform? You know, we had a good workout. I mean, I would say I hung with everybody pretty well.

And, you know, it was great. And I think that's something that you can do very well with that. And I've gotten, you know, there's guys in the NFL now on the carnivore diet. There's professional MMA fighters on the carnivore diet. They're all doing well. It's not for everyone, for sure. There are people that just don't feel very good with that. And I don't know why that is yet, you know.

And, I mean, maybe there's some people that don't eat enough. One of the things Stan and I talked about is fueling yourself properly. And if you just don't have an appetite and then you expect yourself to go perform at a world-class level, that's going to be hard to do. So you have to be able to eat. And carbohydrates help you to eat more. There's some impacts on some of the satiety hormones. We know there are studies that support that.

So you can eat more, which is going to have an impact. We also know that carbohydrates are going to be very effective at restoring glycogen, which can be beneficial as well. I think that when it comes to muscle building, can you build muscle without carbohydrates? Sure, you can. Is it the most optimal, most effective and efficient way? Probably not. I mean, again, I,

I think as much as, as much of the studies we have, you can point to flaws in all these studies. You can say, what's, you know, what else are you looking at? When I look at, you know, who are the biggest, strongest guys on the planet? You know, when I look at bodybuilders, they're all eating a high, high, high protein diet for sure. They're all training their asses off with mostly high volume in many cases, but they're eating some carbohydrate as well. And I think that's, you know, the effect may be a performance benefit. It may be an appetite and calorie benefit. And so I think that's important. But I mean, again, do you have to do it that way? No, you don't. And there's reasons, you know,

like for some people, and perhaps as we get older, carbohydrates become problematic because then you, like we said, the positive benefits of supporting appetite may be negative because you may, you know, you may eat too much body fat if you're not matching it with training output. The other thing is for some people, they have, you know, I don't demonize carbohydrates or glucose. But what I do say is there are certain compounds and certain foods that are gut irritants. And Stan's done a very good job of the vertical diet in saying some of these foods just negatively impact your gut. And so we need to know what they are. And most of the diseases, I believe, start in the gut. These autoimmune diseases, mental health issues probably start in the gut, skin issues, psoriasis, all the things that occur. So if you can fix your gut and heal your gut,

and I think a lot of us are dealing with dysfunctional guts, dysbiosis, hyperpermeability, and that's probably because of the modern diet. So many people are eating this complete garbage diet, so we've ruined our gut, we've ruined our ability to properly process the nutrients in the good foods we should normally eat. So we have people that now they can't tolerate whatever certain fruits and vegetables,

which sounds crazy, but it is what it is in many cases. And you have to restore that and fix that. And later on, like we see a lot of people that do a carnivore diet for three months, six months, they'll deal with whatever issues they have. And then they can start adding food back in, which is kind of cool. Yeah, eliminate and reintroduce. I talk about that. What are some of your thoughts here

with the carbs, in regards to carbs? Yeah, you know, I talked about this, I think, first on Mike Mutzel's podcast, where I discussed the fact that, you know, you can get to the top of the Empire State Building taking the stairs, but the elevator's probably a little faster, a little better idea. And then subsequently that on Paul Saladino's podcast, and I kind of went over the muscle physiology as we know it now as compared to the way we used to think it. Again, as Sean said, specifically for that 1% of the population that's looking for optimum performance, anaerobic training in particular,

I think that the carbohydrates have demonstrated to provide the benefit of enabling you to get one more rep or do one more set, maybe give you a little more stamina and endurance in the gym for an anaerobic workout. And we see that there seems to be an equivalent benefit from getting fat adapted in terms of endurance. It's hard pressed to see the advantage of carbohydrates there, except for maybe in that given event over probably 90 minutes with every 15-minute periodic intake of carbs, salt, and water, as the ISSN recommends. But with respect to muscle physiology for that 1% of the population, the way that Brad Schoenfeld describes it in his book, Hypertrophy, what we see now is that we used to think the carbohydrates were stored in the muscle as one thing.

And they would do that by grinding up the muscle and looking at the carbohydrate glycogen depletion for any given workout. And they said, well, you're only depleting 40% of your glycogen. So how could it be that big a deal? Well, apparently carbohydrates are stored in different locations. The sarcoplasm is one in particular that seems to be the last filled and the first depleted. And in the muscle, the sarcoplasm, those carbohydrates seem to trigger the calcium channel that is responsible for firing. That's the tropamine, tropomyosin channel that allows for the cross-bridging for the actin myosin contractions. So for those who

study muscle physiology, that'll be very familiar and probably somewhat rudimentary, but that's depleted first. And so that might, just like creatine, might give you in the creatine phosphate system one more rep by renewing that first 10 seconds. The first 30 seconds, having an abundance of carbohydrates available might help. There's also another component to that, and I think that's partly that some of hypertrophy isn't just the muscle fiber, it's the fluid in the sarcoplasm as well, and some of the hypertrophy benefits that are derived derived probably as much as 20% potentially could be from the, the fluid expansion and the compression of the cells provides a hypertrophy

benefit, which you can obtain from more carbs, which obviously hold three parts water and then sodium. So there, there could be a muscle breakdown benefit. It's small. And it, it might help with adding one more rep, five more pounds, one more set throughout

the workout. And the cumulative effect of that over time, this wouldn't be anything you'd see immediately. Although in powerlifting, we do find that the fuller we are, we used to intentionally try and get ourselves as loaded as possible right before a meet with some carb and salt loading, particularly after weigh-ins would help with some of that compressive force with the muscles so there's a benefit there i also found that when you look at most of the diet literature we talked about how important the carnivore diet can be or an elimination diet might be for initial intervention for things like

diabetes for you know, digestion issues. We talked about the FODMAP menu and a whole host of other disorders that people present, often I see present on your website as well. It seems that people, like we said, six out of seven people go on a diet, lose weight. The vast majority of them gain it back within a certain period of time, one to three years, up to probably 90%. It seems like when they go off the diet, they tend to migrate back towards a balance of proteins, fats, and carbs. We also see pretty good literature to suggest that

like a 40% carbohydrate, I hate to put a number on it. I will say that 30% or north of protein seems to be the most beneficial macronutrient that everybody should include where you put fats and carbs. As we saw in the diet fits trial out of Stanford, a one year trial on over 600 people, but where they put carbs and fats didn't seem to matter in terms of weight loss or insulin output. And we also see that in terms of these high glycemic versus low glycemic carbs. If you're controlled for calories and protein,

if you eat high glycemic or low glycemic carbs, it doesn't seem to affect weight loss. And so it's really, like you mentioned, it's really a choice. What's your preference? What can you sustain over time? And how do you feel on the diet? I'm curious about this because, Sean, you've been doing carnivore for a long time. Do you think that there's, and Stan too, do you think that there's something that people

need to think about as they age? Because we know that individuals' insulin resistance gets worse as they get older generally, right? I think you've eaten less carbs over the years, haven't you? Brought them down a bit. Yeah, particularly if I'm not training at the same intensity or if I'm traveling and I don't want to be as hungry as often or as hangry. I don't get the same degree of hunger if I reduce carbs and increase proteins and fats.

But it takes a few days to get, quote unquote, fat adapted. We see that with like those oral glucose tolerance tests, et cetera. If you're fat adapted and you go in and hit yourself with a shot of glucola, you're going to spike and it's going to look crazy. You have to kind of reintroduce carbs before you do something like that. So your body will respond acutely based on your current level of adaptation. Yeah, I mean, you specifically asked about as you get older. Yeah, especially athletes.

As much as I hate to admit that I'll include myself there now. I keep thinking I'm in my 20s. I think some of the misconceptions that I find out there is that older athletes can't train hard. I think there's some issues around you can only do a third

of what you could do in your 20s. Personally, I'm not finding that. I continue to train hard. Stan, I saw a funny post of you about talking about when I was going in and maxing every day, I was hitting a 600-pound bench, and now I'm listening to the science. I'm down to whatever, 400 or something like that.

But I think there's this expectation that as I get older, I'm just going to get weaker, and I'm not going to be able to train hard. And I think that's a problem. That's setting yourself up for failure. And I don't approach it that way. I'm like, I want to, for instance, I mean, today we do these deadlifts. This was a lifetime PR for me. I hit today, two days shy of my 50th. 22 reps, 415 pounds, trap bar deadlifts. Yes. And deadstop. That was the thing. I wanted to make sure it was deadstop.

Turn the camera on and have Andre Milanochep screaming in your ear. It's bound to do that. Yeah, it helps. But I mean, it's something that so, I mean, you know, and I haven't been doing it my whole life. I'd say for the last maybe four or five years I've been playing with that. And so, at least I'm better than I was four or five years ago. And so, I think that one is that, again,

the average person in the U.S. and even the average gym goer is probably under eating protein. You know, like Stan and I both think 30% is kind of the minimum bar of entry for protein consumption. Maybe you're up 40%, 50%. If you're trying to get leaner, you might even have more protein in there. So I think that has a uniquely beneficial effect on your ability to stay strong, keep a lean muscle mass. And then for me, I find that for whatever reason, a carnivore diet allows me to recover better.

And so like I said, I'm doing jujitsu now. I'm still training hard. I'm doing all these things. And I find that, I mean, I'll wake up tomorrow and I'm going to train hard again. Whereas maybe if I were on a different situation, and I'm not saying one diet, but I mean a standard American diet, I think it's inflammatory in general, you know, for whatever reason

you are. 70% processed food. Yeah, you can put processed food there. It's probably the biggest, biggest. Well, fat. Fat is inflammatory. Body fat. Well, yeah, body fat.

Yeah, body fat. Yeah, there's inflammatory cytokines. Yeah, so I mean it's one of those things where if you can stay lean and strong, I think you can train even old. And, you know, I mean, my goal is when I'm 90, I'm hoping I'm coming to super training gym with these guys and we're going to do some deadlifts. I mean, that's the plan, you know. Yeah. You know, let me say, let me jump in here and say a couple of things. If I can recall, I should have had my pen and paper out.

One thing in particular is that a lot of people think, and some of the literature suggested, I think even when Jordan Tromlin did his PhD, uh, he did a PhD on protein metabolism and a lot of the information that we've been utilizing about, uh, protein comes from his work and others. Uh, we talked about the fact that people become less sensitive, uh, muscle protein synthesis as they age, but more and more of the recent research suggests that's because of sarcopenia is because they lost muscle and aren't using it as much or maybe

as heavy as they used to. And so I would suggest to say that, that you know, lifting and building muscle at irrespective of age. I don't think we see it until we get much older even, about the end of our 60s or 70s where we start to see a decline. We're seeing now that people in their 50s and older are retaining muscle protein synthesis from an equivalent bolus of protein

at 40 grams for maybe 100% maximization muscle protein synthesis. Another thing you said with respect to you just recover better and feel stronger on steak and eggs. A couple of things, a couple of components to that. Menel Henselman wrote about this recently. Alan Argon's done some research on this as well and printed on it. Cholesterol. It does appear when you look at two groups of people who have equivalent calories and protein intake, one group has egg whites, the other group has whole eggs,

that the whole egg group is getting a much greater hypertrophy and strength outcome as a result. And the presumption initially was micronutrients, and now it's suggested from subsequent studies that it's possibly the cholesterol that's providing us the benefit. Thank you. I managed to remember those two things. I appreciate it. And, you know, obviously saturated fat's a contributor to that. And the thing to watch out for is if you, you know, you are, do have a propensity to,

predisposition to accumulate LDLs as a result of that, if you're not clearing them fast enough, although exercise certainly helps with that. But yeah, cholesterol. And I've mentioned this with respect to kids' diets. I told the story before about I was at the airport, and I was standing behind a gentleman with two young boys, probably, I don't know, seven and nine years old. And he turned around, he looked at me, and he's like, see, boys? I'm telling you. He nods at me.

He said, if you want to get big and strong, you got to eat your vegetables. And I looked at him, and I said, are you asking? And he goes yeah tell him and i said boys if you want to get big and strong you got to eat steak eggs and milk and he kind of looked at me in shocks but i'm dead serious if you know i'm the guy who we've discussed before uh who had delayed onset puberty because i was working at 7-eleven and eating uh the crap there the hot dogs and nacho cheese pump crackers and soda pops from the time I was 12 to the time I was 16. And it's not until I went back to Pennsylvania my senior year of high

school and lived with my uncle that I started eating, you know, steaks and bacon and lard. And the neighbor had a dairy farm where we got whole milk straight from the cow with the four inches of cream on the top and the glass bottle that you had to shake. And next thing you know, I put on 20 pounds in six months. I went through puberty finally as a 17-year-old senior in high school. So there is a foundation that's necessary and beneficial. And that's why I did a video talking about the importance of cholesterol, the importance of whole eggs.

And even I talked about eating chicken, what did I say, instead of chicken breast, eating chicken thigh. Yeah. Higher in cholesterol and easier and more fun to eat. And again, the caveat to that being, you know, this is for a fit, you know, individual who doesn't have adverse effects and only a blood test can really tell you where you fall in terms of that genetic predisposition. Dr. Baker, have you ever had any pain and injuries and stuff like that prior to the carnivore diet?

What were some of the struggles before? Because you've been on it for five years, and we see how well you're thriving now. But you were a Highland Games athlete previously, did some rugby. Because it doesn't seem like you have any pain now. It seems like you're kicking ass yeah i mean i and you know part of that is my whole career i i realize the importance of hardening my body for those athletic activities you know i was training i was you know trying to prepare myself i'm kind of an over preparer i'm kind of i'm i'm not particularly tough so i like

to be over prepared so you know so when it's time, you're like, it's not so bad for you. But, I mean, I did have some very significantly and severe quadriceps tendonitis. And I remember I was squatting one time. I was doing a 500-pound squat, and I had a little pop right above my kneecap. So I think I partially tore my quadriceps. And I was working. My orthopedic surgeon partner, we took some x-rays and there was nothing major, but it was just enough and it hurt me

for about eight years prior to going on a carnivore and it would affect my ability to train because some days when your knees hurt, you don't feel like squatting or you don't feel like training. And that, I went on carnivore and I remember about two months and as an orthopedic surgeon,

I was dealing with tendonitis all the time and so I knew what to do from the literature, you know, all the different, you know, eccentric loading and stretching and all these other modalities that we have to treat that. And I tried all those things and it never went away. I went on a carnivore diet and I noticed within two months, my quadriceps tendonitis, which had bothered me literally every day for eight years, went away completely. And it's never come back, which I thought was really, really interesting. Now, you know, do I occasionally get strains and aches and pains now because I still train pretty hard? Yeah. I mean, when I get done with a hard night of jiu-jitsu, the next day I'm kind of like, you know.

But, I mean, it's generally so much better now at 55 than it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago at 40 and 45. So it's clearly better. Yeah, we worked out hard today. So much better now at 55 than it was 10, 15 years ago at 40 and 45. So it's clearly better. Yeah, we worked out hard today. And afterwards, we shot some content. And we sat down for probably an hour to do that content. And you popped right up. And you didn't look like you got up like someone who's older. You got up normal.

And Stan was kind of, I think Stan was a little jealous because Stan was shaking out his knees a little bit. He's like, I need to walk around a little bit. I got a little stiff. And so maybe some of that is contributed. I mean, who knows? Maybe it's partially genetic as well, but who knows? But it seems like it's helping you a lot.

And for you, Stan, I know you had some injuries and some things that were going on with yourself that almost took you out. At one point, you thought you needed hip surgery. Yeah, I had two different doctors give me an MRI and tell me that I needed hip replacement surgery. And same with your knees. Can you tell us about some of that? Chronic tendonitis. And both of these pains were the kind that would keep you up at night.

They would throb. I couldn't sit in a theater for an extended period of time or drive a car. The hip would be just throbbing. I'd be rubbing against it while I was driving or in an airplane with your knee bent. I was just screaming to the point where you're just rubbing the knee. It was tendonitis. And I thought it was going to be a permanent chronic condition, degenerative from all of my powerlifting, and I was going to pay the price. It was really just a matter of probably poor programming or just too much in too short a period of time, going back and forth from bodybuilding to powerlifting.

But I did a rant called Keys to Pain-Free Knees, another one called I Broke My Back, where I talked about kind of the preventative measures that you can utilize and then also the rehab methods that you can utilize. And that was really just reducing the load and the range of motion and move early and often. That's the basics of it, try and obviously get enough sleep and calories and protein. Oftentimes people get surgeries or what have you, and they don't understand how important it is, particularly in those moments,

to maintain a calorie surplus and adequate protein. It's really hard to rebuild a body at a deficit. Did you get any surgeries, by the way? I didn't. Yeah, I didn't have to get cut on. I went in for some mobility work, I guess you could say. I just moved through whatever range of motion that I didn't experience pain. There's some interesting work that, I don't know if you've talked to the folks from Barbill Medicine yet, Austin Baraki and Jordan Fagenbaum.

They do some great research, great stuff on pain management. It comes from, a lot of it comes from the biopsychosocial method and those methods talked about by Dr. Laura Marmosley from Explain Pain out of Australia. And they talk about the fact that, you know, the pain isn't a really good indicator

of the degree of damage that's been done and that psychologically speaking, it's a defense mechanism and you really need to continue to try and move. What often happens is that people become what Greg Knuckles refers to as kinesophobic. They just stop moving. And anytime that happens, if you, you know,

limit range of motion, I mean, imagine putting a cast or an ankle brace on an ankle, it atrophies and you lose range of motion. And that's the last thing you want. And that is often what people do with their back pain is that they just stop moving. And that's the last thing you want to do. You want to continue to move. Even if you get somewhat injured or feel a pop or a pain in that given workout, you should lower the weight and range of motion and continue to move through so you can kind of desensitize the area and put more blood in there and then continue to do that ongoing. Another thing is I see a lot of people end up, and this isn't an indictment on physical therapists and chiropractors. They're not all the same. Some are better than others.

And a lot of times they'll go in and next thing you know, they're getting bent and twisted and turned and crushed and cracked. We refer to that as picking the scab. It really just prolongs the problem. I oftentimes, and I may have mentioned it before, wish I was in the physical therapy or chiropractic industry because the diet industry, we've got a 95% failure rate. I don't care who you are. The recidivism, as we mentioned earlier, people gaining the weight back is very, very high. Our success rate is very low long term. There's obviously some immediate gratification for people who remedy, you know, certain health issues. But just exactly the opposite is true in the industry of chiropractic and physical therapy.

About 90 plus percent of pain resolves itself spontaneously within four to six weeks. So whatever intervention, regardless of what it is, whether it's physical therapy or chiropractics, or you got some gua sha or electric stem, or even wore a copper bracelet, you will attribute your recovery to whatever intervention that you were doing. We see this even in, as you understand the research better than I, in sham surgeries with knee surgery. We see that the more, what you call it, severe the intervention, if you actually cut them open and sew them back up, but do no intervention, the greater the placebo effect and they get equivalent pain

remediating outcomes from the sham surgeries we don't actually do any surgery as compared and that's not all you know if you've obviously if you've got a you know a ligament tear as opposed to a strain or then that's a very different thing but so the whole pain science and pain businesses uh i think i i want to say almost with the growth of CrossFit, that whole industry exploded because so many people were going in and overtraining or people with little prior experience were going in doing very dynamic things. And that industry in general, physical therapy and chiropractic, exploded. therapy and chiropractic has exploded. And, you know, in turn, a whole lot of minimally effective, if not effective, other than placebo procedures are being implemented that just don't really have any proven, you know, long-term outcomes as compared to just general movement or patients or just, you know, like I said, just lightening the load, shortening the range of motion and continuing to move.

Yeah, that's interesting. When I was doing my surgical residency and about 25 years ago, there was a study out of Baylor University, a guy named Bruce Mosley did a study on meniscectomies, you know, meniscus tears, degenerative meniscus tears. And he did sham surgeries and he'd make the little incisions for your scope portals, and he'd sew them back up, and he wouldn't tell them to. The outcomes were no different. And that shocked the orthopedic community because we were doing thousands and thousands of scopes

and these scopes to do meniscectomies on degenerative arthritis. And it turns out you're not doing diddly squat for these people. And still even today, those operations continue to go on, and they don't provide really any significant relief. And so it's one of those things where... There were a couple of statistics I want to throw out here.

And this is right out of... I went to a barbell medicine seminar a couple of years ago. This is their actual manual that they put in here. I took some pretty copious notes in listening to them. And I think highly

of these folks' recommendations. We've got the ultimate student over here, by the way, just so people don't know. Stan has literally gone back to school. You've attended many, many seminars. Yeah, I got my CSCS from the NSCA subsequent to... You'd actually think that Stan is like a new lifter

or someone who's newly getting into the field, but you've been around for however many years. Yeah, I love this stuff. I've always sought out the best information. I went to Flex Wheeler when I wanted to be the best bodybuilder. I went to Mark Bell when I wanted to be the best powerlifter.

I think everybody should have a coach and have ongoing education, even me at north of 50 years old. I still take classes, go to seminars. I just got back from Pat Davidson's seminar in Miami. He's an extraordinary mind. And the muscle doc, Jordan Shallow, was down there. So, you know, you just keep learning. And there's a lot of great people to follow on the internet now. Obviously,

I've been following Doc for years. I even printed out something that he posted. What was this, two years ago? Or how long ago was this? That is actually from earlier this year. Yeah. I copy and paste these things into a notepad. You ask me any question, I'll pull up my notepad. And I've got all the studies and stuff from a variety of different people. I don't have to, you know, I'm not the foremost authority on this. I'm not the guru. I've just found the people who have the greatest, I think, experience, both academically and in application.

A lot of the people that, like I talk about, the folks in barbell medicine, or Lane Norton or, uh, Greg Knuckles, uh, those are all people who both, who train and compete either in powerlifting or bodybuilding or what have you. And so I think those are the best resources, but I don't know as much as they know. Uh, but I learn a lot as I've gone along in the way and, uh, I'm incorporated the things, uh, talked a lot about the things that Mark Bell taught me and how I, you know, subsequent or prior to coming to Mark Bell, I totaled 2,070. Six months later, 2,226. I mean, Mark put 200 pounds almost on my total in six months just from making some minor modifications. Some technical adjustments, also some different training techniques.

That was so fun. I was like, this is going to make me look really good. Yeah. And even some pain management stuff, like with the slingshot and changing my grip and using SSB bars and using bands to learn more explosive speed. But I'm getting sidetracked. Here's some interesting statistics here. People with herniated discs, over 30% of 20-year-olds will present with herniated discs and have no pain.

Degenerative discs, like if you were to put somebody under an MRI, 30% of 20-year-olds, no pain, 96% of 80-year-olds, no pain. It doesn't seem as though pain is a good predictor of these kinds of things. And it's on MRIs as well. We could go into MRIs, how ineffective they are. People try and identify some sort of degenerative problem, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether that's causing pain or fixing that would remedy the pain. We don't know.

Yeah, even looking for a problem is a problem. Yeah, I mean, if we were to MRI all of us, just head to toe, we would find hundreds of things wrong with us. We're like, oh, so don't even want to look there. The Bulgarians say it's the same pain. It just moves around the body. That's what they say. I went to a seminar a few years back with Brett Contreras, PhD, the glued guy, super smart guy. And he said something that stuck with me ever since that's discussed here as well.

And that's that you've got to be really careful identifying people as broken, as needing fixed, because they'll focus on that. And it provides kind of a nocebo for them. The negative expectations result in worse outcomes. And the positive expectations result in worse outcomes and the positive expectations result in better outcomes so to be very cautious about people who are wanting to go get identified as having some problem that then needs fixed because uh then they're they're more likely to think that identify themselves as that problem uh rather than than thinking about their potential yeah there's the concept of secondary gain they like identifying as sick

so they can get other people feeling sorry for them. I mean, it's a true phenomenon where they like to identify with their... You're going to get us into politics here real quick. And it's going to show us an excuse to, yeah. We're headed down that road. My buddy over here in SEMA, on his hand, it says limits,

and the limits is crossed out. Can you tell these guys why you have that? Oh yeah. Well, my mom, she's a, she's Nigerian. She's an immigrant. You know, you know the saying, the sky's the limit, right? So she hates that. She hates that saying in general. So ever since I was a kid, she always said the sky's not the limit and because she just had a twist on that. So that's why I have this because it's just like, I don't, we talk about on the podcast all the time about being very careful with the things that you believe in about yourself and the things you say about yourself, right? Because a lot of like – for example, the sarcopenia thing that you guys were just talking about.

On the internet, within a lot of these videos, there's a lot of people, especially when they see older athletes that – you guys aren't old, by the way, but when they say athletes that are a little bit older doing well, they automatically think those athletes, oh, they must be taking so much shit because like once you get to 30, 35 sarcopenia hits, your testosterone can't be how you start losing muscle, right? Where we know so many athletes that are like you guys that are continuing to maintain, get stronger. And that made me wonder from both of you guys, what are the aspects of your training that you believe allow you to stay so resilient? Because you pay attention to a lot of people within fitness

once they start getting into their 40s, 50s, right? I mean, a decline is expected. You're not going to be maybe as you were in your prime at 25, but not as many people are able to maintain what both of you have been able to maintain because you could still fuck up. Like you do jujitsu, you're going to fuck up some 20-year-olds. You're lifting, you'll still fuck up 20-year-olds. So what aspect of your trainings allows you to maintain this type of resilience?

Let me hit the elephant in the living room here before Sean jumps in on that. And that's that we're both 54 today. Sean turns 55 on Mondays after birthday. And we deadlifted today and we did reps. We did 405. 20 was the goal. 415. 415.

I can't remember. Had a 65-pound bar. So, Sean, we were going to do 20. Of course, Sean has to be a one-upper so he bangs out 22 and so uh i got in there and everybody was screaming and yelling i was able to get a couple more 45 and uh but sean's lifetime natural i've been natural for about 24 hours now so i wanted to make sure that that although i although i got him by a couple reps today, there's an asterisk after the competition after my name.

Yeah, but okay. So, I mean, as far as what allows us to continue, I mean, you know, part of it's desire and interest. I mean, some people just lose interest. I mean, it's like, this is hard work. Some people don't want to do it day after day, year after year. You know, I think part of it is what has been the reward for me doing that. And so so in my

career, it's kind of funny as a doctor, when I went through my training residency back when I went through, it wasn't a good time. You were abused as a resident. People would yell at you, scream at you. Physically, I mean, you'd be sleep deprived. I mean, there were some guys that were physically literally hit. I mean, this is normal in surgical practice. They didn't do that to me because I was six foot five, 280 pounds, and I kind of acted a little psychotic. I kind of let them know I was a little mentally unstable. So if you fuck with me, you might die. But, I mean, there's some advantages to doing this.

And so I've always felt that there's – like Marx says, strength is never a weakness. And I think no matter what your endeavor is, certainly athletically, but just in life in general. It was funny. Two years ago, I did some crazy dieting. I got down. I got all the way down to 204 pounds. And I felt like death. I mean, it changed my mental outlook.

I felt weak. I felt scared. I was anxious. It just didn't feel well. By the way, you're like 245 right now, right? 245 now. But I mean, it took me three months to get back up to 260 because I just ate everything I was anxious. It just didn't feel right. By the way, you're like 245 right now, right? 245 now. But I mean, you know, it took me three months to get back up to 260 because I just ate everything in the house.

It's like, argh, I can't do this anymore. And you're 65. I'm 65. Yeah, so you can hold it. But I mean, it was just something that, but I mean, I make an effort. Like we talked about this in SEMA. You know, a lot of guys are strength training. I mean, finally, it used to be jogging. Remember, it was jogging for 70 years and the Cooper stuff and all that stuff. And about 20 years ago, people said, wait a minute, maybe we should do

some strength training. So now we see a lot of older athletes doing strength training and staying pretty damn strong. And I think that's great. In addition to that, like I said, I'm jumping, I'm sprinting. I think that that part of it is very important to maintain that because that's something, you know, if you want to be athletic and move and, you know, run from bears and kill, kill prey, like humans might've been designed to do. I think that's an important aspect of the physiology. So maintaining that, however you want to do that, jumping, spreading, throwing, uh, those things are great. You know, like, like the bike sprints, those are another great thing. So I just, I just kind of try to maintain those things and they all build on each other. I, you know, the nice thing is I'm is I'm not – like when you're powerlifting, you've got a singular goal, and everything else is on the back door to that.

You're not going to do too much cardio because it's going to detract from your ability to bench press 800 pounds or whatever it might be. But I'm at the stage where I'm kind of like I'm having fun with jiu-jitsu. I do want to compete and compete at a high level, highest level as I can, but I still want to maintain that general, you know, functional function. I consider you've got to do hypertrophy work. You've got to do strength work. You've got to do conditioning work. And I like the explosive part of it.

And if I hit all four of those aspects, I think I'm covering most of the bases for what makes you a functional athletic human being, which I think is a good place to be. You can't be a power lifter and be a bodybuilder. You can't do that. You can't break all time world records and be a professional. I've shown that for sure. Well, you can't be in a marathon runner. I mean, I mean, that's a better, you know, I agree with you there. My, uh, my son's, uh, uh, when he was,'s, when he was younger, my wife put him into cross country. Well, he's Samoan, okay? He was six foot one, 315 pounds when he was 15 years old, deadlifting 500 for reps.

Cross country is probably not in his genetic predisposition. Just if you're five, seven, you're probably not going to be a center for the Los Angeles Lakers. So you certainly should pick something that if you intend to be good at it on a national, international level, you certainly should pick something that's consistent with your strengths, your genetic predisposition. I would say on my behalf, with respect to as I've aged and the reason why I've been able to maintain good health, good performance, pain-free, it wasn't always that way. When I quote-unquote retired from powerlifting, I had spoken before about the fact that I started to have fear as I approached the squat bar. I'd never had that before except for the last year that I was powerlifting. I would walk up

to a 900-pound squat and I would think about what happens if I miss. I'd never had that thought before. And that was probably a good indicator to me that it was time. Plus, maintaining that much weight, I don't think is a great idea. I always encourage powerlifters as they get older, they need to consider the burden of that on the body. If it's blood pressure, blood sugars, fatty liver, whatever, as we all have discussed. I just don't think it's a good idea to maintain that much body weight, even if it's you know blood pressure blood sugars fatty liver whatever as we all have discussed um i just don't think it's a good idea to maintain that much body weight even if it's muscle mass although that has less of an adverse impact than than body fat particularly visceral fat um but i tried for a couple probably a few years after that to still do what i always had done to retain uh you know somewhat close to that level of strength.

And it was, again, with the hip and the knee and all that stuff, just the chronic arthritic pain. I had to redefine myself. I had to change the way that I trained. That was for certain. I wasn't going to be able to continue to use that particular stance because of the impact on the hip, so I had to change my stance. And it was humbling at first because you don't just go back a little bit.

You go back a lot when you start over and pick a whole new form. I think you were telling me you were using like 185 or 225. I went down to 135 on squats, yeah, just to try and change my stance so that it wasn't loading the hips as heavily. And I squat completely differently now than I did when I was competing because when I was competing, it impacted my hips to such a degree that I couldn't continue with that.

Plus, the frequency and the load that I was using. Now I have to train. I can't lift as heavy as often. Pull up a squat, Andrew. Let's get some nostalgia. With the 19 camera angles, I always ask Jim to bring half a dozen cameras for every angle. But the last probably two years when I was just powerlifting and not bodybuilding, I think the biggest problem, the biggest mistake I made is that I had reduced my total volume. Because you always wanted to go to the cheesecake factory that's why yeah i was like oh we got more exercises to do you're like nope that's time to eat i'm good bigs

but even volume outside of uh outside of the heavy training you're just so fucking big it's so wide the stance is there that one that one i can't do that wide of a stance anymore. That hurts my hips. Yeah. Look at that big guy over there. But historically, I was competing in powerlifting, and then I would go into a bodybuilding block, and I would do a lot more volume and frequency and lighter loads and shorter rest periods, and it would give me a pretty extraordinary cardiovascular base that would carry over into my powerlifting as I reduced frequency and volume and increased load. And so now I move a lot more than I used to move some years ago. The 10-minute

walks, the sled drags, just more. Even on a leg day, I might go do some lat pulldowns. Even on a heavy leg day, I'll do a 5x5, 70 or 65, just to finish at the end, just to pump tons and tons and tons of blood into my body. And that has been a huge benefit for me as I've aged in terms of maintaining my joints. This is just making sure that I'm, I'm not doing stuff that hurts. That's an obvious one. And I'm maintaining, uh, more volume, uh, again, at least three times a day with the 10 minute walks are religious, probably four. And I like to do volume. Again, at least three times a day with the 10-minute walks are religious, probably four. And I like to do things that get a little more blood in the knee than just a walk. A backwards treadmill at 15 degrees at two miles an hour, just doing intervals there is nice.

I get my cardiovascular up. A recumbent bike under modest tension. I'll do little 40-second sprints. your modest tension. I'll do little 40 second sprints. Sean today, you know, took us through a HIIT workout, uh, uh, doing, you know, really fast five or six second sprints. He's done 30 of those in a row. We did five today and I was about spent on that. So, but I have tried to, to maintain my cardiovascular fitness. Uh, there's that epic 905 squat. Yeah. And that was a month later I got buried under that in competition, my first bomb. And Mark didn't even wait the requisite 24 hours to talk trash about me on that.

You mentioned some things that you avoid nowadays. So you mentioned that you don't do stuff that hurts. What are things that people avoid nowadays. So you mentioned that you don't do stuff that hurts. What are things that people should avoid or what are like, it seems to me there's a massive benefit in just avoiding stuff like with a carnivore diet. I think one of the great things is that you end up, especially in the carnivore challenge, you end up just avoiding snacking and you like eliminate snacking and same with what you promote. What are some other things that you think people can avoid that are real big things that can really help them a lot, such as something that you mentioned that you can do for yourself,

like a 10-minute walk? So what's something that people can nix to really make some great improvements? Yeah. You know, I would want to optimize sleep. Things you can avoid would lead to that, would be not staying up too late, not getting the blue light in your eyes, and just kind of the whole sleep hygiene, cool room, dark room, obviously avoid things that that hurt and that can be both in the gym and outside the gym with the lifts that i do and and i've mentioned previously that i have a uh an intolerance or an allergy whatever you'd like to call it to seed oils and i've long since learned after almost 20 years of suffering from uh these chronic bouts of uh of uh severe gast distress, which I described in detail in one of my videos on

explosive diarrhea, spackling the can and having to shower afterwards when I eat. And in all fairness, because this might segue us into more of this kind of conversation, and it led me to introduce foods like the ultimate elimination diet, the carnivore diet, and the FODMAP menu as a transition from that point for a lot of my clients. Because most of my clients presented with some of these problems because I was dealing in an industry, both in terms of weight loss for chronic dieters in the bodybuilding, figure physique, bikini industry, and weight gain amongst athletes. in the bodybuilding figure physique bikini industry and weight gain amongst athletes. An extraordinary percentage of those folks had these kinds of digestive issues, which, like Sean says, they started to see immediate relief. So who am I to intervene and say, oh, boy, this is an elimination diet,

and you shouldn't stay on it. And I think we just posted recently about that. Just because you're eating low FODMAP foods doesn't mean you're on a low FODMAP diet. We're not restricting everything and it's not a permanent recommendation. But I mentioned that in my video on seed oils that it is a poison to me. And I said I'm biased for that reason. I've just in the past been more vocal about nobody eating them. I've just in the past been more vocal about nobody eating them. And where I've ended up on that is in my book, which is something we wrote almost two years ago, which has come to market to say that the vast majority of these oils. And I have to mention that probably the best discussion debate I've seen on seed oils was between Alan Flanagan and Tucker Goodrich here on your show.

I thought that was extraordinary. oils was between Alan Flanagan and Tucker Goodrich here on your show. I thought that was extraordinary. It was, uh, two very well, uh, educated and, and, uh, informed, uh, individuals on the, on the literature. Uh, and you know, it was kind of a toss up. I gotta be honest with you. You know, I, I, I wanted it to be a slam dunk. I wanted seed oils to be poison. I really do. I, I have, and I've, uh, I've expressed that because they are to me. But at the end of that whole conversation, what I got most out of it was probably the most, I think, convincing argument against seed oils for me and what I put in my book was made by Alan Flanagan, who's a proponent of seed oils he in ultra-processed food. That's enough. End of discussion. You could have started and stopped there for me. I'm done. As far as my recommendations to people.

But I can't say, as I can't say about peanuts, although they can kill people with anaphylaxia, as I can't say about shellfish, which certain people are allergic to, I can't generalize that. I can't say that about gluten for people who have a gluten intolerance or allergy, I should say. I can't say that and generalize that under the whole population. So I'm cautious now not to do such dose- dependent individualistic uh is really where i fall in there but um so i i make that recommendation uh on seed oils uh but there is as alan argued i think on on your show there is folks who say when you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, you see a decrease in LDL, cardiovascular disease markers, not makers.

We don't see an all-cause mortality outcome, certainly they overfed people 700 calories a day in these muffins. And the muffin was palm oil. That's not a whole food. Maybe if you replace butter with canola oil, you might see a benefit in LDL cholesterol. It's not a whole food. You know, would you replace a steak with canola oil, you might see a benefit in LDL cholesterol. It's not a whole food. You know, would you replace a steak with canola oil? Calorie for calorie. There's no benefit in that. And there's certainly no micronutrient value or protein or anything else. And so I can't see a food in your diet or the one I'm recommending, or in just about any whole food diet, any whole food diet, not just about,

that you could replace one of those foods with canola oil and have a net benefit. I can see the standard American diet. I can see butter. But that's about it. And that's what the studies that have been referenced show, not replacing whole foods. referenced show not replacing whole foods. Yeah, I guess, and obviously Stan's recommendation on sleep and some of these ultra-processed foods clearly are the main culprit. The nice thing about my diet is there's no such thing as ultra-processed carnivore food.

It doesn't exist. It can't exist. And so if it helps people get off that stuff, that's probably a significant part of the benefit. I think there's other benefits with regard to high-quality proteins, bioavailability, micronutrients, which Stan has talked about. There's a book out recently. It's called

The Cloth Thickens by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, and I interviewed him the other day. And it's an interesting thought on what is causing cardiovascular disease. And he posits that it's more of a thromboembolic event than so much of a cholesterol deposition event. And cholesterol is still involved.

And he maintains that cholesterol is actually coming from the cholesterol in the membranes of red blood cells because of the lipoprotein A content. And he's got a pretty compelling argument. impressed me in that particular book is how much emphasis he demonstrated in the literature on the role of stress, you know, negative stress in the development of cardiovascular disease and other diseases. And so, you know, again, how do you avoid that? Well, I mean, you know, obviously, you know, certainly in the climate now, political stress, you know, we have all this sort of stuff being piled at us through social media and media in general. You know, some people have people in their lives that are just not helpful. And so, you know, if you can, you know, if some people talk about you're the product of the five closest people around you. And so if you have positive, upbeat people that, you know,

encourage you to do helpful things and, you know, do all the things we'd like to talk about, then that's going to make a big difference. So I think, you know, avoiding toxic people, stress, unnecessary, you know, some stress is good. Sorry, Mark, you got to go. No, I mean, the stress we had this morning, you

know, the training, that's good stress. There's great stress. That's hormesis right there. That's hormesis, and then there's a chronic negative stress. So I think if you can, in addition, all things Stan said, avoid some of these stressful issues. I'm not against plants at all. In fact, even during World Carnivore Month, I eat a little bit of vegetables just because it assists me away from having disaster pants.

This is me away from having disaster pants. But something that dawned on me during World Carnivore Month was that if everybody in the United States eliminated all plants from their diet, they would be much healthier. Because there's a lot going on with plants. And we were just talking about the different oils and stuff like that. But sugar is a plant as well. And these processed foods are made out of plants. They're not made out of animals. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, to be fair, there are processed food products that have egg in it, that have dairy in it. So you can make a lot of cakes and junk food with animal products, but—

But there's still going to be plants in there. Right, but they're not independent of plants. So if you were to say everybody went on a carnivore diet or, you know, as close to that as reasonably possible, you would probably see a net health benefit to the United States. I mean, when people criticize a carnivore diet, I'm saying, well, what are you comparing it to? If you're comparing it to what everybody's eating, it's far healthier. Whatever negative connotations you think may be out there, it is clearly far healthier than what 95% of the people out there are eating, which is what Stan pointed out, 70% ultra-processed food. The majority of the products are sugar, corn, soy, and whatever else.

Wheat, I think, is the top foods we consume. So as Mark points out, most of the junk food contains plant products. It's not to say you can't eat fruits and vegetables and some people put legumes and some of those things in there and have a relatively healthful diet but um yeah but if you eliminate all animal food you can still have a very junky diet you know you can i mean and we see that the oreo vegan oreo cookers you know they did you got the fat vegans why are you fat if it's you know you got to ask that question but uh anyway. I got to be careful going full Monty on just animal products. I don't want to demonize foods.

Best diets are the ones you'll follow. There's plenty of those foods that people tolerate very well. Again, I said it's – even with respect to the FODMAP menu, it's individualistic. Not everybody has these digestive issues. It's dose-dependent. A certain amount of training is hormetic. Too much could certainly be injurious. Same thing could be true of any vegetable, fruit, grain, et cetera.

And some of that may be actually beneficial in small amounts. We talk about sulforaphanes and broccoli, et cetera, et cetera. I just don't like the idea of megadosing. And I think that a lot of the studies suggest that there's more of a positive benefit to fruit than vegetables when you look at some of the epidemiology anyhow. So I'm cautious. How it's prepared matters, and it can be cumulative in nature. And so I am cautious because that is how it affects me. you know, is how it affects me.

But with respect to, and we know so very little about this, I hate even to bring it up, but the gut microbiome and its potential need for fiber, prebiotics in particular, so that it doesn't start eating away at your own mucosa layer. And so I got to be cautious and suggest that fiber in one form or another, and that's why in the vertical diet I do recommend both probiotics and prebiotics. And I put in low FODMAP prebiotics such as potato and carrots in particular and some spinach and those kinds of things and yogurt for probiotics and calcium. But I'm just cautious.

I can't go full Paul Saladino here. And God love you, Paul. I love Paul. I've been on his show. But sometimes some claims that are made that might be beneficial for, as I was mentioning earlier, a small portion of the population who has these issues, and you have to be very careful what term you use. You can't say dysbiosis or leaky gut because it's not scientific terms necessarily.

But if people do have celiac disease, IBS, Crohn's, you know, any of those types of problems, you've got to go with a, you know, kind of a low residue diet that has less adverse impact on the large colon. So I'm just, I think there's enough evidence out there, even if it's epidemiological in nature and probably is more about the healthy user bias that these populations who tend to eat sufficient vegetables, it also tends to offset any potential downside of eating too much meat. a primarily meat-based diet with sufficient vegetables as opposed to a vegetable-based diet. We see equivalent outcomes in healthy populations when you get rid of the healthy user bias. I think that was the Whole Foods shoppers who you would

presume to be generally healthy individuals, exercised more, didn't smoke, weighed less, generally healthy individuals exercised more, didn't smoke, weighed less, where they weighed in in terms of meat consumption versus vegetable consumption, they had equivalent health outcomes. And so I'm just cautious. I don't want to say vegetables are bad. I'm cautious about the whole good food, bad food conversation because I don't want people to demonize certain things that may be unnecessary and give them more options. Yeah, I agree with a lot of that too. But I just think sometimes when we give folks, I mean, you kind of see what's going on out there and how many people are way overweight. And when they're given options, it doesn't appear like they make great choices.

Yeah. And so if people are maybe just more aware of that there's a lot of different styles of diet to go on, that would be great. And they can maybe steer towards those things. Including a vegan diet. And we get the same feedback from their followers of the vegan diet. If they lose weight, I said this on John's podcast a couple of years ago, that 95% of health benefits are realized simply from weight loss itself, regardless of the diet. We saw that in the McDonald diet and the Twinkie diet. Having said that, the caveat to that is if there isn't a long-term deficiency in micronutrients,

usually people can thrive with the weight loss itself, and they'll feel great for 30, 60, maybe even six months until such time that it manifests in some sort of nutrient deficiency, and then that whole thing will blow up in their face, which is why we're cautious about including meat and eggs because it's so highly bioavailable micronutrient dense. Dr. Baker, what do we see? Like you mentioned,

there's been some people that were on the carnivore diet for many, many years. What did we see in their stomach? Like is somebody that doesn't eat vegetables or doesn't consume hardly any fiber or no fiber are they missing out on anything like is there well i mean i mean they're missing out on fiber obviously now the question is you know how essential is obviously it's not an essential nutrient or i would be dead and all these other people would be dead so you have to say is it conditionally beneficial i think there is conditional benefits i think you know

when it comes to say blood glucose mitigation you know if you're eating an apple versus apple juice you're going to get less of a glucose excursion with the with the apple compared to apple juice even if you match the same amount of glucose or carbohydrate in there um are there um i mean it has a profound society effect for many people. It's a classic bodybuilder diet, chicken and a bunch of broccoli, right? As much as you can stuff in your gut, so there's going to be benefits in there. Doesn't smell too good. Yeah, true. And I would argue, as much as you guys like to talk about poop, I would argue that if you're bloated and gassy and farting all the time, that's probably not a good situation. I don't think we're designed that way. And so I think

if your digestion is doing that, either the food's wrong or there's something wrong with your gut. But I mean, Stan pointed out, and I think rightly so, this healthy user bias or a marker of affluence. You know, people that can afford organic fruits and vegetables tend to be just more wealthy. And wealthy people have better outcomes. You can look across the world. When we look at life expectancy, the countries that are rich live longer.

They have better access to healthcare. They have better overall healthy habits, which are going to help that. As far as, you know, are we seeing, am I seeing major problems with gut? I do see some. I mean, I do see some people that chronically have diarrhea and they can't get past it and they have to add fiber. I'm fine. Go ahead and do whatever works. We see the same in vegan diets too. Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

But I mean the other thing you pointed out was, you know, IBS, approximately 15 to 20 percent of Americans are diagnosed with IBS right now. So it's a pretty – It's not insignificant. And that's diagnosed. There's probably a lot of people that have subclinical or not yet to be diagnosed diabetes. And I think it's mostly not because we're eating too much healthy natural food. It's because we just have junk in the diet and I think it's destroying

you can call it gut dysbiosis. I like to call it gut dysfunction because it kind of incorporates everything, whether it's leaky gut or dysbiotic gut, dysbiotic, the wrong microbiome. And that's another thing that I think is an interesting confounder here because a lot of times we hear about things like TMAO, trimethylamine oxide,

which is associated with choline and what's the other one? I'm blanking. I think it's creatine or choline. And when we eat a lot of meat, you know, the gut can turn that into TMA, which is toxic, which our liver converts to TMAO, and that has an association with heart disease. But what I think we're really seeing— Well, fish is higher in TMAO and certainly isn't—

Fish is higher, yeah. So when you get it tested, they tell you— So it's your saliva. Yeah, they don't tell you to eat fish, you know, before. But what I think, you know, even if we accept the fact that TMAO is associated with heart disease, and the association is there, the question is, why is it there? And really what it is, is it's a disease. And the association is there. The question is, why is it there? And really what it is, is it's a marker of a dysbiotic gut.

So if you're eating meat, if you're sticking meat into a standard American diet, you may develop some problems due to that. Don't blame the meat for what the cheese and the bacon and the fries and the shake did. All the garbage is doing that. So we're seeing it. And we also see that with people with already preexisting kidney disease. They can't clear TMAO, so they have higher levels. So they're already sick. And so you're assigning kind of reverse causality to this stuff. And I think that's a big error.

And so what I want to do, and I'll probably do this, I've got to get some labs next month. So I'll probably order TMAO. I've never tested it on myself. My prediction is my TMAO is probably going to be normal, even though I eat 25 times the average American's red meat intake. If it was so bad for us, I should be the least healthy guy on the planet. I should be dead by now. You think about the average American, you might understand, we eat 2.4 ounces of meat, red meat a day.

That's that much. That's a tiny little square. If that's what's killing everybody and you ignore the 70% ultra-processed food. It would kill me to only eat that little. Right. I mean, I couldn't survive. And that's the danger. We have Eat Lancet saying we're going to allow you to eat seven grams of meat per day.

That's like the size of your pinky fingernail. I mean, that's what they want us to go to, which is nuts. And I just posted on the Enchianti study recently. Right, yeah. It's a 2021 study. Animal protein intake inversely associated with mortality in older adults. The more meat they ate, the healthier they were. Unless they died, yep.

Yeah. the healthier they were. Unless they died, yep. Yeah. You know, Stan, in the Vertical Diet book, you have a list of micronutrients along with foods that will combat those so you don't have micronutrient deficiencies. And when a lot of people think about the vertical diet,

Paul Saladino talks about eating a bunch of organ meats, liver, et cetera, to try to combat that. But do you notice or do you see a lot of people that have micronutrient deficiencies when they do strictly carnivore? Are there any types of issues that they deal with there? And if they want to stay carnivore, what can they do or what should they add to their diet so that they don't have to deal with that? Yeah, I mean, you know, so there's a difference between like, you know, individuals and general recommendations.

So I've always said if you like organ meats, eat them. If you notice a net benefit and you like them, eat them. The study that Harvard did, and I specifically asked, Belinda Lennertz, a researcher, asked this question and said, compare people eating organ meats to people not eating organ meats and see what the outcomes were. And there was no, literally there was no difference. And so there was no increased rate of symptoms of nutrient deficiencies.

There was no increased rates of failing to get better. And that's what I've seen, and I've got data on 12,000 people doing the diet. I see the same thing. Now, having said that, I get people that tell me I feel better when I eat, you know, whatever, X amount of liver twice a week. And I can't discount that. I say, okay, well, great. If it works for you, it works for you.

There's certain things like folate. You say, okay, well, great. If it works for you, it works for you. There's certain things like folate. That's a very common. I've seen that not super frequently, but one of the more common things I see relatively low folate on a lab test. Now, the question is, does it mean anything? Is it significant? I don't know the answer to that. I mean, you could say if you're having a baby, the baby might have a neural tube defect. Folate deficiency usually ends up in things like megaloblastic anemia. You have these really big red blood cells that, you know, they're, you know, kind of

deficient and there's some other, you get mouth sores. I don't really see the clinical manifestation. So I'm kind of, you know, when I look at normal ranges for labs, I have to say, well, what is the context of this? And Is this really significant here? I don't know the answer yet, so that's the thing. But I mean, if you're worried about vitamin C deficiency, they sell vitamin C tablets on the damn store. You can use that.

There's no reason you can't. I don't care if people supplement something. We had a discussion earlier today about are supplements helpful? If somebody needs to do that, that can be helpful to them. But I don't think most people need that.

I haven't found most people to do that. That Harvard study had someone in the carnivore diet for 28 years, which I was really impressed. I said, I didn't know I had somebody that was 28 years. So we've got some long-term data on this stuff. What do you guys think of the liver king? Have you seen the liver king?

Yeah, I've seen his stuff. What do you guys think of the liver king? Have you seen the liver king? Yeah, I've seen his stuff. I've got to be very careful and make sure that folks know that eating raw meat can cause a lot of problems. Paul Saldino fell into that problem. He ended up getting sick. What happened?

He just ate raw meat. It's a raw brain. Be careful with that. I've said the same thing about egg whites, the bacteria in egg whites. Those should be pasteurized or cooked. Yeah, I'll second that on the raw meat stuff. I mean, and I just had a nice discussion with Bill Schindler, who's a paleoanthropologist, and talking about how traditionally we've cooked meat. And really—

You shouldn't have eaten that raw meat the other day. Well, I mean, honestly, probably most of the time you're going to be completely fine. cooked meat. You shouldn't have eaten that raw meat the other day. Well, I mean, honestly, probably most of the time you're going to be completely fine, but there's that instance. You get very, very sick. Yeah, there's a person named Amber O'Hearn who I respect tremendously who's been doing carnivore diet for 11 years. She was doing raw meat and got very sick, and it took her a year to recover from that, and she's still feeling manifestations of it.

So I think all these people out there talking about raw meat, raw meat, just be cautious. I mean, because you could really, I mean, the potential for negative, I don't know that

it outweighs the positive. I don't really buy that raw meat is so much better for you than cooked meat. I just don't buy that. Sometimes people will say, like raw meat aside,

but sometimes people will say like if you eat liver, it helps you heal the liver. If you eat heart, it helps heal the heart. I think that's nonsense. There's no, right? Yeah, it's all broken down in your stomach. I mean, it might be someone's belief, but there's no science to any of that. No, that's complete nonsense.

Right. That's the idea of like eating collagen is going to go straight to your knee. It's broken down into individual amino acids and then reassembled in the body as needed. So I just, that's the one big thing people to exercise caution it makes for great instagram i gotta tell you i i love this industry it's it's been entertaining and it's getting even better with tiktok it makes for for great uh i want to transition real quickly because i talk a lot about sodium in the vertical diet. Yeah, and he just had like four packets of element, like four grams of salt. And that becomes an important component of a whole food diet, a low-carb diet.

One of the things that people do experience is the keto flu or what have you. And it's just the fact that when you lose glycogen from the muscle, you're also losing three parts water, which is about 70 plus percent, probably more sodium. So people can get some deficiency in salt in particular, other minerals as well. And so we add salt back in. That's an important part of compensating for the loss of that. Again, 70 percent of the population is eating highly processed, ultra processed food. That stuff's very rich in salt. So when I made my recommendations, when I talked about sodium some years ago, the medical community was all up in arms,

obviously conflating my recommendation with those for hypertensive, sedentary, overweight people, which I specifically said, this is a recommendation for active people who aren't eating fast food or highly processed foods. And if you're hypertensive, which somewhere around 20% to 30% of the population is salt-sensitive or hypertensive, a lot of that is probably due to their current health condition. You should not add salt to your diet. You should probably stay on a lower sodium diet.

There's more important things you can do to reduce hypertension, such as resolving sleep apnea, losing weight, getting sufficient micronutrients such as potassium and magnesium, etc. And that bears out in the studies. But you do want to add salt back in to the diet. And there's a number of studies that suggest that That bears out in the studies. But you do want to add salt back in to the diet. And there's a number of studies that suggest that kind of the average worldwide is somewhere between 3 and 6 grams or 3.5 and 5 grams. Kind of if you look at all the populations throughout the world, that's where they settle in at. And so I think it's important that you use that kind of as a baseline because there's – what the studies continue to say, and I printed out a whole bunch of them here, that the current evidence suggests that if you're not hypertensive, that eating that sodium does not have an adverse effect on cardiovascular disease.

One of the largest studies, of course, was the PEER study, which I referenced years ago, but they did another recent update. years ago, but they did another recent update. And Salim Youssef said he's the president of the World Heart Federation. He's a cardiologist out of Canada and one of the lead researchers on the peer study, which is one of the largest. Current evidence indicates that most people around the world consume a moderate range of dietary sodium, three to five grams a day, and that this level of intake is associated with the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality. Several health organizations, and this is important here, several health organizations

recommend low sodium intake for the entire population, a level that has not been achieved by any modern population in the world. We talk about compliance. We talk about recommending things to people that they can do consistently. These short-term studies, like the DASH diet and some others are usually 30-day studies. And they're also confounded by the fact that there are studies on hypertensives, and they also dramatically increase potassium and magnesium in the diet to eat more fruits and vegetables. So what's the effect for the weight loss?

That one probably doesn't need much commenting on, but this is another one that says higher intakes of potassium and magnesium, but not lower sodium, reduce cardiovascular risk in the Framingham offspring study. Lower sodium intake was not associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Potassium intake led to a 34% lower risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as magnesium and calcium. So that is one of the reasons that I build the foundation of the vertical diet to be high in potassium, a potato, some fruit, some yogurt. There's 100 milligrams of potassium or of potassium in every ounce of meat that you eat. You can easily cobble together about 4,700 milligrams of potassium a day.

Dr. Baker's probably getting that just from the meat that he eats. There's some hate to appeal to authority, but there are some good authorities on this that, to reference, Lane Norton is one of them. He said, sodium is not a problem. It's a critical nutrient for every cell in the body. It's responsible for creating action potentials in your nervous system. Its association with heart disease is confounded by the healthy user bias, again, as we discussed, and consumption of processed food and increased sodium consumption.

Your kidneys will increase sodium excretion and vice versa. The blood volumes, as you mentioned, very tightly regulated. That's what your kidneys are for. When you deplete sodium, your body increases aldosterone and retains water. Blood levels of sodium do not change in studies. Lane has said specifically the same thing I said, which I didn't realize until I read this article of Lane, that he has some clients consuming over 10,000 milligrams of sodium a day and their health markers are normal. I said the same thing in my video some three years ago when I just got lambasted and attacked, of course, by the medical community.

I do have clients consuming that much. I have clients who are salty sweaters. Lane Johnson's one of them. He was sweating out five grams of sodium an hour. And so obviously we had to put in an intervention. The Philadelphia Eagles, they're tested by Dr. Sandra Goddick from the Heat Institute. She's a PhD in thermoregulation and hydration, and she'll do salt testing by using a patch. So she has these specific measurements, and then she gives them a hydration protocol that they utilize. It's a high-salt drink with two sugars. They use dextrose and maltodextrin. I've been recommending fructose and dextrose in a two-to-one ratio of dextrose to fructose because it's easier on the stomach to digest. But when you combine those,

you have better uptake. Sean Wells, who's a nutritional biochemist and he's a fellow of the ISSN, he says he thinks it's the most beneficial ergogenic aid for athletes utilizing salt. Helps with brain fog, as I've mentioned, cramps, improves performance, stamina, endurance, recovery. It's the most abundant electrolyte lost during exercise when you're sweating. And again, mentions the epidemiology confounded by ultra-processed food consumption and talks about the benefits of sodium bicarbonate as well as a buffer for hydrogen ion activity. Eric Trexler from Mass Research Review. Sodium heart disease risk is through sodium's increase in blood pressure, which would only apply to hypertensives who weren't getting sufficient potassium. It's only relevant for salt-sensitive individuals, and even then it's dose-dependent

and salt-concentration-dependent. Very important to remember. If you're going to consume a can of Pringles and not drink any water, you're going to have a problem. The salt concentration is important. If you drink sufficient fluid with your sodium intake, you're not going to have the same adverse effects. Mentioning again, 25% to 30% of the population is salt sensitive. 5% to 15% is reverse salt sensitive. Lane Norton said this as well, which I didn't read earlier. Those people, when they get low sodium sodium have an increase in blood pressure the reason that i talked about it not only in terms of performance for athletes in the amount that they sweat out but i talked about the

fact that as a personal trainer somebody who's trained thousands of clients over the years worked in gyms own gyms still train clients when you get a middle-aged woman or elderly woman that comes in and uses the leg press and then stands up and has to hold on because she's dizzy, you realize that that's because of salt depletion. And the fix to that problem is getting sufficient salt. I just had a guy yesterday DM me two days ago. He said, Stan, I'm throwing up after workouts. Why is that? And I said, you need some, like a Gatorade during your training, something, an assault tablet. The very next day, he's like, oh my God, I had an amazing day, set a PR.

I've been getting that kind of feedback. We've talked about it before. Probably the second most frequent piece of feedback I get after probably the CPAP for sleep apnea is from people who incorporate salt into their diet and see a substantial improvement in their performance in the gym. Alan Argon's last on this list. Large-scale scientific reviews have determined there's no reason for people with normal blood pressure to restrict sodium intake. It's been known for 20 years that people with high blood pressure who don't want to lower their salt intake can simply consume more potassium-containing foods. Dutch researchers determined that a low potassium intake has the same impact on your blood pressure as high salt consumption does. The average guy consumes about 3,100

milligrams of potassium a day, 1,600 milligrams less than recommended. These are all, I think, highly regarded individuals commenting about the very same thing I've been saying, we've been saying for many years now that, of course, I've taken lots of incoming assaults because of how it might adversely affect a sodium-sensitive, hypertensive, elderly, obese individual. Yeah, I want to add, you know, just back, I interviewed Bill Schindler, and again, he goes out and lives with all these indigenous tribes around the world, and every single one of those tribes seeks out salt to add to their diet. And the point Stan makes about the correlation between sodium consumption and also processed

food is the biggest confounder. I mean, you know, if you look at where is most of the salt coming from, it's coming from junk food. So to blame, again, it's the same, you know, misconception. We're blaming the junk food or blaming the salt for what the junk food is doing. And, you know, I think, you know, I find from a performance standpoint, in fact, I failed misconception. We're blaming the salt for what the junk food is doing. I think I find from a performance standpoint, in fact, I failed to do that before I worked out

this morning. Usually I'll take some salt. Beforehand. We were downing it after. Still got them laying around here. I should have done it before. I would have probably got an extra rep or two. That was it. You want a rematch, don't you? We're coming back here for your next birthday. With some salt. As we point out, I've been on a low-carb diet

for now eight or nine years. I was on low-carb diets before I started the carnivore diet. I learned early on that restoring my hydration prior to training was important. You talked about the compressibility of the muscles. When you're more hydrated and your muscles are more hydrated, you're stronger. You perform better. I love that feeling.

You're swolled up. It's almost like you're wearing a bench shirt. Yeah. I've got one more topic that I want to hit on before we close out. I know I tend to be a little long-winded. Thank you for coming to the Stan Efferding podcast today. But something that's probably one of the more important things, because we just talked previously about the deaths in the bodybuilding industry

and et cetera, powerlifting, strongmen. We've seen them. I've recommended that people get blood tests. about the deaths in the bodybuilding industry and et cetera, power lifting, strong men. We've seen them. I've recommended that people get blood tests. I've recommended this for many, many years now. And I've always done this online. And I was able to just order whatever tests I wanted. They would email me a requisition form.

I'd run down to LabCorp, get my blood draw. Three to five days later, I get a blood test. I done this over a hundred times in the last 12, 14 years. Almost on a monthly basis while I was competing just to kind of see how horribly I was destroying my body. But this new group came along and you've talked about them here recently, Merrick Health.

Merrick Health, M-A-R-R-E-K health.com. And I'm skeptical, you know, a lot of people do this kind of thing. So i looked up their website and i started comparing my blood test prices strictly on a price basis to theirs and these guys brought blood tests out for half the cost of what i was paying one of the uh i think that the uh the difficult challenges for a lot of people's blood tests can be expensive it's kind of a barrier to entry so So I compiled on their website. I asked because

Smokey brought it to my attention. I say, can you guys create a blood test that's similar to the one I give to my athletes and some clients? But it's like 400 bucks, but it includes a consultation. It's a lot of stuff. And I thought, well, that's going to prevent some people from getting a blood test that should get it. The people who need it the most, the ones who are ignoring high blood pressure and potentially thick blood and some other issues. And so I compiled one here that has like 90% of what I think that anybody would ever need or more. That's only 100 bucks. The prices on this is ridiculous. I don't know if you've looked at them, but some of them are ridiculous.

The prices on this is ridiculous. I don't know if you've looked at them, but some of them are ridiculous. I mean, a urinalysis, $4.71. A CBC, complete blood count, which includes your RBC, hemoglobin, hematocrit, your platelets and all that stuff, $4.50. HA1C, $7.50. A full iron panel, $6.89. A lipid panel, $4.75. It's crazy.

And that's with LDL-HDL ratios, cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL, all that's in there. TSH, $4.35. Insulin, $9.00. Ferritin, $3.00. Stradiol, $7.00. Anyhow, this entire list and the whole metabolic panel four dollars and 42 cents and that's your ast ale tree creatinine bun you know sodium glucose potassium the list going on obviously testosterone free testosterone did i mention prostate specific antigen is on there um a lot of stuff on here i put it in uh estrogen also as well. $102. I call it a budget panel. I just

ask people if they want a copy of this just to DM me. And I just copy and paste it. And is that something people go to their site, order it, and then they go where? Go to merichealth.com, yeah. And where do you get your blood drawn at? And then they email you a requisition form. You take it right down to LabCorp. Oh, wow. Okay. And LabCorp draws your blood. And then three to five days later, you've got all the results. And they give you, yeah, I'd print all this out.

It's just an extraordinary list. Yeah, I can send it to people that might need that. Merrick, M-A-R-E-K. Health.com. And that's a budget panel. I mean, there's no way these guys make a single penny on that panel. But if you need consultation and you want the more comprehensive panels, you and I both, I think, have a panel on there that's much more comprehensive for those people who can afford it.

But I want to lower the barriers to entry. I said the same thing about a CPAP. As important as that is, cost becomes a barrier to entry for most people, particularly people who need it the most. It's less expensive now, and people can do at home, and there's a disposable one yeah people can get like a disposable uh sleep test and you can mention this stem because the comment i see a lot because we talk about merit quite a bit there are some people that of course that continue to say well you know you only need to get your blood work done if you take steroids and that's not the case no not at all and now i will say that there are some tests that might incline people to be concerned about things that they probably shouldn't be concerned about because they have no symptoms associated with those things. And interpreting them becomes, you know, not everybody interprets them the same.

You know, some HRT doctors are podiatrists and not endocrinologists, and some are better than others. And I've been experiencing this since I was 20 years old. I got diagnosed with hypogonadal when I was 20 years old. I had varicose seal, which is a vein that doesn't drain from the testicles. And so it can cause a warming of the testicles. So you get low T. Diagnosed at 20 years old. And it's kind of what kicked off this kind of recurring blood test venture throughout my life. And my general practitioner would tell me something completely different than an endocrinologist. I would take my labs running down to the endocrinologist like, he told me this. And he's like, no, you don't have to worry about that. And I was like, whew.

So, yes, there are experts, endocrinologists who are best to consult on this. But at least it tells you some really important things. Like, how would you know your lipids? You know, how would you know if your liver or kidney were affected without the creatinine and the AST-ALT markers? There's a lot of things on here. How would you know about, we talk all this stuff about inflammation and people taking anti-inflammatories. I don't mean to dive off on a whole new topic. But, you know, if you don't have elevated C-reactive protein, downing anti-inflammatories all the time is probably counterproductive to your hypertrophy goals.

We see this with metformin. We see this with NSAIDs. We even see this with, you know, mega-adosing anti-inflammatories like turmeric and other things. There's a downside to that. You want acute inflammation to address whatever hormetic effect that you're attempting to impose upon your body so that you can adapt and respond to that. So I just think it's important that people understand that they can use some preventative measures such as blood pressure control, blood thickness,

kidney, liver information, lipid information to implement some sort of protocol that can fix these numbers. That's why we step on the scale in the morning. Hey, I'm fat. I weigh this. I need to weigh this. So let's use this.

Same thing with a continuous glucose monitor for some people. There's no evidence I need to weigh this. So let's use this. Same thing with a continuous glucose monitor for some people. There's no evidence that it really improves outcomes, but it might give you an inclination that, hey, I've got a problem that you could, when I say weight loss outcomes is what I mean. But for some people who aren't aware that certain foods are, they might not be aware that their postprandial glycemia is like 180 or 200. They might not know. And that could be a really good thing

to know in terms of how that could be affecting other health issues. You know, your energy levels, et cetera. It's fun, too. Like, it's kind of fun

when you get your blood work back and you see what's going on and you go, oh, no, like a couple of these things aren't very good. But then you get

information. It's interesting, isn't it? Well, you get information on how you can help it. And then you're like, okay. You implement some sort of plan to rectify it. Yeah, don't be a lazy bum. And then 90 days later, you test again to see if you got results. Yeah.

Yeah, it is fun. And it's more fun when it's only $100. And also understand, guys, because a lot of people think that when you get your blood work done, for example, Merrick, they interpret it for you, right? They think that you're just going to get a bunch of HRT stuff. Yeah, they do that, but they also give you either nutritional protocols or supplement protocols to deal with whatever type of issues are going on. That's the first way to actually deal with it.

Yeah, lifestyle interventions. Can you get the labs independent of the consultation part? Yes. That's what this one is. This is a budget lab, no consultation. Okay. It's very affordable. Yeah.

And you can use promo code PowerProject10 for 10% off those labs. There you go. Well, bam. You have to tell us about Bones Jones before we drop off of here. You've been working with him. You've been helping him with his workouts and stuff. And what kind of improvements is he seeing? What's it like to work with this guy oh my god john's probably one of the most talented athletes i've ever come across he's incredibly gifted uh you know i've

worked with a lot of great athletes but this is one of those guys that uh some of the things that he does how quickly he responds to any intervention that we implement. He needed to add weight, obviously. So he went calorie surplus, adequate protein, started doing some hypertrophy work. It was far enough out from the fight that we could do that. But we do move heavy weights fast. Want to make sure we increase his speed as well. We brought an overspeed treadmill in to try and increase his speed and do tempo runs for conditioning. So he lifts weights. He trains extremely hard.

I'm always in there training with him. He's very competitive, so he's trying to beat me all the time. There's some stuff he beats me at, you know, and I'm a powerlifter. But John's, his grip and his pulling from all the years of wrestling in Greco-Roman, incredible. Not just his strength, but also his muscular endurance, how long we can do weighted carries and stuff with. Mostly focused on core stuff and posterior chain. He was already very strong. He worked down there with Z uh zia strength with jordan

doing kind of a west side style program and he was already dead lifting damn near 600 pounds so he's he's very strong that way but his posterior chain needed a little more strength and we you know we just tested that by putting him on a glute ham raise and he just wasn't able to knock out enough to our satisfaction and so and that's another thing that's helpful with that over speed treadmill is that if you keep the hips forward you you get a lot of good kick for for glutes and and hamstrings there's john here he's on the over speed treadmill you've been able to help him a lot with uh just managing pain and things like that as well right yeah he's had kind of some, he's moving good. He's doing good there. He got as fast as 20 miles an hour on some of these runs.

That's Matt Winniver from Matt Wittimer from beat personal training out of Cincinnati. He, he was a strength and conditioning coach for Pittsburgh and then for the Cincinnati Bengals under Buddy Morris. Oh yeah. And Buddy Morris is kind of in the NFL industry is a legend. Buddy Morris is currently the strength and conditioning coach for Arizona.

John's younger brother, Chandler, works for Arizona. Something to be said about John and his genetic talent. His younger brother is an NFL Super Bowl champion, 6'5", 260 plus, runs like the wind. His older brother is an NFL Super Bowl champion. Jesus Christ, that pedigree. Art, yeah. He's played for Baltimore. He was a D lineman, over 300 pounds.

And so, yeah, I think that John can well afford at 6'4", the 7' wingspan and his frame to be in the heavyweight class. We bulked him up, I think, as high at one point as the high 250s, maybe even hit one morning at 260. You know, kind of our condition was as long as we didn't see performance drop off. And by that, I mean vert, broad jump, speed, measured those things. You can get as heavy as you want as long as those things continue to improve or at least don't decline. But he's loved the program. He's very involved in every aspect of it. He's got a great support team down there, obviously, working with some of the trainers from Jackson Wink.

And his former strength coach or the one that he's used all these years. We just came in and kind of added a nutrition protocol and some speed training and just keep... What I like most is that John, over the last few fights, hasn't trained year-round. He's come in before the fights and he's acknowledged in many the fights and he's acknowledged,

you know, in many interviews later and later each time. And this time, like he's put in a good nine months with us and he's, he's, he's ready. And so the anticipation is, is that,

that the winner of Nogano gain will fight John. The deal hasn't been signed, but that's at least what the murmurs are on the inside with the UFC, is that he'll take on that champion, which would probably be four to five months following the fight, depending on who wins. Gon would probably want a quick turnaround, and then Gano would probably want a longer turnaround. It's all speculation. How'd this all come to be?

How do you train this guy? Well, I have this friend, Mark Bell, who bumped into John, I think, at the airport. I literally walked like I sat next to him on a bus. It was really weird. And just started talking to him. And John, he's the most affable guy. He's very easy to talk to, very friendly. And you just blurted out, who's doing your nutrition?

Yep. And then I think a subsequent conversation, you asked him again. So he reached out and I said, i'll be on a flight tomorrow and flew down there and and uh you know we trained as well and i was i was kind of a drill sergeant you know told john he couldn't sit down between sets i said set my timer on you know two minutes after every set i'm like on you're up you're up let's go quit standing around so he So he kind of liked that. And John likes to be around people who motivate him and make him compete. Very competitive.

But he's now down training in about every other, every third week he goes down to Arizona and works with Henry Cejudo, which is... A gold medalist and former UFC champion. Oh yeah, he's amazing. And he's been down there. One of the big things that John's obviously great at is wrestling, probably one of his biggest talents.

And he was down there wrestling with, I think, Arizona's NCAA national champion wrestler and holding his own against a guy 10 years younger who has been wrestling at the highest national level. And John's, his performance has been phenomenal. He's, it's been real rewarding to see someone respond so quickly to the interventions that we've employed. And he's staying healthy. That was one of the big things, one of the biggest things we did when we get down there was fatigue management that was the first thing when all the coaches met we got to stack fatigue

high fatigue days, low fatigue days which is hard with John because he wants to go hard every single, even if it's a jujitsu day he wants to go live if it's just doing wrestling skills he wants to go live he's hard to constrain but he's responded very well hard to constrain uh so uh but he's uh you know he's

responded very well it's been exciting adventure we're looking forward to signing the fight and then you know doing the last bit of work to get him ready for it i know you've been a lot of around a lot of freak athletes like you've worked with like pro strong minutes etc but when you work with john uh what do you see differently as far as that work capacity? Because people look at John and they just point to certain things, but there's different things about those types of athletes. And I think everybody already knows his endurance is ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. He'll train.

I mean, within two minutes of coming to the gym, he'll be pouring down sweat. And an hour and 20 minutes later, he'll still be going just as hard. And that was, that's one of the hardest things with John is, is, is getting him to stop. Uh, you know, I mentioned he'll just want to go hard all the time. And even in boxing, he'll get in the ring and he'll start boxing. He's got a professional boxer that he trained with, uh, getting ready for some of his other fights. And, uh, you know And six rounds will turn into eight rounds, will turn into 10. He just keeps going.

And you're looking at the clock, and I'm over there fidgeting because I'm concerned about fatigue, obviously, but he's just amazing how much effort he can put in and then how well he recovers. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for being on the show today. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. Sure thing. Thank you guys so much for being on the show today. Andrew, take us on out

of here, buddy. Sure thing. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Please like and drop us a comment and subscribe if you guys have not

subscribed already. Turn on all those damn notifications and please follow the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on TikTok and Twitter.

My Instagram and Twitter is at I am Andrew Z. What's up, dude? Before you go, Stan, how'd you like the Piedmontese? That's why I liked it because you were talking a lot about it. And this isn't an advertisement for. What's up, dude? Before you go, Stan, how'd you like the Piedmontese? That's why I liked it, because you were talking a lot about it. And this isn't an

advertisement for Piedmontese, right? And they don't give me free food. Although they did send some steaks down to John, and he loved them, too. But, oh my God, I was telling you today, I need to know exactly which cuts those were, and how you cooked them. And you got an air fryer, and I just bought an air fryer at home. But my wife's been

cooking chicken in it. I haven't tried any steaks in it, but geez, these were, I mean, like you could have cut them with a spoon. We didn't have to cut them. We just picked them up and you bit them and they flaked off like it was pulled pork or something, but it tasted unbelievable. I can, I thought for sure if, if John or if Sean had gotten ahold of that cutting board before the rest of us got in there, it would have disappeared, but it was ridiculous. And one of the things I like, because I had tried their meat previously, one of the things I like is that even their ribeyes are lower in fat than what a traditional ribeye would be. And even their lean meats, like a top sirloin, is more tender than what you would

presume to think a lean meat would be. And so they're all delicious and you get the best of both worlds out of them, whether you go with a fattier cut in terms of low fat. And there wasn't one millimeter of actual gristle fat. If that's your preference, sorry, but I personally don't like, I cut all that off. And Sean, you had mentioned something at lunch about what that means in terms of whether the fat's around the edge or whether it's veined throughout the meat itself. With that company, I've never bitten into Piedmontese meat out of all the times I've been eating it and had to spit stuff out of my mouth. Is that an actual person, Piedmontese? What's the name?

It's a brand of the cattle. It's a breed of cattle. They originate out of my mouth. Is that an actual person, Pete Monteser? What's the name? It's a breed of cattle. They originated out of Italy, but it's interesting with that cattle, because I talked to the guys a while ago about their breed, and they don't lay down as much connective tissue. While they're big and muscular, they're not actually very strong animals,

which is kind of an interesting thing. They're bred that way and they have these just huge muscular, which tends to be very lean, but it's also low in connective tissue, and so you don't get that really hard, difficult. So it's a very soft chew, so it's very, very pleasing. And just to touch on what you talked about, intramuscular fat versus subcutaneous fat. So if you have a marbled steak, you know,

if you're going for a different breed or something like that, that fat tends to be higher in monounsaturated fat relative to that peripheral or that outer, like the fat on the edge. That tends to be higher in saturated fat if that's a concern for you. So there is – and also steers or male cattle also tend to have more marble fat versus a female or a heifer. So that's just kind of weird cow science. Wow. It was amazing nonetheless. Yeah, and all the cuts are that good though.

It's hard to really say, but for me personally, I like the flat irons. They say it's super high on the tender scale or whatever it may be called. It's ridiculous. Like you said, you can cut into it with a spoon, and that one has no fat in it, and it's still freaking delicious. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Like you said, you can cut into it with a spoon, and that one has no fat in it, and it's still freaking delicious. It's incredible. And if you guys want to have some of that Piedmontese beef, head over to piedmontese.com. It's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com.

And at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $150 or more, you get free two-day shipping. And, Seema, where can people find you? I'm at Seema Inning on Instagram and YouTube. I'm at Seema Inning on TikTok and Twitter. Sean, all your stuff. And then, Stan, all your stuff. Okay, my stuff.

So it is Sean, S-H-A-W-N, Baker, 1967, Instagram. I am Sbakermd on Twitter. I'm just plain old Sean Baker on YouTube. And I'm sad to say I'm on TikTok also. Yeah, that's good. I haven't done that yet. What's your website, Doc? Oh, my website for the company is called revero.com, R-E-V-E-R-O.com, and I'm really excited about

that. We are bringing health and reversing disease. We're about to add physicians to the community. We're about to go full-scale medical this year. So it's going to be an exciting time for us. Is your podcast also on there? You do interviews on there. You do live stuff on there.

You're on there all the time. Yeah, every day at 9 a.m. Pacific time, I do a live, either an interview with somebody or we just chat it within the community and I answer questions. Stan, where are you at? I'm at Stan Efforting. I've got a stanefforting.com website. My Vertical Diet 3.0 ebook is on there that covers everything we talked about today in

great detail. My Instagram is at Stan Efforting. My YouTube, Stan Efforting. I've got a lot of rants on there that are fun to listen to. And that's everything. I've got a meal prep company. We deliver nationwide to listen to. And that's everything. I've got a meal prep company. We deliver nationwide to the, to your door, the monster mash and many other over 50 meals to choose from is the

vertical diet.com or you can click on my link from Stan efforting.com to get there. I love those meals. When I went over to your house one time, when I was in Vegas, I stopped by your house and you gave me a big old giant bowl of like hot monster mash. Monster mash. And it was rice and beef and bone broth.

And it also had the sweet potatoes in it. Yeah. And I was like, what is this? You're like, it's my meal prep company. Yeah. I'm like, you're lying to me. Like, there's no way that it's a meal prep company. That one's addictive.

It was unbelievable. Andrew, why don't you throw in the code for that as well? Yeah. So verticaldiet.com. And links to everything down in the description below and the podcast show notes. But yeah, load up at least like two weeks worth of meals. Make it worth it. And at checkout, IntraPromoCode Power Project, you get free shipping.

And if you order 16 meals, you get two extra free meals. And on top of that, Stan's going to send you one of his coolers for free. Again, links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Yeah, thank you guys again for being on and congratulations on all the success that you guys are always forging forward and

Stan, with what you've done, I can't go to a powerlifting meet without seeing people with Monster Mash and the carnivore and the carnivore. Yeah, and the carnivore challenge has been amazing. And it's just I appreciate both you guys and I love being around you guys. Strength is never a weakness.

Weakness is never strength. I'm Matt Marks, Millie Bell. Catch you guys later. Thank you.