Behind the Bastards - The Primal Diet Con
Episode Date: April 6, 2023Robert is joined by Dr. Kaveh Hoda to discuss the Primal Diet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Ah, Gwyneth Paltrow's Butthole is what Kava and I are talking about right now.
Kava Hoda, Doctor, you were just interviewed by Buzzfeed about said Butthole. How did that go?
You know, it's interesting. I have been spending a lot more time talking about Gwyneth Paltrow's
rectum than I ever thought I would. I assumed going into medicine, I would a little. I just
didn't think this much a lot. I actually feel like a startling number of doctors have a similar
story. Ah, Kava, welcome back to the show. For you and I, it's been weeks for the people listening.
They have been jerked as if through time travel from the live show that we did earlier this year
at SketchFest into this conversation right now about Gwyneth Paltrow's Butthole,
which could cause psychological damage. We may have destroyed some people.
And I think people will be very disappointed to realize how little growth there's been personally
between us in the weeks from the show to now. There's been like, maybe you'll notice you can
like track it. You can just like pay attention to what we said then and now. And you could see a
downward trajectory of our emotional growth. Oh, yeah. No, I think definitely we have we have
like regressed in a number of ways. For example, I no longer know how to drive. I'm still driving.
I'm still driving. Don't worry. But I've lost the ability to determine what the signs mean.
Thankfully, my vehicle is very large, so it's been okay so far. I just kind of Americaed my way
through that problem like everyone else on the road in a truck. Yeah, no, that's good. It's healthy
and it's American and it's here. It's now I love it. I love it too. Speaking of American, nothing
could be more American than adopting unhinged and dangerous diets that you stick to like a religion
for a series of farcical health benefits that are in no way real. That is maybe the most American
thing that there is. It's the driving a truck without knowing how to drive of health care.
We are the best at it. We are. Other people have tried. I've seen the Germans give a good
shot at it, but no one does it like we do. No, you think the Mongolians could do nonsense like
this? Absolutely not. Their fad diets are trash. No, their fad diets are probably actually okay
for for you. But ours are the good old fashioned nonsense fad diets. Yes. Robert, the photos
in this script are so gross. Oh, Sophie, I haven't even put all of the grossest photos in there.
I'm waiting on those because I want I want you to be surprised by them too, Sophie. It's worse.
So I felt like first off, you know, a live show, we kind of have to be a little leaner
than we do in our normal shows. We don't have as much room to kind of because, you know,
you get a hard out usually the venues only open so long. So there's stuff that we kind of left
on the cutting room floor. And as I was putting that stuff back in so we could talk about it now,
there's also a bunch of stuff that I found and was fascinated by. And now we're just going to kind
of talk about some really fucked up shit for a while. And if there's time left over, we may
watch some more liver king. But first off, yeah, I wanted to talk, Kava, a little bit about the
realities of the so called primal diet. Now, obviously, we use that word a lot in part one
in the context of the liver king. The term has, I mean, this goes back quite a while, but one of
kind of the modern users of this term, one of the people who's been most responsible for sort of
making it a big deal in the internet age is a health grifter, he would call himself a health
blogger named Mark Cison. Mark is the author of the primal blueprint, which he describes as a set
of rules to let you quote, control how your genes express themselves in order to build the strongest,
leanest, healthiest body possible, taking clues from evolutionary biology. And I think some of
what's going on there is we talk about this in some of the Jordan Peterson episodes, very common
misunderstandings of epigenetics, which are often taken by these guys to mean that like, oh, you can
activate superpowers in your blood from your ancestors and are more often like, well, sometimes
you can activate through environmental stresses, things that are beneficial, but sometimes you
get diabetes. Like, it's a crapshoot. Exactly. And the very basic tenets of this are always so
off. It's just like, first of all, to assume our ancestors all ate the same thing is ridiculous.
Yes, we will talk about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But no, no, police content. Yeah.
I'm sure you're going to talk about this, but it, and like you said, you, we left a lot of meat on
the bone, so to speak, from that. Sure. Do you like that? That's a paleo reference. Yeah. Yeah.
But and now, as we're going to do a meat, you know, as we've left meat on the bone, this is,
we're making like a nice stew, a bone broth, which these guys are soaking. Yeah. We're just
going to soak in this. It's, I'm assuming this guy was like a wellness influencer, right? Like,
how long ago was it that this, the primal diet came out? Yeah. Back in like the 1960s, I think,
is kind of when a lot of this started. It was generally called the caveman or paleolithic diet.
And yeah, a lot of it revolves around the idea that our earliest ancestors who lived from around
two and a half million years ago to about 10,000 BC had everything figured out nutrition wise,
right? They were, they were doing it like perfect. They avoided seed oils and processed foods. They
ate exclusively meat. This is what guys like Marxists on claim that like, yeah, they avoided
seed oils and processed foods. That's why they were so healthy. They ate nothing but meat or 60 to
70% of their diet was meat. And that is kind of the ancient man that food bloggers and fitness
influencers in the primal space, like our liver king, imagine them. Now, not all of what the
paleo crowd is saying is bad. Obviously, Kava, as you know, processed foods are associated with
higher cancer risk, especially processed meats. That is something you definitely want to limit
in your diet for optimal health outcomes. Yeah, red meat is associated though, as well.
They never seem to note that, but like, well, but red meats also not great for you in massive
quantities. The funny thing about these guys is that their whole point is like modernity is
killing us. And yes, modernity is, but it's more because of guys like this and their ability to
reach millions of people via the internet. You know, it's not, not everything they're saying
is wrong. Like, yeah, you're totally right. Processed foods and particularly processed
deli meats, red meats are not good for you. You should avoid them. But to like glorify this ancient
diet, which, you know, they're probably not getting right. And it's going to be exposing them to
higher risks of a cancer due to red meat and lower fiber and probably lower micronutrients
because of this, these primal paleo diets. I mean, they miss the points. They're just,
they're cherry picking little health points that help them sell a supplement at the end of the day.
They're doing that. And they're also kind of like one of the things like, yeah, if you are,
if you are someone who is like living in a food desert, eating it, you know, reheated meals or
whatever, swansons and stuff for every meal or fast food all the time. And you are able to switch
over to like a, a, you know, raw food diet made out around like lean, organic meats. Yeah, you
will probably notice some health benefits, but also most of the people who are living that kind of
diet are doing it because it's what's affordable. It's what they have time to cook if they're working
80 hours a week. You know, if they live in a food desert, like millions of Americans do,
they, you know, processed foods are what they have access to. So kind of inherently a lot of the,
when you do see different health outcomes with the people using, you know, living the primal
life or whatever or doing keto or whatever fad diet they're doing, a lot of it's just going to be
like, well, you're rich. So like, yeah, you know, you're accrediting it to this fad diet. But at
the end of the day, you have the money to eat healthy and intentionally as opposed to like,
well, I have 17 minutes to figure out what I'm having for dinner and it can't cost more than
$4, which a lot of people are in that boat. And that, you know, you're not going to be able to
make the healthiest possible choice if that's the reality you're living with. Yeah. So there is other
stuff that's kind of more on the fence in terms of paleo advice. Paleo people tend to avoid dairy
or processed grains. And while it is absolutely true that a lot of people eat more dairy than is
ideal for their health, if you look at like the groups of people who are longest lived in the
world, for example, an awful lot of them eat lots of yogurt, like that is traditional food like
kefir and different things like that. Those can be parts of very healthy diets and are for large
quantities of people. And also a lot of these paleo folks are replacing whatever they're cutting
out with massive quantities of raw red meat. If you're the liver king or just red meat, if you're
a normal paleo person. And that's not necessarily an upgrade from a health standpoint. Meanwhile,
some of the stuff they're cutting out like bread, you know, white bread's not great, but there's
all sorts of very healthy breads and very healthy grains that are good for your diet. And that are
also as we'll talk about part of a diet human beings have been eating for hundreds of thousands
of years. These kind of people also tend to avoid peanuts, lentils, bees, peas and legumes,
which are all potentially healthy and were also probably available to many ancient peoples.
As you noted, there are many health issues with a diet heavy in red meats and consuming said meat
raw offers no health benefits and many downsides. It is worth noting a lot of primal diet advocates
are not weirdos about eating it uncooked like the liver king is. But by far the most unhealthy thing
about these specific primal diet folks is their insistence that not only does their exclusionary
diet benefit health, which is debatable, but that adhering to such a diet will cure modern illnesses
they call these modern illnesses like diabetes. Sisson writes on his blog, while the world has
changed in innumerable ways in the last 10,000 years for better and worse, the human genome
has changed very little and thus only thrives under similar conditions.
And that's not true. No, that's not true at all. Very factually wrong. No, like for what
I say some bullshit. It is. I mean, and among other things, like a lot of these people are the folks
who focus on like gut health and stuff and we'll talk about gut biome and not acknowledge that
like, well, actually a lot of what has to do with whether or not we can digest certain things has
to do with gut biome, which can change much faster than 10,000 years.
You know, it's it's funny. When these these people, the reason I think he does, he sells
these like foods or the reason the liver king, I assume is pushing these this diet is not because
he is even in any sense believes it works. It's just because he knows it's disgusting.
And he knows that no one will eat it, but he has convinced people that it's going to help him
to help them because of modernity and ancient detoxing and all these nonsense words that
that every grifter in wellness throws out there. And because he knows no one will want to do the
nasty stuff that he is advertising, which gets the clicks that he can then see to say instead
of doing all that, you just have this, I'll take care of it. This is the stuff that you need this
one little pill. It's it's an ancient pill made in a lab. It is it is not it is modern,
but it's not modern. And it's not going to be it's going to be a modern thing that's ancient
in this nonsense that somehow people will buy and do the mental gymnastics around until they get
to this point where they are willing to to spend shit tons of money on these products that are
completely unproven in any way. Yeah. And it's it's taking advantage of the fact that like health
is confusing. There is a lot that we don't understand, particularly when it comes to stuff
like why is it hard for some people to lose weight or keep weight off? Like why is it difficult for
people to like control their blood sugar? Like all of the there's all these different things that
like even when there is an answer, maybe you don't have good access to it because you don't have
good access to quality medical care, but you always have access to tiktok, right? And so this
guy can offer you a solution to all of your health problems. It's worth noting that like as we've
talked about the idea that human beings have not changed fundamentally in 10,000 years or however
long is fundamentally untrue as this right up from Scientific American makes clear. I'm going to
quote from this now because it summarizes it pretty well. Several examples of recent and
relatively speedy human evolution underscore that our anatomy and genetics have not been set in stone
since the Stone Age. Within a span of 7,000 years, for instance, people adapted to eating dairy by
developing lactose tolerance. Usually the gene encoding an enzyme named lactase, which breaks
down lactose sugars in milk, shuts down after infancy when dairy became prevalent. Many people
evolved a mutation that kept the gene turned on throughout life. Likewise, the genetic mutation
responsible for blue eyes likely arose between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. And in regions where
malaria is common, natural selection has modified people's immune systems in red blood cells in
ways that help them resist the mosquito-borne disease. Some of these genetic mutations appeared
within the last 10,000 years or even 5,000 years. The organisms with which we share our bodies have
evolved even faster, particularly the billions of bacteria living in our intestines. Our gut
bacteria interact with our food in many ways, helping us break down tough plant fibers but also
competing for calories. We do not have direct evidence of which bacterial species thrived
in the Paleolithic intestines, but we can be sure that their microbial communities do not
match our own. Even if eating only foods available to hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic made sense,
it would be impossible. As Christina Warrener of the University of Zurich emphasizes in her 2012
TED Talk, just about every single species commonly consumed today, whether a fruit,
vegetable, or animal, is drastically different from its Paleolithic predecessor. In most cases,
we have transformed the species we eat through artificial selection. We have breadcows,
chickens, and goats to provide as much meat, milk, and eggs as possible, and have sown seeds only
from plants with the most desirable traits, with the biggest fruits, plumpest kernels, Swedish
flesh, and fewest natural toxins. I think a big part of it for me is this ignorance of the fact
that everything has changed about the things that people have access to since then. There's
basically no one who's capable of living and eating the diet people did 10,000 years ago,
or even particularly close to that diet. I mean, he's right to some degree. We haven't evolved
so far from those ancestors that we would look that dramatically different, but there have been
acquired genetic mutations since then, things that help us with the changing diets, like starches,
or being able to consume cow's milk well until after childhood. I mean, you could debate how much,
but clearly, we have. Clearly, there has been some adaptation, that much we can see.
Yeah. I mean, there's just a... If you want to think about how much even animals have changed,
like there are a lot of species of livestock that require assistance in birthing their young
because of the ways in which we have bred them. Wild animals, the ancestors of those animals,
did not need human beings to deliver their babies. Obviously, they did. Otherwise,
they wouldn't have survived. Yeah. The Kentucky Fried Chicken Chickens that come out so big,
their breasts are so big, they cannot mate or walk. Yeah. We made those. We invented them.
I mean, maybe we shouldn't have, but we did. They're not the same as whatever people were
eating 8,000 years ago, even if they were eating chicken. Very basic research done by scientists
who study prehistoric man with rigor rather than write fantasies about him shows they also were
not immune to health problems, which is the weirdest thing about this to me. I think a lot
of it started... There was a lot of writing you would see 30, 40 years ago about people in 10,000
B.C., 20,000 B.C., probably if you survived to adulthood would have had a muscle and bone density
that only the very best athletes have today, which they were living outside the whole time.
They were always moving. They were always like, yeah, maybe that was the case,
but that's kind of translated into they didn't have any health problems and none of the modern
issues that we have, which is objectively untrue. For one thing, obviously, a minority of our
paleoancestors lived to adulthood. Many would have died before 15, which is why their life
expectancy was so low. More to the point, they suffered a lot of the same ailments we did.
A recent Lancet study found signs of atherosclerosis or clogged arteries and more than 100 mummified
remains from ancient hunter-gatherer and forager societies around the world.
A common assumption is that atherosclerosis is predominantly lifestyle related and that if
modern human beings could emulate pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural lifestyles that atherosclerosis
or at least its clinical manifestations would be avoided. They found evidence of atherosclerosis
in 47 of 137 mummies from each of the different geographical regions. The shit that they claim
is like, well, this is a result of your processed diet. I'm sure that makes it worse in some cases,
more common, but they got this shit back then too in part because they've eaten a lot of red meat.
There's always this interaction between, and I'm sorry, this is probably more
sciency than you guys want, but there is always this complicated interaction between your genetics
and your environment and the things you do and how it affects your body and how people,
the cholesterol, how they may react or how they may have it in their bodies. When it comes down to it,
it genetically, as long as you're able to pass on your genes, which means you're able to have sex
at some point and have kids, then whatever happens after that doesn't matter as much. If you are
dying of atherosclerosis in your 30s, your 40s, you were still able to pass on your genes. It
didn't make you genetically weaker. It wouldn't necessarily be affected that way. It could still
be there. It could have been there then and still here now. We know that there is a genetic
contribution to all these diseases. Yeah. There are reasonable people in the Paleo subculture
that reject the liver king stuff about munching raw organs, but they still tend to see the basic
realities of the ancient diet. They tend to argue that the basic realities of the ancient diet
provided a good guideline for optimal health performance, which is also just nonsense.
As you mentioned a little bit earlier, we don't know much about what prehistoric
people ate in a lot of cases in all regions of the globe, certainly. We don't know how widespread
different kinds of prehistoric diets were, but we do know that they were different all over the
place based on the time of year and based on what different people had access to. More pointedly,
there's no such thing as the primal diet or the hunter-gatherer diet. There were a bunch of
different ones. I'm looking at a chart right now that lays out. This is looking at modern
hunter-gatherers, and modern hunter-gatherers like the Inuit, like the Hiwi, like the Ikung,
like the Hadza, are often called living fossils because of how similar they supposedly were
to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. That is not true. There's certainly value in studying them.
You can learn things about hunter-gatherers in all periods by studying hunter-gatherers today,
but these are modern people living in the modern world whose lifestyle, whose bodies,
whose health have been affected by modernity. They are not fossils. They're human beings.
I can't imagine they like that term. They're just people.
Now, it is worth kind of if you want to look at what these different people's diet includes.
Inuit folks, as much as like 90, 95% of their diet from animal products, from animals that
they hunt. The Hiwi people, it's more like 80% animals, about 10 to 15% fruits and vegetables,
and then about 15 to 20% roots, something like that, 75%, maybe a meat. But the Ikung only eat
about 10% of their calories, 15% of their calories from meat, whereas they get about twice as much
from fruits and vegetables. They eat a few roots. The vast majority of their caloric intake, more
than half, is seeds and nuts, and they get a little bit from meat or from milk and cornmeal.
The Hadza are at about 50% of their calories from meat and fish. They get, you know, about 15,
20% from fruits and vegetables, and then about 30-ish percent, something like that, from roots.
So, as you can see, even within just these four people, the diet varies quite widely. And like,
you know, you could look at the Inuit and say, well, that looks like at least in terms of quantity
of meat consumed, like what the liver king is doing. But if you look at the Ikung, that doesn't
look at all like the liver king's diet, nor really does the Hadza. So, it probably behooves us to take
a deeper look at one of these people, the Hiwi, to just talk about kind of how their diet and their
health actually are in modernity, because they do eat, I get about 75% of their calories from meat
and fish. And most of this, like sometimes up to 95% of their diet is wild caught or wild foraged,
right? So, they are getting almost everything they eat from nature around them in a way that is
very traditional, that is very much kind of like what these paleo people imagine, folks, you know,
the hunter-gatherers they're looking back to getting their calories from. But the animals
they're not eating for one thing are not the kinds of animals that you are going to find in a grocery
store. The Hiwi eat capybara, they eat collard peccary, they eat anteater, armadillo, fish,
turtles, iguanas, birds. A lot of these are species that simply are not available in grocery stores.
I would love to try capybara. If I'm being honest, I've seen a couple at the zoo,
and they look a little tasty. They have like a little juice to them, like a little ham
running around with fur. I'm not going to not eat a capybara if it's an offer to me, absolutely.
Although they are very sweet, so that might be emotionally difficult.
It's a hard pass for me, fellas. I'm a curious man. I'm a curious man. I'll
eat anything someone offers me in their home. Exactly. I watched Indiana Jones in the Temple
of Doom. We talked about this. There's only one good part of that whole movie. There's only one
good part about that whole racist movie, and it's that it teaches, it doesn't matter what's
put in front of you, you eat it, because that might be the last meal that those people have to
offer. You eat it. That is a firm thing that I believe in. That is the one bright moment in
that movie's attitude towards, I don't know. But then it gets really racist with like monkey
brains. It gets racist pretty quick, yeah. Anyway, Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom,
Dr. Kavehota recommends it as a awoke guide to life. So let's continue talking about the
Hebrew, because while these folks do kind of live the ideal liver king life on paper,
they are not a famously healthy people. Now, obviously, this isn't just due to their diet.
We do not know how they would have lived a couple of thousand years ago, right, before,
you know, the colonization. You cannot divorce the health problems that these people face from
capitalist modernity, or the degree to which they've had their climate ravaged, their environment
ravaged, and their traditional homelands encroached upon. But they also suffer consequences that have
probably always been present of eating huge quantities of game that has not always been
sufficiently cooked. The Hiwi are shorter, thinner, and less energetic than other hunter-gatherer
tribes nearby, like the Aceh and Paraguay. They suffer from infections of parasites like hookworms
at an exceptionally high rate, and only about 50% of their children survive to adulthood.
Behind the Paleo craze is a legitimate debate by some scholars over the realities of the Stone Age
diet and how much it might match an ideal diet for modern people. The fact that some of these
scientists, like Lauren Cordain of Colorado State University, have written books advocating the
Paleo diet muddies their claims a bit more, and I'm going to quote from National Geographic here.
After studying the diets of living hunter-gatherers and concluding that 73% of these societies
derive more than half their calories from meat, Cordain came up with his own Paleo prescription.
Eat plenty of lean, meat, and fish, but not dairy products, beans, or cereal grains.
Foods introduced into our diet after the invention of cooking and agriculture.
Paleo diet advocates like Cordain say that if we stick to the foods our hunter-gatherers
once ate, we can avoid the diseases of civilization, such as heart disease, high blood pressure,
diabetes, cancer, even acne. Now again, there's some of this that has its origins and probably
kind of the motivation to start writing about this shit has its origins in a somewhat legitimate
anthropological theory, which is the idea that we humans might have developed our big brains
and thus our ability to invent shit, like podcasts, because our ancestors were such good
hunters that they ate a shitload of protein and that made their brains grow up big and strong.
Now, it is true that hunter-gatherers around the world crave meat more than any other food and
usually get around 30% or more of their annual calories from animals, but most of these groups
also endure extremely lean times where they eat less than a handful of meat each week.
There's studies right now that suggest that kind of reliance on meat in ancient humans
probably was not the only thing that fueled the brain's expansion, especially since there would
have been large chunks of the year where that simply would not have been available. And we're
going to talk about that as well as the high meat subculture, which I'm excited to introduce to you,
Kava. But first, you know what? Never. You know what is responsible for our large brains, Dr. Hoda?
Yes, the fact that the female human anatomy allows for the pelvis to have an anterior
sort of direction allows for a wider birth canal. No, no, sorry. No, no, it's these products and
services. That was my second guess. That's the second guess. That's right.
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Oh, we're back. And I just, I feel smarter. Thanks. Oh, man. Those were amazing dick pill ads
that really hit the spot. I mean, I typically don't like dick pill ads, but those make me
think that it actually works. Yeah. And, and, you know, what they say about dicks, they're
like a brain. They're the brains of the crotch. That's not what people say. So let's talk about
the anthropological theory that a reliance on meat is kind of what made human brains get
so much bigger. It's kind of worth noting that like the idealized version of hunter-gatherers
and of our ancient ancestors is of these kind of like super hunters, you know, stumbling into the
bush or going into the bush with, you know, a spear or an atlatal or a bow and arrow and just like
dropping animals every single day in order to bring meat back to the family. That's not the
way it ever has been or ever will be because hunting is actually really hard, Kava. It's
extremely difficult to do. I've never done it. I tried fishing once. It didn't work out well for
me. I'm not, I would, if there ever isn't an apocalypse and I'm going to try and find you
so you can gather food for me and hunt things for me because I will perish otherwise. I mean,
most people will, basically everyone will perish if you rely entirely upon hunting for your calories.
Trapping is much better. You know, when it comes to fishing, doing stuff like setting up kind of
traps along the coast that are, you know, big nets that can sweep up large numbers of fish,
that's much smarter than just like going out into the bush with a bow and arrow. You do get
calories that way and you get stuff that's useful for you like, you know, skins and pelts and whatnot
that can be a necessary part of like clothing folks. But, you know, groups like the Hadza and
the Ikung Bushmen of Africa fail to get meat more than half the time when they go out hunting,
which doesn't mean they're bad hunters. It's just like hunting is difficult and it's gotten more
difficult in the modern period. But also, even though certain things have gotten more difficult
now, they also have better weapons than people would have had access to 20,000 years ago because,
again, they're not living fossils, right? They're human beings in 2023. Yeah, it's kind of worth
noting that when you actually look at different kind of peoples living a more traditional life,
who do eat meat all the time and who do make it the vast majority of their diet year round,
it tends to be coastal peoples or people like up in the Arctic. I mean, that is also a coastal
peoples like the Inuit who do a lot of, you know, fishing, they do a lot of trapping. They do get a
lot of like larger animals like seals and narwhals. But as a general rule, most hunter-gatherers
cannot rely on hunted meat year round or even trapped meat, which is why all of these groups
only survived because of foragers, which was a job primarily done as far as we can,
as far as we're aware by women. Often women with like young children would do a lot of the foraging.
They would get things, you know, various kinds of plants, tubers, nuts. It can be kind of resource
intensive to process them. So it's a good thing to have little kids do. It's not hard to teach
little kids to like process nuts or to process tubers. Things like plantains and manioc in the
Americas. Australian aboriginal people often feasted on nutgrass and water chestnuts.
There's this kind of story that these peoples all must have been these sort of primal hunters,
but again, none of them survive without foraging. And when they're foraging, they're eating the
kind of stuff that these primal diet advocates and guys like the liver kinks are telling you
not to eat, including grains. There's evidence of people eating grains for at least 100,000 years,
which is more than enough time for us to have evolved the ability to tolerate them.
In fact, we would not have survived to this point without them.
We have had adaptations clearly for starches and for grains.
Sure. Yeah. And there was probably a fairly long period of time where large numbers of people were
doing a lot of weird pooping. And those people are heroes and we should remember them as such.
Our courageous ancestors who pooped out grains long enough that they were eventually able to
tolerate them. God bless you all. Heroes, American heroes.
Just like those ancient Europeans guzzling milk and just shitting constantly for generations
pooping themselves to death so that I could enjoy a nice block of cheese.
That's right. Just trying different milk from different animals.
Just to see what happens. Pioneers all.
So white people have a long history of fetishizing indigenous peoples and those living kind of what
are called more traditional lifestyles while also attempting to profit off of merchandising
aspects of that lifestyle. The liver king is one silly example of this trend,
but perhaps the most preposterous is the tale of high meat.
So, Kavit, fermentation. Blue apron before there was blue apron.
Yeah. Yeah. You will make blue apron high meat if you just don't take your blue apron bag in
for several months because it's just rotting meat. So Kavit, you can ferment meat.
Fermentation is a process of controlled decay. You can ferment meat and eat it and it can be
fine for you. That is a process that's not wildly different from the process of making
sauerkraut. Various peoples all around the planet have done this with meat and fish
for as long as there have been people probably or pretty close to it. There are examples for
food in Scandinavia, I think like lutefisk, which is basically fish that you let rot in a very
specific way so that it ferments. The Greenland Inuit, the Greenland Inuits enjoy what's called
kiviak, which is a fermented seabird dish. And it's actually fascinating. I've never had this.
I would try it where it offered to me, as we just discussed. But the way that you make kiviak,
basically, you get several hundred small birds called ox, and you leaving the feathers and
stuff on them, you tightly pack the bodies into a bag made of seal skin that you've left the fat
on. Because as it rots, the fat is going to make the bird meat tender. So you sew up this seal skin
with all of these hundreds of birds in it, and you grease it with seal fat, which repels flies.
And then you store it underneath a bunch of rocks, right, so that animals can't get to it.
And you let it ferment for, I think, usually something like three or four months. When the
process is done, when you kind of come back for it, you open it up, you remove the feathers from
the birds, and then you eat the birds' skin, bones, organs, and all. It's consumed raw. I think the
bones get a lot softer when you kind of let it ferment like that. And that's the thing a lot
of people are going to be like, well, that sounds nasty, and that's fine. You don't need to eat it.
I would, again, I'd try it. The Greenland Inuits, like most Inuit peoples, eat mostly meat, and they
sometimes get as much as 98% of their calories from animals. They do consider kiviak a delicacy,
but it evolved for a specific and very practical purpose. The fact is that hunting, as we've
talked about, is often difficult or impossible for chunks of the year. Think about what it's like
where the Greenland Inuits live. There's times where you simply can't go out and hunt because
it's too fucking cold to survive doing that. And you need to have food that's stored that can
tide you over during those periods of time. Kiviak is hunted and prepared in the spring
so that it can be consumed during the winter. And it was probably developed over time as a way
to preserve calories during periods of abundance for the lean winter months. Because it contains
so much organ meat, kiviak is extremely high in vitamins and nutrients. It is thus an incredibly
pragmatic thing to have in your diet if you live the way in Greenland that the Inuit do, right?
It makes total sense when you actually think about logically why would they do this,
what role does it fulfill? A very practical thing to do. But of course, weirdo fitness
influencers and diet freaks on the internet have leapt onto the idea that fermented meat is the
ultimate source of nutrition. They call it high meat, which they say I think is a term that has
been used and been used by some Inuit peoples rather than, but you know, when we're talking
about like kiviak, this is a that's a pretty deliberate and elaborate process. A lot of
high meat advocates are basically leaving mason jars of raw meat out for months at a time,
either in their fridge or at room temperature to consume after its age. Some people will age
shit for like a year, which people aren't generally doing with stuff like kiviak. So
I wonder how many GI illnesses that I as a gastroenterologist have treated over the years,
where it was someone who did something like this and they just didn't want to tell me.
Yeah, they've been eating high meat and it's making them poop themselves to death
because they didn't tell me. Yeah. And it is worth noting you can buy meat and you can ferment it
and you can eat it and it will not be dangerous for it. It is possible. I should I'm not saying
you should do this. It is theoretically possible to ferment meat as other people have done for
generations in a way that is not dangerous for you. It is not likely that you are going to
do it with the advice that you are getting on reddit.com and there's no specific health benefits
for it, right? And again, the Inuit are not eating kiviak because it's like a superfood that gives
them liver king like powers. They're eating it because like it has a lot of vitamins and it
stores well, right? Like it's it's not. They have to. Yeah. Well, it's if they have to,
it's become part of the culture. There's all sorts of cheese and stuff is a way we've got all this
milk. How do we store this shit for a long period of time, you know, right? I'm sure some of it was
found out by mistake. Like they were really hungry and they had stored something and they
realized it was it was something they had stored for a while and it fermented that point and they
tried it and they realized that they were able to survive it and it got them through and then
they were able to sort of adapt that and make it work for them. I get it. I get it. Yeah, it's like
the story of how cheese, I mean, this is it probably is much it's certainly much more complicated
than that. But there's kind of like a legend that there's this guy in the desert and he's got this
water bag that's made out of like a lamb's stomach and he pours some milk in it to go hiking in the
desert and over time because it's got that I forget exactly what there's like a stomach acid that
used to make cheese. And like that's where we get our cheese from, right? Is like this guy's
hiking and he realizes, oh, something has happened, you know, that's that's but delicious.
You wouldn't call it cheese is not a superfood. It doesn't because it's made this weird way.
It does not come with like all sorts of superhuman medical benefits. It can be part of a healthy
diet, right? Yeah, right. High meat advocates are, of course, weirdos on the internet. And so they
take the weirdo on the internet tact of being like, this shit gives you powers, basically,
it makes you euphoric. It'll they do talk about it helping you lose weight, which I suspect they're
right about, but not. Yeah, man, if you eat nothing but rotting meat, you will lose weight.
Shit yourself to good health. The Robert Evans health book, just get by 400 hot dogs and leave
them leave them in the bed of your truck. Get one of those like get it get it get a Ford F 150.
That's a key key or a Toyota Tacoma and get one of those big metal lids fill the whole bed with
hot dogs and just drive around all summer in it, right? And then when winter comes and food is
scarce, pop that hood open and just go to town with a spoon, you know, you're good to go. You're
good. The hot dog truck is the ideal way to consume calories. It'll put it'll it'll go straight to
muscle. It's like steroids for you really you get extra energy from it. It's great. That's a
coma truck full of basically hot dog pudding. Yeah, a hot dog, a hot dog Tacoma. Sometimes I'll
get just sour cream, pour some in there too. You want to like start at the beginning of
June and then by October, your hot dog Tacomas probably ready to eat. Are we just trying to
see if we can make Sophie puke at this point? Yeah, I think we are. You can't do it. But you
know who can make Sophie vomit with joy? Yes, the sponsors of this podcast.
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Hey everybody, we're back and boy, we have some more high meat to talk about,
but Sophie has informed me that earth-shattering political news has just come down the fucking pipe.
Yeah, Donald Trump will be the first former president to face criminal charges.
Honestly, good for him. Proud of him.
Oh man, it's been a while since fun-breaking news broke while you were reporting, Robert.
See, so this means that the grand jury has voted to indict him on this is, okay, so I'm sorry,
I shouldn't know this, but this is because of the hush money? Is that that's why?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the 130,000 or something.
Yeah, his role back in the in the hush money he paid Stormy Daniels back in 2016.
No, before, no, apologies, before that he paid Stormy as before the 2016 election,
and then lied about. God, that's funny.
Is there any chance that he will actually suffer any form of consequence from this?
Well, I mean, I think he has to either surrender himself or be arrested,
just because he has been charged criminally. So, you know, that's you could argue a consequence,
although there are there is some kind of reporting from people around him saying
that he wants to be arrested and get the cameras on him and stuff. And, you know, obviously,
you can and there is a decently long American political tradition of being arrested in ways
that benefit you as a as a public figure, right? That is a thing.
And Trump is certainly capable of being that kind of guy. I am still saying it's pretty funny.
No, it's it's hilarious. And I love it. And it's the best news I've heard in a while.
Wow. What a great piece of news, Sophie, to come in while we're talking about eating meat that
you've allowed to rot for unbelievable quantities of time. Speaking of rotting meat.
Yeah, speaking of Donald Trump, in a way, isn't Donald Trump like a Toyota Tacoma filled with
rancid hot dogs and butter? Yeah. Yes. A lot like that. He's a fermented ex-president,
is what he is. Yeah, he is. He is a politician that we have. I mean, honestly, Rudy Giuliani's
been fermenting for a lot longer. And leaking. Yeah. So, high meat advocates report feeling
euphoria after eating rancid meat. It's called high meat because you feel high having eaten it.
There's no way to disprove a subjective claim like this. It might be due to the placebo effect.
It might be due to the fact that a lot of these people shit themselves after death and they
feel hilarious. But also outside of, I mean, maybe they do. Maybe it does make you feel high,
right? I've definitely had like a fucking good ass kombucha that made me feel pretty pumped.
So I get it. Maybe it's I'm not saying it's impossible. But the health claims that are generally
made by these people about high meat are impossible. A Jonas Vanderplanitz is an advocate of the primal
diet and one of the former leading lights of the high meat subculture. He claimed that a primal
diet cured him of everything from autism to juvenile diabetes. Here's a fun quote from a New
Yorker article that interviewed him. That's disappointing because his name is so fucking cool.
It is a pretty cool name. Vanderplanitz says he got the high meat and its name from the
esque that he they use, you know, the term that you shouldn't use for the Inuit who savor rotten
caribou and seal a regular serving of decayed heart or liver should have can have a tremendous
Viagra effect on the elderly. Vanderplanitz told me recently, the first few bites, though,
can be rough going. I still have some resistance to it, but the health benefits. I'm 52 now.
I started this when I was 42 and I feel like I'm in my 20s. So that article was published in 2014.
Shortly after being interviewed for it, in August of 2013, Vanderplanitz fell off the
railing of his balcony in Thailand and seriously injured himself. A statement I found from a friend
on the Get Raw Milk website explains what happens next. Yeah, he broke his back quite severely next
to the first rib and could not move his legs. He took care, charge of the care of his body,
even in the hospital where he had them wrap his torso to stabilize the bones. He did have one
x-ray and then would not let them do more. The doctors wanted to operate and he refused. He
had them wrap him and feed him food and continued so for two days. He was apparently in good spirits,
but did experience what must have been severe pain, for he did let them give him at least two
pain shots. This might have been necessary for him to stay awake and in control as the body can
shut down from pain. There was blood in his stomach at some point, for he did regurgitate some food
with it. On the third day of his hospital stay, he sent his girlfriend to a court proceeding
in Bangkok about three and a half hours away about the land there in Thailand over her protests.
He insisted she go. While she was gone, he went into a coma and they put an IV in him.
When she returned, he was very bad. At this point, she emailed our time member who called a few of
us. The doctors say he had a kidney infection and a blood infection. They continued to feed him
butter and honey as instructed and followed his wishes as possible. They gave him oxygen as his
breathing decreased and he steadily lost blood pressure. They told us his kidneys had stopped
functioning and were not producing urine. They wanted to do something, but no one had any authority
to override his stated wishes. I'm not going to laugh about this guy's situation, but that is
kind of the consequence of this attitude towards health. I'm just surprised the honey didn't fix
his kidneys. That's the part of it that I don't understand. Yeah, it's shocking. Seems like that
should have done the trick. They didn't give it IV. That's the thing. Yeah, that's probably it. IV
honey, that would have saved him. Most of the high meat videos that you are going to find online
are of some dude who looks like he owns multiple crypto wallets and has intense opinions on
decentralized. I did find a fun one by Dr. Annette Bosworth, MD. Now, when you Google her,
the first result is Annette Bosworth guilty of all charges, which immediately let me know we
were in the right direction here. It turns out she ran for Senate and filed a bunch of false
documents, which is actually a lot better than I'd expected, given that she's a doctor. I was
expecting like, oh, how many people did she get killed? How many bodies is this lady stacked?
That's the best case scenario. Yeah. In this video, she starts by saying she's on the ketogenic
diet and recommends rotting meat for ketosis, which again, I guess kind of makes sense in the same
way that getting so drunk you vomit up everything in your stomach can technically aid in ketosis.
The first thing that she notes as she walks you through her journey of fermenting raw chicken
livers is that she was quickly forced to put the jar outside because it stinks so bad,
which might have been a sign. You have to like, basically burp the meat like this to let the
gases out and like expose it to air periodically and stuff. There's like, there is a process to
fermenting the meat if you don't want to get super sick, although it doesn't look good. Sophie,
can you show him the day one of the fermenting chicken liver? Just so we're starting with the
baseline. Okay. I've seen some bad stuff. She's like adding some salt to it, a little bit of water.
So that's day one, Kava. Yeah, let's do it. Show me. Your consent. Okay. Yep.
Okay. That doesn't look great. Okay. It doesn't look amazing, but not bad. Yeah, just just kind
of looks like meat that you've got seasoning or something. Here's day four. Oh, that's rough.
Yeah. Yeah. That's not the way the meat that you put in your body should ever look. No, no.
So she does this for weeks. She doesn't say exactly how long until it's a pure black sludge.
Look at this shit, Kava. That looks like oil. That looks like just pure petroleum.
Can I tell you this? There are certain things that the body does that hit you in a primal way
to tell you it's not okay. Don't do this. This is a dark tarry sludge that if I'm being honest,
it looks like when you have a big upper GI bleed and it gets partially digested as it moves through
your track, it comes out looking like this. We call it melanin. Oh, that's good. That is what
this looks like. Just the look of it hits me on the primal level that my brain stores for the
fear of sharks and the aliens from alien. This is how this hits me. This is not to be consumed.
No, no. Speaking of aliens, this reminds me of the black ooze that comes out of the aliens
and the super soldiers and ex files. That is the closest thing to this. Sophie,
can you play that segment from the video for us all? This is them eating it.
And they seem as frightened as you should be. It's her and her son.
Yeah. Okay, so that. Oh, yeah. Well, that's what they were all about. I don't know. Oh,
okay, let's cut it up and put it down on that so I can see it. It has the consistency of a dead
slug. So there's a piece of liver. Oh, it still has a substance to it. It's not.
Okay, so there's cut that half and you can have half and I can have half.
Oh, that's a lot. That's a lot.
Who's this kid? This is a kid. Yeah. Oh, she's coming. Your son cry at first.
Why is she making her kid do that? You don't fall.
Oh, she can't handle it. Because people aren't supposed to eat things like this.
This is horrible. This is a jackass video. Can I stop it? I don't like it.
Okay, I'll put salt on mine. That's a great talk, put salt on mine.
No, this is like what Chuck Grassley Seaman looks like.
Yeah, it does look exactly like I imagined Chuck Grassley comes that one time I saw it.
No, Sophie, I am going to take over, though, because I want to show you guys some stuff,
because I've been I've been doing my digging here, you know, as I want to do. And I've been
following a bunch of different paleo and primal accounts. So here's one. This is a Twitter account,
a Risto perp breakfast for winners, raw heavy cream, fruit and honey, leftover raw ground
beef with raw eggs. It doesn't look good. But at least it's fresh. And the next response is him
saying, a friend convinced me to eat raw rotten meat, high meat yesterday. And it actually felt
great. Very interesting, since everyone would think it's crazy. And then there's a deleted tweet.
And he he he he posts a picture of the high meat that he ate. Oh, my God, there's bubbles all over
it. There's its growth on on the meat. It's horrible. So fucking gross, man. It's so fucking.
I don't understand what they think they're getting from this that they couldn't just get from regular
meat. What about the I mean, could they just not to see it like fermented things that we have made
in our know are safe? Like if they just have like sauerkraut? Yeah, it's I think a lot of it just
comes from these are people who are in the kind of fitness and various like kind of weird specific
elimination diet communities. And the more you get into that, the more kind of weird stuff that
you'll hear and be willing to try. And it's one thing if like, you're actually doing your research
and you're interested in like, Oh, I want to know all these different ways people used to ferment
weed or meat or do ferment meat and cultures around the world. But a lot of folks aren't doing
that. I found this one Reddit thread where this guy is talking about his high meat diet and people
are like, he's doing like oysters, like he's letting oysters rot. His goal is to ferment shell.
My goal is to ferment shellfish until it is at least one year old. Holy shit. Who knows? Maybe
it won't even smell like farts, but start to become more tasty. Oh, God, it's horrible. And there's
like, listen, I can't explain to you the nasty things that I've seen with my job and the unspeakable
things I've seen in the human body and and done in the human body to help people. And this is
troubling to me that this is this is hard for me. I can do it. I can do it. You're not going to.
I'm not going to tap out. I will not tap out from from these videos, but I don't enjoy this.
Yeah, it's it's there's a lot that's like fucked up about it. At one point someone is like, hey,
I'm looking at your I'm looking at like what you're doing here. And, you know, I live in Inuit
territory. And it's never as hot as it is where you live here. Like whatever they're doing to
ferment their meat, it's like 60 at the hottest part of the year. So you may not be doing it right.
And he's like, no, man, the Inuit have been doing it forever. It's he just like doesn't listen at
all. There's another person who responds because they're talking about like, well, salmonella and
botulinum and E. Coli are our faculative anaerobes. So they can't grow when oxygen rich air is present,
which is why you expose stuff to oxygen. And someone responds, biochemistry researcher here,
this is absolutely incorrect. Salmonella and E. Coli are faculative anaerobes, but this means
they grow best with oxygen, yet can adapt to anaerobic environments. Like there's all of these
like and hopefully everyone is okay. Hopefully the people doing this don't get themselves killed.
I don't know. Those tweets were often like a year ago, right? I didn't see anything. I didn't see
any follow up on that. Yeah. No way to know. But I don't know. Don't do this. Don't do this is kind
of I think we're both Kava and I are going to come to at the end of this episode. We don't agree on
much, my friend, you and I. Yeah. But this is one thing I think we can both agree on. Yeah.
I don't know about this. You know, the funny thing about all these people, this is so I've
been spending a lot of time sort of like diving into medical grifters recently and doing stuff on
people like Dr. Bos here. It's always the same concept. It's always the they start with this
very basic premise of like health is a choice. I mean, they don't take into account any of the
socioeconomic stuff and any of the genetic stuff. Yeah. It's a choice kind of implying that, you
know, if you're sick, it's your fault. And then on top of that, there's like they'll
polarize foods. They'll be like, here are foods that you should eat. Here are foods that you
should not eat. Here are foods that are good and foods that they almost make it like a moral thing
like they're good and there's evil foods. And they do that. And then the third thing they do
is then they have their supplement that they sell or their scam or their book or their YouTube channel
that you have to subscribe to. That's how they they monetize it at the end of the day. It's always
the same thing, this polarizing of food and romanticizing the past and romanticizing things.
It's whenever you see the term ancient, it's always it is 99 percent of the time a scam of some
sort. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you wouldn't. Ancient peoples sometimes were able to take care of their
injured and sick loved ones. And sometimes they beat them to death with rocks or left them to
starve because times were tough. And that was the best thing that they could do, right? Shit's tough,
you know? Shit was tougher in the past and people had to make hard decisions. You wouldn't
advocate that because those hard decisions were a necessary part of the survival of our ancestors,
that they are good things to do in the modern era, right? Because, for example, we have like
splints now. Like you don't have to, you don't need to, if it's a cold winter and there's not
enough food, you don't need to club grandpa to death because he breaks his ankle, you know?
That's not, not that that's what everyone did. People went to great lengths to try to save their
loved ones, but hard choices had to be made. And we don't have to make choices like that anymore
because we have like stoves and heaters and people who can splint wounds, you know?
You know, the whole thing about this, this doctor and these people eating the fermented foods that
they, you know, and doing this again, the thing about it is, you know, 10 years ago,
you would have shown me this video and I would have been like, all right, whatever, they're doing
it to themselves, let them make themselves sick, let her do that to her and her son. I mean,
who cares if it doesn't kill them, then, you know, whatever. But, you know, the truth of it is,
like, all this pseudoscience stuff, now more than ever after the last four or five years,
I realized that it's all contributing to our society getting much worse. It's all, all this
stuff is incrementally making people trust real science less. It's making people not clear about
what is real and not real when it comes to things like, say, the vaccine. And people have a harder
time making the right decision when it comes to things that are really important. So, and yes,
also, they are dangerous, too, to do these things. There's parasites, there's bacteria and all this
stuff. But it, the stuff all makes me so mad now. It didn't used to bother me that much. I used to
just laugh about it. And now it makes me just actually kind of angry whenever I see this nonsense.
I mean, the liver king is a weird one, too, like his, I'm not entirely sure what his,
what his thinking is, but like, it's almost like implied, like you eat the balls of a bowl,
you get the strength of the bowl, you eat the liver, it'll make your liver stronger,
you eat the brain, it'll make your brain. It's like this weird homeopathy, like cures,
like sort of thing, which has been disproven. And again, it's just, it's perpetuating this,
this faulty science at best, I'll call it faulty science. But it's all like a grift. And it all
contributes to basically the collapse of our society. It makes me very upset. And I think
what you're saying, Kava, is that we need about 60 volunteers that because we're scientists,
we're going to do a double blind. So 30 of you fill a Tacoma bed with a metal top with hot dogs
and butter or cream and just let it sit for three months and then eat all of it. And then the other
30 of you around October, just buy a fresh Tacoma full of hot dogs and butter and eat it all fresh.
And then we'll see who's healthiest and that'll let us know if this is a good idea.
It's randomized. It's, I don't know if we could double blind it because we might have to figure
out like how to hide the smell in the stench, but I feel like we have a trial here. I feel like
there is something we could do. There's something we could work with here. Now, you don't hide the
stench. You just get like a decal that says work truck and stick it on the side. People won't ask
questions. Nobody's going to ask questions. There's no good smelling Tacomas.
Well, everyone, sign up to volunteer for our Tacoma high hot dog challenge to see if it's
good to eat hot dogs that have been left in the back of a Tacoma. We'll do a science altogether,
endorsed by Dr. Kavehota. Yeah, sure. Sure. It's the end of the world anyway.
Why not? Might as well. Maybe this will help us survive the end of the world. Maybe this is
what makes us not need water, you know? Yeah. Enough Tacoma hot dogs and we could make it
possible for people to survive in Arizona again. Yeah. It's like the tarragon mist. You'll survive
it and be stronger or you won't. Yeah. Yeah. One way or the other. Look, there's only one way to find
out. Kava, do you have any place that people can find you online on the Twitter? Find me at the
House of Pod Twitter and listen to my podcast where we talk about things like medical drifters
and we'll talk about other medical fun stuff and then sometimes not such medical fun stuff.
It's called the House of Pod podcast. Listen to it where you listen to podcasts. That's it.
That is it. Well, thank you, Kava. Thank you for being there with me and the live show going
into the field with me to fight the liver king and all of these other silly people.
They're free, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I'm there for you all next week,
but not anymore this week because we're done for the week. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media,
visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there. I'm Maya Schunker, host of the podcast,
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