Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 184 - Frank Tufano

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

Frank Tufano was eating a carnivorous diet before it was termed the Carnivore Diet. He offers nutrition coaching and uses his YouTube channel as a platform to educate his viewers on health providing articles and studies to support his claims. He was on the hunt to be on the healthiest diet and came to find that the Carnivore Diet, which includes eating raw organ meat, is the healthiest diet. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenattyprofessor/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

whenever you are ready i'm ready ready freddy let's do this ready with the spaghetti so what's happening i gotta i gotta work out already in today i saw that that you uh you popped in here pretty early today yeah i came in here and uh did a little bit of cardio session and hit up some deadlifts and some bed of rose and some leg curls just moving around you know trying to feel good gonna work out again i might i might work out just moving around, you know, trying to feel good. Can I work out again? I might, I might work out again. Cause like, um, you know, my workouts are a little shorter. So actually they're a lot shorter.

Like there might only be like 20, 30 minutes long. So, uh, when they're shorter, it's kind of easier just to get them in. Cause you're not thinking about your workout being so hard. And I think that's a huge problem that a lot of people make when they're thinking about a diet, thinking about exercise is they're thinking about a diet, thinking about exercise is they're thinking about, man, this is going to be,

you know, I have to go keto or have to do carnivore. I have to be vegan or they, they think that they have to do something so crazy. And it's like, well, where are you starting from? Yeah.

Let's, let's figure that out. If you're starting from the couch, then a walk, a simple walk outside would be fantastic progress. And to do that for a few days in a row, that would be a really excellent place to start. It doesn't always have to be so hard, right? I'll just change the simple things first. I know a lot of people that when they first start lifting, they start with like their programs have

like two and a half workouts or two and a half hour long workouts. I'm just like, God dang, like, no, you're not going to stick to that. They work out like six or seven days a week. Just start slow. Well, we know a lot of people too that, that exercise frequently and that don't have nearly the body that they want or the strength that they want. And these same people will, you know, on a Friday, Saturday night, they might go and let loose.

And then they're like, all right, that's it back on Monday. Like when Monday comes around cardio in the morning fasted, and then I'm going to hit the gym at night. And it's like, dude, you're really like, you're setting up a really rough schedule for yourself. That's okay. That you enjoyed yourself. That's fine. Everyone should, everyone's got the right to good for you.

Uh, and just, you know, don't let just like jake cutler said don't be fancy be consistent figure out a way to be consistent with it if you if you're able to do fasting that's great if you're able to throw in some cardio that's cool if you're able to mix in some lifting some cardio and some fasting that's great but it doesn't have to start out that way you don't have to start out with a big bang right away you can kind of chip away at things you can work your way into things. That's kind of why I'm excited to talk to today's guests. Cause it's like, how do you end up down this rabbit hole like this?

You know, how do you, we got another carnivore guy on the podcast today. And not only is he carnivore, but he's like eating raw meat, right? He's a, he's a deep savage. Yeah. He's eating raw meat, raw liver. Dude, you ever done that before? No. What about sushi? Oh yeah. I've done savage. Yeah. He's eating raw meat, raw liver. Dude, you ever done that before? No. What about sushi?

Oh, yeah. I've done sushi. Yeah. I guess it's odd that that's accepted, right? You ever have carpaccio, like sliced beef? Just pretty much, I think the same thing as raw. I think when I went to a restaurant with you guys. Yeah.

Yeah. They had carpaccio. That was the first time I had that. But yo, like in my household, we cook our meat, bro. Like we all cook our meat. So yeah, this is definitely different. It's a culture shock. Yeah, the only thing I've ever had is just poke.

Yeah, I've had poke too. But now that I think about it, it is kind of odd that like, you know, I'm cool with eating like fish, right? Raw fish. But the idea of eating absolute raw meat, like raw, raw is kind of odd, right? Yeah. I just kind of put those two together. I'm like,

huh? I never thought of that. It's weird too. Cause like a raw steak doesn't sound that bad, but raw ground beef sounds horrifying. Sounds disgusting. Completely horrifying. Or raw chicken.

Can you even eat raw chicken? I don't think he, I don't think he eats raw chicken. I think he does like straight raw red meat. I mean, can you just like, you know, grab a bird and try to just eat it or like, you know, go bite a cow? Straight up eat it. Freaking tackle him. True carnivore.

Have you had like raw liver and stuff like that? Like just straight up? Have you done that? I don't think I have. Yeah. There's a, there's a video of him. Like he has this like large raw liver.

You're just chewing and he eats the whole thing. I'm just like, God, how does that taste? I would like to eat something's heart just to say that I did. That would be pretty savage. Yeah. Cause that's like a Mike Tyson saying,

I want to eat his heart. I want to eat his children. I remember when he said that. He did eat somebody's ear. Oh yeah. But yeah, that's, uh, it's interesting. Well, I guess we'll get to the bottom of it. We'll try to figure out why the hell this guy's doing all this stuff.

Yeah. It looks like he's good to go. So you guys want to hit him up? Yeah, let's do it. You know, it'd be easier just to be born Nigerian. It would be. That's definitely true. Then you just have perfect skin.

You're handsome and tall and strong and all that stuff, right? You get to laugh at everybody else. Hey, there he is. How's it going, Frank? What's going on? How are you, gentlemen? Look at this guy. He's got perfect teeth and perfect skin.

Is this from eating raw meat? What do we got going on here? His teeth are so white. Little bit of column A, little bit of column B. I'll leave it at that. What's going on with this diet? It looks pretty crazy to see you eating raw liver and stuff. How did you even get into something like this? I'd imagine you weren't doing this when you were five years old, right? No, it's actually a pretty interesting story. I used to be really big into bodybuilding, fitness, that whole thing.

And I did it from when I was about 13 to maybe 20. And at some point I said, this isn't for me. I never really wanted to take it to a professional level. Never had a large bone structure. I was always like 5'8", like 150, 160 pounds, even when I was muscular. I figured it just wasn't for me. And after taking a drug called Accutane, which I didn't actually know at the time, that kind of ruined my digestive system. You know, I was eating three, four, five pounds of sweet potatoes a day and had no energy. So I was like, okay, this isn't working for me. How can I figure

out what I should be doing? I literally started Googling what the healthiest diet is, came across a few different YouTube channels and ended up discovering a book on indigenous civilizations. It was called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. And this dentist went around early 1900s and he noticed one thing that was consistent across every single diet of these native people. That was the presence of certain animal foods, and particularly ones that were along the lines of organ meats. And even though we're talking about organ meats and things that people don't deem as approachable. Other nutrient-dense foods that are more approachable, like some of these groups of people had shellfish, crab, mollusks, clams. They had dairy products. They had eggs. It's not just, you know, biting a piece of raw liver out

of a live animal. And I said, okay, this makes sense. And upon further inspecting these animal products, they had an inherent fat-soluble vitamin content. And I can get into the actual bioavailability of that stuff in a bit. But the other thing I was thinking was, okay, I don't have energy eating carbohydrates. And if animal foods are the most nutritious foods, according to what I've read here, then wouldn't it make sense to eat animal fat as my source of energy? what I've read here, then wouldn't it make sense to eat animal fat as my source of energy? And putting it together in my head made sense because, okay, well, animal foods have the highest amount of nutrients in their most available forms, and animal fat can be used as an energy source in ketosis.

And then I read another book called Primal Body, Primal Mind, and at the time, which was about over six years ago now, I kind of paralleled a keto diet with a paleo diet and said, okay, I'm going to do paleo keto, but that pretty much means that I'm only eating meat and fat. So my theory behind not including vegetables and fruits were that the modern forms of the fruits and vegetables in a lot of cases, and especially at certain times of the year, weren't necessarily as high in nutrition as they used to be. And at the time, I didn't actually know about the carnivore diet, and there was actually a forum, Zero Carb, at the time. That's what the diet was referred to, and I came across it, and upon reading what that diet was, just muscle meat and no real guidelines to nutrients,

no real guidelines to macronutrient ratios, I didn't really think much of it. So, you know, three, four years go by and I decided to make a YouTube channel because one of my goals was to convey the importance of these nutrients to other people and how good I felt. And even though I took that drug Accutane twice, I mean it ruined my liver, ruined my body. I'm sure there are so many people familiar with the drug and how bad it is. Even though I took that drug twice, it still didn't fix my acne. The only thing that actually ended up fixing my acne was going on this diet and removing

a lot of foods and increasing the nutrients. But there's a lot of— the three main things I use to explain aspects of my diet are one, a logical standpoint, two, the anthropological evidence of our ancestors, and three, the scientific point of view, actually looking at the nutrient content of foods and the mechanisms in the body. And we can observe that through nutrient databases or even mechanistic studies. You were eating large amounts of potatoes back in the day. It sounded like you said you were eating like three or four pounds of potatoes every single day.

Nowadays, do you eat any carbohydrates? No. Back, so over my six and a half years now on this diet, the only time I ever consumed carbohydrates was back in last year, April of 2018. I started experimenting completely raw. Most of the time I consume maybe 60, 70% of my food is cooked, not cooked, I'm sorry, 60, 70% raw, and then the rest is cooked. And when I mean cooked, even though I'm just cooking the steaks blue rare a lot of the time, but that one time I did try carbohydrates was on the raw primal diet. I had a little bit of raw honey and I tried incorporating some dairy products again. Uh, and that, I mean,

I've always had a dairy allergy when I was younger, so that didn't really work out so well as much as milk products from a local farm, raw, high-quality, grass-fed, although there's definitely some things you have to be aware of if doing that, the difference between those dairy products directly from the farm and the dairy products that you buy on the shelf in the supermarket, that's definitely a discussion to be had. So my reasoning for incorporating anything into your diet is either nutrient density or energy. And the role that carbohydrates or grains

play in my mind is when we look at certain indigenous groups in the recent few thousand years when agriculture started and we started producing readily available forms of carbohydrates, they replaced wild plant foods as an energy source. And every single one of these carbohydrate sources can be addressed on an individual basis in regards to its composition, its preparation methods, what the pros and cons are. Obviously, something like modern wheat, which is made from hard red winter wheat, it has 48 chromosomes. It's hybridized. It's much more inflammatory than an heirloom variety of wheat like einkorn wheat. It has 12 chromosomes.

It's something our ancestors would have consumed. So not only do you have to look at the base food, you have to look also at the preparation of it. Are you naturally fermenting that sourdough bread and breaking down the anti-nutrient content, or are you just throwing that bread in the oven as is with a yeast starter overnight? And then there's, of course, a bunch of different grains have different preparations from oats to rice, a bunch of grains across all indigenous groups. But one thing I did want to touch on as a final in this regard is the sheer variety of foods these people consumed and the variety of preparation is absolutely absurd. Imagine this. You go fishing in a river and there's 10 different types of fish in that

river. And for each of those 10 different types of fish, there's 10 different species. So you might have six, seven different types of trout in one river. So just the amount of animal foods that our ancestors consumed was incredible, hundreds to thousands, let alone wild plant foods. Imagine walking into essentially a jungle and seeing just the sheer variety of foods we use to eat. That being said, there are indigenous groups that only ate like some of them. Maybe they only had Swiss cheese and rye bread. So it's definitely something important to note. But what's even crazier is one indigenous group might have prepared one food in one way and another group would do it in a different way. And the amount of different ways they would do it, you know, imagine you could take a fish.

You can eat it raw. You can cold smoke it. You can hot smoke it. You can boil it like under in an oven. You could bake it in fire. You could roast it over an open fire. There's dozens of different food preparations that these people practice because it was their job. You know, their job was survival in nature and their job was to prepare food. And you can imagine if

you have limited food access in your environment, you're probably going to start doing some interesting things to either change the composition or to preserve it. And each of these things serve different purposes. One of the few people I've ever heard talk about, you know, switching up the type of meat that you eat was Charles Pullaquin. I don't know if you're aware of some of his work, but he mentioned that he thought it was important that you, you know, you don't just always eat cow. You don't always eat elk. You switch things up a bunch.

And do you think that's important too, to have a wide variety? You're not just eating cow meat all the time? I think a good answer to that question is yes, there was a sheer variety of meats in the indigenous groups, but the one consistent thing was the quality. So when you have access to different sources of meat, it helps to vary them because to vary them as you don't necessarily know the quality of the animal unless you raise it yourself. So if you buy grass fed meat from one place and grass fed meat from another place, I have like pictures on my Instagram of this grass fed beef fat. It looks orange,

but I'm sure you've never seen something like that in a supermarket. So the quality of the food definitely ties in here. And when you're only eating one type of meat from one source, that's where you start to question, okay, is this the highest quality source of meat I'm eating? The only scenario where I would say it's okay to eat one source of food is if you're literally seeing what that animal is eating in its life, essentially. Of course, there's, you know, a realism that we have to have that's practical to life that we can't always be eating the highest quality foods at all periods of time. But that doesn't necessarily justify going to a restaurant and having wings fried in soybean oil every night.

So when I'm hearing what you're saying about the foods you eat, it seems that whenever you're looking at these meats and you're looking at your food as far as a utility and you're looking from a big micronutrient standpoint. So what's going to give me the most nutrients in what I eat. So I'm curious because whenever I, whenever I see people go from like, you know, pure carnivore or pure vegan, right. And they just cut out all certain forms of food. Um, and a lot of individuals that do carnivore, a lot of people feel much better than when they were eating all of these carbohydrates. But then I see a lot of vegans that claim that they're feeling much better eating no meat. How would you, like, let's just say, bring somebody to the other side? Or would you even

think that they should if they're feeling much better doing something totally opposite to the carnivore deal? Okay. So the carnivore diet achieves one thing inherently, that's the removal of inflammatory foods. Okay. The vegan diet can do the same thing. So the reason I market myself to the carnivore diet is because my diet is technically a carnivore diet, but what my diet achieves is the micronutrient density. And before really going into a discussion of the vegan versus the carnivore diet and actually like analyzing, okay, vitamin A in its plant and animal form, vitamin K2 in its plant and animal form, what we can look at is what happens to vegans after they go two, three,

four, five, six months on a vegan diet. So B12 deficiency is obviously something that you can't ignore. Every vegan needs to supplement B12. And for me, the logical perspective behind B12 doesn't make sense because you're literally following a diet that you could not follow when they didn't have the supplements, even 40, 50 years ago. That's one logical thing wrong with it. And I haven't done an incredible amount of research on this yet, but I'm not sure if B12 blood levels are indicative of tissue levels. That's definitely something I would be concerned about. But B12 is definitely associated with neurocognitive problems in the long run. And the second thing is the iron. I haven't seen any proof that vegans would not be anemic in the long

run. It's not an issue in some people. And one thing that I should have said before this was people have different genes that regulate how well they assimilate vitamins from plants. That's why some people last a very long time on a vegan diet and some people fall apart in two months. One other vitamin that's not really spoken about is vitamin D3. And I think vitamin D3 is the best argument against the vegan diet because the skin itself synthesizes cholesterol to absorb vitamin D3. So if you don't have extra cholesterol in your body, you literally can't achieve certain levels of vitamin D3. So I would make an argument that from an ideal health perspective, it's physically impossible to get your D3 levels to that amount

on a vegan diet. So those are just problems with a vegan diet in general. I mean, but another thing to consider is a standard American diet is so poor that when people refer to standard American dieters as meat eaters, the macronutrient ratios in a standard American diet are 30% animal foods and 70% plant foods. So these meat eaters, are they really meat eaters? And what's even more interesting is vegans always talk about blue zones, these zones where people have unusually high life expectancy. But guess what the macronutrient ratio of blue zones are? It is the exact same as standard American diets. When we actually look at what these blue zone

people eat, they might eat 70% of their calories from grains and 30% well, more or less, and 30% from animal foods. But the food quality is the difference. They're not eating McDonald's burger. They're not eating McDonald's burgers. And, uh, what was my favorite cereal when I was a kid? Uh, what's the cookie crisp? Uh, like that type of stuff. So they're not eating that type of stuff. These people are drinking sheet milk straight from the goat in their backyard. These people are eating the highest quality cheeses, the highest quality grains. They're preparing them in certain ways. And there's definite pitfalls in the context of a standard American diet that we have to kind of brush to the side. The problem with the vegan diet is we're missing those main nutrients, but

there isn't. and I always tell people this, you know, whether it's 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now, these vitamins, there's going to be a big emphasis on them because they are literally the most important things in human function. And I'm sure you guys have heard about the importance of vitamin D3 in the recent past and how doctors are even subscribing vitamin D3 in larger amounts. And there was a study that I post on my Twitter like every week. The vitamin D3 RDA was based on a statistical fallacy. The 400 IU RDA was actually supposed to be 9,000 IU. So there's definitely something to be said about the importance of these vitamins going under the rug. But the reason I'm saying this is because I can't even convince carnivore dieters to eat these nutrient dense foods. How am I supposed to convince a vegan to do it? It's,

it's very, very difficult to turn people off. What I like to do is I like to present information and let people make the decision for themselves. And of course, there's a lot of things that go into that, uh, an unusual amount of things that go into that. But if someone really wants to make a turning point, what I always tell people is if you do something and it doesn't work, you may, you might want to think about doing it in general. That's, you know, when I take vitamin D3, when you go out in the sun to the beach, you feel euphoric, right? You feel amazing after going to the beach. When I eat foods like liver and salmon or when I eat certain high vitamin animal foods, I feel like running through some drywall. I can go, I can go,

I can go, I've, you know, I work as I used to work as a bartender. I still do. And sometimes I would go like two or three nights without sleeping. And then I'd have to go down to Manhattan, work a 10 or 12 hour shift. And I'd still be running circles around everyone else. So there's definitely something to be said about optimizing your energy levels and how you feel on your diet. Uh, is a vegan diet better than a standard American diet? I think so in the con, but it depends on what you were eating and it depends on how prone you are to B12 deficiencies and iron deficiencies. I think in the short run, it's better than what most people are doing. And, uh, in regards to actually, it's better than what most people are doing.

And in regards to actually, I mean, I don't really want to discuss how to supplement an ideal vegan diet because there are literally certain things you cannot get. And that's a bit off topic, but it's definitely something I can go into. Seems like everyone needs to have some sort of nutritional plan, you know? And it seems like the biggest factor in all this is, you know, avoiding junk food, which is all the same stuff we hear all the time. So potentially if you're on a vegan diet, you may be avoiding some junk food, but there's ways of doing a vegan diet where you're not avoiding junk food. Um, there's also a keto, a keto diet where you could potentially be avoiding junk, junk

food, but there's also, you could be doing a keto diet and having some kind of dirty keto foods in there things that have sugar alcohols in them and whatnot but whatever the case is whether you're doing carnivore vegan keto uh paleo it's probably still a better decision than a standard american diet it's still probably we're still probably probably eliminating some excess junk, maybe some excess sugar, excess processed foods, and we're probably ultimately limiting some calories. Do you think calories factor into any of this at all when you start to really look at the different diets and things like that? Yeah, one interesting thing to look at in the context of calories is how your body assimilates nutrition from plant foods versus animal foods. What people

notice when they go on a keto diet or carnivore diet versus a vegan diet, the volume of food that you need to consume versus the amount of food you expel is drastically different. So the caloric intake when increasing your plant food consumption, it can definitely go down. And I mean, there are arguments going either way. There are people that go on a keto diet and gain weight. There are people that go on a carnivore diet and gain weight. There are people that go on a vegan diet and gain weight. One thing to note on the vegan diet is the high anti-nutrient content of these foods. Because of things like phytates, which inhibit mineral absorption, oxalates also inhibit mineral absorption.

Things like lectins can cause leaky gut. What this essentially does is it causes your body not to absorb the nutrients in the food. Your body loses its ability to digest the food. So, there is a concern about certain anti-nutrients in certain grains and legumes specifically on a vegan diet. I mean, this can be alleviated to some degree by fermentation. Of course, it can be made easier by choosing foods with less anti-nutrients. I mean, like carbohydrate sources like sweet potatoes and plantains and maybe fermented oatmeal would be better choices than kidney beans. That's an example of that. Caloric restriction ties into fasting as well. I mean, I think the overall reason that people consume excess

calories and don't lose weight is the lack of nutrients in their diet, and that's affecting their hunger signals. But restricting calories is definitely a way to become healthier, even if you're eating, doesn't really matter what you eat. It's definitely an improvement. And one way to go about this is whenever you put something in your body, it's always a net loss. It doesn't matter how healthy the food is. It doesn't matter how good the food is for you. You're always doing something negative to your body because either way, you're putting stress on your digestive system.

You're putting stress on your cells to eat something. So whether you put something in your body or not, it's just a matter of arguing how negative it is. Uh, liver, the act of eating, the act of eating itself causes inflammation period. Yes. That's, I mean, that's a very loose statement and it's, it's, it's, it can be used in a negative connotation in a, in a weird way because obviously we need to eat food. But this is where we assess the inflammatory response to the food, whether it's just based on its inherent profile of nutrients, anti-nutrients, whether you have an allergy to it, as well as the caloric density of the food. That's, you know, we look at the food. Is it going to give you issues?

What's the nutrient density? Two things really, just inflammation, nutrients. So looking at a food like liver or salmon roe, if you try to eat fish eggs, you wouldn't get past a quarter pound of them. That's because of the nutrient density of the food. And that's a lower caloric restriction. So, you know, you can make arguments that if people were eating a nutrient-dense diet and had proper satiation and proper appetite, that they wouldn't be over-consuming calories and they wouldn't be stressing their digestive system in an artificial amount. This also ties into lean body mass and bodybuilding because when you have a higher lean body mass,

your body requires more nutrition and more sustenance. So your body will crave protein macronutrients more than fat or micronutrients. So, uh, you know, when I used to lift weights or like you guys, even if you guys fulfill your micronutrient requirements, you guys are going to want way more protein than the average person. Just from that, your, your body, your muscles are literally telling you, I need protein. I want to eat protein. That's not the same case with most people. But fasting is a whole, like, that's a big topic in itself with autophagy. And the main benefits of autophagy is people claim that, and it's not a claim, this is what it does,

your body essentially recycles its cells and it heals itself in autophagy. But my argument behind a nutrient-dense diet is that the processes that regulate how cells are made, gene expression and cell differentiation, are directly correlative to the cell health in your body. So vitamin A and vitamin D3 in particular are the precursors to gene expression. Gene expression turns on and off certain genes. This literally tells your body what cells it needs to make, whether it's a stem cell or a red blood cell or a white blood cell. I don't want to go, you know, I'm not a biochemist or a physiologist. I don't want to go into this too much. But one anecdote I like to make is when I had terrible, terrible cystic acne, you know, it would take weeks for the acne to heal. And then when I had this terrible, like nickel sized blemish on my face, that blemish would take three, four, five, six months to go

away. I did a video on my YouTube of, I had a cyst, it exploded and I, well, yeah, this is a little gross. I'm sorry guys. Uh, so anyway, the point is I heal my skin in literally three days. I went from a cyst on my face to pretty much clear skin. And the way I did this was I fasted, I consumed a large amount of retinol from liver, vitamin A, and then I went in the sun for five, six hours a day. So what happened was, you know, the first day it kind of got inflamed and then it popped. The second day it started healing. Third day it formed into a scab. And the third day, the second day it turned into a scab. And the third day, the second day, it turned into a scab. And then the third day, it was pretty much completely healed and the blemish was almost gone. So our body essentially is like a plant. You know, when people are growing something,

they don't blame the plant's genetics on it not growing. They blame the soil. They blame the nutrients it was given. They say it didn't get enough water. We kind of need to look at the same thing for humans because genetics are determined by environment over a period of years and years and years. That was a bit of a ramble from the original question of, you know, do calories matter? But I think I touched on it on a few different ways. I think a lot of people would be curious, especially looking into, you don't eat any vegetables or anything like that, right? Mm-hmm. Okay.

I'm not against them, though. You're not against them. Yeah. Cool. A lot of people would wonder, because I think I saw a video where you mentioned how fiber isn't necessarily that important. How would you explain that to individuals in terms of like, do you get fiber from outside sources or is that important to you at all? No, no. So in regards to fiber's association with any sort of health benefits, such as reducing cholesterol, what was it usually associated with? Reducing

cholesterol, more consistent bowel movements, reducing rates of bowel cancer. That's not actually demonstrated in studies, but to me, fiber does play a role in the health of the gut microbiome and building a diverse microbiome. And that ties into, you know, the thousands of and hundreds of wild plant foods that indigenous people used to consume. So having a certain gut bacteria, your gut bacteria is essentially specific to your, well, in the case of, let's say like a mother has a baby and starts nursing her child. The mother is eating certain foods in her diet that are in a way introduced to the child through the breast milk, the environment.

Then when the child grows up, the child would eat the foods that are in the mother's environment. And this is kind of what determines our gut microbiome. So the role that fiber plays in this gut microbiome is just inherently being in those foods that they needed to eat to survive. And I think survival is a big overarching thing here. A lot of the foods we used to eat were really because we didn't want to die, uh, from a, from a caloric standpoint. Uh, but fiber from a mechanistic standpoint in the body, the only thing that's hypothetically beneficial is, uh, feeding some sort of positive gut bacteria. Um, and in, in actual cases where people have digestive issues, uh,

especially, uh, things like diverticulitis as well as IBS, reducing fiber actually improves their, their gut health. What about, um, performance? You know, we're just talking about like, uh, lifting weights or athletics. Um, what are your, some of your thoughts on, you know, utilizing a carnivore diet for these things? And does it also make some sense for somebody to add in some carbohydrates at some point, or do you think people don't really need them? So I've had conversation with an exercise physiologist about this, and he claimed that carbohydrates are not beneficial in any way whatsoever, that a meat and fat diet would be better. But I am not necessarily, that is not

my method of thinking. My method of thinking is your body needs to produce enzymes to digest food, whether it's pepsin for protein, lipase for fat, the starch digesting enzymes as well. Your body can only digest a certain amount of each macronutrient at any point in time. And when you're a high performance athlete and you're consuming an unnatural amount of food in regards to what maybe your body frame or your genetics allow you to do, you know, obviously someone like Thor, uh, those strongman guys is what I exactly think of when I think of this stuff. I'm thinking, okay, these guys have a very, very high lean body mass. They require an incredibly unrealistic amount of food. Uh, what would answer your question is, can we actually figure out whether the body can absorb only fat and protein faster than it can absorb the combination of fat,

protein, and carbohydrates? Is there a bottleneck on the pepsin production in the body? Is there a bottleneck on these protease, protein-digesting enzymes, amylase carbohydrate digesting enzymes? Is the body bottlenecked in producing these enzymes as well as insulin? Or can the body actually produce just as much, you know, of these digestive enzymes as it needs in the context of an animal foods-based diet? I think this is going to be anecdotal. If you're not a super high- performance athlete, I really don't think this will make a difference. Once you achieve a certain amount of activity and muscle mass, then you might notice if you consume carbohydrates and you're on a carnivore diet and you notice a performance increase, I think you're at that threshold where your digestive enzymes cannot

keep up with just the protein and fat diet. Dr. Justin Marchegiani That, yeah, that, that actually makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, bodybuilding purposes, I think some people, uh, talk about like, you know, getting a pump and a lot of bodybuilding coaches will say, uh, that that's critical, you know, in, in your training. And then from a powerlifting perspective or strongman perspective, uh, it's my belief that it's just important to have body weight on you. So this may be against what most people are looking for. Most people are, a lot of people are looking to get smaller or lose, lose body fat, lose

weight. But for a power lifter or for strongman athlete, or even some MMA athletes, it might be important for them to stay in a particular weight class. So therefore they might need some of the carbohydrates. And like you said, I think it was pretty accurate account of what you said. Um, basically, uh, the carbohydrates could be a fast acting energy source that could help them, uh, potentially recover from workouts. Some people are doing two workouts a day. So how are you going to get the fat and protein to really kind of like shuttle into your system? Maybe it does make some sense to have some fruit or some

coconut water or something in between workouts, Whatever, whatever carbohydrate source you choose will probably be appropriate enough to kind of replenish some of those stores and get you into that next workout, get you kind of repaired from the previous workout. There's so many factors here because when you think about what your body needs to recover and perform, you know, you don't only need protein to repair the muscle tissue. You don't only need fat for energy. There's also nutrients. There's the electrolytes. There's a lot of factors that go into this.

And, yeah, I mean, on one hand, I really do want to know what would happen if someone like, you know, Brian Shaw or Hafthor Bjornsson went on like a high nutrient carnivore diet. I mean, 100% they're losing a lot of weight. The question is how much strength would they lose and what the adjustment period would be. Unfortunately, I don't think it'd be possible to do that in the context of these people because it would just be too detrimental to their, essentially, professional career. But I'd love to see some more research being done on this in the future because, you know, the metabolism of protein and fat and energy is definitely something that's not understood by a lot of people. Yeah, we're seeing it more and more with like kind of endurance

athletes, people that run, people that do rowing and things like that. And we're getting really good accounts of, of what these people are doing and the response that they're having. And it seems like it's a good one. Um, but yeah, we don't know what it looks like, you know, from an NBA basketball player or NFL football player or, uh, you know, high level strongman athlete. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I've been consulting with a, uh, collegiate basketball player and what we do for him is we increase the nutrient density, but we still keep some carbohydrates in the diet. So we, we essentially have a very high nutrient carnivore diet, but then he has things like sweet potatoes, high quality grains, uh, maybe some more dairy products, maybe honey occasionally, just things for the carbohydrate metabolism in the body what are some of your thoughts on this and sema from you know having

a bodybuilding background and being someone that does jujitsu and you lift i mean you have a pretty a pretty busy schedule you know with uh the amount of physical activity that you have um have you uh explored any of this have you tried tried just to only eat like almost keto and just only eat meat? Yeah, no, I have like, I think for the past two weeks or so, you know, I've started messing with much, much lower carbohydrates. So I haven't cut my carbs out, but having probably a minimum of like 50 or 60 a day, which is much lower than I usually have in the past in terms of my macronutrient intake. And unlike like Frank, like I mainly have paid attention to my macronutrient intake. And unlike Frank, I mainly have paid attention to my macronutrient intake to make sure that I have intake for enough food to fuel my workouts,

because a lot of days I'll come here and then I'll go to jujitsu afterwards. And oddly enough, I've found having much lower carbohydrates but much higher fats didn't really affect my energy levels that much. I did feel a little bit of an effect in the gym, but at least in terms of my cardio on the mats, it didn't affect me that much. But what I really am curious about is because something I never paid much attention to in the past has been my quality of meats. I've heard about you guys talk about this a lot, grass-fed versus grain-fed meats. I never paid attention to that. And I'm just, how important that is in terms of like potential performance or quality of meat. Because personally, like, again, I just make sure that I'm eating enough food, right? My macronutrient intake. I do take a few supplements here and there

to make sure I get my D3 in. I thought you were natural, bro. Uh, I got to take no subs, but like, like my D3, et cetera. But, um, I haven't paid attention to like me making sure my meat is grass fed. I know Frank that you, you've talked a lot about like, oh, grain fed meats are not good at all. Um, how does that tie in? Does that tie into performance or any of that? Yeah, I'm smiling here. Cause this is like, this topic in general is what my main focus is. So one thing to look at is if you look at those indigenous groups and what they ate and you analyze the foods by amount and the micronutrient amounts, we can assume that those amounts of foods that they're eating and those micronutrient amounts are what the recommended dietary allowances should actually be. And things like, you know, the human body can produce 100,000 IU of vitamin D3 in the sun, the higher retinol content of these foods. So, we can assume that humans have a higher nutrient requirement than what we've been told. Now, when we actually analyze the nutrient content of the food, there's one thing that determines the nutrient

content of the food, specifically what the animal was raised on. The example in cows is, and cows have very interesting, ruminant digestion is very interesting. You know, a human would actually have to have five gallons of fluid in their stomach fermenting to be the equivalent. But in grass, when a cow goes in the field, it has an incredible sense of smell. It might think clover tastes like ice cream. It might think wheatgrass is a burger. And the cow will actually go in the field and choose, you know, the grasses and whatever that they like the most. And this is because the nutrient content of those grasses varies. And vitamin A is actually mislabeled on food.

In plant foods, it's beta carotene, but they can label it as vitamin A for some reason. The carotenes in this grass convert in the cow's body into retinol in its tissue. So cows are eating the plant form of vitamin A and converting it to the animal form of vitamin A. Same with vitamin K. There's vitamin K1 in grass, and the cow converts vitamin K2 in its body, and this is through fermentation.

The gut bacteria eats the grass, ferments, turns into nutrients in the body. So if the cow is being fed a crude soy feed of like corn, whatever, like cooked corn, cooked soy, things like that, it's not going to have micronutrients. And this is the problem also with a lot of vegetables in modern diets. Think of soil as in there's micronutrients in the soil that aren't necessary for the growth of the plant or the animal, and then there's macronutrients in the soil that are not necessary for the growth of the plant or the animal. And then there's micronutrients.

So, I'm sorry, I'm confusing things completely. You need macronutrients for energy. This is what you need to grow a plant or a human. Micronutrients can be deficient in plants and animals, and they will still grow. So, these macronutrients for soil are NPK. Uh, let me just, one's potassium, one's nitrogen. Uh, and I always forget the other one. It's just, just general fertilizer. Uh, so it's nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. So you need nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to grow a plant. So essentially if you grow corn with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to grow a plant. So essentially, if you grow corn with

nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, and then you feed that corn to a cow, it's not getting those micronutrients in it. The same thing can be said about humans in general and how we are raised on low micronutrient foods. So basically, how the food was raised determines the nutrient content. So if the cow wasn't eating grass, it might not have a high nutrient content. And in the context of grain fed versus grass fed, yeah, I mean, on paper, grass fed is going to have vitamins that grain fed isn't going to have. The fatty acid profile is going to be better. But you have to consider the muscle isn't really where the nutrients are stored. The nutrients in the animal are stored in the fat.

That's why they're called fat-soluble vitamins. They're not called protein-soluble vitamins. The muscle tissue stores minerals and elements, and if there's fat intertwined between the muscle tissue, there is nutrients in that fat. But if you take a grain-fed steak with a ton of fat on it and a lean grass-fed steak, the nutrient content is going to be insignificant because there's no and a lean grass-fed steak, the nutrient content is going to be

insignificant because there's no fat on the grass-fed steak. This is where in, you know, when you're eating muscle meat primarily, you're not really looking at a nutrient-dense source compared to the fat. And when you look at what our ancestors ate, ribeye and ground beef didn't exist because animals don't actually store fat in those parts. That's because of how we've bred cattle, other factors. Fat in the animal is stored on the belly, on the brisket, on the short rib, around the kidneys, those fatty parts of the animal, around the organ tissues. That's where we would have had to obtain fat and calories in nature.

So the whole grain-fed versus grass-fed debate in the context of eating a steak isn't nearly as relevant as it is in the overall diet. And the primary fat-soluble vitamins that we're concerned about getting, it's not really, I mean, you know, we have vitamin A in the form of retinol, probably the most underappreciated vitamin, the most important vitamin that's going to be discovered, I think, really, in regards to people understanding that you need to get it in large amounts. Vitamin D3, of course, we don't have to touch on that anymore. Vitamin K2 is a big one. Vitamin K2 ties into vitamin D3 and calcium metabolism. So, in order to absorb calcium in your body, you need vitamin D3. But in order to move calcium around tissue, you need vitamin K2.

I think it's called matrix glob protein, MGP moves, it binds to calcium ions in the body and moves them around. And vitamin K2, vitamin K2 is the secret of a lot of these indigenous groups and some animal foods because vitamin K2 is only present in high quality animal foods. And what we mean by this is if an animal is not grass fed or raised properly, the vitamin K2 content will be lower. But what's more important about K2 is its presence in fermented foods. So although foods like egg yolks and liver have some vitamin K2, when you ferment a food, it increases the vitamin K2 content. And the one thing that I can't get past in my mind is that there's a really good

book, The Indigenous Foods of the South Sudan, The Fat of the Land. All of these indigenous people, whether it's the Eskimos or the Africans, they purposely rotted their meat. And I mean, in modern society, we eat things like cheese and ham and yogurt. We eat a lot of rotten foods all the time, and we don't really think twice about it. But these people would literally take fish, leave them out in the sun for seven days, and then eat it. And you might say, okay, that's the anthropological evidence. What's the logical evidence?

Okay, maybe 100 years ago, we wouldn't have had refrigeration. What's the scientific evidence? The protein maybe 100 years ago, we wouldn't have had refrigeration. What's the scientific evidence? The protein breaks down, it becomes more digestible. Well, there's three enzymes in meat, fat hydrolyzing enzymes, proteolytic enzymes, and the glycolytic enzymes. The fat hydrolyzing enzymes ferment the fat, the proteolytic enzymes ferment the protein, and the glycolytic enzymes, when the animal dies, the lactic acid, the glucose, the proteolytic enzymes ferment the protein, and the glycolytic enzymes, when the animal dies, the lactic acid, the glucose in the meat turns into lactic acid. That's why sometimes

people think liver has carbs in it, but that's not actually true because the glycolytic enzyme breaks down the glucose in the liver into lactic acid when the animal dies. So these enzymes ferment meat in a way that's more favorable to the human microbiome. So, not only are you breaking down the protein, you're fermenting the fat, and you're turning certain nutrients into vitamin K2, essentially. So, there's definitely a role in indigenous groups of these vitamins, and there's definitely an importance of these vitamins in overall health. But this is something that is, you know, we know it's present in their diets. It makes sense on a paper value perspective that you can't really obtain these vitamins

in any way from plant foods. And anecdotally speaking, you know, when I eat these foods and a lot of my clients, when they eat these foods, they notice a difference. When you sit down and you eat certain foods, you notice immediately how you feel. So definitely, I mean, you know, some people like saying I speak out my ass. Some people like saying, but I try to give as much information as physically possible. If I can explain it in any way whatsoever, I do it. And I'm also open-minded to the contrary. But again, it's one of those topics where people, if people haven't heard about it and they come across all this information about it from someone, and this is not something

that it's like, I read a book and I started, this is, you know, when I'm on the street, this is literally what I'm thinking about. You know, when I'm driving in my car somewhere, this is what I think about. I have ideas and things I write down every single day. This is an accumulation of like seven, six, seven years of doing this. And that, all that information is accumulated into essentially a five minute blurb on why vitamins are important. So that's why I like to say, as I said earlier, present the information, let people do the research on their own. But there's definitely a lot, a lot of, a lot of, if you, if, you know, I could talk for two hours just on vitamin A, you know,

there's so much to touch on. It's just absolutely insane. Um, when you, uh, are talking about these, uh, these different fermented foods, how do you personally have fermented food? You mentioned that you, uh, have trouble with dairy. I think, you know, fermented food, you know, one way to get it is through like, you know, yogurt or kefir or, uh, uh, but what are some other options people can look into? So obviously I'm, I mean, I'm, if you guys haven't realized I'm crazy yet, I have, they call it, it's called high meat. And this is what the indigenous groups used to call it because it makes you high when you eat it. And meat can actually be inadvertently rotten. So if you bought like ikura or salmon roe in a store, you know, if it was salted and fermented and you ate it, it would give you that similar feeling.

Obviously, so the two easiest access foods for K2 are egg yolks and cheese. Egg yolks have vitamin K2 in the form of MK4. That's the form that's present in animal foods when they're not fermented. And then it turns into MK7 when it's fermented. MK7, K2 is the fermented form. And there's evidence that you kind of need MK7 as well. So cheese has high amounts of MK7. Cheese is really kind of the best source of food that most people have access to unless you want to start eating duck liver or goose liver. And that's because migratory birds have a very interesting

function of their metabolism where they store fat in their liver for the winter. So when these ducks fatten up, they're also storing vitamin K2 in their liver. That's why emu oil is a very popular supplement product. Emu oil has a high K2 content. It has benefits to it. But cheese is interesting because – and I guess we could talk about quality of dairy here. So the difference between the dairy on the supermarket shelf and a raw grass-fed dairy product is, first of all, there's no inherent nutrient content to the dairy product if the animal wasn't on pasture. So we can kind of cross a lot of that off. When the dairy is homogenized, it's a much larger fat particle than sheep milk or goat milk. So when you shrink down this protein

particle, it can get through the gut lining and be more inflammatory to people that have cow's milk allergies. And you're also pasteurizing the milk, although that can kill bacteria that the farmer might, you know, bacteria and milk and concerns about bacteria are generally from poor cross-contamination practices, like they didn't clean the milking machines, things like that. So although pasteurization does that, it reduces the nutrient content. And when you pasteurize a food, while you're cooking it, and a raw food ferments naturally, a cooked food oxidizes and rots and forms harmful bacteria. So if you have a raw piece of meat on the counter for a couple hours, that's fine. But if you cook that piece of meat and you lay it out, that's how people get sick. But if you cook that piece of meat and you lay it out, that's how people get sick.

So cheese in specific cases, it's made with the rennet of the animal. And, you know, baby calves have rennet in their stomach that curdles the milk into cheese. Essentially, it's pretty interesting. Like I would mean not to be cruel, but if you cut open a baby cow, there would essentially be cheese in their stomach. And the way that cheese is made, you take this ideally raw, high quality grass fed milk product. You add the rennet to it. It forms cheese and then you age it. And that aging process adds K2. And if people want to get a good source of K2 in their local supermarket, there's usually plenty of raw imported cheeses. Parmigiano Reggiano is a DOP. It's a designation of protection, which means

they can only make the milk from certain cows in certain areas, and it has to be made a certain way. And that Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP guarantees essentially that it is a raw cow's milk cheese, that it is a very high quality source of nutrition. So that's a very easily accessible one, but generally any raw imported cheeses are what people should look for in the supermarket. But since I am allergic to cheese, what I essentially do is I, I will take any really animal meat, animal fat, and I'll put it in a jar and I'll pretty much let it ferment. And guys, I, I really, I am not crazy. Like a lot of this stuff came across in a weird way. So one time I bought some beef fat from a farm and it smelled like Parmesan cheese. And I was like, and then like, I didn't, I didn't

eat it. I just left it there. And then I smelled like rotten. It smelled like a dead body in my kitchen the day later. And I was like, what is that? Is that the fat? So I go open the fat up and it smells like a comment, you know, it's cheese is funky. It's rotten. It really is. So I tasted this beef fat and I swear to God, it was, it tasted exactly like Parmesan cheese. Obviously the texture was different, but I was like, that's really interesting. If you, if you ferment fat, even from an animal, any animal, it develops similar flavors of the cheese. And a good example of this is people that eat dry aged steak, almost all steaks are dry aged now, but you go to a steak house, you have a dry aged steak. It's essentially rotten piece of meat. I mean, obviously the fermentation process is way

different, but, uh, that's definitely an interesting element of my diet that I haven't really incorporated for most of my carnivore dietary history. Uh, I just, uh, the importance of it is something I'm focusing on now, but mainly because of the food access thing, you know, for me to have rotten jars of meat and do that, it's completely crazy compared to, to go into a store and buy a cheese. That's for sure. Dr. Justin Marchegiani And, uh, vitamin K can, you know, you were mentioning, uh, basically how it can help, uh, I guess, metabolize calcium or help, uh, kind of move along calcium, but it can be

really beneficial to your heart. Is that right? Yeah, very. It's important in blood health, but when I, so in regards to the actual metabolism of vitamin K in blood health, I know it reduces blood clotting. That's for sure. I think I'm going to look up the metabolism of that real quick, but one thing I do like to touch on in regards to blood health is specifically omega-3 fatty acids. So there's a really interesting book called the Eskimo diet. And the one analogy I like to start this conversation with is if you cut an Eskimo's arm, it would take them eight to nine minutes for their blood to clot. An American would take three to four minutes. That's it. And you might think, oh, that's a bad thing. They're going to

bleed to death. No, that's a testament to how smooth their blood flows. So what omega-3 fatty acid consumption does to the blood is it changes the structure of the blood cells. It makes them more pliable. They can squeeze through arteries better. Blood cells are actually much larger than a lot of the tiny arteries, not arteries, but the tiny veins and vessels they go through, and they need to squeeze and be flexible. Omega-3 improves the flexibility of this. It reduces the fibrinogen in your blood, which is, it makes your blood flow quicker. And it's, it's really just an overall ability to bind to calcium, the not omega-3, but the K2's ability is really that binding to calcium and taking it out of the blood is reducing a lot of inflammatory stress. Uh, I mean, ironically, the video I did

yesterday was on calcium and showing how calcium deposits in kidneys and the heart are really a result of not getting enough vitamin K2. And one overarching thing that I say a lot is the calcium RDA and the idea that calcium builds strong bones is one of the biggest mistakes of our generation. Uh, calcium RDA being high is actually a consequence of us not getting enough of these vitamins in our diet. Uh, I have not consumed any calcium in six and a half years and my blood levels of calcium are right dead in the middle. It's like 9.4 on a scale of 8.2 to 10.6. Yeah. It's, it's so interesting when, once you start to eliminate a lot of other foods from your diet, uh, it's really crazy how the, uh, blood work starts to really, uh, kind of mend

together and, and almost like fix itself. Um, you don't really lift anymore nowadays. You, you basically just run. Right. And what's the kind of reason behind that? Like, uh, you know, we, we love lifting and we, we, we also understand that like, you know, the way that we like to lift, uh, we might be beating ourselves up a little bit and maybe it's not going to help us necessarily live to a hundred. Do you do it for like longevity purposes or why did you just kind of switch things up?

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot. And I've been having this conversation myself with the past few days, actually, because, you know, I have a I have obviously marketing myself from a health nutrition perspective. There's also a fitness aspect. And if I don't work out and I don't lift weights, I'm kind of missing some sort of clientele in a way. So on one hand, I wanted to lift weights again for that purpose. On the other hand, you know, I mean, I work as a bartender. I do my YouTube channel. I have another job that I work on the side. I can get

in the gym for an hour or two a day. That's not too much of an issue. But the extra eating, I'm going to lose three, four hours of sleep a day. That's my personal reason. I've always had really bad stretch marks on my arms. And I know that sounds silly, but that's never going to lose three, four hours of sleep a day. That's my personal reason. I've always had really bad stretch marks on my arms, and I know that sounds silly, but that's never going to go away, so that's not actually a good reason because regardless of my muscle, I always have the bad stretch marks.

I think with my small bone frame, right now I'm like 5'9", 140 pounds. For me, I have very small, I'm sure you guys are familiar with the term small joints. I'm sure you could explain it better than other people. I have really small joints. So when I have 16, 17 inch arms, that's not like on one of you guys, like your arms are probably like 18, 19, not 18, 19, but like 20, 21 inches. You guys are gigantic.

If I when I have 16, 17 inch arms, I look really, really big, uh, at least for my bone frame. And I actually did a physique competition back in 2015. I mean, on my own, I looked okay. But if you put me next to those guys, you'd be like, what is that guy doing on the stage? So the, the bone frame, even if I did, if I lifted weights and I kept lifting weights, even if I did, if I lifted weights and I kept lifting weights, my peak muscle tone for my frame is only going to be 180, 190 pounds max, max. So with my small bone frame and how I look like a, like, you know, it's way too muscular. Uh, part of that ties into, um, you know, fitting into my suits. That was honestly like a reason, like I don't fit it. Like I ha I mean, I, yeah, I could retailer all my suits, but then what if I don't want to lift weights again?

A lot of maintenance things, but in regards to the actual physical reasons about why lifting weights might be detrimental, the only concern is to me, you need to consume excess calories to put on muscle. And as we said earlier, anything you eat is inherently inflammatory. Um, that's one element to it. But there's so many benefits of lifting weights. It's hard to say that it's bad because when you go into a gym, the people that are in shape are not on the treadmill. The people that are in shape are lifting the weights. And one fact that was really shocking to me, I mean, I always knew muscle burned a lot of calories, but one pound of muscle burns 50 calories a day. So if someone put

in a one or one and a half, two year time span for a natural, metabolism is going to increase a thousand, 1500 calories, depending on the amount of muscle they put on. And that will literally help them lose all the weight they need to lose. So there's another element to this though, is we are much less muscular than a hunter gatherer. You know, these people would have been much more muscular than we are now. So getting into the gym and doing this weightlifting is a way to make up for sedentary activity. Uh, if you stand, you know, if you're a hunt, I mean, I mean, if I'm a bartender and I'm moving around all day, shaking up drinks, doing this, doing that. And I used to work as a personal trainer too.

But the point is, if you're active on your feet all day doing things, building muscle inherently through endurance activity, you're going to have a decent lean body mass. But if you're sitting at a desk all day, the only way for you to make up for that seven, eight hour day of sedentary activity is for you to go in the gym and kill yourself for an hour. So I don't think there's any detriment to weight, weight training. Obviously, if you're in the realm of, uh, you know, you want to try to deadlift your house and like rip up some ply boards, that's a different conversation. Like, uh, I used to do that stuff. Uh, I mean, I was never really that strong. Um, I only, maybe I bench press like low three hundreds and deadlifted like maybe in the,

in the low four hundreds after training for a couple of years, I was never in, I mean, my brother's a bit more into the, the powerlifting stuff himself. Uh, I mean, I think he deadlifts in the five hundreds. I don't know what his numbers are, but you're part of, uh, you're part of some triplets. Is that right? Oh, you know, this is so, this is so funny. I always forget to bring this up, but it's, I, yeah, you know, this is so, this is so funny. I always forget to bring this up, but it's, I, yeah, being a triplet is a pretty unique thing. So, um,

we're all 27. Um, my brother's out, uh, he, he's an engineer, uh, works in aerospace. Um, my sister unfortunately is mentally disabled. Uh, so I do work with her and, uh, you know, part of the reason that I do this whole nutrition thing is because I have a belief that, you know, nutritional deficiencies can cause things like that. Not to say that that was the reason my sister was – I mean, the reason my – I mean, that whole story about how my mother had kids, you know, they botched the C-section and she ended up having to get like a double kidney transplant. That's a whole different story. ended up having to get like a double kidney transplant. That's a whole different story. So my sister isn't necessarily the reason and my belief in nutrient density is the reason, but seeing modern medicine, how we're living now, how unhappy people are just even on the street, all of this stuff has been a driving factor in my message to just get people healthier in general.

My thought is if someone's healthy, if someone's energetic, that's part of the problem. You know, if we make sure everyone has a certain quality of life, you know, in regards to improving the world in itself, it's so much different. You know, I remember when I went, what, what, what did I do? One day I went into, it just seemed, I felt like everyone around me was on edge besides myself. Like I went into a butcher shop and I was like, I was just like holding my hand. I was like, Hey man, what's going on? Do you guys have? And he was like, hold on a second. The guy was like freaking out, you know? And then I went, um, then like I'm driving my car and these people act like lunatics. Just the behavior that people portray in general to me is so absolutely crazy.

And I drive, listen, I drive in Manhattan. There's something wrong with me. I was going to say you're in New York. Yeah, no, I mean, there is something wrong with me, but there's like a different level of anxiety that people have that I haven't noticed in myself or healthy and reasonable people. Uh, I guess a good way to coin this is a lot of people are emotionally driven and that's part of the reason they also don't really care about that, their help too much. And you know, if, you know, if you can't fix yourself, how are you supposed to fix other things?

I mean, of course, you know, I mean, there are 99% of people on this planet don't eat a healthy diet, and they're doing amazing things. But I just feel like out of context, you know, a lot of times when I go places and just seeing how people act, how unhealthy people are,

how unhappy people are, and that's hopefully, and I'm places and just seeing how, how people act, how unhealthy people are, how unhappy people are. And that's, uh, hopefully, and I'm doing it well so far improving, uh, people's lives in that regard. Have you ever seen a Ghostbusters 2? Oh, listen, man, I, I would, I'm, I haven't, I've seen Ghostbusters 1. I haven't seen Ghostbusters 2. So the second Ghostbusters, uh, takes place in new york city and underneath uh the city is all this uh pink slime and as people are getting more on edge and as people

are getting more pissed off this pink slime is is rising up and it's and it's mounting and i think i think that the pink slime represents carbohydrates and sugar and processed foods. And I, I really honestly feel that like, this is bringing people to a fucking boiling point. And I, I couldn't agree with you more on, uh, like the sanity of people. Like I walked through the airport and I, a lot of times just, just in general, just smile at people. Like, I mean, every once in a while I have resting bitch face, but for the most part, I try to, I try to be, I try to be pretty happy because I feel like if you, if you smile, it kind of makes you feel happy on the inside and brings your, brings your mood up. And why not acknowledge the person that's walking across from you or whatever?

Why not kind of give people a head nod or smile a little bit? People look at you like they just want to punch you right in the fucking face sometimes. And it's like, man, what's this guy's problem? Maybe he needs to get on a carnivore diet i don't know i went to the i went to the ups store earlier and i saw this i mean like this like maybe middle-aged asian lady walking out of the ups store i walk into the ups store i go out i go to the post office and i see her at the post office like oh hey what's going on we had both had the same idea and she was like you know she was just she was just looking at me with like a death stare. And I was like, and then I explained to her, I was like, oh, no, you were just, she was

just in a haze. It wasn't even that. She was just in a haze of confusion. I'm sure she didn't even notice me when I was there. And I noticed most people are in this haze of confusion. And, you know, is it the sugar, the carbohydrates, the refined foods? Of course. But I'd be curious to see if you increased,

if you had, if these people had a base amount of nutrients in their diet, that's probably part of it too. That's, that's my main contribution. You know, uh, before the show, we were actually talking about, uh, raw meats and eating raw meats and you know, like my family wouldn't F with that, like, like straight up, you know, just like you cannot convince an African family to eat raw meat. But Andrew mentioned something funny that I never really thought about. I eat sushi, you know, and I, yeah, you know, I eat raw fish. So what is this like adversity? It's like eating a raw, a straight up raw steak, right? So this is a, yeah, this is a whole nother big topic

in itself. This is a, so in, for the indigenous example, all indigenous groups ate cooked raw smoke. They ate all types of meat. Yeah. Every indigenous group, every single way, raw, you know, every way, uh, logically speaking, um, on, in a scientific, on a scientific basis, what happens when you cook meat is you're essentially, you reduce the micronutrient content to some degree. Let's say you cook a steak well done, which most people don't do, so the nutrient degradation isn't this severe. If you cook a steak well done, broil in the oven for an hour, you lose about 50% of the B vitamins and 20 to 30% of the other fat soluble vitamins. Now, of course, if you cook a steak rare, that's not as big of an issue, but what you're doing by cooking the steak is you're concentrating

the calories. So you're sacrificing micronutrients and you're increasing caloric density. This is very important for survival because, um, you know, when I tried the raw primal diet, I started craving meat. I started, uh, not meat. I started craving cooked meat. I started craving salt. There's a caloric need and consuming only raw meat products. They like bottlenecks that caloric need in the diet. So when, and if you're consuming a carnivore diet, there's no indigenous group that was really, uh, there are very few that were completely carnivore. And even those that if an indigenous group had unlimited access to animal foods they would still only eat 80 of their calories or so from animal foods so

this means that okay if you only need to eat maybe 30 to 40 percent of your calories from animal foods to get enough nutrition in the diet it doesn't really matter if you cook your meat and reduce the nutrient content by a certain amount because you're still getting the nutrients in you know does that make sense so if you eat if you need content by a certain amount because you're still getting the nutrients in it. You know, does that make sense? So if you eat, if you need to get a certain amount of nutrients and cooking the food reduces the nutrients by half, why not just eat double the amount? That's what you can essentially do. So what you're doing is you're getting more calories, but you're getting less micronutrients. Uh, I mean, there are some nutrients that you do lose. Uh, like if you really cook a piece of meat long, vitamin C content is lost and meat does have vitamin C. Uh, for the, anyone that doesn't

know that, uh, there's a couple of nutritional databases that do indicate that. Um, and, and certain, usually the water soluble vitamins are more prone to oxidation. Uh, vitamin D3 is a bit more prone to oxidation and heat as well. Uh,, the bacteria thing and the parasite thing is certainly a big one to talk about. So, salmonella and E. coli. Salmonella occurs only in chicken. That's pretty important to note. Chickens carry salmonella, I'm assuming it's because even though a lot of animals are kept in horrendous conditions, chickens are kept in even worse conditions. horrendous conditions, chickens are kept in even worse conditions. E. coli is present in, I mean, I'm sure more people get E. coli from romaine lettuce than they do from eating meat. And there's a lot of recalls around, but this is all cross-contamination. People don't realize that

a lot of these very low-paid workers literally have to use the bathroom in the fields, and sometimes that gets in people's vegetables. People don't realize what's going into, you know, where the meat's going, what's going into that ground meat. You know, I've never, I mean, listen, I've been eating meat for six and a half, seven years on this diet, and I've never been sick once from raw meat. That being said, I've never eaten ground meat from the supermarket raw. That is definitely a good way to get E. coli. And another thing to touch on is the strains of these bacteria. So if a grass-fed animal has E. coli, the strain is different. When you feed a cow grain, you increase the acidity of their rumen, one of their stomachs.

This makes the E. coli bacteria more resistant to acid. Normally, the E. coli that occurs in a grass-fed animal is going to be killed in your digestive tract. It won't be as harmful. But that acid-resistant strain of E. coli, that will wreak havoc on your digestive system. It's interesting how feeding these animals different foods affects their meat quality, too. Since ruminants have a different digestive system than chickens, the omega-3 to omega-6 in grain-fed beef is far more favorable than the omega-3 to omega-6 in grain-fed chicken. But things like chicken and pork are supposed to have essentially the same omega ratios as things like grass-fed beef and wild-caught fish. It's just

to have those animals on that quality of pasture is really cost prohibitive at this point. So the bacterial concerns have a lot to do with cross-contamination and how we're raising our animals. Uh, you know, no, if you go out and you hunt a deer and you killed that deer, granted, it didn't have some sort of infection. All that meat is going to be free of any modern bacterial issues. Uh, so I, I mean, if I need to touch more bacteria, I can, but the parasites are what scare people. And on one of my raw meat eating days of video, people were like, oh, parasite has entered YouTube or something like they're making jokes that I'm going to get parasites. And as someone who's works in restaurants, who's been a fish cutter, who's, who's been, you know, cuts meat, I know what animals parasites occur in. So parasites in

ruminant animals. I mean, has anyone, if something, listen, any of you guys listening right now, if you, if you've seen a parasite in a steak, please let me know because I've seen hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pounds of meat and I have not. Uh, I don't even want to bring this up cause it's not really a concern, but an animal can be infested with liver flukes. And these, uh, are, I think it's like snails and marshlands carry these and then the cow eats the grass and then they get liver flukes. And these are, I think it's like snails and marshlands carry these and then the cow eats the grass and then they get liver flukes in their liver. But if a cow has liver flukes, it's not going to get past the butcher. They're going to see the liver is infected,

the animal's sick. It's not going to get, the meat is not going to get past. I'm sure you could Google pigs have cancer and you could see meat with cancer in it. And you could see stuff like that. That stuff does not get past the butcher. Thankfully. Uh, the big concern, the only thing I have seen worms and parasites in is fish. And it's funny cause people do eat sushi, but you know, people will go, I'm sure. I wonder how many people have said, Oh, you're going to get sick from eating raw steak. And then they go to have sushi the next day. And they don't realize that sushi is actually a lot easier to get sick from. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, if you freeze meat at a certain temperature, it will kill the parasite, but parasites and fish are very, very normal, especially in larger ocean fish. Uh, if I

filleted open a salmon and I didn't find a roundworm in the belly or a nematode in the belly, I would be surprised. Uh, the nematodes that occur, the roundworms that occur, they're non-segmented roundworms that occur in salmon, aren't harmful to humans because they can't really burrow through the intestine. They can cause a stomach upset if they get through. But this is like if you get sold a piece of meat and there's a worm in it and it gets past the butcher, it gets past your inspection, it's kind of your fault for not really looking at the meat carefully. And if you're not looking at the meat carefully and slicing it thin,

then you probably want to cook it a little bit to some degree. And the worms that are actually an issue, there are some segmented tapeworms, but those occur in freshwater fish. But salmon do go upstream and in rivers, so they can have tapeworms, but these tapeworms are much, much, much larger. And so this ties into the butcher thing. It's not going to get past the butcher. You know, when they cut open this salmon, there's going to be so, it's going to be so infested that it's not, the meat is not consumable. I mean, if you guys really want to get grossed out anymore, you can watch parasite videos on YouTube. But a really good resource for this is the CDC, Center for Disease Control. You can

type in any parasite, any animal, any disease you're concerned about. It will give you statistics on how frequently people get sick. It will give you statistics on parasite occurrence rates, on bacterial infection rates, what foods they come from. And you'll find that it's mostly plants. I didn't want to forget about trichinosis as well as prion diseases. So trichinosis, I think that's from feeding. A lot of the time it's from feeding animals garbage. Uh, but the main concern for trichinosis is a wild game meat. So unless you're eating bear meat or wild boar meat, you shouldn't really worry about trichinosis.

Uh, pork used to have trichinosis cause how, uh, how poorly we treat our animals. So if you're going to consume pork, unless you're raising the animal yourself and you got the animal tested for trichinosis when you slaughtered it, I wouldn't start doing any raw pork. But there are a lot of countries that do consume raw pork and they raise animals specifically to consume it raw. I mean, same thing with chicken. People eat plenty of raw chicken. But prion diseases are really interesting because prions are misfolded proteins, and you can't kill these things. You know, you could heat it.

You could throw them in a— —substance in the environment that does not go away. I mean, Joe Rogan had a podcast on this with an expert on prion diseases and chronic wasting disease in deer. And these proteins, essentially, these prions folds tissue in your brain and essentially makes holes in your brain. Now, in the context of mad cow disease and consuming it and having an issue, there has never been one case of mad cow disease in the United States. All of the cases were from people who consumed meat in another country, and then they came

over here and were diagnosed with the disease. I've heard many very shady stories about the origin of mad cow disease, but to my understanding, they fed sheep that had scrappy, which is the form of mad cow and sheep. They fed sheep meal to cows, and then they developed the bovine form of it. I mean, you can also get prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, if you were like a brain surgeon and then you lick the scalpel. But when people think that they're going to get a prion disease from eating brain tissue specifically of the animal, that's not true. The prions occur in all the tissues of the animal. Although they are more concentrated in the brain and the spinal cord, the prions are in the whole animal itself.

So in regards to concerns about actually, you know, day to day physical concerns, scrappy in I think it's actually called scrappy. I'm an idiot today. It's called scraie because what happens is the sheep start scraping their bodies against the fence. So scrapie in sheep has not been shown to be transferable to humans. But as we said earlier with these sick animals, these things don't usually get past the butcher. I mean, if you cut open a lamb skull and there's holes in the lamb's brain, maybe don't eat it. Pork is actually immune to prion diseases. They have like a genetic immunity to prions. Interesting. I have not eaten, I've eaten calf's brain.

What's also interesting to note is mad cow disease cannot occur in an animal until it is past three years of age because it develops over time in the animal. What other brains can you eat? I mean, obviously, you don't want to go out and eat a deer that had chronic wasting disease. You don't want to eat their brain or something. I'm sure something might happen there. But the point is, it hasn't actually been shown that you can even get prion diseases from other animals outside of humans and cows. And the reason the cow form was transferable to humans is because it was a mutated form of BSE. And the reason you can get, uh, I mean, you can get crucial the outcomes from eating brain tissue that has crucial the outcomes. Uh, and also some people are immune to it in general. That's also interesting to know.

You mentioned that you don't eat raw ground beef uh so what's your favorite type of uh raw meat to eat yeah i mean i i've maybe i've i actually gone to whole foods like twice in the past year and eaten raw ground meat that's on a rare occasion that's the only time i've ever done it um i go to uh local pennsylvania has some listen the amish people they're the shit man i swear to god these people raise the animals how they're supposed to be i bought this ground veal the other day and I ate this ground veal. I was like, what the fuck? I was like, Jesus Christ, this veal. It was so amazing.

The fresh meat raised how it's supposed to be. I just have local farmers. I ask them, hey, what are the cheap offcuts you guys have? Fatty stuff. And I just eat whatever. But, you know, you might think a brisket or a short rib or something has to be cooked a very long period of time. To me, I could cook a brisket medium rare, slice it against the grain, and I can still chew it. I mean, I might have to slice it a little smaller.

But my favorite thing to eat from a taste perspective, the tastiest raw foods to me are, obviously, I mean, raw dairy is delicious. Raw cream, raw butter, raw milk, raw sheep milk. Man, one of my favorite, most delicious foods in the world. But in regards to foods you can cut off of an animal, I really like the bone marrow can be really tasty. But this ties back to indigenous people. They literally had preferences for every part of the animal. Like they might have liked the lower leg bone marrow raw, the upper leg bone marrow cooked. They might have liked the sheep head boiled and the caribou

head roasted over a fire, very specific food preferences. And when you start tasting these foods and you notice what you like, um, things taste different. You know, fat from one part of the animal tastes different than other parts of the animal. But in regards to actual cuts of meat that most people are familiar with, uh, yeah, of course I love ribeye. Ribeye is delicious if it's really fatty. The fat on brisket has a very unique flavor to it. The fat on the belly of the animal, most people eat bacon, has a very unique flavor to it. Every part of the animal has a flavor. I mean, that's the great thing about this diet. When you eat, you could taste if a steak is flank steak, if it's skirt steak, if it's New York strip filet mignon, you can taste what part of the animal the meat is from.

Same thing with the fat. Same thing with the marrow. It's, it's, it's really interesting. Where should somebody start? You know, let's say they're grossed out. They think you're disgusting for eating raw stuff and eating raw brains and everything. They think you're disgusting for eating raw stuff and eating raw brains and everything. Where should somebody start just to get some more nutrients in their diet period without having to, uh, uh, be on too crazy of a schedule?

I want it to be very clear that you don't have to eat raw food to be healthy. Indigenous foods. I mean, sorry, I'm sorry. Indigenous groups did eat both cooked raw fermented food. You can eat a completely cooked food diet. I mean, if you're cooking every single thing to well done, the only thing I would be concerned about is maybe you want some vitamin C in your diet from somewhere else. You don't have to eat raw products.

If you're looking to source products, there's some excellent websites like eatwild.com, localharvest.org, where you can look into local farms and farmers markets and see what meat you have accessible. On a more, on an easier, relatively speaking term, I literally can go to like all the supermarkets and local butchers in my area. Halal butchers will have lamb, uh, pretty much any part of, I did a video where I tasted every single part of a raw lamb that I slaughtered. There's meat that's easily accessible. You just have to do a little bit of legwork. You have to say, okay, does ShopRite have grass-fed ribeye?

Oh, ShopRite has grass-fed ribeye for $9 a pound. It's pretty insane. Does, I mean, Whole Foods is a different story. I can't afford to eat there myself. You know, I'd probably go broke buying steak at Whole Foods. Maybe you could do ground beef at Whole Foods, but you really have to look at it. We'll start from the easiest. So explore your local options, supermarkets, any sort of wholesale store like Costco, see what they have available. For fish,

local Asian markets are a godsend. These guys will have like anything alive that you could imagine that you would eat. They have it there and they will cut it for you. And I mean, even things, they have live kill markets like where I am in Queens and Brooklyn, but the meat quality ties in here. The hardest thing to do is to get a quality source of meat fresh and cheap. You could get frozen stuff. I mean, that makes it easier. And once you've explored all those local options, then you can look into farmer's markets and local farms. I literally call up farms and I say, hey, how often do you... Abattoir too. Abattoir is a slaughterhouse. You could call these places up, how often do you slaughter an animal? Can I buy X amount of meat per week? If you show people

you're willing to spend money and develop these relationships, then you can get these foods. Obviously, I do consult a lot of people that don't want to do these things. So there is a way to do it. And like that food I mentioned earlier, raw grass fed cheese. I mean, the problem with eggs is even if you're going to the supermarket and buying the best pasture at omega three eggs, they're still being fed predominantly grain feed. Uh, the grass fed meat is not as fresh and good as it could be. So there is a slight sacrifice in quality if you do want easier access to food, but I always like to think there has got to be something wrong with you to do what I do. There has to be. You got anything else? Uh, yeah, no, I'm sorry. The resources,

uh, for anyone that's interested, eat wild.comcom, localharvest.org, realmilk.com is great for finding local milk sources. And then you can even just Google, I would just Google stuff in your area, butcher, abattoir, farm. There's probably a ton of Facebook groups that I don't really mess with. Andrew, you got any questions over there what you got buddy no well my question was exactly like yeah how do we get started but the those uh the websites that you mentioned were great so thank you for that um one thing that i i did want to ask and me and sema were talking about it earlier uh you know you mentioned uh indigenous people and our our ancestors and whatnot um and i'm not trying to be combative or anything like that. But if we were just to take like an A-B comparison, and I'll just be super basic and simple with it. We are living longer now. So why is it referenced so much

in some of your arguments? So I actually did a whole video on that the other day explaining that. One thing off the bat, that's not actually a true statistic. The life expectancy now is not too far off of what we used to have. The constituent here is the infant mortality rate. So there were groups of people who would literally have an infant or child mortality rate of 15, 20, 25%. But if you got past that young period of life, you would likely live to 65, 70, 75. And if we look at life, I mean, we can look at blue zones and life expectancy by country and see what foods they consume in general.

But the main argument against that is the life expectancy. The other thing I'd like to bring up is, okay, you know, you could argue, let's say these people did die at 35. Let's say some of them did because these people are surviving. How long do we think any of us would last in the woods without modern rifles, modern equipment? The fact that these people were able to survive with a bow and arrow in the forest, like, like to me, that's the craziest thing in general. If these people can survive with a bow and arrow in the forest and procure calories in that way, it's completely amazing. And that ties back into, if you go into a forest, the only thing you will be eating is animal foods because you didn't have your ancestors to tell you this plant is good, that plant is good,

you know, what to eat. There's that element of these people were literally trying to survive. They had very harsh lives. And even in these tribes where they were very skilled and adept at hunting and they were able to procure calories very easily, they still went around killing each other. You know, if you Google Australian aborigines, cannibals, the natives to Australia, there's some really, really crazy stories that I could talk about on here about, uh, what, what these cannibals used to actually do. And, uh, they had beliefs like eating the heart of your enemy would make you stronger. Eating their brain would make you smarter. And I mean, listen, the brain tissue of an animal might have omega-3 fatty acids in it, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should, you know, go over to your neighbor's house and have some twisted thoughts going on.

But to tie it back to their life expectancy, people don't realize the infant mortality. People don't realize the elements of survival. And, I mean, the main thing is there's no evidence of degenerative disease in these people. There's no evidence of diabetes. There's no evidence of cancer. There's no evidence of chronic disease. And if you see what they looked like, they look like marble statues. They look like perfect physical specimens in a lot of these pictures.

And one interesting thing I bring up is, not to offend any people, have you ever seen a picture of a bald Eskimo or, well, First National Alaskan or a bald Native American? These people didn't lose their hair either. That's one interesting thing. Yeah, it just, it gets, it got me thinking, you know, looking up pictures of Native Americans, looking up pictures of these indigenous people, you know, they all look the same in a way. They, if you think of a species of people that are from a certain area, they kind of look a certain way. And whether or not they develop properly in that way is conducive to their environment. Did I answer that?

Did you want me to touch on anything specifically on the life expectancy thing? No, that's just about it. And yeah, it's kind of like the who's better. Like, is it Jordan, LeBron? Like, there's so many different variables there. Like, it's impossible to do an A-B comparison. But no, I think you hit it was a Jordan LeBron. Like there's so many different like variables there. Like it's, it's impossible to do a, B comparison, but now you,

you, I think you hit it right on the head, man. Yeah. And I think too, like, you know, I think that we're dying longer is what I said kind of before we got on the

show. It's like, there's so many people are so sick. Oh, it's, it's upset. And then people want to say, oh,

life expectancy is higher and people get excited about that stat. And it's like, well, everybody's on like all these weird drugs. And I think, I mean, I'm just, I just go by what I see. I see a lot of people not feeling well. I see a lot of people, uh, you know, in wheelchairs and, uh, just sickly and, and just not doing well and having diabetes and heart disease and, uh, all these other things. So I think that the message is great. You know, if we can get people to be healthier

and I, I like your message too, because it's coming from a place of addition. Now, yeah, it would be great to have everybody like wipe out processed foods from their diet. And it'd be awesome if people could have the willpower that you have to not eat a carbohydrate for the last decade. But, you know, we realize that that's not probably realistic, but can you start to get more meat in your diet uh can you start to explore maybe some of the things that you mentioned to get more nutrient dense foods uh can people make some room for some dairy and for some fermented foods yeah absolutely you can you absolutely can it's not hard to do anyone can kind of implement some

of these things and i think that's a great way to go about it is addition by subtraction. You keep adding, uh, convince people that they need to go on a walk or have some form of exercise, convince people they need to drink more water, convince people that they need more sleep. They need to recover from their day. They need to recover from their workouts. And, uh, I think it's a good place to start. Definitely. And if these types of foods are supported, if people start, and even in the past years, you know, these big companies, whether it's McDonald's or processed food companies, when they see people want healthy foods, they switch their marketing. They try to meet the demand. So if people want to be healthy and people want healthy foods and they're complaining

that, oh, it's too expensive to do. Well, that's, that's a whole different story. Once we support, once we start becoming healthier, start supporting these higher quality foods, that's when there becomes a drastic shift and it becomes accepted as opposed to the opposite of the norm. Yeah. Should be seeing, uh, some, uh, fast food, rotten meat places, uh, opening up around the country pretty quickly here. I think it's funny that that McDonald's cheeseburger, although I, some places McDonald's does sell, you know, essentially rotten milk on the cheese. I mean, I think the actual cheese, the cheese on McDonald's patties is actually completely fake. It's not legit, but I think that's a funny thing. Like people say, uh, you know, that you brought up the rotten meat at McDonald's. Well,

technically speaking, if that was a, if that was an aged burger and cheese, you know, it's, it's really, um, it's really about convention and perception too. It's, it's really interesting. Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you. Thank you so much. Where can people, uh, where can people find you? Yeah, sure. I'm Frank Tufano on YouTube. You guys can follow me on Twitter, Instagram,

website, frank-tufano.com as well. Appreciate it. Thanks again. Thank you guys. Okay. Take care. Very interesting, huh? Eating all that raw,

raw food, huh? Pretty cool. I think some things, some things he said, I mean, are, are easy to adopt. I mean, other than, other than like, uh, diving in on some raw food. I mean, I think, um, I mean, it's all stuff we've, we've talked about on this podcast before. Um, having some variety of meats, um, you know, uh, we've talked before on the podcast about, you know, uh, bone broth, bone marrow, liver, heart, brain.

Can you eat some of those things? Can you eat liver and heart? And maybe not like maybe, maybe just don't dig it. Right. So don't make your life any harder than it really needs to be. But if you try something and you like it, then maybe you found something that you can implement into your life.

I think the biggest, yeah, the biggest deal is just getting over how unconventional it sounds in your head. You know, like, like we, when we talked about fasting before, like you mentioned, we, we thought it was the stupidest thing ever. We do it. Oh, it's pretty great. So just like, again again like just getting over oh raw meat that sounds bad like from as a kid you just hear don't eat raw meat right right so you just got to get over that and maybe do some research see what you can eat maybe give it a shot see how you feel probably a lot of it's probably not that bad yeah i'm trying to think

of like other than a restaurant where they've had some thinly cut beef, I don't think I've really tried a lot of like raw meat in that sense, other than like we said, sushi, pokey. That's been about it. I haven't really, you know, at home, I haven't just randomly grabbed a piece. I eat my food pretty like rare but yeah raw is uh it's a different ball game is a little different and what he said made some sense too it was like if you choose to cook it maybe you just need to eat a little more of it and get the same amount of nutrients because when you cook it you're going to cook out some of the nutrients so it's like okay that sounds i mean a lot of what he said even though there were some things in there that

are crazy and he at least acknowledged that like most people aren't going to be able to follow and do exactly what he's doing. Yeah. I like what he said about, you know, eating basically twice as much because I know when I make a steak rare, it tastes so much better, but it kills my stomach. kills my stomach again back to my ridiculous stomach but when i cook it really well i it's easier to handle but i'm also like ah like damn it i cooked it a little bit too long but then i don't wake up in the middle of the night with my stomach cramping the way i did the other night with tri-tip it was so bad but what if you eat less of it and it's cooked a little less i could give that a go yeah maybe try that yeah i wonder if it's the fat content too because i know i got some some friends that i've put on diets before and like when i put them

on a keto diet their stomachs just they're just dying and i think it might have to do with just the maybe the overall amount so maybe just try to eat try to eat like six ounces and just see what that does yeah maybe i can't like uh keep uh, uh, the demand of trying to break all that down in my stomach or something. Could be. Some people, uh, there's so many other things that factor into this, but some people's gallbladder doesn't like keep up with, uh, trying to digest that amount of fat. And so therefore it could be, you know, making you sick or it could be other influences as

well, but maybe just trying to eat a little bit less might, might work. Yeah. Might do you some good. Yeah. But then I'm going to want to reach for carbs. Oh yeah. I know. Carbs like other carbs.

I know. Carbs, carbs beget carbs. Well, that's what I noticed when I've been fasting. Yeah. I'm still doing it every day. It's, I'm still loving it. But if I have something, I don't know, like I'll have potatoes or I'll have extra rice just because I'm like, oh, this tastes really good right now.

The next day is really hard to get through like that initial wave of hunger. So I don't know if that's just me or if that's just the way it is, but it's been tough. I think a lot of problems get solved, you know, when you keep your stomach empty, I think that'll continue to help you a lot. So I think fasting can be, can be great from that sense. And I think, you know, what Frank was talking about with just eating less and just, you know, the conventional American standard American diet versus some of the other types of diets people might go on the main factor, whether you're going vegan or carnivore which seem like

total opposites maybe in both cases you just are making healthier decisions and maybe in both cases because you're on a quote-unquote diet you're also choosing to eat less and maybe the simple act of just eating less can help make us healthier and then also you know when we had mark sisson on the podcast we've had other people on the podcast, we've had other people on the podcast who've talked about ketogenic diets and they talk about, um, you know, your body's ability to switch over from being a sugar burning machine to a fat burning machine. I think that some of these things are, are misleading. And I think that in the absence of excess calories, I think the body works itself out and uses what's there as fuel.

I think your body's like, Hey, we got, we got a little bit of sugar over here and you're getting kind of tired. Let's, uh, funnel that out to whoever needs it. And I just think the body, like, although it is, um, it can be very confusing on how all the stuff works. I think it's, I think it's simply a lot of times does come down to, you know, if you're, if you're continually eating massive amounts of food, I think you're kind of wreaking havoc on your system and causing a lot of problems. Yeah. And then my biggest concern and, you know, how we talked about it a couple episodes ago, but like it's fasting doesn't make any sense to me. Like I need to be eating way more like this is, you guys are dumb, blah, blah, blah. Uh, I haven't lost any weight at all.

And I've really only been eating one to two times a day. And yesterday or Tuesday, I'm doing deadlifts. Those trap bar deadlifts. But Mark was like, yeah, let's go for a heavy set of six. You know, just see what you can get. Like you're probably still feeling strong from the meat and everything. So let's just go for it. I ended up pulling 306 times,

um, previous to that. I did 300 once for a like all time PR. So, uh, I don't know what that was all about, but it's, I'm not losing strength and I'm not losing weight,

which was my biggest concern of all of this. So whatever the hell is happening, it seems to be working. Yeah. Well, I think fasting just uh it uh your body releases some hormones that help protect uh lean muscle mass your body will release some uh hormones that will just help protect you in general so i think it's you know

how long were you fasting that day were you fasting pretty long on that particular day i don't know exactly i just know, so I'll for sure skip breakfast and then I don't eat before one o'clock. So there was a good chance that that was an 18 hour fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's kind of falls in line

with most of the research that shows, you know, that you aren't going to really lose muscle mass. Now, you know, could you, could you optimize your diet better towards gaining more muscle mass and towards by eating, you know, could you, could you optimize your diet better towards, uh, gaining more muscle mass and towards by eating, you know, more frequently? Sure. I'm sure you can. Right. But, um, you know, from what I've seen and SEMA's, uh, been doing this for a little bit longer as well. And, um, I think, you know, a lot of people are reporting, uh, kind of similar effects with fasting. Yeah, that's great i think yeah it just takes a lot of trying it out because like like i mentioned shortly i was doing it wasn't keto because i was still eating carbs but i was eating less than about 70 grams of carbs a day and still doing the same level activity just to see because like in the back of my head i was like i'm gonna

feel tired i won't have much energy i felt fine like i didn't feel like i had any less energy at all i actually felt maybe a little bit better so it's kind of odd because like when you look at a lot of like, let's say high intensity athletes, maybe athletes that do basketball, soccer, jujitsu, I would have expected to feel like no energy on the mats. Cause that's what I hear from a lot of people that, you know, cut, cut out their carbs or eat way less carbs, but I didn't feel any of that. So I think there's probably a large mental aspect to it. They're like, oh, I'm not eating carbs, feeling tired. I think that a lot of that might not actually be true. It just might be literally mental.

Yeah. And you're pretty smart with all this stuff too, because you've been doing it for a long time. So I'm sure that maybe when you looked at it, you're like, I'm going to cut back on some carbs, but I ate way more fat. I'm going to have, yeah, I'm going to have more meat. I'm going to eat more fat. Right.

And I think that was Frank's point was like like a lot of times if you're going to eat carbs, a lot, maybe you're not getting the nutrients that you need. Maybe you, uh, eat a couple of French fries or maybe you eat, uh, which you'd get like a little bit of like vitamin C and a little bit of vitamin A and maybe some potassium and some sodium from that. But you're not going to get a whole lot more than that. But if you just ate, simply ate more meat, you would get more nutrients. Uh, you'd probably get a good amount of calories because you'd get more fat and you'd get more protein. So when you start to kind of break it down that way, you know, something like rice, um, just is almost just carbohydrates. It doesn't really have a whole lot else in it. It doesn't mean that you can't eat rice and doesn't mean that you shouldn't ever eat rice.

It just means that, you know, maybe, maybe what we're looking at most of the time is not always the right thing. You know, we're always looking at the macro and maybe we should be looking at the macro and the micro and piecing those together because maybe when, when we piece those together, maybe we have something that would work more efficiently and work faster for us. So anyway, I thought that was some good stuff.

It was. Yeah. I like that. He wasn't, um, I mean, yeah, he did say some crazy things and he does some even crazier things. Unconventional. Unconventional. There you go. Thank you. Unconventional. You're good with the, with the words. Uh, but he wasn't, you know, he said that he doesn't totally write off vegetables and he, you know, he wasn't so like, it wasn't like a religious thing for him. Yeah.

He's just like, this is what's working and this is why it works. You know, he kind of had a little bit of facts to back everything up. He wasn't full board. Everyone should be eating meat. Yeah. Well, and you can also just, you can utilize this knowledge for whatever you need, you know? So like vegetables, somebody might say vegetables

are kind of worthless. And like he pointed out, vegetables can sometimes have anti-nutrients. Um, and they, they certainly don't have a lot of calories, right? But okay, now let's talk about, you know, you're doing a bodybuilding show or you're doing a physique show and you want to lose a bunch of, or let's just say you want to lose a bunch of weight.

And let's say, let's say you weigh 300 pounds. You want to lose weight. Well, shit, a 300 pound person has probably over a long period of time consumed a lot of food, a large volume of food. So now let's say, okay, you know, I want you to, um, with every meal, I want you to have, you know, two big servings of vegetables because you want that person to feel satiated and you want them to get used to their food and you want over a period of time to bring down their caloric intake. And that's where you can utilize vegetables to your advantage.

And furthermore, if you just like them, just eat them. You know, you don't need to make your life that hard. I mean, if, if something is, is messing up your sleep, if something is messing up your stomach, uh, if you're not feeling right, then yeah, you need to like reevaluate that. But in general, if you're feeling pretty good and you like the foods that are in your diet, you're pretty happy with the results you're getting. But I don't think there's a lot of reasons to really overly worry about it. The fight's not against vegetables. The fight's not against fruit. The fight is against trying to pull the reins in a little bit on these processed foods, because those are the things we're going

to tend to overeat. And more than likely, those are going to be the things that give us the body that we don't want. Yeah. It's really just taking a little bit from everything and just keeping it simple. I don't eat a lot. Don't eat a lot of sugar or a crazy amount of it. If you want to have a little bit here and there and a lot of processed packaged foods. I've been staying away from that for a long time now and I just feel overall better. Um, and just add in what feels good. You don't have to totally cut out carbs if you feel better with carbs, but don't eat like 800 grams a day, liquid carbs. It's just, it can be very simple, but you can make it difficult if you do a lot of unnecessary things.

When you used to eat more carbs and even when you design diets for people, what happens when the carbohydrate intake is really high? I would imagine that the fat content has to come down, right? The fat con there there's a guy right now. His name is John, John Schaefer. I think you've, you've seen it before. He's the really white black guy on Instagram, right? He's eating like maybe 400. He he's white and black. That's why, but he looks white, but he's half black. That's why he's the really white black guy. Anyway, um, it should be his Instagram name. It is an Instagram.. Oh, it is his Instagram name. It is. John, I think right now is eating like 90 grams of 90 or maybe a hundred grams of fat a

day, but he's eating like an excess of 490, 500 grams of carbs. He does jujitsu also. He's done shows. He's jacked. And this is like the leanest he's ever been, but the most food he's ever been eating. And that's even a pretty reasonable amount of fat. Like a lot of times you hear even some of these high level bodybuilders that are big, that are, you know, this guy probably weighs what? 200 pounds?

210, actually probably at 210 to 212. And the funny thing is during his, like right now he's doing jujitsu and lifting, but when we were getting ready for his bodybuilding show, I think like a year ago, year and a half ago, um, he was eating, I think like maybe his carbs are at 200 and his fats were down to like 50 to 60 to get that lean and he's doing a lot of low intensity cardio. Um, now obviously he's just doing much more work and for, to actually feel that work, he has to eat a lot of food but he's almost he's close to being show right i've met him before at barbara brigade you've met him yeah so i mean if he were to prep right now like he'd be there in in six weeks right but like he's eating an insane amount of food um so it really just depends on the person and like how much activity they have to feel their workouts that's what i'm like it's also a good idea it's a good idea to get yourself used to eating more food it's a good idea

to get yourself used to eating less food right i mean if you were going to go back to bodybuilding you might want to think about like um you know for lack of a better term you might want to think i'm going to race up my metabolism and i'm going to start to eat more often more frequently uh and maybe you're going to start to do two a day workouts where you got a little bit of cardio in there, a little bit of, uh, pump sessions going on here and there. Right. And so you might just switch stuff up just to throw your body, like just to throw a monkey wrench into it and kind of just see, uh, you know, how you, how you react to it.

But, you know, a lot of people that are trying to adhere to a diet, they just try to always eat less and always eat less and always eat less. And then they start maybe with something like fasting and then they're trying to fast more and more and more and more all the time. And it's like, well, now you might get to a point where you're going to start to rebound back from it. So we need a, you need to kind of like an exit strategy out of these things. Like what, what are the next couple of steps going to look like? And what I shared with a group that I've been helping earlier today, I just said, there's going to, there, you need to have time for everything. You understand that, you know, there's going to be periods of time where you eat less and you'll continue to weigh

less. And there's going to be a point where your weight just stops. You're 185 pounds and you're stuck there and you want to be 165 or whatever. You're just going to be stuck. They'll be stuck there for a little while. It's okay to be stuck. And when you're stuck, that's a good, good time not to give up, but it's a good time to switch gears. It's a good time to say, okay, I fasted. I made some progress. I lost 15 pounds. That was great. Um, and I, and I, you know, got rid of carbohydrates i'm gonna bring fruit back in i'm gonna bring uh i'm gonna bring a cheat meal back in once a week i'm gonna bring you right like just because it's you're playing the long game you know you don't there's no reason for you to weigh 165

tomorrow and even if you did even if we could figure that out you're gonna rebound back hard and you won't be in the shape that you want to be in anyway so because we know that we're playing a long game it might take us a year to get there but that's fine the longer that it takes us to get there the longer you're going to be able to stay there and the easier it's going to be anyway that's all the time we got for today strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later