Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - Debunking the Worst Medical Advice You’ve Ever Been Given | Dr. Ken Berry, MD

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Your doctor might be making you sicker — and he'd know, because he was one of them 💊Dr. Ken Berry — board-certified family physician and bestselling author of Lies My Doctor Told Me — reveals how weak evidence and industry influence shaped the medical advice you've been told your whole life. He breaks down the truth about cholesterol during pregnancy, becoming osteoporosis-proof, the rise of insulin resistance in women, and why the same diet gets totally different results for different people 👀Thank you to our sponsors!TAYLOR DUKES WELLNESS: Use code "ALEXCLARK" for 10% off your purchase at https://shop.taylordukeswellness.com/discount/ALEXCLARKGEVITI: Use code "ALEX" to get 20% off of your first purchase at https://www.gogeviti.com/cultureapothecaryPRIMALLY PURE: Use code ALEXCLARK for 15% off your first orderhttps://primallypure.com/BLDG ACTIVE SKIN REPAIR: Use code “ALEX” for 20% off your order at https://shop.bldgactive.com/discount/ALEXPUORI: Use code "ALEX" for 32% off Puori Creatine+ when you start a subscription at https://puori.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoo5oW7qvHsFEVEC9tdsQajWNQa4cUSWYra7jo-mudUoI7oOLVxtJOOVV: Get an exclusive discount on your first red light therapy order at https://joovv.com/alexVOTE ONLINE: https://realalexclark.com/voteOur Guest:Dr. Ken Berry, MDDr. Ken's Links:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kendberry.md/X: https://x.com/KenDBerryMDYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCIma2WOQs1Mz2AuOt6wRSUw FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/kendberry.md/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/ken-d-berryWebsite: https://phdhealth.community

What's one of the biggest myths that doctors are still falling for? Food doesn't really matter. The majority of chronic disease in America today is directly caused by your diet. If you want to lose fat, you've got to cut the carbs. That's just as simple as it gets. So if everything that you've been fighting for is right, does that mean that millions of Americans have been made sick by official medical advice? Absolutely.

The USDA, the FDA, the AMA, the ADA, the AHA, all of these are. organizations are complicit. When I took the oath, I meant it, and I had been harming people by giving them the ADA medical advice. I had been making diabetic sicker, pushing them closer to kidney failure, closer to the amputation by the words coming out of my mouth. Today's guest is a doctor who says that he spent the beginning of his career making people sicker instead of healthier, not because he didn't care, but because he trusted the medical guidelines in the science that he was taught. He now believes much of that guidance was driven by weak evidence, industry influence, and a health care system built to manage chronic disease

instead of prevent or reverse it. Joining me today is Dr. Ken Berry, a board-certified family physician, bestselling author of Lies My Doctor Told Me and co-founder of the Proper Human Diet. Today we're talking about whether we've been misled about cholesterol during pregnancy. Why you have rosacea, why your retina keeps detaching, how to become osteoporosis proof, why women are struggling with insulin resistance, what the change from PCOS to PMOS means, why you're on the same diet as your friend, but you still can't lose weight, and how there is more freedom outside of health insurance than with it. Watch this episode on Culture Apothecary via Spotify or Real Alex Clark on YouTube. Please welcome the legendary Dr. Ken Berry to Culture Apothecary. If tomorrow you

became America's Surge in General, what is the first piece of nutrition advice that you would delete from every government website? Whole grains are in any way. way of health food. Why do you say that? Because bread is made up of starches and inflammatory protein. And some people can eat bread and they don't really have an inflammatory reaction. But the carbs, the starch that breaks down into sugar, that counts for everybody. Now, there are less bad versions of bread. So if any of your viewers at home are making their own sourdough bread, if they're grinding their own grain. Oh yeah. We're all about that in this show. So definitely that is the least bad bread option. But I've been studying nutrition for years. And that study has taken me

into the fields of anthropology and archaeology and history. And bread without exception has always been a poverty food. It's always been a starvation food. Never in human history has bread been a health optimization food. So when people say something like whole grains are so nutrient dense, they obviously have never looked up the nutrition in bread. There's a long list of foods that are much more nutrient dense and not only nutrient dense, but the nutrients are actually available to be absorbed by your body. You are a medical doctor.

How much training on nutrition did you get in medical school? And how did that compare to pharma training in medical school? Yeah, so 99.99% of my training in medical school and residency was pharma training. We did at the University of Tennessee have one nutrition class, unlike many medical schools, and this was back in, what, 1998? Jeez, that was a long time ago. And so for one hour a week, two days a week, for half a semester, we had a nutrition class.

But 99% of that class was teaching us how to treat somebody who had been in a housefire. and they were in the burn unit and they couldn't eat. And so we intravenously fed them or somebody who had been in a vehicle accident and smashed their face and couldn't eat. So we had to feed them intravenously. But to your point, as far as just the feeding of a human out in the wild, maybe one hour out of the entirety of medical school. Why do you think so many doctors believe things that aren't true? I say this and people think I'm being flippant, but doctors are just dudes and chicks. And what I mean by that is, is they're not demigods.

They may have a little bit higher IQ than the average person. They may be a better student than the average person, but there's nothing special about a doctor. Many of my classmates did not have a higher IQ. They were just hard workers. You can be a doctor with an IQ of 100. There's no special, like, you know, holy grail of getting into medical school other than just being willing to work 23 hours a day and sleep every third day. And so doctors are just as susceptible to misconceptions, to fallacies, to misinformation. And there are certain styles of misinformation that people who are educated are actually more susceptible to.

What do you mean? Somebody who's got a PhD or an MD or some graduate degree. When they hear a proclamation from a regulatory body or like the American Diabetes Association, they're much more likely to just accept that at face value. Accept it blindly. It wouldn't even occur to them that maybe they have some financial disincentives. And so therefore they've slanted their message. It doesn't even occur to a doctor.

Whereas, you know, just a regular person, if they say, oh, the ADA just said that you should eat 11 servings of whole grain a day, they're like, okay, take it. You know, the docs like take it to the bank. I'm sure they did the research. And the regular person's like, that's a lot of bread. What's one of the biggest myths that doctors are still falling for? Probably the biggest myth that the average doctor might believe, but very often it's an unconscious belief, is that food doesn't really matter, okay? Because first of all, the majority of doctors in America got no nutrition training. So you understand the implication is we didn't even have a class in med school on that.

So obviously that's not important, you see? Yeah. And so then when you're doing your residency training, nobody talks about diet. My friend Casey Means, actually, when she was on my channel, she said that she brought up a diet in her residency training. Like, maybe they're eating too much of this and all the other residents looked at her like she was from Mars. Like, obviously diet has nothing to do with this. Why would you even bring that up? When the truth of the matter is, is that the majority of chronic disease in America today is directly caused by your diet,

by what you're eating and sometimes what you're not eating. That's the predominant cause of chronic disease. So what do you think all these doctors thought when this announcement was made within the last couple months from the administration that if your hospital is serving this crap food and not adhering to the new dietary guidelines, you're going to lose funding? I think that the average doctor probably thought that was a little bit kooky and a little bit conspiratorial because they believe either consciously or unconsciously that diet is really irrelevant. Humans can eat whatever, and then I'll just, I'll medicate them. I'll send them to the pharmacy

for a pill or an injection or an infusion, and you can eat pretty much whatever. That's not a big deal. So if everything that you've been fighting for these last several decades is right, does that mean that millions of Americans have been made sick by official medical advice? Absolutely. By official nutrition advice coming from the U.S. government, also from the ADS. the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, all of these organizations are complicit. Now, do I think there was a huge conspiracy? No.

I think there were some incorrect assumptions made early on in American medicine and nutrition, and they've just kind of multiplied and magnified over the decades to kind of land us where we are now. Now, do the big corporations want to make billions of dollars a year? Of course. Big food and big pharma, they've got to make their billions. And so they're going to do whatever it takes to make those billions. But the people who were really tasked with protecting the American public, the USDA, the FDA, the AMA, the ADA, the ADA, the ADA, the ADA, the AHA are guilty of dereliction of duty. Was there a study or a patient that you came across that kind of made you rethink everything and thought, I got to.

to leave the conventional medical complex? I can tell you exactly what did it. So all of my life, I've been very slender, very athletic. And so I go to medical school. I'm in residency training. I'm working full time in the emergency department and also full time in the clinic and just eating whatever because I had that assumption. I can eat whatever. It's fine. I'll just take a pill if I need it. And I lived in scrubs, which have a drawstring at the waist. I'm very tall. And so I had to wear extra larger 2x scrubs. So there was plenty of drawstring in the middle. And so I knew I'd gain some weight, but I didn't have time to jump on a scale.

One day I jumped on a scale, and I was 297 pounds. Whoa. And now I'm 6'3 foot 3. I like to think I carried that very well, but I did not. I'm sure. I was a fat doctor. So I got some labs checked. I was pre-diabetic.

Now, here's where the epiphany comes. I was like, dang it, because I'm a Southern boy, if you can tell. I don't know. The accent's very subtle. I think you're from Boston. Right, right. And so things have to make sense. One plus one is two, even if it hurts your feelings. That's kind of how I was raised. That's the patient population that I work with. It's very disingenuous if a fat doctor comes into your room and says, now, Alex, you're a little overweight. You're going to, you need to lose a few pounds. Okay. And I think the women who watch this show are very familiar with the eye shift that men make, right, when they're talking to a woman. I was getting the eye shift, but it was going to my belly when I would say, you need to lose a few pounds.

They would look at my gut and be like, okay, I'll get right on that, Doc. Thanks for that. So I took home the American Diabetes Association handout that I gave to all of my patients who were newly diagnosed with pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. And I'm like, I can't be that doctor. I can't be a fat doctor telling people to lose weight, telling people blah, blah, blah. So I take that home and I commit to it for 90 days. I stop eating bacon, which really broke my heart. I cut down on saturated fat, red meat.

I ate lots of whole-grained bread. I had fruit juice smoothies, lots of fruit and berries. Oh, you probably started gaining weight. Oh, you're going to steal my thunder. Okay. And so at the end of that 90-day, I literally followed the PDF from the American Diabetes Association handout because I had paid. pre-diabetes. And I started jogging two days a week. And let me just tell you, I hate to jog.

But I did it. You might say, okay, what happened? At the end of that 90 days, I'd gain three pounds. And my A1C, it actually went up a tenth of a point. Whoa. That was my epiphany as a doctor, because doctors, this will be great. Your viewers will love this. Your doctor thinks that you're full of crap. Okay. Your doctor thinks, oh, I told Alex what to eat and what to do. She didn't do it. That's why she got fatter and sicker. Now I had this three months of personal experience because I live with me. I kind of know what I did. I knew that I had stuck to this 100%. I knew that I was out there on that country road jogging, trying to listen. Back then, it was not an audible. It was a CD player. And I would just strap it to my arm and try to jog

listening to a medical journal or something. That didn't work well. But also, I hate to jog in general. And so it did not work. Now, now I'm faced as a doctor in my special snowflake that somehow this advice didn't work for me, that makes no sense. Maybe this advice is just wrong. Maybe all of my patients who I'd been secretly thinking they're not compliant, they're not doing what I'm saying, tell them to do. Maybe they were listening to me. Maybe this is just junk advice. And so that's when I started reading outside the box. I started looking at anthropology. I started reading. I read the paleo diet by Dr. Lauren Cordane. I read Dr. Adkins Diet revolution. You know, just whatever I can get my hands on.

And all of these were saying, yeah, you've got to cut the carbs. If you want to lose fat, you've got to cut the carbs. That's just as simple as it gets. So I tried that for 90 days. I must maybe eating 100 total grams of carbs a day. Still a lot by keto and carnivore standards, but I had cut it from 300 grams a day on the ADA diet down to 100 grams a day. Immediately my A1C went back to normal.

Three months. who's back to normal. I had lost 20, 30 pounds. I was feeling better. And then things that I didn't expect as a doctor, like my arthritis pain got better. That's weird. You know, it wasn't my knee arthritis. It was shoulder arthritis.

That's odd. How does that work? Also, my heartburn got better. How does that work? Also, my rosacea went away. Then when I started recommending a ketogenic or a ketivore or a carnivore diet to patients, and they would come back in and say, oh, yeah, I've lost 40 pounds. But also, my acne is better.

My psoriasis is better. I didn't immediately discount that and think, well, they're crazy. There's no way. Which is what the average doctor would think. Like, diet doesn't have any effect on stuff like that, but I had already seen it in my own personal journey. And I'm like, well, maybe. And so I kept reading and I kept referring back to the physiology textbooks

and the pathophysiology textbooks trying to figure out how. Why is my rosacea gone when I eat this way, but when I eat all the whole grain breads and all the skim milk dairy, my rosation comes back with a vengeance. How does that make any sense physiologically? What's the mechanism? Then I would hear these stories from my patients. I had people who were on the surgeon's schedule to have a knee replacement.

And after 90 days of keto or carnivore, they'd come back, and they were walking with a cane, sometimes two canes. They didn't have their cane. They're like, I call the surgeon and cancel that. Is that okay? because my knee doesn't hurt anymore or it's 90% better, can I put that surgery off? And I'm like, heck yeah. That's awesome.

You can put that surgery off. You don't need it unless you're having severe pain. And I just kept hearing hundreds and hundreds of face-to-face. People saying, oh, my gosh, I never dreamed that it would help this, that, or the other. And so that's why I'm so just on fire to talk about nutrition and diet. And everything I've learned about it is because, yeah, it can literally change your life. I tried this little ditty called the Blue Beauty Drink the other day, and I swear it made me feel like a Disney mermaid who also does her taxes on time.

Like my skin was glowing, my hair wasn't trying to escape my head, my nails, my nails look like they could murder somebody softly and elegantly. This isn't just some Instagram snake oil. It's anti-aging from the inside out with blue spirulina, bovine collagen, biotin, and amla, all of which are basically just superfoods that scream, yourselves will finally behave, Jessica? It hydrates, nourishes and actually does something for your gut, hair, nails, and skin. Botox, toss it. Injectibles, forget it. This is liquid functional beauty that you can drink and feel morally superior with while doing it. It's also refreshingly sweet with a hint of citrus, so it doubles for a little

mocktail for dry January. You can sip it and feel like you're sophisticated while your liver takes a break. Go to Taylordixwellness.com. Use code Alex Clark for 10% off. That's Taylor Deekswellness.com. Code Alex Clark for 10% off, the blue beauty drink. So for those of you who don't know, Vance does CrossFit, not once a day, twice a day. And he is genuinely the most incredible athlete that I know. I mean, the man is over there thrown around 400 pounds like he's loading groceries into the trunk. But his hands are absolutely destroyed. It's almost become part of our nightly routine where he walks in the door, holds his hands out to me. And he's like, hey, babe, can I use that active skin repair again? And every single time I'm like, sure, but what exactly

is the long-term strategy here? Because tomorrow morning, you're just going to go rip them open again. I keep telling him to wear gloves. He refuses. It's a parent. a matter of principle. He says it's super dorky, whatever. But active skin repair has honestly become our go-to for just about every skin issue. Cuts, scrapes, burns, sunburns, rashes. It's like by number one go-to gift for anyone who's having a baby. Basically, anything where your skin needs a little extra support. It uses hypochloric acid, which is a molecule that mimics your body's natural immune response to help cleanse the skin, soothe irritation, reduce inflammation, and support healing. It's medical grade, but it's also natural and non-toxic, so it's

safe for all skin types, even sensitive skin, eczema, rosacea, and acne-prone skin. It's gentle enough for babies and grandparents and even pets. With over half a million happy customers and thousands of five-star reviews, it's one of those products that I am always glad to have in the house, in my car, in my purse, diaper bag, you name it. I don't have a diaper bag yet, but you will really love it in yours. Visit active skin repair.com. Use code Alex for 20% off your first order.

That's active skin repair.com code Alex for 20% off. Do you ever think about those patients that you had before you had this epiphany and like the advice you gave them and what happened? I apologize publicly multiple times. The very first apology, I just took a legal pad and I wrote, I'm sorry in Big Sharpie and posted a picture. Like, I'm so sorry because you're going to make me cry because when I took the oath, I meant it. And I had been harming people by giving them the ADA medical advice. I had been making diabetic sicker. I had been pushing them closer to kidney failure, closer to that retinal detainable.

closer to the amputation by the words coming out of my mouth who I dedicated my life to helping people to improving their health and I had literally been harming them. Now, it wasn't intentional. Of course. But does that make it any less bad for them? You think food also has to do with retinal detachment? 100%. My mom is about to have her second surgery for that. Diabetic retinopathy is called diabetic retinopathy for reason.

The leading cause of blindness in the United States is the complications of diabetes. Wow. That's the leading cause. The leading cause of amputations is diabetes, the leading cause of kidney failure, diabetes. When you take diabetes out of the equation, and to be clear, 95% of cases of diabetes are type 2. I know the people with type 1 diabetes feel like they never get talked about, but it's because it's such a tiny minority. But everything that I say to people with type 2 applies to people with type 1 as well. You say that chronic disease is America's biggest threat.

So not fentanyl, not China, not terrorism. It's chronic disease. All those things are important. Yeah. And all those things should be addressed. But if your question is, to me, Dr. Barry, what is the thing that's killing the most Americans? That's disabling the most Americans. That's affecting the most Americans.

American's mental ability and mental health, it's not the Chinese. It's not TikTok. It's not any of that stuff. It is the food that we're being sold and told, hey, this is healthy or the implication, this is healthy enough, right? And so, yeah, you're eating Doritos, but it's the new protein Doritos. So therefore, that's fine probably. We don't know. There's no research, but I guess it's fine. And so I could just go on and on for hours. But yeah, if you took the metabolic syndrome, the type 2 diabetes, the pre-diabetes, the fatty liver, the metabolic syndrome, if you took all that out of the equation, America's health would skyrocket. So do you think that we have a health care system in America, or do we have more of like a disease management system? It's 100% of disease management system. And to be clear, big food and big pharma love that. They're totally fine with that. The average patient, however, can they feel. This is not right.

This is not anything that I want to be part of. When you're in the hospital and they bring you your cafeteria tray and you're like, okay, is that food going to help me heal? That's a valid question. And the answer 99.9% of the time in any American hospital is, no. Not only is it not going to help you to heal, it's going to probably slow your healing process. Are you still practicing like you have patience and stuff? Part time. Okay.

Do you take insurance? I do not. I have not for years. I've been trying to educate the audience on this. You'll be the perfect person to help me. And I've been talking about how you don't need health insurance. This is controversial. There's other things I like, like health shares and things like that.

But paying cash is seriously going to save you money and get you better quality care and get down to exactly what is going on with you. So can you explain why? Health insurance is like a matrix that you got to escape. The incentives for a health insurance company are so misaligned with the actual health of their customer, which that's a whole other podcast we could get into. But what people need to understand is that if, first and foremost, you fix the foundational thing of your health, which is your diet, it's my firm belief that 80% of chronic disease and 80% of healing in reversal of chronic disease comes from what you eat

what you don't eat. Okay, number one. Number two, if you fix your food, then you're going to get rid of your pre-diabetes. You're going to reverse your type two diabetes. Your blood pressure is going to come down. Your fatty liver is going to go away. If you've got sleep apnea, your fatty tongue and fatty throat, which are literally documented things that no doctor ever talks about, they go away. Your sleep apnea goes away 90% of the time. You can sell your CPAP on eBay. Okay. Your skin conditions get better, eczema goes completely away when you stop the grains and the beans and the other inflammatory things, psoriasis typically improves by 95% on a proper human diet. And so now you're like, okay, first of all, you were going to the doctor six times a year

for all of your medical conditions that I just named. Nine out of ten of them are now gone, so you don't need all those specialists anymore. You don't need to go to the doctor for blood work six times a year anymore. You might need to go once a year, right? And so then, yes, in that scenario, having health insurance with a low deductible, it becomes just a complete waste of money. You don't need that. Now, I think we all probably need some catastrophic in case you fall off the house or you get hit by bus. Then you probably need some kind of, you know, safety net health insurance for that.

Right. That's what I like. I like, so I talk about crowd health a lot on the show. I love that company. Like 99.9% of all of their cases are covered of severe catastrophic events like that, like falling off a roof or some guy accidentally shot himself while hunting. It was like millions of dollars in medical bills. It was all covered by crowd health. So like that's an example. Sure. And so I'm not anti-modern medicine. If you fall off the house or you shoot yourself, you need a trauma center. You need modern health care. You need the intensive care unit. You need the burn unit. You need all that stuff. but the vast majority of what is being practiced in American clinics and American hospital is chronic disease management

and taking care of all the complications that came from the chronic diseases that are entirely caused by diet and entirely reversible by diet. And so you would break the back of modern American medicine if every single person took the new inverted food pyramid and read it from left to right, top to bottom, and focused mainly in the top left corner and just ate that stuff, you would break the back of big pharma, you would break the back of big food, and you would also encourage local farmers and local ranchers. You would destroy industries, but you would also create other more, in my opinion, more ethical, more God-loving industries that makes sense if you really love planet Earth and you want to take care of it.

you would literally change the economic landscape of America. And, of course, big farmer and big food are not interested in that. And so they're going to fight this at every turn. But yeah, food is the answer. People that are like, well, I just have to have health insurance, traditional health insurance because of those catastrophic moments or whatever, are not considering the fact that I believe it's one in four claims gets denied. So this idea that like this is your like fail safe, like it's going to always be there for you is just not even necessarily true.

you've got people filing bankruptcy due to medical emergencies constantly, and they have health insurance. Of course. So this is a whole tangent. I'm super passionate about it. But how much of the chronic disease epidemic in America do you think is political? Do you have a lobbyist in Washington that goes and argues your position to senators and congressmen? I don't. Nor do I.

And I imagine most of the viewers. They don't have their own personal lobbyists that they can say, hey, go talk to senator so-and-so, and tell them to vote no on this bill. The average American doesn't have any traction whatsoever in D.C., not even much at their state house level. And so I think that it's a huge political problem because big pharma and big food and big ag and big medicine, they have all the lobbyists. And so they're able to lobby all the congressmen and senators. They're able to lobby the FDA and the USDA. And say, you know, no, no, let's reword that or let's change that or let's kill that. That obviously perpetuates the problem.

I think many people still perhaps naively think that the federal government should help the citizens. But increasingly, I don't think that's really the case because I think the federal government has been completely captured by the big corporations. And so that's why back in 2017, 2018, when I started this, I'm like, I'm not even going to try to happen at a legislative level. I'm just going to make videos to help people. And so each YouTube video is just me sitting talking to a patient saying, oh, you've got psorias, okay, here's what you do about that. Oh, you've got PCOS. Oh, here's what you do about that.

I still, to this day in 2026, do not hold out any hope, even with MAHA being where it's at. I'm very thankful that that message is getting out there, but I don't think it's going to change any government regulations long term. I don't think it's going to change governmental laws at the federal or state level. My hope is that enough people like me and you and you just say, oh, so I should eat way more meat and eggs and way less of the package stuff that comes in plastic bags and cardboard boxes, and that will improve my health. Yes, do that. And then who cares what the federal government does after that? Because you are now healthy. True freedom is not relying on the government for anything. And as conservatives, we know this. It's so weird to me, like, this is where conservatives start to kind of fumble a little bit. they're like, when it comes to, you know, medical advice, food advice, and then anything having to do with pharma, it's like this is where all of a sudden we are nervous to take it back into our own hands, right? And this is a conservative problem. Because liberals, I mean, they're wrong about 99% of stuff, but this is the one thing that they've been consistently right about until the pandemic. Now all of a sudden they decided, I guess they don't care about these values anymore. But historically, it was the left that did. And so this is, you know, my favorite thing. And when people are like, well, do you ever, you know, when a leftist asked me,

do you ever think the left is right about anything? I'm like, yeah, you guys were right about not vaccinating your kids and drinking raw milk. And guess what? Then they all get real quiet. Yeah, you were right about organic. You were right about go back to the land. You were right about a lot of stuff. Yeah.

But then they completely lost the plot during 2020 because they had to tow the party line. And so now they've just diluted and destroyed the only message that they really had that made any sense. Yeah, it was the only common sense message. Such a shame. What is the strongest argument against carnivore? If you think about it, there's really not one. And here's why I say that. So a carnivore diet sounds very fattish.

Sounds very, you know, Instagrammy, TikToky. It sounds like influencers. This is the oldest diet that humanity has ever eaten. Okay. And I mentioned earlier that my study of nutrition had pulled me into anthropology, archaeology, paleoanthropology. And so if you ask an anthropologist, what's the oldest food that we can document that humans have eaten? It's meat, 100% of the time.

So is that what you're doing, 100% meat only? I'm happy to go into Hawaii. I don't think everybody needs to be a carnivor. Okay. But I think there is no proper human diet that does not contain meat, eggs, and fish. Oh, sure. Your diet is not proper. If you think a vegan diet is healthy and natural and ancestrally appropriate, you've been diluted.

Yeah. You're confused. Okay. It is very clear from the anthropological evidence that meat has always been the go-to food for human beings. We are omnivores, definitely, by classification. But that doesn't mean that we are equally healthy if we're eating mostly plants. Right. Okay. That's, that is, and some people can tolerate way more plants. Some people cannot tolerate them. So for me, somebody who fattenes very easily develops pre-diabetes. very easily, all carbohydrates break down into sugar, okay? Whether it's the carbohydrates from a jelly donut or the carbohydrates from cooked broccoli.

A carb is a carb. Fructose and glucose are sugar. Broccoli can be a carb. A hundred percent, yeah. And so it definitely broccoli has some fiber. Okay. And that's definitely going to slow down the sugar load that your body gets. The more you cook it, the more it just becomes a carb.

And most people's grandmother cooks the broccoli to death, right? No, that's what I do. I like it literally charred burnt. Well, here's the thing. That's actually probably healthier. Oh, okay. Because when you talk about eating plants, you've got to talk about two things. And a lot of people miss the plot on this. The first thing is the carb count. And so if you're somebody who doesn't ever, you never have a problem with your weight,

then you can cook your broccoli like you like it, cooked and mushy and charred, and it's fine. The carb count goes up, but it doesn't matter for you because you're able to tolerate that level of carbs. But the other thing that doesn't get talked about, which is a very real thing, is the phytochemical content in every single plant that you eat. For some people, these are very inflammatory. Let me get this out of the way because I know I'm going to say it at some point. There's this thing in human physiology called a normal distribution curve, which means that the majority of people in the middle, if they eat too much of something, it's going to have a negative effect. There are people over on this tail that if they eat hardly any of it, it's going to have a negative effect.

And there are people over on this tail, they could eat five pounds every meal. It's not going to affect them really at all, seemingly. Most people can eat 100 grams of carbs a day. Doesn't really make them fat. Doesn't make them diabetic. They can tolerate that, okay? And that's why low carb is on the left-hand side of a proper human diet spectrum. Some people got to cut the carbs more down to a ketogenic diet.

In order to lose the stored fat, in order to get rid of the fatty liver. Some people have, like me, I have to cut the carbs. carbs as low as I can possibly cut them. And so really what a carnivore diet is, is it's the lowest carbohydrate diet that a human can eat. It's not zero carb because eggs have a gram of carb per egg. A serving of liver has two grams of carbs per serving of liver. So it's not zero carb, although that's a pretty standard misnomer.

People will call it zero carb, but it's not. But that's irrelevant. The relevant thing is it's the lowest carbohydrate. option. It's also the diet lowest in phytochemicals. Okay, because phyto means plant. Animals have built-in defenses. They have claws. They have teeth. They can kick you. They can run away. They can bite you. Plants don't have that liberty. They're stuck in one place. And so what plants developed during their life cycle is chemical defenses. Now, this is not talked about because the ADA is very plant-based diet-centric, right? And so they're never going to talk about phytochemicals. They're

never going to say, oh, you know, the reason that you're on five different medicines for your eczema and it's no better is because you're eating all the grains. Right. That's why your eczema won't get better. People with psoriasis, same thing, people with rosacea, same thing, acanthosis, nigracans, acne, the average teen or 20-something with bad, I mean the bad scarring, acne, it's skim dairy and it's grains and beans. Once you eliminate that and eat way more meat, eggs and fish, your acne is going to not go completely away because if you have no acne, that means you're old. So when you get that pimple, you should praise that pimple. It's like, see, I'm not old. I'm still young. I've got one now. I'm like, yes, see, I still got it. But your acne is going to

improve by 80 or 90 percent. You're not going to need that depression-causing acutane anymore. not going to need that four trips a year to the dermatologist for the special medicine for your acne if you get the phytochemicals out of your diet. And so a lot of people, when they first hear this, it's such a paradigm shifter that they can't hear it. And another thing that modern medicine in America has done is made people start to define themselves by their illness. So if you have multiple sclerosis. And I say to you, hey, we've actually got about 10 case studies now of documented MS that is in complete remission now on a carnivore diet. It's going to be a case series published soon. Not only do they not hear that as, there's hope, they hear that sounds offensive to them.

Like, how dare you imply the same thing for mental health? Yeah. Depression, anxiety, OCD. When you say it's at least worsened by your diet. Right. Oh, they hate that. If not caused completely by your diet. You know who really hates hearing that your food is causing a lot of your... American Psychology Association for one. Well, definitely for one.

But also, it's Gen Ziers online. Hate that. It's because they've been taught, Alex, that that's part of who you are. Yes. And it's part of their identity. And it's not their fault. But it is their problem. They like having their problem.

Maybe, I don't know. I'm not a Gen Zier, so I don't know. But I can tell you that I have interacted with Gen Zeres, who when they get past being offended by what I said, then they're like, oh, so you're, are you saying there's hope? And I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm saying. There is hope. And it's not from buying some product for me or some line of supplements for me. It's just fix your diet and keep it fixed. That's going to make your mental health issue less severe.

And for most people who have severe depression or another mental health issue, if they can fix their diet and improve their symptoms 90%, you don't think that's a win. That's a victory? Of course it is. But 90% of them just get offended and tune out. It's like, no, how dare you say that? What is the biggest mistake that people make when they're trying to become carnivore? So the biggest mistake everybody makes when they try to improve their health. through diet is what I call the false choice.

Okay. And so you go from eating Doritos, even the high-protein Doritos, which just cracks me up. It just makes me want to slap somebody, right? It's like, hey, let's take utter junk and add some casein protein and then act like it's a health food. But if you're living on jelly donuts and Doritos and Pepsi Cola, and you're like, dude, I'm fat and diabetic and I feel miserable, I got to clean up my act. Good, yes, that's correct.

but then they make this false choice because it's so ubiquitous in modern society, they're either going to say, okay, I'm going to start eating Mediterranean, which is predominantly plant-based and high-carb. Or I'm going to eat the ADA diet or the AHA-Dash diet, which is predominantly high-carb and plant-based. Or I'm going to start eating lots of whole-grained bread instead of, you know, just the cheap white bread. And nothing happens.

They spend a ton of money. They buy this line of supplements. They join a program. They maybe go to their doctor, get a prescription, and they really expend all of their willpower and a lot of their wallet power and nothing meaningful changes. Now, what do you do in that situation? You say, it must just, it's me. It's my genetics. I'm just big-boned. I'm whatever. I'm big-boned. Right? You know, it's like, oh, I just give up. And that's the thing that on my YouTube channel, I'm like, no, I know you think you've tried. everything. You've tried every diet, but you have not because you've been sold a bill of goods. And the people who have told you eat plant-based Mediterranean, eat vegan, eat vegetarian, they're not trying to trick you. They truly believe that that's a healthy intervention,

but it's not for the vast majority of people. You know, 88% of adults in America have at least one marker of metabolic illness. Wow. And so it's not a high-carb plant-based diet, that's not the solution for you. You've got to cut the carbs and keep them cut if there's any hope for you. And so don't make that false choice of, okay, I'm going to switch from the jelly donut diet to this plant-based diet. You know, Oreos are vegan, right? That's not an improvement in your health. You've got to cut the carbs and keep them cut. What do you say to somebody who says, I feel really good, including vegetables in my diet? Then keep doing that. If, If you fatten easily or if you're 20, 30, 40 pounds overweight, you need to count your carbs

and keep your carbs under 100 to start with. If that works great. If it doesn't work, cut them down to 50, then 20, then 10, then as close to zero as you can get. But if you're like, no, I don't have visceral adiposity. I don't have that gut. I'm not overweight or obese. And I eat lots of vegetables. Keep doing that.

That's fine. I need to say something because I see this in my DMs every single day. Alex, I want to get my health together, but I just don't know where to start. Or I'll do it later when I have more money. You know, I've heard every version of this, and I get it. The system is confusing on purpose. You go to a doctor. They check like five things.

They tell you you're fine. They send you home. Meanwhile, you're still feeling exhausted, inflamed, just off. So then you do nothing. You wait, and waiting becomes your health plan. This is why I'm really excited about what Jevity just did. They launched a completely free tier, not a trial, free. You go to go jevity.

dot com, upload blood work that you already have from any lab, and they give you a personalized longevity blueprint that analyzes over 90 biomarkers and actually shows you what's going on. When I saw my blueprint, I didn't just want to know. I mean, I saw all that info and I wanted to fix it. And if that's you, after finding out about what's going on with you, you can do the Jevity Plus membership. You get an actual functional clinician who walks through your results and builds a plan around you. Not a template. They build you a plan. And they don't stop at just testing. You get access to supplements, peptides, hormone optimization, nutrition help, real protocols based on your laps. They test over 90 biomarkers, retest every six months, adjust

your plan, and you have a care team you can actually message. Go to gogevity.com, use code Alex. Again, go to gogevity.com, use code Alex. I love when people say, I don't take creatine because I'm not trying to look like the rock. Really? Neither am I. By that logic, I shouldn't drink water because I'm not trying to become a whale. People hear the word creatine, and then they start picturing some named Blade screaming at a squat rack while dry scooping pre-workout and punching drywall. Meanwhile, there's actually a ton of research looking at creatine, not just for physical performance, but for cognitive function and mood, too. At this point, I'm interested in anything that helps me remember why I walked into the kitchen.

That's why I started taking Puri-Creatine Plus. What caught my attention is that they combine 5 grams of creatine monohydrate with 400 milligrams of torrine in every serving. Both support energy during high-intensity workouts, and there's exciting research looking at their role in supporting cognitive performance and mental clarity too. But honestly, the biggest reason I trust them is that Peory for creatine publishes the third-party testing results for every single batch, looking for heavy metals or anything else weird that you want to avoid. Just scan the QR code on the back and you can see exactly what's in your product. They're also the only supplement brand with

the clean label project transparency certificate, meaning every batch is independently tested and the results are published online. Use code Alex at Peory.com. That's P-U-O-R-I. Peory.com, code Alex, to get 32% off your first order when you start a subscription. That's more than $23 in savings. That's P-U-O-R-I.com.

Use code Alex at checkout for this exclusive offer. I have some women's health questions. Yes, let's do it. What are some of the biggest lies women over 40 are being told? The biggest lie is your food doesn't really matter. Just go see your doctor. That's the lie from big medicine.

The lie from big food is, oh, you've got to cut your saturated fat and you've got to cut your cholesterol intake and you've got to really avoid that red meat. See, the big food companies, in order to make billions of dollars a year, you can't sell meat and eggs and fish. That's not how you make billions. The way you make billions is you make stuff out of three ingredients, a grain, wheat, rice, oats, corn, soybean, okay, grains and beans. And increasingly, they're using soybean and pea protein to make the junk food with.

because they can have a higher protein count and like protein Doritos now. It's healthy. So grains or beans. Number two, sugar. And number three, vegetable seed oils. And this is all stuff that is subsidized by our government. So it's cheap. Oh, wait.

Now you're getting very conspiratorial here, Alex. Yes, that's correct. All of the things that you use to make a commodity. I want to eat food. I don't want to eat commodities, okay? But grains and beans are subsidized. vegetable seed oils are subsidized. And yes, sugar.

Sugar beet, sugar cane is subsidized by the federal government. Why would they do that? Why don't they subsidize broccoli? Why don't they subsidize chicken eggs? Why don't they subsidize local farms and small farms? They just want to subsidize the commodities that they can ship to other countries. This is kind of random. But you know what I found out yesterday that really blew my mind?

So in the state of Florida, sugar, like controls everything. Big sugar. Yeah. So that's like a massive sugar state, sugar whatever. I don't know, farmers and stuff. So the sugar people are the people that control the Fruit and Vegetable Association there. I mean, so they just, they're in everything. You literally, you're like fruit and vegetable association. It's owned by big sugar. It's crazy. So that's like a whole thing I kind of want to deep dive into sometime. The one thing that they don't own is the local rancher near your house. They don't own him. If he's raising sheep or go, or cows, and you buy from him, you are literally starving. Big sugar, big ag, big pharma, you're starving them, okay? But if you buy something at the supermarket in the middle aisles, that's where they put the biggest markup, because that's what I was getting to,

if you make something out of grains, sugar, and vegetable seed oil, it's shelf stable for years. Rats won't eat it. Bacteria won't eat it. Fungus won't eat it. So they can call it fresh, even though it's three years old. They can make it in China, ship it over on a cargo ship, put it in a warehouse for six months, put it on the supermarket shelf for three to six months, and still say, oh, it's fresh. This is an exclusively American mindset thing.

Anywhere else, you talk to a European, you talk to somebody that's from France, and you say, you know, my bread can last for months. They are so grossed out by that. You want mold and fungus and rats to want to eat your food. If it doesn't, then it's not food. And so Europeans come over here and they're like, this is disgusting, you know, what is this bread? I mean, they are really grossed out by the bread here. Not to mention everything else, but it's very culturally normal to, you know, every day or two, you go to the market that's near you and you pick up your local, your bread and your fruit and your vegetables, whatever. And yeah, if you don't eat it, it goes bad and then guess what?

You have to replace it. But the idea is you eat it. You're not supposed to have this stuff that lasts for months in the fridge. Correct. Correct. but that's what big food is interested in selling you because the final brick in building this wall is that when you make something out of those three ingredients, you can make a 1,000x profits. Okay, because all the ingredients are subsidized, so they're essentially free, right?

They're shelf stable, so there's no loss, like, oh, it molded, oh, it went bad, there's none of that. And you can charge a 500%, a 1,000% a 1,500% markup on it. Can't do that with fish, eggs, meat, real bread that are actual human made. You can't make a thousand percent markup. So Kellogg's and Craft Hines and Mondal is they're not interested in that. Okay? They want shelf stable forever, essentially free ingredients. You know, they're super cheap.

And I can source them from anywhere. and then it'll sit on the shelf for two years, and I make a thousand percent. Yeah, I'll take that deal. Right. But they're not interested in a local rancher or a local farmer. They have no interest in that. And that's why increasingly, people who really want to take charge of their health are buying everything they can from as close to their home as they can. What do you say to the woman whose blood sugar is so trashed? She's like a snackaholic. She feels like she has to constantly eat snacks throughout the day. So the first thing I would say to her is there's no such thing as a healthy snack, period. What about celery? Right. So if you're snacking in between meals, you didn't eat enough during your previous meal,

which tells me that you've fallen for the false choice again, that, oh, if you're trying to lose weight or get healthier, you've got to eat smaller portions. I was an animal biologist before I went to medical school. And so animal biology, mammology, I've been. studying that stuff for decades. There's not a single animal on planet Earth, Alex, that stops eating before it's full. Somehow, animals without nutrition degrees and without medical degrees, they know what to eat, they know when to eat, they know how much to eat, and they know, importantly, when to stop eating. Humans are the most intelligent species on planet Earth.

We run the planet, but we don't know what to eat or when. or how much or how often? We don't know. We don't know any of that stuff. That's not because we're dumb. We're very intelligent. It's because we've been tricked. And there's a profit motive that's behind the trickery.

Okay? And so if you're snacking in between meals, then it's either an emotional thing. You're either upset about something. Your cortisol's high and you're snacking to kind of, you know, calm yourself. Or you just didn't eat enough in the last meal. You didn't eat enough actual real food. Many people will, you know, they'll try to eat a bunch of rice cakes and they'll eat a bunch of have a big fruit juice smoothie or something and then wonder why they're hungry an hour later. It's like there's no nutrition in that.

You need fat. Fat is good for you, not bad for you. You need protein, real protein that comes from meat, eggs and fish, not from Doritos. You need actual real building blocks of a human body. Then you're not going to be hungry every two hours and having to snack in between. And then the second thing I would tell her is you've got to cut the carbs. It is not the fat that's making you fat. I know fat in your food and fat on your body, they rhyme.

It's the same exact word. So therefore, eating fat has to make you fat. Oh, that's a bill of goods you've been sold by the big food companies. Eating too many carbs makes you fat. The simpler and the more processed the carb, the worse, absolutely. But for some people, they got to cut almost all the carbs. Even that broccoli's got to go for some of us if we want to attain our ideal body weight. Okay. And this comes from a previously fat doctor. I was severely obese by the medical definition.

And the only way I can stay at 225 is carnivore. Even if I eat keto, 50 grams a day, I'll gain 5 or 10 pounds. And my E1C will start to creep up. Now, not everybody's that way. So our woman we're talking about, she probably doesn't have to be carnivore. But she needs to cut the carbs down to 100, maybe, maybe 50s. 50, maybe 20, somewhere on that proper human diet spectrum, the excess fat is just going to start to fall off. She's not going to need Ozzypick. She's not going to need any of this stuff. She's going to stop the snacking in between meals because she does like every other animal on earth, when she's hungry, she eats until she's full. And then she stops eating. Revolutionary. It sounds revolutionary to say it, but it's like, well, every other animal does it and does just fine. They just changed the name of PCOS to PMOS.

What does that mean? So this is polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome now. And that's much closer to the truth because polycystic ovarian syndrome is a complete misnomer. The cysts have nothing to do with PCOS. The first doctor who ever described it, he saw the cyst and he's like, oh, okay, that may have something to do with it. We now know definitively that every woman has cysts during certain times. of her monthly cycle.

You may have a cyst right now. You don't need to go see a doctor for that. That's normal. The cysts come and go. Now, when you're metabolically unwell, this is basically type 2 diabetes of the ovary. So when you have type 2 diabetes of the ovary, PMOS, used to be called PCOS,

then you do have more cysts and you have bigger cysts, but it's because of something called hyperinsulinemia. When you're eating too many carbohydrates, which break down into sugar, that's going to spike your blood sugar. Your pancreas does not like you to have high blood sugar. It's bad for you. So it's going to secrete a lot of insulin to pull your blood sugar down. That gets your blood sugar back to normal, but it also makes you hungry again in two hours

because you ate a high-carb meal. Now you're snacking. Even if it's on celery, you're snacking and then you're eating again. And that cycle every day, you're keeping blood sugar spikes going. You're keeping insulin spikes going. insulin is a growth factor among the hundreds of other things it does, it tells those cysts to grow. And they can get big enough to become painful, they can rupture, all the things. But the main problem with PMOS, used to be called PCOS, is that you have hyperglycemia,

high blood sugar that comes and goes or stays, you have high insulin levels, which come or go or stay, and you have high levels of inappropriate chronic inflammation. That's the three things. that cause what we used to call PCOS, that's what causes it. And so that's one of my first YouTube videos that I made was about PCOS, and I actually said, this is basically diabetes of your ovaries. When you cut the carbs and keep them cut, your ovaries go back to normal. So what do you say to the girl who says, sure, Dr. Berry, I get it.

Everyone tells me I should go keto. So I did, and I didn't lose any way. Again, that false choice, because for a lot of people, keto got super, popular, right? And so every, some of the big corporations now, big food, they're making key, I mean, Slim Fast came out with keto Slim Fast. Keto Bread, there's no bread that's keto, okay? By definition, if it's bread, it's not keto. So they went out and filled up their shopping cart with all these keto products. And they tried that for 90 days. And they didn't make the true choice to go back to real food that's low in carb. What should their plate ideally look like?

It looks a lot like the plate your grandmother used to make for you. It's meat and two. Or it's eggs and bacon. It's literally that it's that. And so if half your plates covered with meat or eggs or fish and then half your plates cover with low-carb vegetables, maybe a few berries for dessert, a few nuts for dessert, that's keto. That's it.

That's what keto is. Keto is not keto bread and keto shake and keto pie and keto pancakes and keto pancake. None of that's keto. If your daughter was diagnosed with PMOS, tomorrow? What would be the first thing you would do before considering medication? If she was willing, because I'm not a dictator, right? I'm just a dad. I would say, hey, as a doctor who studied nutrition for a long time, darling, I highly recommend you go overnight carnivore. Let's get it under control. And then you probably don't have to stay carnivore. After 90 days or 180 days,

we can go back to low carb, we can go back to keto. We can add back some vegetables, some berries, whatever your favorite plants are. We can probably add those back. But right now, you need to get this under control because you're my daughter. You're in charge of whether I have granddaughters or not and grandsons are not. And so I want a bunch of those. So I need you to fix your PMOS so that you can get busy with my grandchildren. Let's talk about pregnancy, but when it comes to the men.

So should men be preparing for pregnancy and be focused on nutrition just like women should? Absolutely. 100%. If a young wife is over here eating keto or ketivore to try to increase her fertility and they're having fertility problems as a couple and he's sitting over there drinking his Pepsi and eating his ding-dongs, he's the problem. Because about half the time, it's the sperm motility, sperm fitness, sperm count. That's the problem. That's why a young couple is not getting pregnant. He needs to be keto or ketivore or carnivore as well. So when you've got a guy who has like zero sperm count. I mean, it's like completely missing. Is it possible? Have you seen it possible where they can

get that back just by completely reversing diet trends? Absolutely. Whoa. A lot of its diet, I would say 80% of it. Now, there are medical conditions. There are genetic conditions. There are injuries early in life that can leave a man with a very low sperm count, and that's not his fault. But the majority, I'll just tell you, I've got friends who are fertility specialists, and they always talk to the the prospective mother as well as the prospective father. It's not just a woman issue. You've got to get them both in there, number one. And number two, sperm is the problem half the time.

And number three, more and more fertility specialists are talking about you need to go keto, you need to go carnivore. And no smoking weed. No, weed's going to lower your testosterone. Yes. Because in order to make a baby, you actually have to have sex. Yeah. And if you're testosterone sitting over here at 150, because you're smoking weed,

and living on junk food, you're not interested in sex. Wow. Yeah. Why did she marry you to start with? It would be my question. But, hey, let's not go there. That's another episode. There is a huge number of pregnant women who are on SSRIs.

Yes. Because it is impossible. You know, we now know about how severe SSRI withdrawal is. And so, you know, these women are on SSRI since they're 14 years old. They get pregnant. You can't just stop taking your antidepressant because you'll just have a horrific withdrawal. So the doctors are now telling them, well, I think it's safe. You can be on an SSRI while you're pregnant. What is your opinion on that? What should they know? I'm very opposed to that.

All the SSRIs are pregnancy class C, which means that we've got enough research on them to know that they're not going to cause a monstrous birth effect or they're not going to kill your unborn baby, right? We have enough research to know that they're relatively safe. But here's the Here's what we don't have any of. We have no long-term data showing that if a pregnant mom is taking Lexapro while she's pregnant. What's that going to do to that unborn child's mental health 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now? Nobody knows the answer to that. And obviously, nobody cares. Well, I did an episode. I think it was Dr. Adam Murado. Am I thinking right? Maybe not. I might have the doctor wrong. But anyway, if you just Google, Koldropa, pregnancy, SS. I have a whole episode on this. It was shocking the research and the data that this doctor had on the effects of SSRIs on unborn children. And so I have a hot take on this because I know that there's women in my audience and they've been like, you know, well, this is ridiculous.

I'm not going to not take my SSRI while I'm pregnant. Then guess what? You shouldn't get pregnant. I tend to agree. Until you go through, and it could literally take you two or three years, until you go through getting off the SSRI, do not get pregnant. Don't even try to get off the SSRI until you fix your diet. You got to fix your diet first because if you're still eating the junk, you're not going to be able to get off of it. You're going to have a relapse and you'll have to go back up on your dose.

The vast majority of the SSRIs, you have to wean them very, very slowly. You cannot just stop taking them. And so if you're like, you meet the perfect guy, you get married, now you want to have a baby, but you're on LexerPro, you want to, you want a quick, there's no quick fix. I'm sorry. Now, here's the true villain, and it's not even a villain because he didn't know better. The doctor who started her on that SSRI when she was 16, 17, 18, maybe 12, maybe 22. Maybe seven now. Did that doctor say, hey, you don't want to be taking this when you get pregnant?

Yep. Did that doctor say, hey, some people, it takes years to come off this. Yeah. Like they have to go to microdosing. They have to get a liquid version and count drops. and it takes three years to get off this. And so my question to anybody watching this who's taking an SSRI is, did your doctor tell you that before you started taking this?

And if your answer is no, and I know it's going to be no, so don't lie. Did you make an informed decision? You didn't. You weren't given the option. So did that doctor lie? Is that doctor a villain? Right? He probably doesn't know.

He doesn't know better. He's being told by the pharma rep that is completely safe to take while pregnant. Right, right. So he's telling you what he knows. So he's in the same boat. I was in when I was telling people, here's the ADA handout, eat this way now that you have diabetes. He doesn't know better, but he's still causing harm. Yeah.

What do you do with that? How do you assign blame in a situation like that? He believes he's doing what's right. She trusts him. Now you've got this woman. She's married. She wants to have a baby. Now she's like, but I'm taking, you know, Paxil.

What do I do? I don't know. And I tried to stop it. Oh, my God. I couldn't. Now what do I do? Well, you're going to have to wean off that. You guys may have to wait a year or two or three to have that baby.

Yeah. This is why I'm so thankful to get to do this show and talk to people like you about things like this because maybe there is a mom who, you know, found herself in this situation and now she's in this mess. Yep. But, you know, eventually when she's got a teenage daughter or whatever, or you have a teenage daughter right now currently and she's going through it and the doctor's telling you to put her on SSRIs, you've now heard this information. And you can say, hold on before we take that. Do you understand how hard it is to get off this drug and how you're going to have to maybe put pregnancy on hold? Because you're going to have to wait to take the time to do this. Do you understand the severe withdrawal symptoms, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like, that's what I like about the show is it's giving people the opportunity to finally get that informed consent that they weren't getting. Yeah. One person at a time. Because you're not going to change the American Medical Association. Right. Let me add, while we were talking about pregnancy, let me add this, gestational diabetes. Oh, yes. I wanted to ask you about that.

Is completely caused by what you're eating and is completely reversible without medication by fixing your diet. And so if you had gestational diabetes in a previous pregnancy, you can have subsequent pregnancies and not have gestational diabetes. You've got to cut the carbs. For the average woman in her late teens, 20s, early 30s, who's pregnant and they're like, oh, your blood sugar's going up, you've got gestational diabetes. If you will cut your total daily carbohydrate intake to 100 grams a day or less, it'll go away in 90% of you. The other 10% will have to cut them down to 50 total grams. If you're in late 30s, early 40 pregnancy, you may have to cut down to 50 or even 20 total grams. Not net grams, total grams.

Very important. because the big food manufacturers, they've caught their wives to the carb thing now. And on the front, they'll say, only three grams of net carb. But you turn it around, it's got 20 grams per serving of total carbs. You've got to count total carbs. And so gestational diabetes, without exception, is completely reversible. If you have it, you can reverse it. You do not need to go on insulin.

Literally within two weeks, you can have normal blood sugars if you cut the carbs long enough. And a lot of women are like, yeah, but what about I've got to, I have nutrition. to feed the baby, yeah, the most nutrient-dense foods are the lowest-carb foods. And isn't there another option? You don't have to drink that yucky drink. Yeah, yeah. And so any pregnant woman, ask your OB-G-Y-N or your midwife, I want to wear a CGM. I'm not drinking 75 grams of sugar. I'm not doing that. And isn't there food dye in that? Oh, it's nasty. It's worse than a Coca-Cola. If that's even possible, it's worse than a Coke. Just tell them, I'm not doing that.

Don't even say, may I not do that? Just I'm not doing that. I'll wear a CGM. I'm not trying to keep you in the dark doctor. I want you to know what my blood sugar is, but I'm not doing that to me and to my baby. Is the fear of cholesterol during pregnancy misplaced? 100% misplaced. Guess what the human brain is made of?

Clestrel. Fat and cholesterol, okay? When you're building another human brain, you need to be eating copious amounts of fat. You want to eat high cholesterol foods, okay? You want to eat lots of protein. Your baby is literally built of protein and fat. That's what your baby is going to be built of. Your baby is not going to be built of carbohydrates, okay?

It's not going to be built of plants. It's not going to be built of fruit juice smoothies. It's not going to be built of any of that. Your baby is built of protein and fat, just like you are. Every nerve in your baby's body is wrapped by fat. That's how they are insulated. That's how they conduct so well. Every cell membrane in your baby's body has a lipid bilayer, lipid.

It's literally surrounded by fat. That's how the human cell works. And so if your doctor tells you to eat low fat, you need to ignore your doctor. That is ignorant advice. Your baby needs you eating lots of animal fat and animal protein. That's how you're going to build a beautiful, healthy, intelligent baby. Can we all just admit something? It's summer.

Nobody wants to wear a full face of makeup. And I am not contouring in 97 degree humidity so that I can look like I'm melting into a puddle by the community pool. That is why I've been raving about the brand new sun serum and lip and cheek tint from primally pure, which I have on right now. It is my favorite non-toxic skincare brand. This is my entire summer personality now. I've even got my makeup artist on board. She's like, okay, this actually slaps. The sun serum is basically skincare.

Okay, it's SPF 30 and your complexion all in one. It is so excellent. It evens everything out, but it still looks like your skin. You can put that on at the pool, right? So you've got your sun protection, but you still look like you have makeup on. And then I throw on this lip and cheek tint. And suddenly I look like, you know, I've been drinking enough water and I'm making good life choices. It is so stunning.

I'm wearing the, I believe this is pomegranate. It's kind of like a corally, tomatoy, light reddish peach color. I don't know. That's like a terrible description, I guess. but you can see what it looks like on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. I can jump in the pool and this doesn't immediately slide off my face. And at the end of the day, I just use a little miscellar water before cleansing. It comes right off.

I'm telling you. Beauty is finally getting smarter. Fewer products, better ingredients, less looking like you're preparing for a Broadway production at 10 a.m. I also love the primally pure as female founded and formulates without synthetic fragrance, Phaas or a bunch of unnecessary junk. Use code Alex Clark to get 15% off your primarily pure purchase. There is so much good stuff too at primallypure.com. That's code Alex Clark for 15% off anything at primallypure.com.

You guys know I'm obsessive about the foundations of health. And one thing most people completely overlook, especially in the dark winter months, is light exposure. Humans evolved with sunlight, okay? When winter hits, days get shorter. We spend more time indoors and we lose exposure not just to visible light, but red in your infrared light, which play a real biological role in how our cells function. Red and near infrared light have been studied for their ability to support mitochondrial function,

which helps drive cellular energy production. That matters for muscle recovery, inflammation, skin health, circulation, sleep quality, and overall daily energy. When your cells function better, everything works better. That is why red light therapy is a non-negotiable in my routine and why I use my juve. I also, by the way, just got my mom a juve. This was really important because she's experiencing a lot of arthritic types of complications. What sets Juve apart is that it actually works. Juve uses clinically proven wavelengths,

delivers a safe and effective dose of light, and offers true medical grade panels that are independently tested and safety certified. That is critical, because there are a lot of fake devices out there using the wrong wavelengths with zero testing. Oh my gosh, please be careful when you're ordering online. I personally have used juve daily for, oh my gosh,

it was like during the pandemic I got my first juve. maybe 2021. So it's been like five years, all right? I use it in the morning about 10 minutes and sometimes I'll do it at night to wind down literally 10 minutes. There's a timer on there. I can read my Bible. I can do my devotions. I can also sit in silence. You can sit, close your eyes, listen to a podcast. It's become one of the easiest, most consistent tools in my wellness routine. Also, put it on and have it on you and your baby as you are breastfeeding. I also love that Juv offers a wide range of options, whether you want targeted treatment or a full body set up in your house. If you want to support your health at the cellular level, especially during winter, Juve makes it simple.

Go to juve.com slash Alex. It's J-O-O-V-V-V-com slash Alex to get an exclusive offer in your checkout. Juve.com, J-O-O-V-V-V-com slash Alex. Some exclusions apply. How come sometimes you could have two different women who are eating the exact same thing and one loses weight and one doesn't? That's that normal distribution curve I talked about earlier. One of them's on this end of the curve. the others on this end. Okay. Now, it doesn't mean that, oh, she needs a different diet. It just means she's able to tolerate the carbs, the phytochemicals, the whatever. She can, the food diet. She can tolerate that more than her friend. That doesn't mean that she's able to be to optimize her health on that diet. It just means that the negative effects of that way of eating are less noticeable

in her. That must be me because I lived off ultra-processed food my entire life, but I didn't get weight. I? So did I. Until I got about 30, 32, that stopped. And so... No, I had other symptoms. I wasn't symptom-free. It just wasn't weight on me. Exactly. And for a lot of people, it's not weight. And you can be very slender and have gestational diabetes. You can be very slender and have PCOS. PMOS now. You can be very slender and have severe acne that's being caused by hyperinsulinia and chronic inflammation. You can be very slender and have type 2 diabetes. You can be super skinny and have fatty liver. The majority of people in India and China, although they're slender, they have fatty liver because they live on rice and beans. They all have fatty liver, but

their genetics, they don't fatten like a Caucasian does, right? It's really hard to make somebody with their genetics obese. Yeah. And so they're slender. And so unless you check labs and check the insulin level and check the HSCRP and check the AOT, AST, GGGT, and all the other stuff, they look healthy to you. You don't know that they have pre-diabetes and fatty liver. Women are terrified of osteoporosis. Good. Even as a kid, I remember being a little girl seeing commercials on a few,

like, oh, I don't want to be like that when I'm old. 100%. Set up straight. Yes. Have we become too focused on calcium and not enough on overall metabolic health and strength training and protein? 100% yes. Okay.

Okay. Let me give you a little primer on what the human bone is made of. It's 50% protein. okay eat your meat eat your fish eat your eggs that's what bones are built of now in the in the protein matrix you put minerals calcium and other minerals in there and that's what makes your bones rigid but if you're eating a low protein a lot you know plant-based diet you're going to have osteopenia if not osteoporosis in just a few years because you're not getting enough high quality protein now there is protein in plants there

There's even protein in Doritos, okay? But it's not the most usable, absorbable kind that your bones can really put to good use. You've got to eat the meat. I'm sorry, that's just how it is. And so if you're taking a calcium supplement and you're eating a plant-based diet, you're literally doing nothing to prevent osteoporosis. What is the biggest diet mistake that postpartum breastfeeding moms are making? Somehow believing that they're magically going to make nutrient-dense milk,

if they're not eating a nutrient-dense diet. Now, the human body is miraculous, okay? Your body, if you're a lactating, a breastfeeding mom, your body will literally rob your body blind of every vitamin and mineral and put it in that breast milk. And you can see evidence of this in moms who have had three babies back to back. And the mom literally looks like an empty shell

and each successive baby is less and less healthy. Okay? That doesn't have to be that way, and it's correctable. So don't think, oh, gosh, I've screwed my other two kids. No, it's all correctable, but it's only correctable with diet. And so if you're breastfeeding, you've got to eat the meat, eggs, the seafood, you've got to learn to, like, liver because your breasts are going to make nutrient-dense milk. And if it robs your bones and robs your liver and robs your, it will.

It will rob you blind because your body wants that baby to live and be healthy. Coffee before breakfast. Medical research has tried for over 100 years to prove that coffee is unhealthy or bad for you in some way. And we still haven't done it. But before you eat a meal, though? It's irrelevant. Now, caffeine is an appetite suppressant, so you might not eat as much for breakfast if you drink your coffee first. But as far as long-term health, the bone, leaching your bone, cowl, that's all foolishness.

None of that's true. Intermittent fasting for women. Intermittent fasting is a huge leverage lever for improving your health, especially if you're overweight or obese. If you have chronic inflammation, you need to be doing some degree of daily intermittent fasting. It's a big deal. Eating fruit every day.

It's dumb. We're all taught that fruits are full of vitamins and minerals, right? It's just provably false. You can say, okay, there's a federal government website, food data central.com. You can go and put in eight ounces of mango or papaya and eight ounces of cheap ground beef. The ground beef is going to kick the mango's butt every single time for virtually every single vitamin and mineral except for vitamin C. Literally every single time. Soy.

Soy is a poverty food. if you're trying not to starve to death. And I'm using poverty food not to be negative. That's an anthropological term. There are foods you eat in times of plenty that are that... Like famine. That optimize your health. Soy, grain, any grain, corn, rice, sweets, oats, they're poverty foods.

They're famine foods. That's what you eat to keep from starving to death. Even in Scripture, we thank God for our daily bread. But that's because back in those times, you were in daily danger of starving to death or going hungry. And so you thank God for the food that kept you from starving to death. A hundred percent. You didn't even deign to ask for some lamb or some mutton or some beef. You just said, hey, just let me not starve.

And I'll be thankful for that. Wine. There's no such thing as a healthy amount of alcohol. Okay. There for many years, medicine tried to say, oh, drink a glass of wine for your heart benefit. All that was stupid. It was sponsored by big wine. And I'm not joking.

You can look it up. There is no healthy amount of alcohol. Now, if you want to have an occasional drink, it's fine. It's not the end of the world, but don't pretend it's healthy. Protein powders. You're trying to make me curse. Trying to make me say a naughty word. Protein, eat your meat.

I eat very, very clean. Yes. I also love a protein powder fruit smoothie in the morning. Okay. The key word there, you love it because it tastes really good. Uh-huh. Right. So if you're drinking it for pleasure and it's not causing any negative health benefit,

it's fine, whatever, drink it. But don't drink it because you believe you've been sold the false choice. Like relying on that for your protein source. Like I need a protein shake for my protein. No, you don't. You're never going to get as good a quality protein in a protein shake or a protein bar or Doritos. Never. Always the meat, eggs and fish are the better quality protein.

But if you love it, it's fine. What about collagen? So collagen is in all meat. Some cuts of meat are much higher in collagen. The collagen supplement that you buy, it's not going to hurt you. But it's completely unnecessary if you're eating enough meat, eggs, and fish. Oat milk. You're really trying to get me.

No, no, no. Milk, first of all, this is, I could talk for two hours on this. Milk is made for babies. There's an age when you should stop drinking milk and not drink. drinking milk anymore. What about raw milk? Raw milk is the least bad option. Okay. Okay, but milk is made for babies. There's no other animal on earth that drinks milk as an adult unless we give it to them. You just drink water? I drink water and coffee and tea, and every now and then I'll have some milk, but I don't think I've got to drink my milk for calcium or I've got to drink my milk for

protein. Milk is to help babies grow and gain weight as fast as possible. So if anybody's watching and you're trying to lose weight, refer back to what I just said. Milk is designed by the creator to make you gain weight as fast as possible. Birth control for acne? Oh, this is so terrible. So, so terrible.

Does it work? Yeah, it makes your acne less severe. But there's 10 other ways to do that that's not going to have the long-term hormonal, potential disastrous complications. Hormone replacement therapy. I can't find any. wrong with it as long as it's bioidentical. Yeah, yeah, not to synthetic. Yeah. Now, there's an argument

that's like, well, isn't menopause a natural part of human aging? Yes, it is. You know, if you're in your 40s, 50, 60s, and you're like, I want to age naturally, then don't do BHRT. But if you're like, no, I want to feel 30 or 40 while I'm 50 or 60, BHRT, 100%. Weightlifting versus cardio. The vast majority of the time, cardio, chronic cardio. Let me say it like that. I got that from Mark Sisson. I think that's a great way to look at. it. So if you want to go play basketball or pickleball or something where you get sweaty and out of breath, that's cardio. But you literally went outside and played. That's good. Do that. But if you're like, I'm going to go and run a half marathon every day, or I'm going to go to the gym and jog on the

treadmill or the stairmaster for two hours, that's dumb. First of all, you don't enjoy that. That's why we call it working out. Go outside and play. But especially for women, as you get older, if you don't have strong muscles, you're not going to have strong bones. It's literally impossible, okay? No matter how much oscal and cow traits you take, you're going to have weak bones if you don't have strong muscles. What is one health test every woman over 35 should know? Fasting insulin. 100%.

Everybody watching this, the next time you go to the doctor's office and he's going to draw blood, ask for a fasting insulin. And what should it be and what's bad? Right now, lab course says anything between two and a half and 25 is normal. This is absolutely false. You want your fasting insulin to be 10 or less. If your fasting insulin is over 10, you have hyperinsulinemia. And that's causing some of the chronic medical conditions you have. And even if you haven't been diagnosed with anything, you know those chronic aches and pains, that chronic thing that bugs you, that chronic thing that your skin does or your joints do or your hair does or your brain does.

or your brain does, it's being caused by the high insulin. How can people work with you as their doctor? Do they have to live in Nashville? Increasingly, I've got about 200 patients. I still go to their house. I see them for free. I don't even charge them. What?

Because that's not, I'm not really interested in doing the one-on-one thing anymore. If people want to ask me questions, the way you do that is become part of our PhD community. And it's $30 a month, less than a copay. You can stay for a month or you can stay for five years. years. But you get to ask me questions for four hours every week. I'm on a Zoom with you. And you can ask me all your questions. Like a group of people? Sometimes it's a group Zoom. Sometimes there's 200 people. Sometimes there's 20 people on the Zoom. So you literally can ask me question after question after question. You can tell me your lab results. You can tell me what medications you're wanting to

wean down and stop. And you can get all your questions answered. Also, we have Dr. Berry AI in there now, which has been trained on every single video I've ever made. Cool. Every interview I've ever done, including this one, next week, it'll be trained on this interview and everything I said today. Every book I've written, every book I recommend, Dr. Barry AI has been trained on that. What? This is cool.

And so this is really great for people who, like, live in Italy that's got a seven-hour time difference, and they're like, well, none of your Zoom's work for me. Yeah. Dr. Barry AI is going to answer exactly how I would answer, because it's not chat. It's only been trained on what I have said and what I've written. That's really incredible. About a proper human diet. And so 30 books a month, you get all that, plus a community of thousands of people all over the world.

And that's how I like to work with people, because when I answer one question for one person, I've just helped one person. But when I answer one question in front of 2050, $100,000, I'm helping every single one of them. because even if it doesn't help them, they're going to go home and tell their mom or their dad or their next-door neighbor or their son or daughter or their best friend, hey, Dr. Barry said, blah, blah, blah, see how it just keeps multiplying if I do it that way. Where can people find you on social media?

So I've got a little YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Dr. Barry in whatever medical condition you have questions about, whether that's fatty liver, whether that's PCOS, acanthosis, Niagara Canes, chicken flesh, yeah, toenail fungus, got one about that, jock itch, got one about that, how to lose 50 pounds, anything, just Dr. Barry and whatever health goal or whatever health condition, I've got a video about that.

I love following you on X, that's probably my favorite. Yeah, I get a little salty on X. I love that, no, I love it, and you're great on there. Okay, ask every guess this, if you could offer one remedy to healistic culture, physically, emotionally, or spiritually, what would it be? Work on your relationship with our creator is number one and foremost bedrock foundational. Without that, I think there's so many false choices you'll fall for just because you wind up believing false things. Have a proper relationship with your creator, number one.

Number two, eat a proper human diet. Number three, live a proper human life. And if you do all three of those things, you are going to have optimal health physically, spiritually, mentally, mentally. And then for your progeny, for your children and grandchildren, not only are you going to be setting the perfect example for them, but you're going to be feeding them exactly what they need to realize their best health. And so it just keeps compounding through the generations if you get those three things right. Dr. Barry, I've been wanting to have you on forever. And so thank you for flying out to Arizona in the heat of the summer. It means so much.

The audience, I know it's going to love this episode. it's going to be a huge one. Thank you very much for coming on Culture Popper. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Before you go, here's something to think about. If the health advice you've been following isn't making you healthier, why are you still following it?

New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, wherever you listen to podcast, don't forget to leave us a five-star review right now on Apple or Spotify. Tell us that our hair is shiny and bouncy, that we smell like strawberries, or that you hate us, but you just love to hate us. This content is for informational purposes only and is not in 10. tended to be taken as medical advice, always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any questions or decisions regarding your health or medical care. I'm Alex Clark,

and this is Culture Apothecary.