Barbell Shrugged - Is Your Doctor Lying To You? Debunking Nutrition And Hormonal Myths with Dr. Ken Berry — Muscle Maven Radio Episode #21

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

There are some “universal truths” about food, health, and the wisdom of our doctors that we all take for granted – but in this episode of Muscle Maven Radio, Ashleigh speaks with practicing physician Dr. Ken Berry bout his book, Lies My Doctor Told me, in an effort to debunk some faulty research and flawed advice as well as empower individuals to do their own research, ask questions, and work with their doctors to achieve optimal health—rather than simply taking every piece of information we see at face value. We discuss the complicated topic of hormone health and hormone replacement therapy, we deep dive into different diet approaches including paleo, keto, and carnivore, and we ask deeply important questions like, are BBQ and coffee bad for you or what?      Dr. Ken Berry  is a practicing board certified physician, an Amazon best-selling author, and a passionate advocate of health on his YouTube channel where he has over 600,000 subscribers. Along with his online presence, he is active in his own community of Camden Tennessee where he has been practicing at The Berry Clinic since 2003. Dr. Berry is known for his direct, no nonsense approach to health and wellness. After signing with Victory Belt Publishing House this year, Dr. Berry just released a second edition of his best-selling book Lies My Doctor Told Me. He is also in the process of writing his second book called Common Sense Keto for Type II Diabetes.      Minute Breakdown:    5 – 20 Intro into Dr. Berry and his provocative book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, the problematic culture of symptom-based medicine, and overworked doctors who don’t have time read research or address their patients in a holistic way. How to broach subjects or concerns or ask questions of your doctor without causing problems.      20 - 42 We talk about hormones: why women are more than just estrogen; key points women should be aware regarding hormonal health; issues with synthetic hormone replacements; and ways to improve hormone profiles naturally. Also: are the negative symptoms of menopause avoidable?     42 – 57  A discussion of paleo, keto, and carnivore diets, how they work, and when they can be useful to treat certain health challenges    57 –  Debunking some health myths around meat consumption and preparation (is grilling and blackening your meat bad? Are preserved meats always unhealthy? Can I eat a hot dog without feeling guilty?) We also talk about the flaws in some food research including flawed study design and misinterpretation—purposely or otherwise—of data       Learn more at kenberrymd.com – from there you can access a ton of free information via his YouTube channel and social media.   Subscribe to Butcher Box and get grass-fed and free range meat delivered directly to your door each month - choose from one of their boxes or customize your own, and because you're cutting out the middle-man (the grocery stores) you get super high quality meat at a lower price. For our listeners, you get 20$ off your first box plus a FREE pack of bacon in every single box you order. Say it with me: FREE BACON! Just use the code MAVEN at checkout or head to butcherbox.com/maven  ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/mmr-berry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reach out to me on Instagram @themusclemaven to say hi and tell me what you thought of the podcast, head to ashleighvanhouten.com to sign up for my weekly health and fitness newsletter, and if you enjoyed the episode please share on social media and leave me a nice rating and review on iTunes!

Hey everybody, welcome to Muscle Maven Radio. I am your favorite female Shrugged Collective podcast host, at least I hope so because I'm the only one. So gotta love those default wins. But nonetheless, here we are talking about the scary truth that doctors are wrong sometimes. And sometimes it's up to us to research and learn and figure out what needs to be done to improve our health. But of course, it's a lot more complicated than that, right?

Most doctors aren't out there purposely trying to mess you up or to give you the wrong diagnosis or the wrong treatment. The problem is doctors are overworked. They're pressured to assume a more reactive approach like sick care rather than healthcare, rather than a proactive one that keeps people healthy, because we all know that there's less money in keeping people healthy. And doctors don't always have the time to read the latest diet research or medical literature. And on top of that, there's the fact that a lot of scientific medical research and dietary research is flawed. It's biased. It's improperly misinterpreted. Add to that the fact that most of us don't really see doctors as overworked people,

just like us. We see them as a know-it-all who has the right answer always, and who are we to question them, right? So this is kind of creating a perfect storm of chronic disease and medication in favor of lifestyle management and reactive medicine instead of sort of a more holistic approach and kind of just general dis-ease, right, that we all can experience that can be largely preventable with a little bit more individual work on our end. So that's where my guest comes in. Dr. Barry is a practicing board certified physician, and he just released a second edition of his bestselling book called Lies My Doctor Told Me. And he's also in the process of writing another book, Common Sense Keto. He works with a

lot of folks who are dealing with obesity and type 2 diabetes. So he's got a lot going on. But the book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, is really, really interesting because basically we're going to delve into myths around nutrition and actually hormones as well and a bunch of other things that were actually completely news to me. And I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about these things. So we're talking about hormonal health, we're talking about how to broach new information or questions or concerns with a doctor, and a lot more. And so I really recommend that you, of course, listen to this interview, but also check out the book. It's very valuable. The way he lays it all out and provides rational research-based conclusions, but also reasoning

why maybe we believed the myth in the first place. It's just very kind of clearly articulated. And I think it's very, very useful for anyone who is just trying to kind of take control over their own health. So that's it. But before we dive in, I have excellent news. And the news is that you get to have bacon for life. Bacon for life. I'm just going to keep repeating that until you start drooling and start listening to me. But it's actually relevant to today's podcast. I'm talking about my new sponsor because one of the myths that we talk about with Dr. Berry is whether preserved meat is going to kill you or not, i.e. bacon and a lot of other delicious things

that you'd put on a barbecue. And I think you're going to like the answer. But anyway, my new sponsor, ButcherBox, they are offering my listeners bacon for life. Okay, so let me explain really quick. ButcherBox is a monthly meat subscription service. And I feel like I don't actually even need to explain it any more than that, but I will anyway. So they offer grass fed beef, free range organic chicken, heritage breed pork, wild Alaskan salmon, all of it's humanely raised, never fed antibiotics or hormones, and they basically deliver it directly to your door. So they have four curated mixed boxes of various animals, or you can make your own customized box, whatever you want to receive.

It usually ends up being about 10 pounds of food, which they say is enough for 24 individual servings. Maybe for someone like you or me, it's like half because I've never eaten the proper serving size of anything ever in my life. But still, I mean, 10 pounds is a lot of meat. And it's super high quality, frozen at the peak of freshness. It's shipped to you on dry ice. Voila, you have the best quality meat delivered directly to you.

And because they're cutting out the middleman, the grocery store, you're going to get your meat at a lower cost because they can pass those savings on to you. And they ship nationwide. And I think I mentioned free bacon. So yeah, if you get in on this deal that they are giving my listeners, you get $20 off your first box, plus a free package of bacon at every single box you order, as long as you have your membership. I feel like this is a reoccurring dream that I've had that just came true in real life, just free bacon out of nowhere. But anyway, I've used their service. They've sent me a bunch of stuff. I've had great experiences with them. It couldn't be easier or more delicious. I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to give it a try. So if you do, head to butcherbox.com forward slash

maven, or you can use the code maven at checkout, whatever you order, and get your free bacon for life. I'm just going to keep saying that until you're dreaming about it too. All right, that's it. That's my speech. On to my interview with Dr. Ken Berry. We're finally going to bust some bacon myths. I hope you enjoy the episode. Dr. Berry, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with me

today. I appreciate it. It is a pleasure. It's good to talk to you. So we have to talk about your book, of course, Lies My Doctor Told Me. I read it very recently and I took a lot of notes and I have a lot of specific questions that are probably pretty selfish because they're ones that I'm interested in, but I think that if I'm interested, there are definitely listeners who are interested. But before I kind of dive into some specifics, I'm wondering if you can just kind of give our listeners a bit of a background about why you decided to write the book and what your aim is with putting this book out. Sure. I'm a board-certified family physician, and I've been practicing as a doctor in a very small town in Tennessee for almost 20 years.

And during the course of my training as a medical student, then as a resident, and then in my continued training as a practicing physician, I kept noticing things that doctors would tell their patients, including things that I would tell my own patients. And I would be left wondering, wait, how do I know that's true? Where did that come from? Why did I just say that out loud to another human who has entrusted their health to me? Why did I just say that? And I've always kind of had that self-policing thing built into me. And my favorite question since I was able to talk, my favorite question is why? I think that may have been my first word, why? And so obviously adults get sick of hearing that. And most doctors get sick of a doctor like me who kept saying, why? Where did you get that? Where's the research? But I think those are valid, mandatory questions. If you have taken an oath to, you know, take care of the health of other

humans, why needs to be your favorite word? Why did I just say what I said? Why did that specialist say what he or she said? Those are mandatory questions to be a good doctor. And I think it's important too, and this is why you made this book available and accessible to non-doctors like us normal people who are reading it and able to understand it, because we should be asking that question too. I think it's been too long, yeah, that we've just been like, well, let's just trust whatever this person's telling us because they're the doctor and they're smarter than we are. And I think being able to sort of be empowered to even just ask questions is really, really important. So absolutely. And I love the way the book is laid out. Because it's really, it's really clear, it sets up like

what these these lies or these myths are, and why it matters to get the right answer. Like if that that lie is true, why that that's important, and if it's false, why that's important. And you lay out support for that lie, if there is any, the common sense about why this maybe should be questioned. And I also like that you kind of put in the book, the do as I do, which a lot of people, you're really kind of walking the talk, right? Which a lot of people don't do. A lot of doctors certainly don't do. So I really like the way it's laid out just super clearly, chapter by chapter. Here's the standard kind of knowledge that's been put out there. And here's why we need to question it. And here's how to question it. And here's how to address it. I

just, I thought that was really, really clear and accessible for people. So how did you decide to kind of lay it out that way? Well, basically, big systems work the most efficiently when there are authorities. And that authority will issue a proclamation from on high, and then all the followers will just accept that as gospel and follow it. That's how a large system works. But as we both know, over the last 60 years, that's the way the system in the U.S. has been working. But everybody's been getting sicker and fatter and more metabolically unwell. So it works on a system level, but on an individual human level, that's a terrible way to practice medicine and to practice nutrition and to practice the care and feeding of a human being that this doesn't

work. And that's why we have all these epidemics of chronic disease. And so I knew that if I wrote a book just to doctors and used, you know, the vernacular of the medical community, I would only have a very tiny audience because doctors are, we're kind of like mountain lions. We like to get on our own mountain and be left alone. We don't like to be told what to do. And so doctors wouldn't hear this. And so I decided very early when I decided to make it my mission to reverse the epidemics of obesity and type two diabetes in the world. And you may not have known that, but that's literally what gets me out of bed every day is I'm sick and tired of the world being fat and sick and tired.

That's got to stop because, I mean, we're the alpha species on this planet. We shouldn't all be sick and have to take a handful of pills in order to play that role. And so I decided very early to use the voice of common sense and reason and just common plain English, medicine in plain words, so to speak, so that the average person could understand the concepts and they could actually shift their own paradigm. They didn't have to wait 25 years for the American Diabetes Association to start telling people, hey, maybe you should cut the carbs a little bit. But so people could start this in their own journey and they could start today. And that's kind of how I was thinking as

I wrote each chapter of the book, is that after you've read this chapter, you will not only understand why we're here, but how to get away from here. Because here presently is a very unhealthy place to be in the United States and most of the developed world. Yeah, it's super helpful. not necessarily conspiracy theory, but the systems put in place that almost seem to encourage doctors to not want to learn and address health issues proactively, because it's just kind of depressing. I'd rather spend more time talking about the answers and the ways that we can educate people and the ways you're doing that. But I just have to ask the question, how can we get doctors to be better and to educate themselves when they are chronically strapped for time, maybe feel personally attacked by questions that are asked,

doctors who can make more money by being treatment oriented rather than functional, like functional medicine oriented? How can we change the system when it's so set up for doctors to not want to treat people as people and holistically? And, you know, how do we do it? Yeah, that's an excellent question. And that's a question that vexes me on a daily basis. You may have heard of Nina Teicholz, and she has an organization called the Nutrition Coalition, and they're trying to change this from the policy level at the federal government level. And I pray for them and wish them the best, but I don't think they're going to get the first base with that strategy because, as you just said, doctors, we don't like to be told what to do. We've got, you know, EBM, which is supposed to stand for evidence-based medicine,

but I think most of the time it stands for eminence-based medicine. So we've got people from Harvard and Yale and the Mayo Clinic giving us guidelines about how to practice medicine. And so the average doctor is going to listen to that and they're not going to listen to anything else. And so I decided very early, I'm not going to be able to change this from the top. That's never going to happen. This is going to have to be a grassroots movement of patients basically educating their doctor. So it's kind of the ultimate ninja maneuver. I'm going to actually start at the bottom and help the lowest of the low, so to speak, actually happen to the powers that be. And I've had many patients come to me and many people on social media come to me and say, you know,

I was scared to death to mention this to my doctor that I'm eating keto or carnivore or paleo or whatever. But I felt so much better. And I kept thinking of all the other patients in the waiting room. These people are suffering and they don't know what I know. And so I decided to talk to my doctor about it. And then you, the, you know, these people get the full range of feedback from their doctor. They get, you know, the, the know-it-all doctor saying, well, that's dumb. I'm the doctor. I'll tell you and you do what I say. And then you also have the doctors who say, well, I've been hearing about this keto, whatever thing, I'm going to look that up and we'll talk about that. And so their patients are literally shifting their doctor's paradigm, which you would never think would be

possible. But it actually is very possible because for many of the laws of human nature, number one, doctors are just people. Right. And so people don't like to look stupid. And so when you start talking about a way of eating and a doctor's never heard of it, they don't like that. But then when you add to that, oh, and I've also lost 87 pounds and reversed my type two diabetes and I no longer have fatty liver and my eczema went completely away. If a doctor hears one, one patient say something like that, they're going to ignore that because that's just, that's, that's background noise. But when they've heard the 10th patient say that, they're going to be curious. And when they've heard the hundredth patient tell them a story like that, they're going to be like,

what the hell? I've got to look up this paleo, keto, carnivore, whatever the hell. So there must be something here that I'm missing. And that's when you just shifted that doctor's paradigm. And once they've done some Googling and watched some YouTube videos and heard all these patient testimonies, the bell will have been rung and they cannot unhear that. And so my mission is to change all of this all the way up to the top, but I'm going to do it from the bottom up, not the other way around. Yeah. I mean, I suppose the answer is similar to the answer in so many other areas of life where we're trying to create positive change in ourselves and in others is about being patient and being, I guess, whether they're doctors or your family members or your friends, it's usually not the best way to go about it. But doing research, making information available, answering questions when people express interest, like all of these things. And with doctors too, I suppose

it's like, it's one of these like quantity over, or quality over quantity kind of situations. Like they're obviously strapped for time and busy and trying to do a million things. But if we can kind of reframe, what are we in this world to do to make people feel better, to improve people's health, to help people? And if we all kind of have that attitude, we can maybe take things less personally and instead just kind of be a bit more open-minded and at least willing to learn, right? That's the hope. Absolutely. And when you improve your own health, you have, by definition, made our planet a better place and a healthier place. And then also you set a great example for your family and your friends. And when enough people have went down that pathway and started that journey, even your hard-headed doctor is going

to take notice when enough of his patients have ignored his dietary advice, his or her dietary advice, and have done something completely upside down and backwards. And it worked. When enough patients have done that, the doctor is going to listen. They have no choice. Yeah, I love that. I think that's so good for people to hear the idea because people don't frame it that way that improving your health is making the world a healthier place.

People do not look at it that way. But it's so important. And especially, and I want to get into this because a lot of my listeners, not exclusively, but I'm really trying to reach out to women, because I'm a woman in this space. And I think that that we need to kind of address women's issues as well. Like, you know, it tends to be like the baseline of like research and understanding for health is generally applied to, to men. And I think we need to kind of open that up a little bit more, too. But I think especially women and mothers and, and women with families, like they're so busy thinking about other people's health. They're not thinking about their own and the impact that that has on their family and their community and the world around them when they take care of

themselves. And taking care of yourself is not selfish because you're helping other people through your own health. I think that's something that people really need to pay attention to. Absolutely. When you're on the airplane and it's going down, you putting your oxygen mask on first is not a selfish act. Then you can actually have the energy and have the consciousness to take care of the other people around you. You don't wait to last to put your oxygen mask on. You can't help anybody like that. And I think that's such an important point for women to understand. And women have kind of got the dirty end of the stick in many, many ways, because as you just said, you know, women feel like they're the caregiver and they have to take care

of everybody. But if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. That's true. But if mama ain't healthy, first of all, she's setting a terrible example for everybody in the family because we look up to mom and we try to, even if it's unconscious, we wind up doing what mom did. And you can see this in adult smokers who, when they were the children of smokers, they hated smoking. They hated the way their house smelled. They hated inviting their friends over because the house stunk and mom was smoking. Then they wound up, they grew up to be smokers because we follow in mom's footsteps, whether we want to or not.

And so by mom putting on her oxygen mask first and taking charge of her own health and taking the time and the effort to be healthy, she is teaching her children and the rest of her family. This is how we behave in this family. And that is so important. And then secondly, 95% of all the medical research that's been done has been done on old white men. And that's, that's well known in the medical community. And so there are certain drugs that just don't work for African-Americans the same way they work for Caucasians. And we're now starting to understand that. And so we can't give them the same guidelines for blood pressure medicine or diabetes medication. And the same goes for women. A lot of the research that

doctors think means something is actually meaningless for women because there's not a single study that included female participants in the study. And so we actually don't know how this medicine will act or react in a female patient because there's been no research whatsoever. Yeah, we've got to change that. But again, I think that your book is helping with that too. And that's why I want to kind of skip around a little bit in terms of some of the notes that I took in the book, because I think there's a lot of nutrition information that I want to get into. But I want to skip to chapter 11, where you're talking about how women are more than just estrogen, because this is related to the topic we were just talking

about and how when we're talking about hormonal health for men and women, we tend to think testosterone for men, estrogen for women, and not consider that it's obviously much more complicated. It's generally more complicated for women as it always is in life. But that both genders have to have, first of all, way more going on than just estrogen or testosterone, but that we all have all of them. So I'd love for you to kind of just get into that chapter and why some kind of key points that women should be aware of when we're talking about hormonal health. Sure. So when a woman is in her 40s, 50s, or 60s, and she starts to go through the inevitable change in life and starts to dip miss the signs of menopause for years until the woman finally starts to have hot flashes and night sweats. And then every doctor knows, oh,

it's menopause. But the problem is, is that the doctor will ignore the menopausal state for often a decade. The woman will be going through obvious menopausal changes, but nothing will be said about it. It's just, oh, you're, you know, you're a mom and a wife and you got a job and you're busy and you're tired. That's just what's going on with you. And that's actually not the case whatsoever. But then the most dastardly thing of all is when the doctor finally realizes that his patient is in menopause, he will, he will, he will give her an estrogen-like patent medication like Primpro or Primrin or Estrace or Estratest.

And these things are not real estrogen, first and foremost. They are patented molecules, and you cannot get a patent on just a naturally occurring molecule like estrogen. And so by definition, none of those pills are actually estrogen. They're fake estrogen. And that's why they increase your risk of breast cancer and ovarian cancer and heart attack is because they're not actually real estrogen. Number one. Does that mean, sorry, just to interrupt you really quickly, does that mean then that your body on some level recognizes that it's not the actual hormone that it needs? Like it recognizes that it can't process it the same way? Or is it because... That's right. It just doesn't fit into

the estrogen receptor like it should. It fits enough to partially activate the receptor, but then it also is different enough that it has different effects in the body that estrogen just never does. And so that's the first and foremost thing is every woman, every time I speak to a group of women, I tell them never, ever take an estrogen by mouth because by definition, that is not real estrogen. And even though the average doctor does not realize that, they think it's estrogen, but it's not. It can't be, or you couldn't have gotten a patent on it, right? And so that's number one. Number two is doctors completely ignore the fact that women need testosterone and they need progesterone as they get older. And all three of these hormones need to be bioidentical. They need to be the actual real hormone molecule. They don't need to be estrogen-like or testosterone-like franken molecules that some big pharma company was able to get a patent on.

That's going to always lead to side effects that you didn't want. But if you optimize a woman's hormones with bioidentical hormones and you optimize all three of them, because in reality, the two hormones that leave first in menopause are testosterone and progesterone. And so a woman will notice that she can't sleep, that she has much more anxiety and worry, and she's starting to gain weight in the middle. Those are menopausal symptoms, but estrogen doesn't fix those. It might help them, but it doesn't fix them like progesterone and testosterone will. And so when a woman finds a provider who's able to optimize her hormones bioidentically with all three hormones, then she doesn't increase her risk of any side effect. She just goes back to

feeling like she felt 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. And I've had so many women in my clinic who would come in on Primpro or Primrin, and I just stopped that immediately. And I optimized their hormones with the bioidentical trio of all three of them. And they feel better than they felt in a decade. And then also doctors will routinely forget the adrenal hormones like DHEA. They'll forget vitamin D, which is a pro hormone. It's not actually even a vitamin. It's a hormone. And it works in the hormone cascades in hundreds of different ways to make a woman feel like she should feel. And these things are huge deals, but they're not even on the radar of the average doctor who just wants to sit down and write a prescription for a

pill on his prescription pad. All right. I'm already learning a lot about menopause because, of course, all women, even if we're not quite close to that stage of our life yet, it's still something that's like another fun thing on the horizon that we get to deal with at some point in our life cycle. How much of, and I know that menopause manifests itself very differently in different individuals and they have different symptoms and different levels of severity of some of those symptoms. But how much can women generally affect any negative symptoms of menopause through lifestyle factors? Because if we're talking about things like testosterone, how much can we expect to improve any symptoms through, you know, better eating, weightlifting, like exercise, movement, better sleep, things like that? Is that something that

is even? Absolutely. Okay. It's huge. It's huge, but there's no money to be made in it, so nobody's going to talk about it, okay? but the average woman and man, for that matter, can greatly improve their hormone cascade by eating the proper human diet. And that's what I'm coming to talk about more and more. And so let's segue off into diet for a second. I'm a big proponent of low carb, keto, carnivore, some variation of that. And I consider all of those to be subsets of a paleo diet. I think at one point in my life, I was eating paleo about seven years ago, and I got, I felt much better, both hormonally and metabolically, but I had to turn down the

carbohydrate knob even more and get rid of all the grains, including quinoa, which I love. But when I kept turning down the carbohydrate knob, I noticed in my labs that my testosterone kept getting better. And I've actually seen that in hundreds of my female patients as well, that when a woman adopts a proper human diet and stops poisoning herself with all the sugars and all the grains and all the industrial seed oils, her hormone profile improves naturally. And I've seen that in so many patients. It's just not open for debate. It absolutely happens. You make your hormones worse. You make your menopausal symptoms worse. You make the onset of menopause sooner by poisoning yourself with processed sugar grains and industrial seed oil so there's no doubt about that and so and you may have heard of the the the peculiar phenomenon of keto babies and

i've actually had four women come to me completely pissed off because they were 52 or 48, in one case, 54 years old and pregnant. No. Yeah. And she's like, dude, I stopped taking birth control, you know, four years ago. But I started eating this stupid keto diet and I started feeling better. I lost weight. I was more attracted to my husband. I was more attracted to my husband because her hormones naturally got better. So her sex drive got better and she got knocked up at 54.

And I'm like, congratulations. Don't blame me for that. Right. I have nothing to do with that directly. But that happens very often because women's hormone profiles just go back to normal when they stop poisoning themselves with the standard American diet. That is so interesting. Okay. And I also think exercise plays a huge role in that as well. So many women are terrified that

they will become muscle bound if they even look at a weight, much less lift weights. But that's absolutely not the case. Any woman who tries to compete at that level knows that you can't just lift a weight every now and then and get muscle bound. It does not work that way. You have to work out for years in order to develop that much muscle. But when a woman does do some sort of weight bearing exercise, and it can be body weight or free weights or machine weights, it doesn't matter. She's going to raise her testosterone, not in a bad way, but in a good, healthy way. And she's going to raise her human growth hormone, which is vital to staying young and repairing the damage that's done

just by living a modern life. All that stuff is vital. And so for me, diet and exercise are the bedrock on which hormonal health is built. Yeah, the lifting weights making you bulky is a personal crusade of mine, because I have, you know, I have a background in a lot of athletics, and I've done bodybuilding, I've done CrossFit, I've done all these things. And I keep telling people, women who are asking

me, I'm like, dude, I am trying to get as big and bulky as possible. This is how I turned out, like you are not going to happen upon it accidentally, don't worry about it, pick up a weight and see how you feel. Okay, but I do. Okay, so I have more questions about the hormonal side of it. So would you say, one of the things I think that we're learning as we learn more about nutrition and even like ancestral health and all these things is that what we maybe traditionally consider to be the natural process of aging, which is to say, we have aches and pains, we don't move as well, we feel stiff in the morning, we start getting fatter around our bellies, we are tired, all of these things that we think it's just we're getting old, right?

We are starting to learn that that's not necessarily the case. And that feeling, feeling run down or feeling sore or feeling old isn't, isn't necessary to getting older, right? There are some inevitabilities, of course, that we are maybe not going to perform or look exactly the same at 60 as we did at 20. But the course of aging doesn't have to be as sort of sad as we maybe in the past have thought it to be. Is that also true for menopause? Like, are the sort of negative things that we associate with menopause, are they a necessary natural part of a woman's aging process? Is that something? No, not at all. That's an excellent question, because that's absolutely not true at all. When a woman stops poisoning herself with the standard diet and gets off the couch and gets moving, the onset of menopause

gets pushed back by, in some cases, almost a decade. And then the actual symptoms of menopause, because menopause is inevitable. It's going to happen. But nobody, no woman really cares about menopause if her symptoms are mild and easily ignorable. Because as we both know, women are great at ignoring things, right? Yeah, I guess so. If you're just having a little hot flash and a little, you know, if it's a 10% symptom instead of 110% symptom, it's not a big deal. And so that's why many of our grandmothers and great grandmothers are like, oh, honey, yeah, it's just a thing. You just get over it. Because back when they were younger, they were eating a much lower carbohydrate, much higher fat diet.

And so they didn't have the severe symptoms. And menopause didn't start in the late 30s like it's starting to starting to happen with many women today who are poisoned by the diet that they are fed by, you know, restaurants and the grocery stores, because they're so inflamed, and they have such a high body fat percentage, it totally screws up their hormone profile. Okay, that's good. I think that's another good thing for us to pay attention to and internalize. And I think it's also useful to mention to all of the women listening that are maybe 20, 30, 40 years away from menopause and are like, I don't care about that yet, that this lifestyle that we're talking about also can

help lessen, like, the bad things that come around with menstrual cycles. And you can have, like, just sort of healthier cycles and the way you sort of, like, deal with everything on a monthly basis can be alleviated or improved upon by having a better diet and lifestyle too, right? Yeah, polycystic ovarian syndrome is caused by insulin resistance and carbohydrate overdose. That's what literally causes PCOS. And also many women's dysmenorrhea or the just, you know, their, their menstrual symptoms every month are so severe that they lose a day of work or they, you know, they just, they have to just take their ibuprofen and zone out for a day or two, or it mentally it's so bad that they

have to take something for, for premenstrual dysmorphia. All of those things tend to go away and you're still going to have your period and you're still going to have some some discomfort with that that's just normal that's how humans are built but it's not going to be that severe day-ending you know 48 hours of cramps and super heavy bleeding and headache and migraines it doesn't have to be that severe it's only that severe because you're poisoning yourself with the processed carbohydrates. Okay. So when someone, when a woman comes to you with either maybe really painful periods, or maybe they're going through menopause, and we're looking to address this not with these

synthetic hormones, or just like pumping them with fake estrogen, we want to look at all of the hormones, and we want to look at lifestyle factors too. How do you, and I know, again, this is sort of like a high level general question, but like, how do you go about this? Can people go off of their synthetic hormones, cold turkey? Do you say, let's start you with some lifestyle stuff first and then we'll do some blood work and then we'll adjust the hormones? Do you, how, what's the process look like?

It's a stepwise approach. And when a woman comes to me with either menstrual symptoms or perimenopausal symptoms, I do this really weird thing and I ask them about their diet. And most women are like, what does that have to do with it? And I'm like, oh, it has everything to do with it. And then we open that conversation and have that conversation. And some women are willing to immediately start to improve their diet. Other women are not interested in that. And so then the next the next step is a complete history and physical exam, of course, but then a complete check of their hormones, not just checking the estrogen and TSH, just the one test for the thyroid, because very often women suffer for decades from hypothyroidism, and they're never properly diagnosed because the doctor just checks the one lab. And so many doctors are worried that the insurance company or even the medical board will yell at them if they order too many labs.

And doctors have got to get over that because unless you check a woman thoroughly and do a comprehensive lab panel, you're going to miss lots of things and you're not going to be a good doctor for that woman. And so it's a stepwise approach, but it all starts with diet. It all starts with that because I can optimize a woman's hormones bioidentically and get all of her hormones exactly where they should be number number wise and there she's not going to feel like she wants to feel if she still continues to poison herself with the carbohydrates okay so if we get our lifestyle and our diet in order and we're still for whatever reason um experiencing some some hormonal imbalances.

And you're talking about bioidentical hormones and leveling those things out. What exactly does that mean? What are you doing? How are we supplementing? So it has to be bioidentical. It cannot be a patented hormone replacement, or it's by definition not the real molecule. And so what you want to do is you want to get your levels back up to the levels they were when you were in your early 20s. And you also want to use the same exact molecule that your body made back when you were in

your early 20s. And that includes real progesterone and real estrogen and real testosterone. And so we try to get those levels in the upper limit of normal. And I'm not about turning a woman into a female Russian bodybuilder. That's not what I'm about. I'm about optimizing her and making her the you that you used to be. And that's exactly how I put it. These hormones are not going to make you somebody you're not. They're just going to turn you back into the you you used to be. And that's what most women want. And so it would come with fixing the diet, fixing their activity level, and then optimizing their hormone levels. And that also includes the adrenal hormones and

the thyroid hormones, if that's necessary. And I would imagine this probably takes a little bit of, to a certain extent, some sort of baseline testing trial and error. Because if, for example, you don't have the records of what my hormone panel looked like when I was in my early 20s, you can kind of guess based on what a healthy woman's panel should look like. But I guess it's, and it's individual too, like maybe some women naturally have higher testosterone and need more of that. And some, you know, there's, there's like lots going on there. So I guess that would take a lot of, like, how long does that normally take if you're working with a client to kind of get these things straightened out? Usually within three months, we can have her optimized and basically, you know, have recreated

the her that used to exist. And so you're right, it matters what your levels were when you were younger, but 99.9% of the time, we don't know those levels. And so basically, I'll start a woman on a bioidentical regimen that makes sense for her age and for her body fat percentage and for her body size and for the activity level she's looking for. And then we'll continue to recheck her lab work and then, you know, have repeat visits to kind of check up on her symptoms. How are you feeling? How are you sleeping? How's your energy level? How's your strength? You know, just how do you feel? Because when your hormones are optimized, you feel great. It's hard not to feel great. Even if you're, if you Even if your social and family life is in a mess,

you're still able to cope with that and you're still able to have meaningful change because you've got the strength and the stamina and the constitution to stand up to those problems instead of hiding from them in the bedroom. Right. Okay. And then this is also, we're going to switch topics soon so that any of the men who are still listening to this can feel like they're included. But this is also a process that I'm assuming is something that, like you said, it sort of takes a or assistance ends and the lifestyle factors have to continue. Because I guess one thing that I hear a lot from men who are using like hormone replacement therapy or have maybe had a history of steroid use or things like that human growth hormone, and there's like this kind of fear that if you have been doing this stuff in the past, you have to keep doing it to keep your levels healthy, to feel good.

And you kind of feel dependent on these things. But I'm hoping, I'm assuming, especially for women, that's not necessarily the case, right? Well, and so as the woman goes down this road and as she's improving her diet and becoming more active and putting on some attractive, supple muscle, she's going to be optimizing her hormones naturally. And so I do have some women who are able to stop the bioidentical part of this completely because they're doing it with their diet and their lifestyle. But some people, men and women, have to continue with the optimization because their gonadal tissue has just played out and said, that's it, I'm done. And I tell men and women this as well. When you're ready to feel and look and act like a washed up old person and go sit in the recliner and be done with your life, then you can stop worrying about your hormones. But as long as you want to be vibrant and vigorous and be out

there running and gunning and doing what you want to do, you've got to have your hormones optimized. If you're able to do that with only diet and lifestyle alone, then hot damn. But if you're not able to, there's not a thing in the world wrong with optimizing you with bioidentical hormones for the rest of your life. And I have women in their late 80s who come see me every three or four months, depending for their hormone pellets or for refills on their hormone cream, because they don't want to go back to feeling like that old worthless woman that they felt like before they had their hormones fixed. Okay. All right. Hormones, very important. And men and women work out, lift weights, eat properly, don't eat a lot of sugar, don't eat processed gross carbs.

And that's a great head start for 99.9% of the population, right? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Okay, got it. All right. So now let's get into some fun food questions that are applicable to everybody. And you've touched on this a little bit with the higher fat, lower carb, keto carnivore, sort of whole foods, paleo-ish approach. And there's a lot that falls under that spectrum. But right now, are you eating like a mostly carnivore diet? Yeah, I'm what's considered a hyper carnivore. Well over 90% of my diet is animal products and mostly red meat and organ meat. That's what I've been living on for the past 14 months.

And I started it as a one month challenge because on keto, and when I say keto, I mean a whole food, real food, no products keto. I basically was eating a lot of fatty meat and a little bit of veg. That was my keto. And I felt much better, but I still had a few lingering things that were bugging me. And so I thought, well, I'll try just a month of nothing but fatty meat, butter, full fat, real cheese, and some organ meats and eggs and see how I feel. And at the end of that month, I felt so much better that I thought I'm going to do this for another month. And so I've kept extending it by a month

at the end of each month because I've yet to find a drawback. I've yet to find a way that I don't feel my best by eating that way. And I do not think that a carnivore diet is best for everyone. I think your DNA matters a lot. I think if your ancestors have spent the last 100,000 years at the equator, you're probably going to be able to tolerate more vegetables and maybe some berries and maybe some fruit and be optimally healthy and metabolically healthy. But if you're like me, all of your ancestry has lived

at the very northern latitudes for the last hundred thousand years and then also have a very high percentage of Neanderthal. And they were they were notoriously carnivores if they had their choice. I do better on almost all fatty meat. That's where I that's where I do best as a human. And so that's why I talk about a spectrum of the proper human diet. You may be able to do great with a hundred grams a day of real vegetable carbohydrates, and then a little bit of fat, some eggs, some fish, some oysters, whatever. And that may, that may be the proper diet for you. There are other humans, however, who need to eat almost zero grams of carbohydrates a day. And I'm one of those. If I

eat even if I eat 10 total grams of carbs a day and that was veg, I would start to gain a little weight and start to get puffy and my joints would start to ache. And I think I think our DNA makes us different enough that you have to kind of dial the carbohydrate knob up and down until you find the sweet spot that talks to your DNA and perhaps to your gut bacteria as well. Okay, cool. Yeah, I took that 23andMe test and it told me I was higher than average percentage of Neanderthal too. I actually like the term you used, hypercarnivore, but in a slightly different way. Personally, I think I could be called hypercarnivore because I really enjoy organ meats and I also have a hard time like staying still.

So maybe the same title, but for different reasons, we could be called hypercarnivore. No, but I think this is a really interesting conversation to have. I've dabbled with sort of the keto approach, the carnivore approach. I try to do sort of a paleo-ish approach, which is just as you've kind of alluded to sort of lower carbs, certainly than standard American diet, but mostly just focusing on trying to have as much whole foods, whole and processed foods as possible. And I kind of lean more towards like a lot of people are talking about plant-based paleo or plant-based keto, where it's whole foods, but it's the majority of what you're eating is plants.

And I kind of tend to go the opposite direction. So I'm more of like meat-based paleo. So I do eat fruits and vegetables, but the higher percentage of what I'm eating is high-quality fatty meats and organ meats. And that seems to be working for me. But my question to you is don't you miss textural differences in what you're eating? Don't you just want to eat something crunchy sometimes? Yeah, I do. And if I do, I eat bacon or I eat chicken skin. All right. Both very crispy and crunchy. And I think what you're speaking to is like cravings. Yes. And even when I was keto and I was probably eating 20 grams a day,

total carbs with some veg, I would still have cravings for the old stuff, you know? And so I tell people, if you were a previous drug addict, if you used to be a, you know, you used to do crack all the time, you can't, you can't. And so if I said, Oh, here, here's some extended release cocaine, it doesn't hit your system as fast, right? It's, it's much, it's a more complex cocaine than just smoking crack. And so you can, that, that, that's healthy. You should do that. Are you kidding me? You don't think that that's going to call the demons? Of course it is. And so I think for many people who used to be carbohydrate addicts, which I think is a real thing, sugar addiction is absolutely a real thing. We have to understand that all carbohydrates, every single one of them, even the carbohydrates in non-GMO organic broccoli that you eat raw, the carbohydrates in that still break down into what? Glucose and fructose. It's the same exact molecules.

They're just packaged differently. And for some few people, they never truly get rid of those food cravings and the sugar craving until they've done a month or two of a hyper carnivore or carnivore. And for me, that's the truth. Like literally 10 years ago, hot fudge cake was my thing that was it that was my man yeah and so if you set one of those in front of me i was going to eat it any time of the day i would eat that for breakfast if i had access to it but after these months of carnivore i literally am not even the tiniest bit triggered you could sit down the most beautiful hot fudge cake right now and i'd'd be like, literally, I have no desire for it whatsoever. Nothing broke my carbohydrate cravings.

And those snacky snacky food cravings better than just getting rid of all the products. And so I don't eat any paleo products or keto products. And I hope I don't step on your sponsors toes. I don't know who sponsors this. But well, actually, I don't care if I step on their toes because I'm with you. This needs to be a whole food, real food thing. Yes. There is no place in my diet and no place in any human's diet for products because anytime you try to take real food and ramp up the production process so that you can mass produce that, it stops being real food. And that goes for every single paleo product, every single keto product, Atkins bars, Atkins shakes. All that stuff is processed crap. Now, is it less bad than a big glass of Dutch chocolate milk?

Yeah, it's less bad than that. Is it good? No, it's not good. Is it okay to have that as an occasional treat? Sure, why not? You know, once a year, thousands of years ago, we'd find a honey tree and we would wear that honey out. But that happened once a year.

And the berries got ripe once a year. So we would eat those and we would eat a ton of them. But we did it once a year. So we would eat those and we would eat a ton of them, but we did it once a year. So I think an occasional treat's fine. It's no big deal unless it's going to call back your carbohydrate addiction that you used to have, then you need to avoid them completely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think what you're, you're touching on here, which is important for a lot of people is the idea of like being able to pick your battles and know your triggers and realize that willpower is a finite thing and that you can only say no and say no to temptation so much so it's

it's like yeah picking your battles and figuring out what's important in your life and i think that this goes back also to the concept of like metabolic flexibility which you know there we can talk about people who have autoimmune issues or specific challenges that make it quite clear that they really should be eating a certain way. And that eating any other way is going to be very detrimental. And really kind of, for lack of a better word, dumb for them to eat, because they're they have specific challenges and issues that they need to overcome. For the vast majority of us, we have a lot more flexibility. And we also have a lifestyle that we're trying to figure out balance between

enjoying our life, being social with other people, doing things that aren't the best for our health, but that really make us happy, you know, from time to time, and then also trying to have our optimal health. So having that flexibility of maybe we're keto most of the time, and then also trying to have our optimal health. So having that flexibility of maybe we're keto most of the time, maybe we're low carb most of the time, maybe we never we drink once in a blue moon. But when we do, we want to be able to set ourselves up so that these little treats or off days don't completely send us off the path, right? So I think that's something but is that something then, for people who are maybe doing a keto or carnivore or low carb thing? Would you what are your thoughts on kind of purposefully putting in either refeeds or off days or things that sort of

challenge your metabolic flexibility and make sure that you are still sort of adaptable and flexible and can kind of handle whatever your life throws at you? So great question. Two things. First of all, even a carnivore, 100% carnivore like me, I hope no one's implying that I couldn't spend, I could like tomorrow, I could eat nothing but Cheetos and jelly donuts. I wouldn't die tomorrow. I could do that. So I would, I would posit that I am as metabolically flexible as I have ever been because there was a time in my life where I could not have just lived on fatty meat. I couldn't have done that. I would have been, I would have had withdrawals because I had carbohydrate addiction. And so I would have felt terrible eating just fatty meat, but now I feel great doing that. But also felt terrible eating just fatty meat. But now I

feel great doing that. But also if I were just, you know, if I fell in a well and the only thing I had access to was Twinkies and Ding Dongs, I would be just fine. I would not starve to death and die. I could eat those things and they would keep me from starving. So I feel like I'm as metabolically flexible as I've ever been. And I think all humans are that way. When we become fat adapted, we can always go back and live on carbs. That's kind of a default. We can always do that. It doesn't mean you should. And then my second point would be, would you tell a former alcoholic, you know, you should have an off day and every Friday just have a couple of shots of vodka. You would never say that. You would never say, or, and you would also

never say, well, I mean, you were, you know, you were an alcoholic and you drank a fifth of vodka daily for years, but you know, beer is a more complex alcohol. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's not as much alcohol. So probably every Friday you could have an off day and just have a couple of beers. I would never tell an alcoholic that because that's ignorant advice. And I think many people, I don't think that that doesn't make that alcoholic more alcohol flexible to do that. I think that's just dumb advice and they should avoid alcohol 100% all the time. And I think there is a subset, either small or large, of people who should consider carbohydrates almost like alcohol. Because, yeah, you can live on them, but that doesn't mean you want to, and that doesn't mean

you should. And so if people want to say they're cycling, if that's how they want to describe their carbohydrate addiction, I guess that's okay. But I have yet to see any meaningful research or any meaningful patient outcomes that show me that an occasional carb up is a good thing. I don't, I have yet to see any meaningful research or any meaningful patient outcomes that show me that an occasional carb up is a good thing. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think there's any positive benefit to it other than it's fun to carb up every now and then, just like it's fun to have a couple of shots of Jack every now and then. Right. Yeah.

Okay. That's a good point. I mean, I think that, you know, to play devil's advocate with that a little bit, of course, what you're saying is true. But because food is so and I agree with you about the sugar addiction being a thing. I think I've actually experienced that myself. And I know what my triggers are through through years of self actualization and experimentation and understanding. But food is a uniquely challenging addiction to address because no one in the world needs booze to live or cocaine, but we all, on some level, to some degree, need food to live. And it can be very subjective where we fall between dysfunctional eating, disordered eating, and just, I don't know, what's fun or what's enjoyable for us. So what some people may consider a food addiction, other people might consider, well, I have a specific diet because I'm training for something

or whatever. So it can be kind of tough sometimes to pinpoint what we need to do versus what we want to do, what is actually damaging us versus what is just kind of harmless fun and treats every once in a while. And I think that's why this journey for health and the optimal individual diet is such a tricky one and such an individual one and such a sometimes long one to come to because there isn't one, as you said earlier, there isn't one, as you said earlier, there isn't one diet or one answer that works for everybody. We need to really do the hard work of experimenting with ourselves and knowing ourselves and understanding what is ideal and what's problematic and what makes us feel and perform our best,

right? Absolutely. I totally agree. And whether your proper diet is an ovo-lacto-pescetarian diet or whether your diet that's best for you is just a 100% carnivore diet, you've got to figure that out. And really what that all comes down to is you're adjusting the carbohydrate knob. That's what you're doing. And so the ovo-lacto-pescetarian may eat 100 grams of carbs a day, and they're fine with that. And their DNA likes that, their gut bacteria likes that. But then I think there's

another subset of the population that needs to turn down the carbohydrate knob to carnivore, and that's where they're going to do best. And we all have to tweak and find that. And many of us will come to low carb and say, oh, no, I'm great with 100 grams a day. I feel great. But the problem is, is you don't know how great you would feel if you stopped the alcohol completely. And that's why I encourage everybody who's doing this is to do a month of carnivore. Just do it. So you can check that off your bucket list. You've already, you've done that. You've tried that. And if you don't feel better at the end of that month, then add back in some good whole food, real food carbs, and find the carb level where you feel your best. But until you try it both ways, you really don't

know. Yeah. Okay, so I have some specific nutrition questions that I want to ask you that you addressed in the book. Because as someone who spends a lot of time reading and researching and interviewing smart people like you, I tend to feel like I know a lot of stuff. And I was reading stuff in your book that I was like, whoa, I did not know this, or I totally believed this lie. So I want to raise a couple questions here. And one of them, especially for us meat eating folks, I think that is important to address. I think it was chapter 23 about grilling meat meat and how grilling meat and barbecuing causes cancer and carcinogenic byproducts. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, absolutely. So what we're trying to do is mimic how our ancestors have lived for the last

250,000 years, because that's how long we think we've been on this planet as the species Homo sapiens sapiens. It's 200,000 to 250,000 years. That's a long damn time. And so a lot of people will want to go back and say, well, they eat bread in the Bible. So therefore, it's ancestrally appropriate. But you're talking about 9,000 years, 10,000 years, that's a blip on the 250,000 year spectrum. And so what we're trying to do is mimic the diet that turned our species from just, I mean, there were multiple different species in the Homo family. We are just the one that survived. And so we have to figure out why is that? It's probably our diet. And so we have to mimic that diet in order to do that.

And in order to do that, you've got to turn down the carbohydrates because at no time in that past did we eat the level of carbohydrates that we eat today. So, but I guess one of the questions that I was asking is about the actual act of grilling meat, the myth. Yeah, the grill. And so when we try to mimic our ancestors, much of the time we would eat that meat raw. And many carnivores are starting to rediscover steak tartare and tuna tartare and eating all these things raw. I can't tell you how many hundreds of egg yolks I've eaten raw because I think that's how our ancestors did it. But long ago, 40, 50,000 years ago, we learned to cook meat. And I think it opens up the nutrition in some of the meat and obviously makes it easier to eat.

But I don't know if anyone's ever tried to stick a hunk of meat on a stick and hold it over a fire and not char it. It's impossible. You can't, you either don't, you either eat it raw or there's going to be some char on it. And so to say that that ancestrally appropriate food, charred meat, slightly charred meat, it's somehow bad for us. First of all, doesn't pass the paleoanthropology sniff test. It doesn't pass the common sense test. So we've been doing it for a quarter million years, but now it's bad for us. And then I think basically what it does, because it does produce some of these compounds that I talk about in the book, but I think these compounds have a hormetic effect on the human body, much like sulforaphane that's in broccoli sprouts,

right? We don't need that. That's not a nutrient, but it has a hormetic effect, and we think it makes us stronger. And I think the same goes for the compounds that are produced when we grill our meat and it gets some char on it. Those compounds have a hormetic effect. And so I'm not afraid of those at all. And when you actually look at the research that the World Health Organization's ARIC committee used to say, oh, my God, charred meat is as bad as smoking or whatever, it's all epidemiology. And it's all based on very infrequently given food frequency questionnaire tests that they would just

hand out to people. And in some cases, they would ask them one time, what do you eat? And literally then they would follow them for the next 20, 25 years and never ask them again, because I know my diet's different now than it was 20 years ago. And I bet yours is too. And so you quickly start to see that this research that we think contains information, it just contains noise. There's not a single randomized controlled trial that shows that the compounds, and they will have what we would call shifts toward cancer or cancer-like changes. But to my knowledge, there's never been a cell that's been changed anytime an expert or an authority says that an ancestral food that we've been eating for hundreds of thousands of years is bad for us, the onus of proof is on that expert. They need to produce some meaningful research that proves that. Otherwise, why would we listen?

That'd be like tomorrow, USA Today comes out and it says, oh, drinking water is bad for you. Well, OK, so you better have some damn fine research to show me that drinking water or breathing air or eating meat is bad for my species, because my species has been doing that for a quarter of a million years. So you can't just come up and say, oh, the World Health Organization said this, therefore it's true. When you actually look at the research like Nina Teicholz did in her excellent book, The Big Fat Surprise, the research is just ludicrous. It's just silly stuff. It's something that a high school biology teacher would tell a high school student,

dude, that's a stupid experiment design. You're going to have to redesign that. That doesn't even, that doesn't prove anything. That doesn't show anything. You can't even draw an association from that much less causation. Go back and redesign your experiment. A high school biology teacher would know better than to do science the way some of these large studies have been done. And it seems too, like a lot of studies, it's not even so much about what they're telling us or showing or sharing, but what isn't being shown or shared

that can create some problems. You got it. One of the things that I was so amazed about that I didn't know, or I guess I didn't really put two and two together with around the sort of browning of food and grilling or cooking of food and creating this, these, I guess, I think the words acrylamides. Yep, that's one of them.

Yeah, but that this stuff is being created in a lot of other foods besides meat that people might consider very innocuous or would never give up, including coffee. So if it comes out, well, I mean, there's always a study coming out that either coffee is going to kill you or make you live forever, I guess. But that these compounds that we associate and demonize grilled meat for show up in a ton of other foods. Absolutely. Anything that any, if you grill your veggies or if you just bake your veggies and they

develop any brownness at all, that's acrylamide and PAH and all the other things. If you eat a piece of toast, that's going to contain hundreds of times more of these compounds because you brown the bread. And that browning is the same exact thing that happens to grilled meat. If you bake anything in the oven from a loaf of bread to veggies to anything, if it browns at all, that's the same exact compounds that we're talking about here. And so really, humans would have to go back to eating everything raw, if this was in fact the case, which I don't believe it is. And life is way too short, because browning anything makes it way more delicious. I do not want to eat everything unroasted or baked or cooked.

That sucks. So, okay. Another one that I wanted you to touch on, because this is another one that I think a lot of educated people still definitely sort of hold as a universal truth, is the idea of processed meats, like things like lunch meat or hot dogs or, you know, something you'd find in your charcuterie plate or whatever as being really inherently bad for you. Yeah. And so human beings have been processing and preserving meat for thousands and thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. We've been drying our meat and we've been salting our meat. That's not, I mean, that's something we've done for a long time. So first of all, if you come at me and say, oh, you know, cured meat, processed meat, that is bad for you. You better have some damn good research. And then when we go into the

research, and I'll refer again to the Big Pat Surprise, if anybody really wants to never be afraid of eating meat again, they need to just read that book and then look at some of the research cited. The research that the ARIC, which is an arm of the World Health Organization, used to air quotes here, prove that processed meat is just as bad for you as smoking cigarettes, is ridiculous research. It's all epidemiology. There is no controlled research in that. Okay. It's just them asking random people, what do you eat? How many cups of ribs do you eat a day? How many pounds of grapes do you eat a month? Dumb questions like that, that nobody can really answer because you don't know. I mean, how do you measure ribs and

cups? That's one of the actual questions. questions yeah who's ever eaten a cup of ribs yeah so what does the average person do on the food frequency questionnaire they christmas tree they're like hell i don't know i'll see i don't know so you're not gleaning useful information you're just gleaning noise from these epidemiology studies and then the the risk ratio that proves without doubt that processed meat, bacon, et cetera, is bad for you, the risk ratio was 1.17 or 1.18. The risk ratio for smoking causing lung cancer is 0.3. It's like 30 times more if you smoke. And so the risk ratio of eating processed meat is background noise versus eating uncured or unprocessed meat. That's number one. And there's

several complexities of this. Number two is in the United States, you can call meat uncured, and that meat will actually have more nitrates and nitrites than cured meat. Because if you just cure bacon, if you're a bacon company and you cure your bacon, the federal government has guidelines as to how much nitrate and nitrite can be in that. And it's very small amount. But if you do organic non-GMO uncured bacon, you can use the nitrates that you get from celery juice and you can have 10 000 times as much nitrate in uncured bacon as in cured bacon and you can call that uncured that's the way the federal law is set up right now and then you're like wait what you're telling me uncured bacon has more nitrates yes i'm sorry to tell you that, but yes, it does. Because if you really are afraid of nitrates and nitrites, you need to avoid beet greens

and celery because they have thousands of times more nitrates and nitrites than bacon. Yes. This is the other part that I wanted to bring up. First of all, nitrates and nitrates, which I know, again, for most of us who are just health and nutrition nerds and just hear these words over and over again, we just associate that with those are bad words. Those are bad. And when someone says that something's nitrate or nitrite-free, that's good. These are compounds.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when in-process meats, they're essentially like they're used for preserving? Yes. Okay. Okay. But yeah, you're saying in the book that there's, we have more like naturally occurring nitrates and nitrates in our own saliva than in processed food. Yeah. The saliva that you produce when you smell the bacon cooking

has a hundred times more nitrate in it than the bacon itself. You actually make nitrates in your body. And actually now a lot of people don't realize this, but medical, there's actually ongoing trials right now to use nitrate as a medicine to actually treat blood pressure with it and to treat other things with it. They're trying to actually make therapeutic patented medicines that contain these now because they're actually good for people. We've seen this. And so I think where this all got started was early on in the paleo movement. There were a couple of really heavy hitters who I have the utmost respect for because they move

the needle greatly, but they would apologize for bacon. They'd be like, well, I mean, you know, you can't just live on bacon. That's not good. But they should have checked themselves right there and said, why? Why is that not good? If they'd done that and not said that out loud, then we wouldn't have kind of this ghost of bacon past still haunting us like, oh, yeah, but you don't eat processed meat. Really? Why? Where's the research for that? And so a couple of the big guys who I love said that, like, yeah, you got to eat, you know, grass fed, grass finished, unprocessed. That's what you got to eat. You got to eat to do paleo right. And if they had just not said that, we wouldn't have to still be having this argument, but they did. And so we are. And that's fine because when you actually

look at the meaningful research, it's, it's silliness. There's nothing there that should scare you at all. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is There's nothing there that should scare you at all. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of coming full circle here with you at the beginning of this conversation talking about just asking the question why, just being curious and asking why things are the way they are, why people are saying that things are the way they are. Because if we're saying that processed meats are bad because of the levels of nitrates and nitrites, then we also then should not be swallowing our own saliva or eating a lot of vegetables. Because they are much higher in nitrate. That's exactly right.

Right. But then kind of taking a step back and thinking, okay, so if processed meats and that, even that title is a little bit ambiguous, because what does that mean? Because if you're eating a steak that's been processed because you're not eating it directly off the cow but if we're talking about you know like lunch meats at the grocery store if they are bad maybe we need to consider the fact that a lot of these products have wheat in them and have a lot of sugar sugar is like the second ingredient in these things rancid processed vegetable. So it's the things that we're adding, these things that we're adding that may be more problematic than these buzzwords that were created, again, like by one person that hit a news cycle, and now we think that they're

evil. But again, it's sort of asking these questions that's more important than just taking anything we read on the internet at face value. Absolutely. And there's so many people who live right at the poverty line or just above it or well below it. They can never afford grass-fed, grass-finished, non-GMO organic. They cannot afford that. A lot of people have an EBT card and that's what they buy their food for their family with. And they could maybe buy one you know one pound of of grass-fed grass-finished non-gmo organic ribeye and that's that literally they'd have to live on that for a month they can't do that so what do we tell those people just tough titty i don't know what to tell you i guess you're screwed no and that's why i made the youtube video

you can do keto with hot dogs and mustard if that's all you can afford you can do keto with hot dogs and mustard. If that's all you can afford, you can do that. You can literally live on bacon, eggs, hot dogs, and mustard. And that's a great keto because that's a thousand times healthier than all the sugar and the grains and the industrial seed oils. Okay. Dr. Berry, I think we're going to have to end it here. I could keep you forever. We're going to have to do a part two because I got to about three chapters in your book and there are about at least 10 more that I want to get to. But thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for writing this book because, again, I just can't speak enough to how accessible

and useful it is for the everyday person. It's something that isn't, it's not preachy. It's not over your head. It's not overwhelming. It's just clearly laid out. If you want to do some research and learn and ask questions and improve your health, here is a resource for you to do that.

So I really appreciate you doing that and putting that book out for us. And I'd love if you could kind of just tell our listeners where they can sort of follow you, where where they can get the book where they can learn more. Sure. So I have a website, Ken D. Berry, md.com. I think if you just search Dr. Berry on Google, you're going to find me. I do the majority of my work on YouTube. I have over 200 videos and they're all about nutrition and lifestyle and health and just kind of health concepts. I've got a pretty big Facebook page that I do a lot of work on.

My wife, Nisha, and I, we do a Facebook Live every Monday night at 7 central and just answer people's questions. And we just literally are sitting in our kitchen table and we'll sometimes have two or three thousand people watching, asking questions about their diet because everyone wants to know what should I eat and what should I avoid? Those are the kind of the foundational questions of improving your health. And I also have an Instagram and a Twitter and a Vero and a Gab and every other social media that you can have. Maybe I should read that book you told me about before we started and wean some of that down. But I try to use different styles on the different social media. And I think different social media reach different people. And so if I'm ever going to achieve my goal, which is reversing the epidemics of type 2 diabetes and obesity in this country, I got to reach a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. All right, Dr. Berry, thank you again for your time. And let's

do this again soon. And let's also maybe exchange some organ meat recipes. Absolutely. It's been such a pleasure. We'll have to do this again. Okay, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If there's anything about this interview that surprised you, or if you have any questions, if you want me to have Dr. Barry on for a part two to talk about anything else, you got to give me feedback and let me know. So reach out to me on Instagram at The Muscle Maven and let me know what you think. Maybe share this episode with someone who you think could learn a little something. That would be the biggest gift that you can give me. And thanks again to our bacon buddies. I think I just started a new hashtag. Our bacon buddies at ButcherBox.

Remember, if you order a subscription to their grass-fed, pasture-raised, very healthy, delicious meat subscription company, you get a pack of free bacon in every single box for the life of your membership. Plus, you get 20% off, or sorry, $20 off your first box If you go to butcherbox.com forward slash Maven, or you can just use the code Maven when you check out when you buy whatever it is you want to get from them. And I think this is an extremely exciting deal because guys, let's face it, you're going to eat meat anyway. Probably if you're listening to this podcast, why not get good quality stuff in a more convenient way? That's actually much more

cost effective. And again, free bacon, the end. All right, join me next week. I'm speaking with the founder of BirthFit, and that's a group that helps women and families make healthy, informed, and intuitive choices around having a fit and healthy pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum experience. So it's really all about fit women, fit moms, fit families, fit babies. I like the idea of fit babies, which is why I'm always buying my friends who have kids those dumbbell rattles, because I like the idea of babies with biceps. But I think BirthFit does more than just give them dumbbell rattles. So join me next week to hear all about it,

learn a lot, and that's it. Have a great day, everybody.