Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - Why You Should Peel Potatoes & Avoid Green Ones + Raw Milk Myths | Dr. Bill Schindler, PhD

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

POTATO/POTATOH…Let’s call the whole thing off! If you’ve ever eaten a green potato chip prepare to have your mind blown. If you buy your bread or milk in the grocery store, this episode is going to teach you exactly what to look for and what to avoid. You may not actually be eating sourdough bread like you thought! 😟🍞According to Dr. Bill Schindler—food archaeologist, chef, and author of Eat Like a Human—he reveals how far we’ve strayed from the way humans were meant to eat.Thank you to our sponsors!ZEBRA: Use code "ALEX" for 10% off any orderLOVEBIRD FOODS: Use code "ALEX20" for 20% off your purchaseGARNUU: Use code "ALEX" to get 15% off your one-time subscription or purchaseGEVITI: Use code "ALEX" to get 20% off your first purchaseTOOTHPILLOW: Use code "ALEXCLARK" for a FREE video assessmentCOWBOY COLOSTRUM: Use code "ALEX" for 25% OFFOur Guest:Dr. Bill Schindler, PhDDr. Bill's Links:InstagramFacebookModern Stone Age FacebookModern Stone Age InstagramModern Stone Age WebsiteJust for my listeners: Get 20% off your monthly or annual membership for a limited time.Join The Ancestral Table and use code ALEXCLARK20 at checkout.📚 Dr. Bill's Book: Eat Like a HumanGreat Human Race Show (Amazon)Toxic Potatoes Article - Weston Price Foundation🌿 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Culture Apothecary WEBSITE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👗 Get Alex’s freshest fashion picks and exclusive guest recommendations—delivered straight to your inbox!Sign up for the newsletter HERE:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠WEEKLY NEWSLETTER SIGNUP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FOLLOW ALEX:Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @cultureapothecary⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @yoalexrapz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @RealAlexClark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcast |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the Cuteservatives Facebook group to connect with likeminded friends who love America and all things health and wellness!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the CUTEservative Facebook Group!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to ‘Culture Apothecary’ on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. New episodes drop 6pm PST/ 9pm EST every Monday and Thursday.

What is going on with potatoes and french fries that would blow our minds? Every one of us has seen it. You'll get a little bit of green on the outside of the potato. Sometimes you see that on your laced chips. Don't ever eat, though. You should never eat the green part of a potato, whether it's in a lase chip or on your counter. It's an indicator that that potato is loaded with more toxins than it ever had before. If you see any green on the outside of your potato, then get rid of it.

Most of the toxins in a potato are in the skin. Most of the heirloom varieties of potatoes are so incredibly poisonous. they would kill you or land you in the hospital if you ate them. What do tribal blood drinking rituals and fake sourdough all have in common? According to Dr. Bill Schindler, there are keys to understanding just how far we've strayed from the way humans were meant to eat. In this episode, I sit down with the food archaeologist,

anthropologist, chef, an author of Eat Like a Human, who has built his career in literal ovens on reclaiming ancestral food wisdom. Whether that means fermenting brains or talking about how corn, should be made, or how you should never, and I mean never, eat a green potato chip. We talk about why your sourdough might be making you bloated, how processed corn is quietly making your brain feel crazy, if it's the gluten, or if it's the conventional flour,

and how to survive if you ever find yourself lost in the woods. This episode literally has everything. If you've ever felt like something is off with our food system but didn't know where to start, this conversation will blow it wide open. A huge thank you to WiRify making this interview possible and hosting us. While my home studio is out of commission because aliens literally came last night and held a seance on my set, it's crazy, there's blood everywhere. Anyways, watch this episode on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Pause real quick.

Do two very brief things. Join the cute servitude of Facebook group and leave us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. Please welcome anthropologist, author of Eat Like a Human and owner of Modern Stone Age Kitchen. Dr. Bill Schindler to culture apothecary. Is most sourdough bread a lie? Like, is most sourdough bread at the grocery store basically just wonder bread? 100%. Actually, almost every loaf of the grocery store is a lie.

And this is how you tell. So the difference between sourdough bread and all the other breads available commercially now is that sourdough bread has a combination of yeast and bacteria of fermentation. Thousands, trillions of bacteria and yeast are responsible for transforming that wet dough into the final loaf of bread. Now, what's cool about sourdough is the bacteria and yeast fermentation just happened naturally together in nature. So all sourdough bread from the earliest loaf ever found 8,600 years ago in Turkey until

the mid-1800s, every loaf of bread was sourdough by default because you had both those fermentations. The yeast fermentation creates alcohol and carbon dioxide. And bread, we don't care about the alcohol. The carbon dioxide makes a bread rise. And the bacteria is responsible for all the real things that make it bread. make it nourishing, make it safe, make the nutrients available to our bodies, destroy the gluten and turn it into something our bodies can handle better. It's responsible for the flavor. It's

responsible for the aroma. It's responsible for the texture. All of it is the bacteria. And that was always there in thousands of years worth of breadmaking. But when Louis Pasteur in the mid-1800s separated, took yeast and artificially separated it from the bacteria that it was living alongside of, and then kept that yeast going in a lab, we now have things like packets of fleshman yeast in the grocery store, and we, for the first time ever, can leavened bread without the bacteria fermentation. So we get none of the health benefits, none of the flavor benefits, none of all those wonderful things as sourdough bread is. So in the grocery store, almost every loaf of bread is just a yeasted loaf of bread, made commercially because it's very easy to

standardize that and put it, do it on a commercial level. You don't have to pay as much attention to it. You're saying even the organic sourdough bread that has like three ingredients, because Sometimes you can find that, that it's basically worthless. No, if it has three ingredients, it's sourdough bread. This is how you tell. Real sourdough bread bakers hate the term sourdough because what they're producing is anything but just sour, right? It's so many other wonderful things about their bread.

The term sourdough turns the general public off. People that don't know good sourdough bread, they hear, I don't want my bread to be sour so I don't want sourdough. We get it all the time in our bakery. The modern industrial food system has taken this misconception that sourdough bread sour, created fake bread, and gives the public what they're expecting, a sour, yeasted loaf of bread. So what they're doing is they're just taking flour, water, salt, and a whole bunch of emulsifiers and dough conditioners and all the other nonsense, and adding something sour to it. So acetic acid,

which is vinegar, lactic acid, or citric acid, and they're just making a yeasted bread that tastes sour because we're expecting that wrongly, putting it in a paper bag, jacking up to price, putting in the deli section as opposed to over by the Wonderbread, and it's expecting and having us pay more for literally the same exact bread. So the thing to do, and you turn over a package of sourdough bread, if that's what you're looking for, if it says acetic acid or vinegar, which is the same thing, or citric acid or lactic acid, it's probably not sourdough because there's no reason to add those things. Whoa. Okay. The hard part is if it says yeast, there are some sourdough bakers that do add yeast. We don't at our bakery and really

hardcore sourdough people don't. But there's a lot of sourdough bakers that will also add a little bit of commercial yeast, in addition to the wild bacteria and yeast that are already in the bread because of the sourdough mother, because it helps make it rise a little bit more, is a little bit more predictable. And from a health perspective, I don't have a problem with that because you're still getting that bacterial fermentation, all the health benefits of that. But it is a red flag. If it says yeast on the back of it, there's a good chance it's not sourdough, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not. But if it has that fake sour addition to it, it probably isn't sourdough. The two best ways to get real genuine sourdough bread is make it yourself,

which is incredibly easy, or go to somewhere where you can actually talk to the baker. You can actually, you know, a real sourdough bread bakery, not the big grocery store, the big bag, and talk to the baker, which is how we should get our food anyhow, really. Well, of course, yeah. Know your farmer, know your rancher, know your baker, all of those things. Your local farmer's market, go there for your produce. Okay, so I've talked a lot about raw milk on this show. I've never had a guest who's drank blood. No. No. I haven't had that. So you are the first. What are some of the wildest things you've eaten for health? That may be one of the wildest. So we were in, we were with Somboro Warriors in Kenya, the whole family. I wanted to experience this very ancient practice that the Sombrough Warriors and the Maasai, they're nomadic pastoralists. They don't farm any plants. They're nomadic pastoralists. They have animals, typically cattle, and they follow them around. So they're semi-nomadic. During the, during the wet season,

when there's a lot of good plants for the animals to eat, they stay put. And during the dry season, when the vegetation is dried up so much that the animals have to eat a massive amount of plants in order to nourish themselves, they just start moving. And they just, the men and the boys follow the animals for half the year. And their mainstay of their diet is blood and milk. Blood and milk every day. Do they mix it together? Yeah. So I'll tell you this is exactly how it happened. Well, it took us forever. It was We have a friend who's a cheesemaker in Nairobi, and we went and met her, and then we flew out and finally got to this tribe that we were going to be with. It was a long trip, but worth every second.

And when we got up there, they took a cow, and they brought it over, and they tied a rope around its neck. And this is the same as if you were going to give blood, and they put the rubber band around your arm, you know, before your veins get big. So they put this rope around its neck and tied it tight, and the jugular. got huge and they walked up with this little tiny bow and arrow and the arrow had a little metal point but it was only like a quarter inch maybe a half inch long and it was wrapped with a bunch of strings so that it only went in about a half an inch and popped out so it's little tiny bow and arrow and they shot this cow right in the jugular like this and the arrow goes in it pops out and it literally there's blood coming out like a fountain like a water fountain and they had this gourd and they

caught about a liter of blood from the cow meanwhile our youngest daughter thought they killed the cow so she's over super upset because it was pretty gruesome. And then as soon as they got about a liter of this blood, they took the rope off the neck, threw some dirt up in the wound. The cow never flinched, like didn't even feel it. We feel more taking blood for, you know, giving blood at a blood bank than what happened to this cow. Cow walks away like nothing happened. They had a liter of blood. They went over and milked another cow fresh, about a liter of fresh milk, raw milk. And then the first thing they did with the blood was I picked up a stick right off the ground. And stirred it until it collagulated around the stick.

And they picked it up and it looked like a, I don't know, bloody meat lollipop. It was this weird looking thing. And they fed it to a dog. And then they went back and forth to the milk in the butt and mixed it together. And then we just drank it. And it seemed so different than anything we've ever done before. Well, sure. I mean, that's an understatement.

But I mean, I want your honest truth, Dr. Bill. Was it disgusting or did it actually taste good? I mean, honestly. It depends on who in your family you ask. You ask me? I thought it was absolutely delicious. Now, it was in context. If I put that on the table here in the studio, like, you wouldn't want to drink it.

Yeah, maybe the atmosphere. The atmosphere, the context, you know, and it was such a culturally rich thing for the, they were so proud to share this with us, right? All those things brought us into this place where everybody in my family, but our youngest, had it. I thought it tasted like a chocolatey, irony, salty milkshake, which sounds disgusting, but it was people listening this, I really want to describe it, it felt satiating. Like it felt nourishing.

You put this in your body and you felt like, oh, my gosh, my body is getting everything it needs right this very moment. Wow. And they drink it every single day, twice a day. That's what they drink every day. And that's the only thing that they have for the dry season. That's it. Nothing else in their diet.

And I will tell you they, from a visual perspective, kind of a West End Price sort of, you going and seeing some traditional group and talking about their broad smiles or what. They were the healthiest people I've seen. We've been all over the world. the healthiest people I've ever seen in my life. And all they do is drink raw milk and blood. So they're not even eating meat for certain times? They will.

But they're, and again, people are seeing this, our idea of blood, we equate it to death. But they look at blood the way we look at milk. It's a renewable resource. That cow gave less blood percentage of their body than we give it a blood bank. They're not, they'll tap that cow again for the blood in two more weeks. How did you become an expert in eating ancestral? My background. So I'm an archaeologist.

my entire, you know, I taught college university level for over 20 years, archaeology and anthropology. And my focus was on prehistoric technologies. So my expertise has been, and I've trained all over the world in how to replicate ancient technologies like stone tools, fire, primitive ceramics, you know, fibers and nets and that sort of thing. And years ago, I realized that almost every single prehistoric technology, every single one of them, was focused on food. Getting food, processing food, storing food, storing food, redistributing food, sharing food, some aspect of that, every single, almost every single prehistoric technology. I mean, you think about it, like every single Albert Einstein of our ancestors

was doing something that transformed our diets. And what's cool is when you see how our diets transformed, we're here as a result of these dietary transformations. When I started to look at that, how do we as humans and how have we transformed a raw material into its safest and most nourishing for impossible that unlocked that last kind of secret that I needed in order to improve my own health and my own family. So things like fermenting sourdough bread. Huge, huge transformation. We have no business as humans from a dietary perspective. Our digestive tract has no business eating grains on its own. In fact, if I handed you a handful of grains, you ate them, it would make you sick. Like your stomach would hurt. You wouldn't get much nutrition from it. The phytates and the lectins

would rob your bodies of nutrients. It is not a nourishing food. It is not a nourishing food. But if we put it through that sourdough process or sprouted or do a number of different things, we can transform a grain that we have no business eating into something that I would argue we can safely derive nutrition from. So it's those technologies that are the key for me. He's like the Albert Einstein and sourdough. You've never seen anything like it. Are pasteurization laws criminalizing health? Absolutely. So we have been, we know for sure that we have been drink as humans, been drinking milk from other animals for at least 8,000 years. I would argue much longer than that. that. The entirety of that time, it's been raw. There were reasons why, I don't agree with them, but there were reasons that people could argue it made sense to start pasteurizing milk. When the milk that people were getting in the late 1800s and early 1900s were making them sick and killing them, because of the system that had been built, there was two ways to solve the problem.

We realized it was such issues. One way was to completely transform the dairy industry all over the world, but in this case, the country, which would have been almost impossible to do. and super expensive. Or you could boil the milk. I mean, who at that moment wouldn't have said, okay, just pull the milk? You don't want these babies dying. Right.

But what people need to understand is, number one, raw milk has nourished us for a very long time. The second thing is, pasteurization does not make bad milk good. Pasterization makes bad milk not lethal. Or makes bad milk not make you sick, at least over the short term. It doesn't turn bad milk into something

that is a nourishing food. It turns it into a food that isn't going to make you sick and put you in the hospital immediately. I mean, that's the difference. Pasterization is a, but the other problem is pasteurization, I know we're focused on pasteurization. Pasterization is a problem. Homogenization is even a worse problem. Why? There's no argument anywhere in the world ever for homogenization making something safer. In fact, it makes it a lot less safe. There's two reasons that we homogenize milk. So the fat molecules and cow's milk are large and light and they float to the surface over time. There's two reasons we homogenize milk. One is because, so we don't have to get up in the morning and shake our milk before we poured into our cereal or coffee, right? Not that we should be eating cereal, it's a joke.

So because we're lazy. But the other reason is because, and the main reason is when we were more connected to our food, when we were going to the local markets or even the grocery stores decades ago and all the milk was in clear glass containers, one of the things in the dairy, industry that we need to recognize is that the wool's been pulled over our eyes the past several decades. Like there is a massive amount of money in fat, right? Cream, butter, ice cream, crem fresh, all of the, there's a massive amount of money in fat. There's more money in milk fat than there is in skim milk. So the dairy industry pulls off fat, even with whole milk. Whole milk is 3.3.2% fat, I think. and what comes out of a cow depending on the season is much, much more than that.

So even when you're buying whole milk from the grocery store, some of that fat is already had been taken off by the dairy industry and goes into other products. But the fact that they've talked us into the idea that, okay, if you want to be healthy, obviously we're crawling out of this now, but for decades, skin milk, skin milk, no fat, skin milk, and then they go ahead and sell us on the back end, you know, the butter and the cream and the rest of it, when they started doing that and pulling more and more milk off, and their cows weren't as healthy, and their cows weren't on grass, and they're trying, And you would also see that there was fluctuations in the amount of the cap of the cream on top of the milk.

When it was being sold in clear jars, you could tell the difference. The consumer could see, oh, that hardly has any fat in it. There's hardly any fat in that. There's hardly any fat in that. And it's going less. And that one, that producer has more fat and cream on the top. If they homogenize the milk, you have no idea how much fat's in that milk. You as a consumer, this is before even we started to push the skim milk part of it.

And homogenization is solely there to hide how much fat is in the milk. That's how it started. But now it's just kind of routine. I don't want to see the fat on the top. I don't want to shake the milk. To make homogenized milk, you have a steel plate, microscopic holes, and you force the fat under high pressure through the steel plate with microscopic holes when you physically explode the fat molecule.

The result of that is something our bodies cannot recognize. It is not a natural form of the fat. It's an artificially physically exploded fat molecule. And now it'll hang in suspension. So at least if you're going to buy milk, like if you have access to incredible raw milk, fantastic, gold standard right there. But if you, if you, you know, if you don't, what do you buy at the grocery store? It's a huge question.

Like what, yeah, because there's so many choices for milk. It's insane. The only thing you can't buy in the grocery store in the milk aisle, which is huge, is real milk. Like, so you have all these things. What do you do? Number one, my number one thing would be that it would be non-humogenized milk. That would be the very first thing to look for, non-homogenized milk.

The second thing to look for is the lowest temperature pasteurization possible. So, and even with that, so obviously no ultra-pasteurized, no ultra-high-temperature pasteurized, but that pasteurized milk is more gentle on the proteins than the other forms of pasteurization. So fat-pasteurized milk that's non-homogenized, obviously A2 would be fantastic, organic would be amazing, but the homogenization and the low-temperature pasteurization are my first and second. You give raw milk to your kids. Their whole lives had nothing but raw milk.

If somebody says to you, how could you give that to your child that is so dangerous, what's your response? My kids are in great shape. They've had it their entire lives. And I'll tell you, when we started, my wife and I started going down this path, hardcore, into where we are now, raw milk was one of the first things we started to tackle. And this was now 20-something years ago. and if you look on the internet then, Google Raw Milk, like the results that came back were every one of them. You're going to kill your family. You know, you're a horrible parent. Like, don't even think about it. It's horrible. So I said, I'm going to spare it on me first. This is

very important to me. And this is about the time I really started to find Weston Price and some other places that were huge advocates for raw milk. So we were living in New Jersey at the time. New Jersey's horrible with raw milk. So I would drive to Pennsylvania every week, get raw milk and come back and make a kaffir shake with it all the time. And this was going on for months. And I'm like, okay, I think this is, this is okay. Maybe we should start thinking about feeding it to the family. And then one day I went, I came back, I went to where I got the raw milk and I brought it home and I made, made Kaffir, made my shake.

And I figured, I had like goji berries and all these other things in it. And I got violently ill, like super violent Leo. Called the dairy right away and I said, hey, I just want to let you know, I had your raw milk. And I got super violently ill. I mean, I was on the side of driving, pulling over on my knees on the side of the road through. It was horrible. And they're like, oh, but nobody else has reported this. Thank you so much for letting me know.

And they're obviously incredibly nervous because I called them. So I was nervous too. I'm like, well, maybe there's something, this is raw milk. Maybe this isn't for us. So I went a few weeks. And then, you know, as it went further back in the back of my brain and I was less nervous about it anymore. So let me try again. So I start drinking raw milk again, everything's fine.

And then about a week or so later, I made that goji berry shake again, finally ill on the side of the road. I was on the side of the road this time, but I was finally ill again. it's a great story because it was the goji berries. It was the goji berries from whole foods, organic goji berries from whole foods that made me sick. But my mind, because I was pre sort of, you know, I had that idea that the raw milk was really unsafe. The milk was absolutely fine. It was the organic goji berries and whole foods. Did you call the farmers and say, I'm so sorry?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because we ended up using them for another few years. So the idea that raw milk is unsafe is untrue. There's a responsibility that's on us if we're going to get raw milk in a state where it's not tested. And this is what we do with our food anyhow. So in Maryland, we're only allowed to get it as pet milk. You can sell it as pet milk.

And there's no oversight on it, which again, that's a good thing. But the downside is nobody else is looking at that farmer besides you and how they treat their cows and how they deal with their milk. So going to a store and buying raw pet milk to me isn't necessarily the best choice. Going to the farm, meeting the farmer, which we should be doing anyhow, but meeting the farmer, seeing the cows, taking a tour of how they milk and what they do with that milk and getting that just sense of, I don't think you should buy milk from raw milk from a farmer that doesn't know the name of every cow that they're milking. Like those kind of things are very important, but it's a responsibility of the consumer.

to go and check that out for themselves. I used to floss with whatever I could find. Shoestrings, a cat's whisker, fishing line, half a twizzler. One day I read that most floss is made of polyester. Polyester! That's right, you're dragging the equivalent of a Forever 21 top through your gum line every night like some deranged dental dominatrix. Zebras floss is made of silk, not plastic.

It's infused with peppermint oil and xylitol, which is both safe and won't leave gray spots on your teeth like some people get with hydroxyappetite. It's been tested and there's no detectable Phaas, which are those forever chemicals that apparently make your teeth glow in the dark or turn you into a werewolf. I don't know. Zebras floss is the only thing that I will shove between my teeth. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Other than passive aggression and the occasional gluten-free cookie, okay? Go to yayzebber.com. Use code Alex for 10% off. That's yayzeber.com with code Alex for 10% off non-toxic floss. First morning in my new place, I wake up starving. Nothing was unpacked. where my plates are, no idea where the fridge even is. I opened the first box I see and it's just bags and bags of Lovebird cereal samples. No bowls, no spoons, just raw survival mode. So,

I sat on the floor because I don't have furniture yet, and I ate Lovebird out of the bag like a raccoon. But honestly, it was incredible and clean. None of that synthetic, sugar-loaded nonsense that you get with most cereals. Yes, even the ones that pretend to be healthy. No pesticides, no artificial dyes, no lab-created ingredients from a guy named Chad and R&D. Lovebird was started by a dad named Parker, who left big food to make real cereal with actual nutrition for his daughter. It's made with organic cassava from regenerative farms, sweetened with honey, and loaded with prebiotic fiber. No junk, just real food that tastes good and doesn't trash your body. So if you are a cereal addict, like, this is a great little snack. They even give 20% of

profits to fight childhood cancer. Family-owned, totally independent, and they run a school cereal swap program to replace junk cereals with real food without charging schools more. That is a mission, not marketing. It's the one cereal that you won't feel weird about eating dry on your kitchen floor. Go to lovebirdfoods.com with code Alex 20 for 20% off. That's lovebirdfoods.com. Code Alex 20 for 20% off. What do you say to people who say there is no nutritional difference between raw milk and

and regular pasteurized milk? Oh, it's absolutely false. 100% false. Here's a great example. When you pasteurized milk, you kill off the vitamin A&D. The vitamin A&D is destroyed. So then we artificially put artificial vitamin A&D back in. So when you see on the milk, it says fortified of the vitamin A&D,

what they didn't tell you was was already in the milk, then they killed, they destroyed it, then they put it back in artificially. Dairy is, in my mind, the only food that is perfectly designed for humans consumption. But they say the opposite. They say, why do we need to drink the milk

that was supposed to be for baby cows? There's three things in the world that are designed for something else to eat it. So it is milk. Milk is produced by mother mammals for baby mammals. There is, honey, it is produced to nourish baby bees. Fruit is the third. The purpose of a fruit on this

planet is to attract an animal to come and eat a beautiful, sweet-smelling, sweet-tasting fruit when the seeds are mature so that they eat that fruit, consume the seeds, and deposit the seeds in a polymer manure somewhere else, and then make baby plants, right, from that. Those are the only three things in the world that are on this planet produced for something else to eat it. Everything else is just part of a biological process of another plant. A grain, a wheat grain is not for bread. It is to make a baby wheat plant. But milk, honey, and fruit, ripe fruit are the only things on the planet that are on this planet for something else to eat it. Now, hot take, but I had Candy Fraser, the primal bod on, and she said no to fruit. It makes you fat. What's your take? I'm not suggesting

that we are designed to eat fruit. I'm suggesting that fruit. I'm suggesting that fruit. is here for something else to eat it. Okay. They're two different things. Oh, are you also anti-fruit? No, no, no, I'm not anti-fruit. I'm not anti-fruit, especially wild fruits. But what's important understand about fruit, every single plant on this planet has toxins

in it. They all have toxins. And unfortunately, the way that we now talk about toxins in this world, it's either, you know, as soon as we hear the word toxins, our brain shut off, we shouldn't eat it. Like, if you look at, I started foraging when I was 10 years old. I'm 52 right now. And I started, I've been foraging for 42 years. The problem with foraging books is that they,

say, okay, this plant is safe to eat or this plant is dangerous. Every single plant is dangerous at some level. Every single plant on this earth is trying to survive and reproduce fiable offspring, like every other species of anything else. And since they can't move, they're engaged in chemical warfare of the outside world. So they naturally are producing insecticides and fungicides and all sorts of things. They're trying to protect themselves. These toxins that they're producing, I know they scare us.

Some of them are scary, like things like oxides are very scary. Some of the toxins that mushrooms produce will kill you, and if they don't kill you immediately, your liver and your kidney will shut down and you wish you were dead. Like there's some really dangerous things out there. But those toxins are also the same things that we use as medicine. Like one of the reasons why the medical industry, pharmaceutical industry, goes and studies plants in the jungles because they're taking these plant compounds that are protective mechanisms for the plants, and they're finding incredible value to make medicine from these things.

Some of these toxins are also spices. Cinnamon is a fantastic example. Cinnamon is the bark of a tree. The flavor cinnamon that we eat and enjoy at Christmas time and the like is actually a fungicide. It's there. It's an insecticide and a fungicide to keep things off. It's in the bark of the tree. It's protecting the tree from things that can attack it.

In small doses, we love it as a spice. In larger doses, people use cinnamon as a medicine. And in much larger doses, it'll land you in the hospital. Okay. Is that why people say you need to be using salon cinnamon or whatever that is? Stalin cinnamon is true cinnamon, but that doesn't discount this. It's still in larger doses. All spices are a toxin.

I mean, they all are. There's a reason why mace, I mean, mace is the outer part of the nutmeg plant. Mace is a great spice and things like eggnog, and it's also the stuff you spray on somebody if they're attacking you. Oh, I don't know you could eat that. Oh, yeah, Mace is amazing. It's part of the nutmeg. It's fantastic. Well, in small doses, in large doses, it's a problem.

So all these plants are producing these problems. If we ever see you on cops, they're going to spray you. And then you're like, mm, delicious. This is what, if we, from a quick biological perspective, think about this. The plants are trying to protect their most important parts. Yeah. So, and creating these toxins are not, I mean, they're energy expensive. They have to make, they're serving a purpose or else they wouldn't do it.

So roots, corms, tubers, what we call underground storage organs, things like potatoes are highly guarded through chemical processes because that's a very important part of the plant. It spends all year a plant that has a starch-rich underground storage organ spends the entire spring and summer through photosynthesis filling it with starch so that in the winter when the top part of the plant dies off, it's living off of that. It's very important to the plant, usually very toxic. The flowers are actually designed not to repel but to attract. They look pretty, they smell pretty, they usually have no toxins in them at all, very.

little because they're attracting pollinators, right? They're attracting. Fruits are attracting only for mature seeds. It's part of the biology process of the plant. It doesn't make sense for a plant to attract an animal to eat its seeds before it's mature. It doesn't make any reproductive sense. Right. It has to be mature. So almost all fruits are either slightly or very toxic before the seeds are mature. And as soon as they mature, they turn it off. So we should never eat unripe fruit, period. You shouldn't eat unripe. Tomatoes, you shouldn't eat unripe anything. The seeds, though, seeds, nuts, grains, and legumes are the babies of the plant of the next generation.

They are usually heavily guarded with all sorts of toxins. So if we're eating massive amounts of these things, then we do need to do something to them to make them safer to eat. How do you know if your local farms raw milk is good enough? In a state where the raw milk is legal for human consumption, there's already a layer of testing that's ensuring that the milk is coming out of there is to the standards that they're. they're asking for. So, but in all cases, whether it, so Pennsylvania is a great example. You can go to Pennsylvania and buy raw milk at a store, not even at, you can go to the farm and buy it, but you can also buy it at a store, like a health food store. Yeah, you can't here in Arizona too. I don't like that for the first time I'm trying a new milk. Like I, we should be going to the farm. We should be

meeting the farmer. They should, and it's not only meeting the farmer. I do think there's a level of, you know, going to the farm, meeting the farmer, seeing the cows, seeing how they care for the cows, seeing how they care for the milk. All of that is incredibly important. But I also like the idea of go there with your family because not only do they get to see it all as well, but the farmer also sees you. The farmer also sees your kids. We're going to be drinking the milk that's coming out of his cows and whether he's handling it right or wrong. All of that, that sort of food system where it's close connection, everybody knows one another, is the safest, most incredible food system on every level, not just nourishment and safety, but also for all the other things that make us

human. So I suggest you always go to the farm, at least in the beginning, before you start buying the milk, to understand, we can filter these things. Everybody knows what a clean farm looks like. Everybody knows what a clean farm smells like. Does it matter to you if a cow is grass-fed, grass-finished for you to drink the raw milk? It's going to be very hard to have a cow that is grass-fed, grass-finished to get raw milk the entire year-round where we live on the East Coast. So if it's possible, 100%. If it's not, I still would suggest the raw milk is better. One other thing, too, with the organic milk, unfortunately, the pasteurization process

obviously makes the shelf life a lot longer. It is very difficult to find organic milk that is not ultra-pasteurized. So one of the decisions people have to make, because almost all organic milk is ultra-pasteurized in the grocery store because it's so expensive to produce, they want that longer shelf-life to be able to sell it. It sits on the shelf. It's very difficult to find organic, non-homogenized, just vat pasteurized milk. If you can find it, get it 100%. But one of the things that the consumer is going to have to decide is, is it more important for them to have something that isn't ultra-pasteurized or is it more important for them? This is if you don't have access to a good,

you know, raw milk source. Is it more important to have non-ultra-pasturized milk that's not organic or organic ultra-pasteurized milk. And I'm going to guess you're going for the other. You're going to choose the non-organic version to get those other two things. Yes. When we're infant, baby humans, we are perfectly designed to consume our mother's milk. I mean, that's the way it's supposed to be, right? So this is what happens when we drink from our mothers. Number one, the milk in our mothers is at body temperature and it's teeming with live bacteria. It's not fermenting yet. There's a mechanism inside of the mother, all mammals, that make it so it's not fermenting until it leaves the body,

but as soon as it leaves the mother and goes into the baby, whether it's a human, a rat, a whale, whatever, it starts the process of fermenting. That live bacteria start that process of fermenting. When the baby's drinking from the mother, it's the baby, including humans, all of us when we're babies, we produce several enzymes that allowed us to safely and efficiently digest that milk.

So things like lipase breaks down the fats, the lipids, lactase breaks down the sugars. And we also produce an enzyme, a protease enzyme, and it depends on the animal. Humans are a little different than other animals. It all does the same thing, which enzyme it is, but it collagulates the milk. So it denatures it. Denaturing means taking it out of its natural state.

So when we fry an egg, the egg whites get denatured, and they turn white and they get firm. So this milk comes in and it gets denatured. The proteins do because of the enzymes that we're producing, and it turns into a semi-solid in our stomachs. And it does that because if all we're doing is drinking, liquids, which babies are, the liquid goes through the body way too fast to break down fully and for the nutrients to be absorbed fully in the small intestines. So nature's figured out, hey, if I turn it into a gel like substance in the stomach, then it's going to sit there longer, it's going to chemically and physically break down better, it's going to ferment, and then it's

going to go into the small intestines in a very similar semi-solid state, sit there longer, the nutrients are going to get absorbed through the intestinal walls, and we have a healthy human baby. What we're essentially doing is making cheese in our stomachs. that every step of it is making cheese in our stomach. We were in the first blue zone ever identified two years ago in the village of Villagronde in Sardinia. And we were with shepherds up in the mountains. And everything depicted about the Blue Zone's eye is wrong. Completely wrong.

Dang it. See, Dr. Bill, this is, you say stuff like this. And I'm like, well, now I want to do 180 and do a whole episode on that. There's a lot there. But we were, so we were in the first Blue Zone ever identified in Villa Grande in Sardinia. We were in the mountains with shepherds. and we were making the most traditional and basic form of cheese. This is how we did it.

And bear with me for me because it's not pretty, but we took a baby goat and we had a drink from its mother. Not baby. It was unweened, though, and had it drink from its mother. And then we took the baby away. And then we harvested the goat and we took the stomach out and hung it up for 10 days and then ate the cheese. That's literally all you had to do.

Every step of the cheese making process was in place there. The milk was alive and teeming with live bacteria. It was the right temperature. it had because the baby was or the goat was unweaned, it was still producing the enzymes needed, including the coagulation, and literally 10 days later, we ate the cheese. So you cannot, if I'm right about this,

and we're making cheese in our stomach. When you burp a baby on your shoulder and it spits up and it looks like ricotta cheese and it tastes like, or sometimes it smells like proloan, it's exactly what it is. It's cheese. We make cheese in our stomachs. It's part of the natural digestive process.

So to take this ingredient, this milk, and nourish a human baby at one of the most vulnerable, nutritionally needy times in our life. That is the perfect food. But it has to go through that process to nourish us properly. So raw milk, to me, is a fantastic food. Fermented raw milk is the next step up. Which is what?

Caffir, cheese, yogurt, all of these traditional fermentation are mimicking what we did as human babies that we can no longer do because nobody in this room, room, no human adult is producing those same enzymes and has that same ability to fully digest the milk and break it down properly the way that we did when we were infants. We've outgrown this. As soon as we get, as soon as any mammal gets weaned, we lose the ability to produce all these enzymes. But then, so to play devil's advocate, couldn't somebody say, well, that's proof that we're not supposed to drink milk forever?

Then I could say that about almost every ingredient. I could say that about wheat and rye. I mean, literally, there's no plant that we put in our body that doesn't require some sort of processing to fully unlock its safety and nutritional repertoire for our digestive tracts. One of the cool things, if you look into the past about animals and plants in our diets and the role of technology in getting food, right? Almost every single technology we invented about animals has to do with getting the animal, overcoming our physical limitations and, you know, bows, and arrows and nets and fishing hooks and traps and all these things to get an animal. Once you have an animal, all you need is a sharp edge and you don't even have to cook it. You have incredible safe nutrition in front of you that our bodies can really access very easily. So almost all the technologies our ancestors invented to include animals in our diets have to do with getting the animal.

We don't need to do much afterwards. The plants are the exact opposite. It doesn't take much to get a plant, maybe a sharp edge or you can pick a berry get or whatever. all the technology we've invented to deal with plants in our diets has to do with making them safe to eat and unlocking the nutrients. But in all cases, we need to do something. We can't do it on our own. We have outgrown our digestive tracks. So that argument, I hear the argument, but I would say that we have no business eating a cow without technology. We have no business eating a grain without technology. We have absolutely no business eating most plants without some sort of a technology to make it safe and nourishing. So that argument doesn't hold up for me for milk, especially if we're fermenting it because we're replicating that same process.

After a long training session, I got a DM from one of you guys complaining about bloating and gut discomfort. Well, at my recommendation, this girl added cowboy colostrum to her post-workout smoothie and said it settled her stomach. It held to recover faster the next day, too. That's the beauty of cowboy colostrum. It's sourced from the first four to six-hour milking of grass-fed U.S. cows, capturing the highest levels of immune and natural growth factors, and proline-rich peptides, all shown in scientific reviews to support gut integrity, immune modulation, and tissue regeneration. Cowboy keeps their colostrum whole, no stripping of fatter casein, so you get the full nutrient

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They also have unflavored. Cowboy colostrum is the smarter, more ethical way to support recovery, gut health, and overall vitality. Learn more at cowboy colostrum.com. Use code Alex for 25% off. That's cowboy colostrum.com code Alex for 25% off. Let's talk tampons because apparently some of y'all are still putting arsenic and chlorine bleach in your hoo-ha every month like it's 1847 and we're curing things with leeches. Garnu said, nope. They make tampons pads and menstrual cups that are 100% organic cotton,

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freaking month, okay? So why wouldn't you do that? Use code Alex at checkout, garnu.com, garnu.com, because you deserve better than bleach in your vaguen, girl. If sourdough is making you bloated, is that because it wasn't properly fermented? That could be one of the things. So we have, at our bakery, we have as of two weeks ago, 11 medically diagnosed celiac customers that are 100% fine on our bread. Now, we have several celiac customers that are not. And celiac, like so many things, are, there's a spectrum, right? But 11 medically diagnosed celiac that are fine on our bread.

One is an 86-year-old woman that eats a slice of our bread every single day. How can somebody who is 100% celiac eat your sourdough? Because it is a different food. Like I hate these terms like bread and milk because within that category of bread, there are things that shouldn't, you know, be related to one another. Wonderbread and what we're producing are completely different foods. Most of the sourdough bread on the shelf at the grocery store and most of the sourdough bread, I would suggest almost all of the sourdough bread you would buy at most restaurants,

unless they tell you what bakery they're getting it from is fake sourdough as well. But what is fake versus real? Whether it's through the bacterial fermentation. Okay. Like I mentioned. So if it has both the yeast and bacterial fermentation happening side by side, that bacterial fermentation. So the reason we call it sourdough is because the bacteria are eating the available

sugars and producing lactic acid. There's a lot of chemical and physical changes that are happening. But it's that production of the lactic acid that is causing a tiny bit of sourness, which the term sourdough would come from. We can control that. If we know what we're doing when to bake it, we can control that. control it. But one of the things that's not getting talked about in the sourdough world that I wholeheartedly believe in is we have got to reach a pH. And I know it's going to sound technical for a minute,

but of 4.6 in order to call something sourdough. So seven is neutral, seven is water. As that bacteria, just think about this. If the bacterial fermentation is happening, bacteria are eating the available sugars, producing lactic acid, the more acid that's produced, the lower that pH is, right? It's actually an indicator of the amount of fermentation that's taken place. The magic number is 4.6. If you hit 4.6, then it activates an enzyme that totally starts destroying the gluten, like turning it into something that our bodies can actually handle. It is a different food.

So there's a lot of nuances here, but the point is if the bacteria are allowed to do its job, put in the right environment by the right human hands that know what they're doing, they are turning that bread that comes out at the end is a completely different food. What tool do you have to buy to test the 4.6 or whatever? You can get a pH meter for $30 off of Amazon. PH meter with a little probe. We use something called a yikmick, but there's a lot of other ones. And it has to at some point in its fermentation reach that number.

And if I showed you my phone right now, we have our team of bakers that are baking right now. Every half an hour of my phone's going off, they're taking pH readings all the time. We track that because the reason we're doing. doing sourdough, it's not because a nostalgia, it's not because, I mean, we love the flavor. We love all those things. The reason we're doing it is about health. So what are the health benefits of sourdough bread, like, quickly? There's no nutritional need for bread in the human diet. Like, we do not need bread to survive. We do not need bread to be healthy. We just like it. And there's other things, the cool thing

about humans and food and the complicated things are there's so many things. Food is, food is a part of everything that we do. Like literally, everything that we do involves food at some level. And to be fully nourished as a human, it's so much more complicated than another animal. Another animal needs to eat the right nutrients in the right way, break it down. We need to do that and we need to meet our cultural needs. And for some of us are religious needs and for some of us are political needs. And for some of us are, you know, our family needs and socioeconomic, all of these things because food is such a part of everything that we do. So to be fully nourished as a human is much more complicated.

I mean, we could have this entire conversation and talk about the macro and micronutrients of all. all these foods and then end the conversation, but we're only scratching the surface. Some of us love bread. Some of us remember eating bread with our grandmother and the fact that if we eat the right kind of bread and even though we don't need bread, but it brings up that memory, I would argue we're more fully nourished and if we didn't eat that bread, even though we don't need it. So it isn't necessarily that we need the bread nutritionally, but if we're going to have that bread and we're going to use that bread to meet an emotional need we need at the time,

which we don't talk about enough, but it's a very important thing. what is the safest most nourishing bread you can possibly have? And the answer to that is 100% fully fermented sourdough bread. Now, from a nutritional perspective, there are things in those grains that are nutritious, but they're not unlocked to us unless we put it through the right process. You're saying that the safest most nourishing form of bread is sourdough. What about like Sue Becker, who came on my show, who's talking about just freshly milled flour to make regular loads of bread? I'm not downplaying how important freshly milled flour is. And it's important not only from a nutritional perspective, from a safety perspective, but also for all those other things that are important. If you're using freshly milled flour, you're probably supporting a local farmer. It's probably a lot fresher.

There's all sorts of wonderful things about it. But remember this. What we talked about earlier, grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes are the babies of the plant. They are highly protected through all sorts of chemical warfare. Like, there's all sorts of things happening. Whether it's freshly milled or not, it has all of those problems with it too. So then you definitely want organic. You definitely want organic grains, but the toxins that I'm talking about are not put there by humans.

They're in the plants themselves already. And the way to get around those toxins is through some sort of detoxification. In this case, the answer would be sourdough. So I'm not suggesting that freshly milk grains is not important. but I do believe the fermentation process done properly is more important than freshly milled grains. However, the gold standard would be freshly milled grains that I put through a sourdough process. Okay. Another, and this is, I know this is complicated, but it is important for people to understand it.

And listen, we can sit here and talk about this all day long. The best thing somebody can do is educate themselves and make a loaf of bread. It is going to make so much more sense as soon as you even make that first loaf of bread. It doesn't matter how ugly it is and if nobody's going to eat it. But that first loaf of bread will show you bring to life a lot of the things that we're talking about. The nutritional, the most nutrition in the grain is in the germ. And a lot of it's also in the brand, which is the coating on the outside. The germ is the baby, you know, essentially going to be the embryo of the new plant and the brand on the outside.

And the rest of it's the endosper on the starch. From a nutritional perspective, if you want nutrition, you need to have whole grains. Most, more nutrition comes through the whole grains, but more toxins come through as well, which makes it even more important because it's the outside brand and that germ where most of those toxins lie anyhow. So if you're doing, sourdough is even more important if you're using whole grains than it is if you're just using bread flour. Because bread flour have a lot less toxins because a lot of the parts of the berry, the wheat

berry that have those toxins have already been sifted out. Okay. Sour dough is incredibly important. You're not anti-sugar, but you're anti-supid. sugar. What is the worst sweetener in 90% of homes right now? Fake sugar. What is fake sugar? Arethratol or Splenda or those sorts of things. I think refined sugar, corn syrup, all of those things are horrible. I think the chemical version of those things are even worse. And we don't need any of them. Like we literally don't eat. We have an entire full restaurant, full bakery.

We do pastries. We do desserts. We do all of those things. And have no fake or refined sugar anywhere in the shop. If you're a baker and you need to buy sugar at the store, are we looking for 100% raw organic cane sugar? Like, what should we buy? I think I could argue that there's no, in most cases, no nutritional requirement for sugar in our diets at all. Again, it's an emotional thing. It's a cultural thing. It's a holiday thing, right? So I don't want to downplay how important those things are. Unfortunately, they get downplayed too much in these conversations. Those are very important needs that many of us have to meet. The sugar that we have access to refined sugar is nothing but pure carbohydrates it can wreck all sorts

havoc havoc so refined sugar is literally just the epitome of empty calories and a food system where the people that are doing the hard work are not getting the money right too many layers too big of mega industries too much shipment around the world it's stripped of everything that has any kind of value to us other than the sweetness unrefined sweeteners maple syrup, raw honey, things called muscovado. There's a couple examples. Muscovado is one that we use. These are completely unrefined.

So you're talking about if these are the kind of sweeteners you use, there's several things that are advantageous to it. Number one is there's other flavors coming in but just pure sweet, which if we do it in a deal with them right, we love. The second thing is that any sort of enzymes or minerals or anything you could argue that were beneficial in that, I mean, the sugar cane plant has things that are wonderful. Maple syrup has all sorts of things that are wonderful.

There is a compound in maple syrup that is highly studied right now to help with cancer. I mean, and it's solely in maple syrup. Raw honey has all sorts of wonderful attributes to it. So anything that you could argue that could potentially be good in a sweetener is coming through with that, along with the sweetness. So it's not fully empty calories. The other thing is that food chain is so much shorter. Like one of the most important things we can do, if we're trying to learn how to feed ourselves.

Listening to podcasts, reading books, all those things are incredibly important. But at the end of the day, you need to inform yourself. You need to take those steps. Taking links out of your food chain. What does that even mean? Taking one step closer to your food. So with terms of sweeteners, instead of buying, you know, pasteurized honey from Costco or BJs, you go to the farmer's market and meet the farmer and grab their honey.

All of a sudden, and you're talking to that farmer, you've taken like 20 links out of the food chain and your steps closer. You've informed yourself your money, your harder money is going to somebody that's actually in your community. Like 100% benefits and that food is better for you as well. One of the places in our food system where I think we really have to take links out of the food chain is with our animals. We have spent 30 or 40 years of this creation of an industry that is trying to hide what it's

doing with our animals from our site under the guise of, you shouldn't have let us worry about that. You don't want to be burdened, you know, to the point where you wouldn't even have a conversation about an animal while you're eating an animal. I mean, how bizarre is that, right? But behind, you know, the screen for 30, 40 years, a meat industry has been created that is criminal. If we paid attention for those, and we were tuned into it, it would have never been built. One place that we need to reconnect and take links out of our food chain is with our animals. And I know for some of us, it may sound really weird. Like, we've gone to extreme. Like we started slapping half of pigs on our counter, you know, years ago in our kitchen.

You've gone to extremes. He just told us he drank blood and had goat eyeballs on the top of a mountain and ate the cheese from its stomach. You have gone to extremes. So maybe that's not as extreme. But you don't have to do that. So taking a link out of your food chain is a very simple step that it could be just something simple. Like if you go to the grocery store now and buy, how weird is it we can go to the grocery store and buy a chicken breast and never see another part of a chicken? Like, so instead of buying a chicken breast, buy the whole chicken.

Like, buy, that is not a huge, that is not an insurmountable step. Or if you already go to the grocery store and buy a whole chicken, then, you know what, go to the, go to the farmer's market and buy the chicken from the farmer and meet the farm. Those are very meaningful steps that don't take a lot of work. Bring your kids with you, right? It's not like we're taking them on foraging, foraging trips, you know, 40,000 years ago. Make sure they go into the grocery store with you instead of sitting in the car on the iPad. And that's a huge step. And if you're not doing that, bring them to the farmer's market, bring them to the farm.

Those little steps are huge, and that's removing a link from the food chain. So to answer your question about the sugars, unrefined sweeteners, maple syrup, raw honey, and unrefined sugar at Muscovado are what we restrict ourselves to in our home and also in our restaurant. What is your opinion on stevia? I'd rather use monk fruit than stevia, but in both cases, I don't cook with either one. What is going on with potatoes and french fries that would blow our minds? We already know about the issue with nut and seed oils in the frying of it. So one thing is, obviously, we should be frying them in the right kinds of high-quality animal fats like lard or tallow or duck fat. But this would blow your mind.

Every single ancestor to potatoes and most of the heirloom varieties of potatoes are so incredibly poisonous, they would kill you or land you in the hospital if you ate them. Most of them are still under domestication. So in the areas, so Bolivia and Peru are the area, Alti Plano, Lake Titicaca area, and in the Andes that go to the Peru, that area was the center of domestication for potatoes. I remember Mr. Schumann's class in eighth grade. He would talk about, oh my gosh, when the early European explorers came over to the new world, they found between 300 and 500 different varieties of potatoes under domestication. It was 500 years ago. Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. But what Mr. Schumann didn't tell me was that every one of them would have killed you unless you processed it properly.

of those things I focused on in my research for a long time for 20 years has been how do we use traditional ways to process plants to make them safer and more nourishing for us. And I was convinced even then that those secrets would also unlock, you know, technologies that we can use in our kitchens, in our home and in our restaurants to make these plants, you know, even today's plants even safer. And this is a great example. So I went to spend time with an I Mara Indian family in Bolivia and with a Kethua Indian family in Peru. In both cases, they still grow these incredibly toxic potatoes and they processed them in several different ways to make them safe. And what I had learned was that

today's potatoes, like a russet potato in the grocery store, the kind of you can just buy off the shelf, still have those toxins in them. They've just been bred to the point where they're much lower levels. So what I'm going to say in a moment, I'm not trying to, I do think there's an issue we scare people a lot in the food industry right now. And I died and like people are scared. They're making decisions because they're scared. And I don't want to scare anybody with this. But I do want to empower you to make a couple of changes in the way that you deal with

something like a potato when you're on home because they make all the difference if you eat a lot of potatoes. Eating one potato, a baked potato with some butter and eating the skin and not processing at all is fine. Doing that every day can become a problem over time. And with the amount of potato chips and French fries that the kids in this country are eating today, it's important to hear this part of it. So I traveled down there and spent time with these two families, these two communities, and learned how they processed these potatoes. And I'm telling

you, the potatoes that they're processing and eating on a daily basis are incredibly toxic still. With the Imara family in Bolivia, we did two things. One is we engage in something called Passa. If you want to think something's crazy, Pasa, and I've read about it in graduate school, I couldn't admit. They eat clay with their potatoes. So their potatoes are so incredibly poisonous. Why even eat them in the first place? You know, that's a great question. Why do they go through all this? But that's a side. No, think about, no, it's a great question, but I'm going to throw farming completely on its head right now in the statement. The things that are there in these plants are there to protect the plants. So if you plant 100 potatoes that have all these toxins that are

there protected, you're going to get 100% yield, period. Think about how crazy it is. I'm thinking at our house right now. In our walkway, we have dandelions growing. We have all these weeds growing, the time and we're doing everything we can in the front yard to get rid of plants. And in the back where our garden was, we would do everything we can to get these defenseless plants to grow. And we're weeding and some people put all kinds. Those plants are defenseless because we've bred these toxins out of the plants. And they won't grow without a whole bunch of intervention. And meanwhile, the weeds, which are, you know, completely well adapted to protect themselves fully with all these toxins are growing even where we don't want them to grow. They're one of the ways we

you'd go about it is what the modern world has done. We've taken all these plants that did great on their own. We've domesticated them through the domestication process, bred out a lot of these toxins. And now we have to hit them with, you know, all sorts of insecticides and fungicides and all these things to get them to grow. And they're worried about what the harvest is. Another way to approach it is leave the toxins in there, get in 100% yield and then go through a traditional strategy to make them safe to eat. Instead of breeding them for thousands of years to be less toxic, they process them in a certain way. But they get 100% yield. their food resource base is less fragile than ours is because they're always going to get 100% yield unless there's some sort of, you know, major devastation. So they would take these potatoes and between every bite, dip them in the special clay and eat it between every bite. And the clay binds with the toxins and passes through the body and the body gets, you know, with nutrition.

They also make something called, the clay is acting like a binder. The clay binds. This particular clay binds with the toxins and the potatoes. And it puts it in a state that the body doesn't recognize and it passes through the. the body and the nutrients that are in the potato get absorbed by the body and they eat it. And I will tell you, I know it sounds disgusting. Again, that context was important, but what blew my mind at the end of doing this, and it was an all-day thing because we had, there's no trees.

We're well above, we're at 16, 17,000 feet. There were no trees, well above the tree line. So we built this oven and fired it with cow patties. That was the fuel for it and roasted these potatoes and ate them and prepared the clay and did all this. At the end of it, there was a little bit of clay in one of the bowls. And the daughter, the youngest daughter of the family is the same age at the time as my youngest daughter, Alyssa was. And my youngest daughter loves mayonnaise. And if there's left, mayonnaise left in the bowl, she's going like this with her finger. At the end of that experience, the potatoes, that girl picked up

the, it looked like I was looking at my daughter, picked up that bowl of clay and went like this with her finger and ate the rest of the clay. I mean, it was not something that they're like, oh, my God, it's something that was a part of their culture that she, she enjoyed eating. She actually went out of her way to eat a little bit more of it at the end. In Peru, they did something called Chino Blanco Tour, they leached potatoes for like six months in the water and then did a freeze drying thing. But then in Peru, they would make something called Tokash,

where they would dig a huge pit, I mean a massively huge pit, and fill it with thousands of pounds of potatoes, filled the pit with water and ferment it. And at the end of it, they would make this traditional dish with these, again, very toxic potatoes. So we took that part back to the shop. And the fermentation part was important to us. So we started fermenting our potatoes.

Let me back. One other important part of the technologies that I saw there was that in every single instance that we ate a potato. Now, we lived in Ireland for a year and they ate a lot of potatoes in Ireland. It does not a fraction of the amount of potatoes they were eating in Bolivia, Peru, especially in the Andes. I mean, the amount of potatoes that one single person consumed in a day would blow your mind. Now, some of the potatoes didn't have as many toxins.

Some of them did. There was a lot of potatoes repaired a lot of different ways. I spent a lot of time down there both up in the mountains and also in the city like Lima, including I went to a place called Restaurant Central, which two years after I was there, one restaurant, best restaurant in the world. Like Noma, it actually beat Noma for the best restaurant in the world. So I was in that kitchen and I was in all these other places eating potatoes every single day. Every single potato that I saw prepared, except for one time, was peeled. and I know that maybe doesn't sound like a very big deal, but these heirloom potatoes, many of them didn't,

if I gave you a russet potato and a vegetable peeler and said, peel it, it's okay, and 20 seconds later you hand me a peeled potato. That's because that potato looks like a football. These potatoes look like, you know, this, like more like a droop of grapes than a big, to peel them. Potato peelers don't even work. Like you have to use a knife because nothing about it is smooth. So the effort that goes in to peeling a potato was massively more than any of us are used to.

It was a very intentional act to peel these potatoes. And in every instance, the best restaurant in the world to the middle of nowhere up on the Altiplano by Lake Titigaca, I ask you, why do you peel the potatoes? And everybody said because that's where all the poison is. Most of the poison, most of the toxins in a potato are in the skin. In America, we always keep the skin on potatoes and French fries. Like those are the good fries that they have some of the skin left. I will never intentionally eat a potato skin the rest of my life.

And if you do one. So the only time. Why? Because that it's true. And I just wrote an article. It was in the wise traditions, the nourishing traditions, wise traditions, the Weston Price Journal about potatoes and about this entire experience. And I have the numbers, not only the numbers, the amount of toxins that are, have been lowered

through domestication, but also the ratio of toxins to the skin of the peasanties. to the inside of the potato. And it makes sense. I mean, think about why those toxins are there. They're there to protect this incredibly important part of the plant. It doesn't make sense for most of those toxins to be in the root. It makes more sense that they're on the barrier between the root and bacteria or insects or predators or whatever it happens to be. So in most cases, the majority of toxins in and around a plant part are on the outside because that's the role that it's playing as a protective mechanism. It's not true that the most amount of nutrition is in the potato skin, but even if it was, the toxin load in the potato's skin makes it not worth it to get those

nutrients. But to make it even worse, the only time we didn't peel it was when we ate it with the clay. And I asked them, I said, why aren't you peeling this potato now? Because those were also the most poisonous potatoes I ate the entire time was that instance. And they said, because this is so powerful, that clay does such a good job, we don't need to. But every other time. So number one, my big takeaway here is, no matter what potato you get, peel the potato. Always peel it. Okay. You know, if you go to a restaurant and you're sitting there and the potatoes come out and they're the small potatoes, you know, and they're cut and they're, you know, whatever, the red potatoes.

And you're eating, that's not a very big deal. But if you eat potatoes on a regular basis, this is when it starts to become important. Peel them all the time. Also, and this is really important, potatoes are not dead. Potatoes are dormant. Like, they're still alive because you can take a potato, cut it up and put it in the ground and it'll make new potato plants. So the chemical reaction. in that potato are still happening, even when it's sitting on the shelf, even when it's sitting in

your basement or in your refrigerator. If that potato senses danger, it's going to produce more toxins. So an improperly stored potato, and what I'm talking about here is mostly if it has access to light, will start to turn green. Everyone of us has seen it. You'll get a little bit of green on the outside of the potato. Sometimes you see that on your lace chips. Yeah.

Don't ever eat those. Ever eat. Wait. We should never eat the green. lays chips in the bag? You should never eat the green part of a potato, whether it's in a lace chip or on your counter. Why? So when that potato root, and I know this sounds crazy, I know it, but look this up after

you listen to this podcast, it is 100% true. If you look, and National Geographic did a great article several years ago about the number of Americans that land in the hospital after eating potatoes that have had a little bit of green on the outside of it. Oh my gosh. So what I used to think, I knew the green stuff was bad. I used to think that was the toxin and that, okay, you get it a little bit over on the end here

and you hit it a little harder at the potato peel or two, you get through the green and then you're fine. That is not true. That green is proxy. It's telling you it's an indicator that that potato is loaded with more toxins than it ever had before. But that isn't the toxin. It's throughout the potato. If you see any green on the outside of your potato, then get rid of it.

Don't feed it to your animals. Don't do it. Just get rid of it. It's not even good enough for animals? I would suggest it's not. It's loaded with glycoalkalo. all sorts of nasty toxins. Okay.

So this isn't a fear thing. It's a traditional way. So I went to study in that part of the world potato processing because those people, that they've been dealing with potatoes for 10,000 years incredibly successfully. That, I think, has the largest history of people with potatoes. So they would know. They would know. They always peel the potato.

So my takeaway from this is always peel. I don't care if it's a rest potato or not, peel your potatoes. Number two. Always buy organic, I would say. Organic is helpful, but again, there's amazing things about organic. The only reason I'm resisting it a little bit is because we have farmers by us that haven't got it, that we love the way that they're farming. So organic. I'm talking about grocery store purely.

Organic is amazing. Do remember, though, that we are peeling the outside of it. So that helps. So if all you can get, I love the way Sean Baker talks about meat. Because I am, if I can get grass fed, grass finished rabbi, amazing. But a lot of people can't afford it. And he's, well, him and can actually Ken Berry just says something that too. Your grocery store ground beef is still going to be more nutritious than not eating it.

I say the same thing. So if the potato isn't organic, do remember you're peeling it. If it's green, get rid of it. And if you can ferment it, you are really taking steps to neutralize a lot of those other toxins on the outside of it. And it's very easy to do it. You ever get lab results back and feel like you need a PhD in cryptic symbols just to figure out if you're okay? Like, is my ALT right? Is C-reactive protein good, a red flag, or a DJ?

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Your child's health deserves more than just a band-aid. It deserves toothpillow. Go to tooth pillow.com, click Is My Child a Candidate, and use code Alex Clark for a free video assessment today. If you're ever lost in the woods or a jungle, what are the first survival steps that you should be taking? What are the first things you should grab to eat? The first most important thing you need to do is get control of your brain. Because if you don't settle down, breathe deep and think about your situation, you're going to make either decisions that are foolish, or you're going to die because your brain has talked you into it. I mean, you literally have to take a step.

Number two, it's not about eating. It's more about drinking. So water is so much more important than food. You can go weeks without food. You can only go days. It depends on the condition, but sometimes not even that long without water. So finding a source of water is a good source of water is utmost importance. And then try to understand what you need to protect yourself from.

It's kind of like if you go anywhere in the world and look at houses, houses are built differently based on two things. One is what raw materials they have at their disposal and also what they're protecting themselves from. Oh, yeah, like all the houses in Arizona are stucco. And what is in your parking lot out here? Not shade. I mean, shade. You're worried about the sun and you're worried about heat here, right? But if you go to northern latitudes, you're protecting yourself from the cold.

Somewhere else you might be protecting yourself from water or from wind. So understand what you need to protect yourself from. and take steps to do that. And it's very, very, very easy to do. I mean, you have to get over yourself and maybe get in a pile of leaves or be around bugs. The other thing is your food resources,

it isn't worth spending a massive amount of time looking for food in the very beginning because you're going to spend a lot of energy in an environment that you're not used to. Two things that are really important. One is bugs, and I know bugs are a hot topic. And bugs were the original protein and fat source. Now, see, everyone's going to say, Alex has somebody else.

Tell us to eat the bugs. It is. See, the conversation has gone to bugs or meat. So, okay. I know what you're talking about. And look, they trust me. So, like, here's what I will say. I know exactly what you're going to bring up, and it's crickets.

Cricket protein. I know it. And here's what's bizarre. All of the research I've done, all of the people I've interviewed, and I've never brought this up on the show, because I know for my audience, this is going to be. so controversial because they think it's some like socialist propaganda. A lot of it is. But in this case, cricket protein is one of the best forms of protein. And when you talk to people in the food

industry or the wellness industry, they're like, dude, like all these protein powders out there, like the number one thing. If you want the best protein, it's like cricket protein powder. But no one will buy it because Americans are so freaked out that they will not buy it. So it's a waste of money. Because I've been doing a lot of research looking into different things. like if I were to start a product or whatever. So I've just been looking into things. That was what everyone said. Because I was like, I said hard no, I won't get into protein powder because everyone's doing it.

And there are people that have done it already amazing. And I'm not going to try to, it's like, you know, big fish, small pond or, or no, small fish, big pond or whatever. So I was like, I'm not going to waste my time on protein powder. They said the only way that you would stand out. And it would be incredible, it would be cricket protein. It would be incredible. And I said, there's no way in hell. My audience would buy that.

There are probably a large number of your audience that are eating from an ancestral perspective, or at least as part of their mindset. Sure. But either or not necessarily in your audience, a lot of people. My diehard Hilda fans. Your diehard Hilda fans. They're like on board with this. They're tracking. All right.

If they are truly, and bear with me, this is, if you're truly eating ancestially, you can't just cherry pick the things that makes sense, you know, to your brain at this moment sitting in the context of, you know, 2025. Like, you need to embrace it all. at least think about it all. We were eating bugs well before we were eating meat. And when we started to eat meat, we were still eating bugs. And we have been eating bugs the entirety of the time that we've been on this planet. And there are still populations of this world in this world that are eating massive amounts of bugs. Have you ever eaten a spider?

No, but I would. I've eaten a lot of bugs. The dichotomy that's been created in social media is bugs equate to somebody attacking us eating meat. And it's not that. It isn't a bugs or meat to me if we're eating ancestrally. If we're truly eating ancessially, it's bugs and meat. It's bugs and meat. Okay.

Now, see, that makes sense to me because you're not coming on here saying don't eat meat, but eat the bugs. And that would be like- Eat the meat and eat the bugs. Okay. Eat the meat and the bug. Not me, but maybe you. Oh, metal, banging metal makes a sound that can travel a lot further than you could ever imagine. If you have anything, if you're trying to get somebody's attention.

Oh, to find you? To find you. To find you. If you can find, I mean, and there's not many parts of the world you can go to now that you can't even find a rusty can on the ground somewhere on the side of a mountain. Like if you can bang metal, the sound travels so incredibly far that it's a great way to be found. One day I better hear that somebody's life was saved from culture apothecary episode. And then you're going to let me know. Bill Shindler. Why are spinach and almonds like shards of glass on your liver? Spinnets and almonds,

I believe, are two of the most dangerous foods in our grocery store right now. And this is the reason why. The most dangerous plants in our grocery stores and our diets are the ones that, you know, incognito slowly provide a toxin that builds up in our bodies over time. And we can't equate because, you know, if you eat too much spend, it's, you know, too much of whatever, almonds over time, months or years later, you start coming down with these symptoms that are showing up that are a result of months and years of consumption of this. And it's hard for us say, oh, it's because of the almond. That can't be the almonds. I've been eating the almonds for five years. Well, that's exactly why, you know, you feel this way. So for 20 plus years of studying traditional detoxified. of plants, right, to make them safe in our diets. The one thing I really haven't found, and I'm looking very hard to find are suitable ways to get oxalates, which are the tiny shards of glass, a plant toxin that's there for several reason, including protection, out of plants. And right now, since I had a huge oxalate issue, and I know you had Sally Norton on before, I had a five-minute conversation with her six or seven years ago, and she changed my life.

I had massive issues because of the amount of almonds that I was eating. Massive issues. I stood up at a Keto Khan conference years ago, and at the end of my presentation, somebody asked me a question. The room was loaded with people. I had hundreds of people. And I said, somebody asked me on stage about almonds. And I went off on almonds.

And then I got done. And we had a booth. Christina and I had a booth for the modern-stownage kitchen in the vendor hall. And I'm thinking, as I'm walking to the booth, I just. dist almonds at a keto conference. Like, I'm going to have an angry mob, you know, pissed off of me. So I'm walking towards a booth and I see a line. We had the biggest line of everybody.

And I'm thinking, oh, my God, they're going to destroy us. And people, the entire line were people thanking me for saying that. Some of them were probably four or five of them were in tears telling me their stories about oxley. See, I went viral before in social media for having Sally Norton on and she was saying, almond flour stay away from it almonds stay away from them you're saying the same thing what were all these people coming to you in tears about almonds effects on their body saying to you it was mostly pain mostly inflammation sometimes it was kidney stone sometimes it was pseudo gout there's five things that cause gout the only one we talk about is uric acid i would suggest right now the prominent

issue that's causing gout right now is oxalates and it's being misdiagnosed as uric acid gout I had it. It was horrible. I had, I have two cornel transplants, unrelated to this, I have two cornel transplants from an eye disease, a carotoconus. I got the transplants 20 something years ago. But about, I forget how many years ago, eight or nine years ago, I had a, maybe longer, I started to get incredibly light sensitive. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't keep my eyes open. I was sitting two pairs of sunglasses. I ended up with a medicine. I went to my doctor, and my eye surgeon and he said there's nothing wrong with you. I can't keep my, there were two full-grown men holding my eye open so this guy could look into my eyes. And he ended up giving me a drops,

eye drops. I take no medicine. This is the only time I've ever taken long-term medicine in my life. And he's like, you need to take these eyedrops. They're called Katerallac. They're not going to fix your problem, but they're going to numb the symptoms so you can get through the day. I want to get you off them as soon as possible. Seven years later, I couldn't, I still couldn't get off these eyedrops. And it wasn't until I talked to Sally Norton. And I, and I, After that conversation looked up one of the places where oxalates get deposited in your corneos, and then all the symptoms of cornea deposition in the corneous, or oxalate deposition in the corneos was exactly what I was experiencing incredible light sensitivity. Seven years, I was taking these drops

twice a day. And I couldn't get off them. He kept trying to get me off them. And I finally, when I took almonds and other oxalates out of my diet, I have never taken a drop since. Years. Whoa. Never taken a drop since. I love almonds. That was my go-to-stop. snack. I do too. But the problem, and this is one of the big, I know we talked about plant toxins earlier, and I know it can get very complicated with fermentation, all this, but here's a very easy takeaway. We have taken away through technology and through mass production of food, and the entire food system has taken away a lot of the limiting mechanisms that prevented us from overconsumption a lot of these things in the past. So for almonds, for example, when I grew up in the 70s, we couldn't

afford a bag of shelled almonds. You barely even saw it at the grocery store. I remember I would go to my grandparents' house on Christmas day. They'd have a bowl of nuts in the shell with a nutcracker. I'd spend three hours cracking nuts to get a handful of nuts, eat them, and that was good. But we couldn't afford shelled almonds. Nobody could. It wasn't even the thing. Now I can go to Costco and buy a bag of shelled almonds for, you know, $10.

And everybody's telling us it's a superfood and we're trying to be low carb. This is what I fell into and we're popping. It'd be impossible to do that 30 years ago. We couldn't afford it. It'd be impossible to have done that even earlier because you just didn't have access to that. Spinach, if you ate spinach itself isn't evil. If you ate spinach for the two or three weeks out of the year that it would grow in your backyard, maybe you get a high dose of oxalates for three weeks and then you're good the rest of the year.

But now we've called it a superfood. We've taken away the limiting mechanism of seasonality. We ship it all over the world. We grow it in hoop houses. You can get spinach and fresh spinach and frozen spinach all year long in the grocery store. and I know people that are drinking a spinach smoothie in the morning and eating a spinach salad in the afternoon for lunch. And it would have been impossible to do that. So I know fermentation, peeling toxins, all these, I know we're talking about if all you did as a parent or as an individual cooking for yourself or your loved one, whatever, eat seasonally.

Like literally eat seasonally. You immediately have gone into a situation where your diversity of diet over time is preventing you in many cases of overconsumption. any particular toxin at any given time throughout the entire year. It's huge. That is huge. Then if you eat spinach in December because you're at a party and it's there at a restaurant, it's not a very big deal. That's a different thing than eating it every single day. We weren't, yeah, we weren't designed to just eat all types of food all the time forever. Like we were only supposed to eat them different types, you know, different times of the year. And so that's probably why we didn't see all these people have these extreme reactions to things

because you're not over consuming it. Absolutely. Plants that are producing food in late summer and fall are the very high carbohydrate foods that are putting on weight, fat for animals to overwinter, right, to get through the winter. But if all we did was eat at least somewhat seasonally, we'd solve a lot of problems. And it also forces us to shop more locally and support local farmers. I mean, it's just a win-win-win-win-all-around. The second thing is that I thought was brilliant is we have this idea that humans are supposed to be this ideal body weight and maintain. throughout the entire year. And that is not true. The mindset shift is different. We have this

idea that, okay, we want to be at this percent body fat at 365 days out of the year. That isn't a very natural thing either. Is American corn driving people insane asylum level crazy? It's not the corn. It's the processing like everything else. The hidden story behind corn is that we think it was domesticated somewhere around 10,000 years ago in the Balsas Valley of Mexico. We actually know what the wild ancestor is and it still grows. It's called Teoscenti. It was the staple of diets for thousands of years all over the Americas, like the staple. I mean, the Aztecs, for example, not only was it a staple food, it was the basis of their religion, it was a basis of their economy, it was a basis of their culture, I mean,

basis of their art, it was everything, huge civilizations based on maze. When the early American explorers came to America, they saw corn for the first time. The term corn actually means grain, and it means grain of the local area, so dominant grain. So when you go to Ireland and would see oats, you would have called it corn because they were eating most, that was the grain they were mostly eating. Or barley over here. Or if you went to Asia, you'd call rice corn, right? Because that was the grain that was dominant. So when they came to America and saw corn or maize, they called it corn because it was the dominant grain that was being eaten. They loved it. It was easy to grow. It tasted good. It was filling. It was cheap. And they brought the corn back to Europe. And because it grew in very similar latitudes. And you can. follow the spread of corn or maize through Europe with a disease in its wake called pellagra. And it was first identified in Spain in the 1700s. Not long after that, it was identified in Italy where it gets its name Pelagra.

It was in Eastern Europe. It shows up again at the end of the Irish potato famine in Ireland. And then it comes to the U.S. for the first time in the early 1900s. The symptoms of Pelagra are this. Red rashy skin. Parts of you would start falling off. Sometimes it's misdiagnosed as leprosy. Aversion of sunlight, bleeding from the mouth, blindness, and eventually death.

Horrible disease. And it's following maize all over, especially in impoverished areas. It shows up in Ireland at the end of the Irish potato famine because we started, America started sending over massive amounts of maize as a famine relief food. And what was crazy is that, you know, you have people that were dying from starvation that were now getting maize and they were getting sick and dying of this disease that they've never seen in Ireland before. It shows up in the early 1900s in American Southeast, Georgia, Alabama, the Carolina's that area.

And it was such a big deal that we hired an infectious disease doctor by the name of Joseph Goldberger. And he goes in to study it. And I mean massive. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying and millions were sick from this disease. It was a very big deal. And this isn't that long ago. It's 100 years ago. So he goes into studies and comes back and says, hey, this is really bad, but I'm not your guy because I'm an infectious disease doctor.

This thing that's killing all your, he wasn't a matter. thing that's killing everybody is not, it's not infectious. It has to do with food. And they're like, it can't, it doesn't have to do with food. And don't even talk about corn. You know, corn is king in the South. Go back and figure it out. So then he takes mental institutions and prisons, a few of them.

We can't do this now, but he did it then, divided them in half, fed half of them, nothing but corn. And the other half they were on whatever diet that were on, but probably wasn't that good. And the half that was eating nothing but corn started getting sick from the same. for his Pelagra. Still didn't, nobody believed them. So he went to the extent where he would set up in these communities where it was prevalent. He'd put a stage in the middle of the town square, bring everybody up and he held these things called filth parties. This was a disease that you were very embarrassed. It was usually in impoverished areas. It was associated with poverty and dirt.

And if somebody in your family got it, you were very embarrassed. So it was called the filth disease. So he would bring somebody suffering from Pelagra up on stage. And as an infectious disease doctor, he knew how, and even then, in the early 1900s, how infectious diseases were spread. So he wanted to show everybody it wasn't infectious. So him and his wife and his partner would, they take a syringe and they drew blood from the person that was sick on stage, and they put it in their own veins. Then they took a cotton swab, and they'd swab all the mucus membranes of the person that was sick, and they'd take that same one and swab themselves, and then they would actually take part of their bodies that were falling off and put

them in these little gel cap-like things and eat them. And he finally made his case. And they said, great, we believe you. It's corn. what's the problem? He goes, I have no idea, but this is your problem. And it was until years later, 1936, there were three scientists in the Midwest that were studying a malnutrition, disease, and dogs that were able to identify that the issue that the humans are suffering from was also something related, was the deficiency of niacin in the diet. So it is a knee-jerk reaction to that, why every baked good in this country for years, and many still today, are fortified with niacin, as a result of that thing there, especially cheap.

baked baked goods, but they still didn't understand what the issue was. But all of a sudden, Pelagra essentially disappears because we're fortifying all these cheap foods with niacin. Here's the punchline. People for hundreds of years, we're talking millions of people sick and suffering, hundreds of thousands dying from this disease, this disease of malnourishment, this disease of absence of niacin in the diet in the body, while eating nothing but a food that is loaded with niacin. They're actually eating nothing but a food loaded with niacin and getting sick and dying of a disease because they're malnourished. And the problem is it was, unless it's processed right, it passes right through the body. There's only one way to make all the nutrients and corn

fully available to the human body and it's that process of nistomalization. The corn is probably the most difficult grain in the world for the human body to fully digest. Anybody who's eaten corn on the cob at a picnic and looked in the toilet the next day knows why. I mean, the whole kernels of corn, right? It is very difficult. Even if you grind that corn up, even if you make cornmeal, even if you make grits, the nutrients, some of the nutrients in it are not available to our body unless we process it properly. Remember, that corn isn't put on earth for us to eat. It's put on this earth to make a baby corn plant. But it's a very simple process that's thousands of years to transform a food that that's all we're eating can make us sick and it's something that can nourish us. So the way it's done is in the past, it was wood, wood, ash, and water over a fire with the corn kernels, simmered for about a half an hour and let it sit overnight. And that's it. That's all you have. to do. We do it with something called Cal or calcium hydroxide. If you go to Walmart and buy Mrs. Whatever's Pickling Lime, it's exactly the same thing. This process to make real tortillas, real grits, real Pesole, real hominy, real masa, real masa, real masa, real masa, real tortillas,

is very simple to do at home. And it literally takes a half an hour. How do you do it? Okay, so you take the maze and you put it in water and a tiny bit of this pickling lime or cow into the water, literally simmered for a half an hour, turn off the pot, turn off the heat, let it sit overnight, and the next day you have that raw ingredient that you can then cook as it is, make something very similar to a corn nuts. It's very similar to corn nuts, but healthy. You can then grind it up. You can then use it as cornmeal. You can then use it as grits. All of that, that simple process that took a half an hour of active time, sitting overnight, transforms it completely different.

Nishtamalization. It's an ancient Aztec word. Nish tomalization. He told me, and my mass of chips ad reads, when I talk about that, I've been saying it wrong. I had no idea. It is a literally a completely different food. So here's a couple of tips for people. First off, I describe it really well in the book on how to do it at home. We have classes all the time on how to do it. It's very, very, very easy to do. If you're shopping for something, you want to make sure that it has actually been, put through that process if you eat a lot of them. Again, it's not a very big deal, but if you eat a lot of them, Masa chips are nistomelized. Our tortilla chips are nishatomalized. One thing to be careful of, though, is believe it or not, according to the FDA,

to legally call, this is insane, to legally call a tortilla chip, a tortilla chip, it has to be fried in vegetable oil. What? Look up the regulations, the FDA regulations. Oh, okay, so we need to change that. We need to change that. That's ridiculous. It actually reads vegetable oil in order.

We're not allowed to call these tortilla chips. What is wrong with 99% of peanut butter, including organic? Remember, so a peanut is not a nut. It's a legume. And legumes are inherently incredibly dangerous unless they're processed the right way. So a great example is a kidney bean. And the processing is very powerful. But it's simple.

If I gave you three raw kidney beans and had you eat them, you would end up in the hospital. You'd be an intense pain and you would end up in the hospital. But if we soak them overnight and then cook them, we've detoxified them. to the point that we can safely derive nutrition. A peanut is a legume. It is inherently loaded with toxins unless it's processed the right way. Now, peanuts were originally domesticated in Brazil. They've been in South America for a very long time before they ever even came to North America. If you look at any traditional preparation of peanuts, they're almost always soaked overnight. They're soaked. And that soaking is power. I know it doesn't seem like much because we're not

actively engaged in something. But the chemical and physical changes that happen with something as simple as soaking or sprouting are incredibly powerful. And same thing with the peanuts. So our peanut butter that we make at the Monterey Sonnate's kitchen, we bring in raw peanuts, we soak them overnight, which is the essential part of detoxification, then we dehydrate them, then we roast them, and then we turn them into peanut butter. Okay. And this is it.

This is your peanut butter. It just says soaked peanuts, coconut oil, local honey salt. That's it. Chunky peanut butter. And it looks the same, but it is a different food. And again, if all you're doing is eating a table spoon to peanut butter once a month, it's not a very big deal. But if you're feeding your kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every single day, that's when something as simple as the soaking process can make all the difference in the world. Do you sell this online or you have to only buy it in person?

No, we sell that online. You say that the ancestral diet isn't rigid, that it's actually very freeing. What is one ancestral habit that a busy suburban family can easily adopt? The basis of the ancestral diet is, by default, it is hyperlocal and hyper seasonal. So I think the easiest thing, and I know we already mentioned it, is eating seasonally and locally is not, they're not just buzzwords. Like that is, that's what our diets were every single day of the year. So powerful in every sense, not only nutritionally, but also from a community perspective, from a ethical perspective, from a ethical perspective, from sustainability perspective, hyperseasional, hyperlocal as much as possible without. killing yourself or, you know, mentally going to the point where it's becoming a problem and

unhealthy. I think that is the first thing. Lately, we're seeing two different narratives on seed oils. You've got half the internet saying not only are they not bad for you, but they're actually really healthy for you. And then you have this other camp that are like, stay away from seed oils at all costs. Where do you fall? Stay away from seed oils at all costs. Why? We have archaeological evidence that shows long bones intentionally busted open for marrow 3.4 million years ago. 3.4 million years. we have animal fats in our diets for the entirety of that time but really getting boosted up about two million years ago the entirety of that time are fat consumption as fat like obviously if we're eating a nut there's some oil in it but the eating of just fat was coming in solely from animal

sources the earliest plant-based fat is olive oil at about eight or nine thousand years ago in just pockets of the world like small segments the next uh is is palm fruit oil, which I want to talk about in just a second. The next is coconut oil, and then much more recently is avocado. Avocado oil is actually very recent in our past. Every plant-based fat I mentioned is fruit from fruit. Olive oil, palm fruit oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil are palm fruit oils. I'm sorry, are fruit oils.

They're not seed oils. Completely different foods. Nut and seed oils, as you know, have only been our diets for about 125 or 150. 50 years. In addition to all the problems associated with extracting oils from nut and seeds, hexane, all the other solvents, deodorizers, deconditioners, flavor enhancers, all of those deodorizers, all those things that we do just to get the oils out and get them in a state that we're fooling our senses to allow it to get past our nose and our taste buds. They've only been in our diet for a very short period of time. We all know, and we've all seen the charts

that, you know, when we start introducing seed oils into the diets, there's a whole bunch of health consequences that are happening at the same time. Now, there's a lot of, there's a lot of environmental things happening in addition to the seed oils. So we can't just say it's just the seed oils. But they have been in our diets for a very short period of time. One thing, when we were in Brazil, one of the, we were there to study how to process manioc, but one thing that happened one day is we got to process palm fruit oil. I, even though I'm in a rabbit hole of all this stuff, so I didn't understand the huge difference between palm fruit oil and pump seed oil. And they get lumped together, unfortunately, both from a nutritional perspective,

but also from a sustainability perspective. And they're different things entirely. There's from the same trees are from the same fruit. The fruits come off. They're not very big. They have a very oily fruit on the outside and a huge seed on the inside. I mean huge. The seed on the inside is a size of like a hazelnut. The processing of it is very traditional. It's been around for at least 6,000 years. And you take these seeds and you put them in water, you warm them up to sort of release the fat, then you put them in a wooden mortar and pestle. You pound it like this to release the oily fibers. You put the oily fibers in water, heat it up.

The oil skins that it comes to the top, we skim it off. I mean, it is a beautiful thing. Harvested by hand, small batch. There's no solvents. There's no chemicals. It is a beautiful. It is incredibly not only nutritionally rich. And on the fat profiles are on the level of lard and tallow.

I mean, the fat profiles are gorgeous. And this is palm fruit oil. Now they take all the seeds. and they sell the seeds off to the modern industrial food system, which has the chemicals and the machines actually then extract the oil from the seeds. That's a completely different thing. So from a fat profile perspective

and from a sustainability perspective, they're different foods than palm seed oil. And we are going to actually start introducing palm fruit oil into the restaurant. Is palm seed oil the one that they're getting and it's like destroying rainforests? Yes, that's a different thing. The way this is produced is not destroying anything.

that what you're talking about is no better than the almond industry or any other sort of, you know, mass scale industry. So the thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but palm seed oil, it's not, it is or isn't bad for you, but it's just environmentally, it's horrific how they get it. Oh, it's both. Okay. It's both bad for you. It is a highly industrialized process to even extract the oil from the seeds. Got it. And on top of it has all these environmental consequences.

fruit, yay, palm seed, nay. And then definitely no to canola, vegetable, grape seed, grape seed. But you like butter, tallow, ghee, lard. Love. Okay, cool. So your book, Eat Like a Human blends, anthropology, archaeology, chef skills, cooking. I mean, all of the things. I love learning from you.

Tell everybody about this book, what you cover, what it's about. And then also, I want you to talk about your restaurant and sourdough classes. is if you are a nerd for sourdough, you have to take Bill's class. It is like a science lesson. You can ask any question if you're like, I don't know why it's not crusty enough on the outside. It's caving in the middle. It's really spongy. It's like shredded like my husband's underwear.

Something's wrong. Like he will figure out your problem during this class. And it's happening in Maryland, like what, an hour and a half outside of D.C.? It's been an hour outside of D.C., hour and a half from Philly, a couple hours from New York. Yeah. So it is so worth it. And to eat in his restaurant, so worth it. modern stone age kitchen. So tell us about everything, the book, the restaurant, the class.

So this book came out of 20 plus years of all the research we talked about today and learning how to feed my family. And we wanted to just share it with the world. So that book was, we created it. Eat like a human. Eat like a human so that not only, it's full of recipes. It doesn't look like a cookbook. It has 75 recipes in it. And it has all the context to make you understand why these recipes are important. And where from a historic and traditional perspective, you know, how we have been processing foods and how to implement that into our own homes today. We didn't know COVID was going to hit. We had no idea what was happening. And the book launched in the middle of COVID. And we also, coming out of COVID, our oldest daughter started a

sourdough bread company. And we brought that back into a building that was originally part of the college, but now we have it. And that book launched the restaurant. So what's really cool about the recipes and the approach in this book is, I can tell you from personal experience, everything we do in that book is highly applicable and doable in a home setting for your family. I mean, this is coming from a family that has, we had two careers, three kids, and it wasn't like we're living on top of the mountain and just homesteading. We were literally, they were running the soccer practice, they were going to ballet, we were doing all the things. So in a modern context, it works, but it also became the basis of the restaurant. So it works in a commercial sense as well.

And I'm really incredibly proud. There's no two ingredients put together outside of our walls at our restaurant. Literally, we make all of our cheese. We do all of our butchering. We do all the everything is 100%. It's insane, you guys. And tell them about the chili. And the restaurant is called Modern Stone Age Kitchen. You had the chili. I forget. Yes. So our approach. And the olives, the olives you had are the only olives I've ever liked in my entire life. I do not like olives. Really? Your olives, I was like, I could eat these like grapes. That is really good to hear. We were just launching, those olives you had were actually launching right now. So I'm so glad you like it. Oh, yeah. Okay, so tell us about the chili. So since we're doing all in-house butchering for everything

and making all of our meats, whether it's for a sandwich or something else, we have the capability of implementing a complete nose to tail approach. But some of the nose to tail stuff has gone a little bit far in the other direction for me. I mean, when we're eating no organs, it was kind of silly. And when we're eating nothing but organs, it's kind of silly too. So our approach has been typically in a traditional sense, if an animal is killed, it's eaten from one end to the other, and then you go out and harvest another animal. So what we did was the percentages that are in our chili and all these numbers are in the book. A percentage that are in chili,

the percentages that are in our hot dogs, the percentages of all the organ meats that are in most of the foods that we create are the exact same percentages that was in the animal. So the meat, the fat, the liver, the heart, the kidney, which are the easy parts for us to get.

Sometimes we can get other parts, we will, but at least those parts, we put in those end final products like the chili in the same percentage they were in the animal. And I think that's a really, the nice thing is, I think that's a very good ancestral approach,

but it also, like you had it. It's delicious. It's not really tinny or, you know, livery. No. It doesn't. Oh, it was phenomenal. It was incredible. And, like, you can go in there and have the best breakfast of your life, the best lunch of your life.

And then also it's like a bakery. Like, you can go there to get your sourdough bread and stuff if you live in the area, which, what is that town called? It's called Chester Town. It's a beautiful, cute Estabstown. It's really, like, hallmarky. Like, it's worth the, worth the trip to go there for lunch. Our goal with the restaurant was to create the restaurant that we would have wanted to take our, been able to take our kids to. So I know we talked about blood and milk and

insects and all these other things. If you look at our menu, everybody would recognize everything on the menu. We're trying to make traditional food as nourishing as it can be using these ancestral principles. We also have the nonprofit, you're talking with the classes. So it's called the Modern Stone Age Food Lab. And we do in-person classes, but here's something we live, this is, I'm so excited because those in-person classes I love to teach, but I can only take about 12 people at a time. We have classes almost every weekend. But we literally, we've been asked for a very long time. Every now and then we've done some virtual things, but we have just launched a community where every Monday night we get together and cook

and then do, so there's a cooking class every single Monday night and then there's a bunch of Q&A afterwards and a lot of communication in between. And this is a great opportunity for anybody who's starting to dip their toes into this. We're using the same sort of equipment you would use in your house. It's not the commercial stuff downstairs, right? It's the stuff in the food lab. The same sorts of whisk, same sort of spoons, the same sort of stoves. And we're going through everything in small bites from, you know, how to refresh sourdough mother, to how to take a part of chicken, to how to make cheese in your house, all of those things. And what I love about it is it's for everybody. Yeah, your husbands will love it. Like, it's really fun. If you are somebody who

I want to make sourdough bread for this, my life, for my family, this is the class for you. If it's, I just want to know more about bread so I know what to buy and how to buy it. Learning how to make a loaf of sourdough bread is the best way to get to that place to inform yourself. And what I like to say is once you've learned how to make some of these foods from scratch, whether you do it again at all or not, you are a different person. Like literally, when you walk into a grocery store, all of the trillions of dollars of marketing and advertising, you're immune to it. You're an informed consumer.

Like it's meaningless to you. You will literally walk into the grocery store a completely, different person. And you will know if you're not going to make it again, you'll know which one to buy without anybody else telling you because you can read through all that nonsense, all the trillions of dollars of marketing and advertising that are there, not for your health, but to make somebody else a lot of money. So I'm really excited for the opportunity to, you know, reach even more people. Do you do sourdough pancakes? Actually, they're probably one of the healthiest sourdough things that we have. They are the longest fermented thing as are sourdough

pancakes and sarado waffles. Guys, I'm telling you, make a trip to modern stone age kitchen in Maryland, if you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture physically, emotionally, or spiritually, what would it be? It'd be connection, 100%. Connecting, reconnecting with your food allows you to reconnect with so many other aspects of your life. I mean, we mentioned earlier how food is interrelated with everything we are as humans. It permeates every aspect of our life.

In fact, eating food is one of the most sensual things that we do. I mean, we use all of our senses when we're engaged in the act of eating. When you reconnect with your food, you are reconnecting with yourself, you're reconnecting with your family, you're reconnecting with your community, you're reconnecting with all of these things in a very, very beautiful way. My life has been so enhanced when I started, you know, and all this happens in the kitchen and around a table. I sign every one of my books. It all begins in your kitchen and around your table because that is exactly where it all begins. Reconnect, take a link out of your food chain, and it could be as simple as learning how to make a loaf of sourdough bread or learning how to make a jar of sourcrow. All of that is a very beautiful thing that has so many consequences, ramifications to completely transform your life.

Have you met Hillary Boynton from? Absolutely. Yeah, she came out to the Monasterny's Kitchen. Yeah, she's doing amazing things. I was going to say, you guys would be two peas in a pot. I love Hillary. And she does school of lunch in Southern California. So kind of she just like her little class there, you have that and on the East Coast.

So, yeah, I figured I was like, you guys need to meet if you haven't met. One other very quick thing I wanted to mention, the true real experience of engaging with your food. and everything that it takes to produce that food is incredibly powerful. And one of the things we started doing a few years ago that we're continuing to do is we do do trips abroad. Ireland is a great example where we do a trip to Ireland. Oh, so I can go with you to drink the blood. Well, that's in Kenya. But we can get your blood in Ireland, too.

But it is a, you know, these trips are immersive. It's archaeology, the anthropology, it's food, its chefs. I mean, the last meals with Ireland's first two Michelin Star chef were, it's awesome. But traveling has been so enhanced for us by getting to know real food. And that's some of the experiences that we're, you know, we're trying to share as well. Oh, cool. Okay. You would love it.

So where do people, like, find out about all this? Is there one website or anything? One website, modern stone age.com. And where can they find you on social media? Two places. So my personal, so what we've kind of done is divide, not divided, but most of the sort of research teaching stuff is falling under my Instagram at at Dr. Bill Schindler. So at DR. Bill Schindler. and that plus all the things that have to do with a restaurant are at at the modern stone age.

We couldn't get modern stone age. So it's at the modern stone age on Instagram and Facebook. We have a really strong social media presence. And we do do an email every Monday. There's a blog. There's a ton of information in our email. So if you sign up for email, anything that any of the classes were doing, the community that I mentioned earlier, any of the specials are running at the restaurant,

you'll get a weekly information about that. The kind of things we talked about today, we dive deep in those blogs, things about the palm fruit oil, for example, was a recent blog post we did. We also have a bed and breakfast next door. So we, as you can tell, that town is super cute. There's not a massive amount of places to stay. And people are coming in. They wanted to experience pizza night with us on Friday, then do the farmer's market on Saturday, then take a class on Saturday in our brunch or whatever. So we do have a bed and breakfast.

It's on the same website. And I just have to put a plug in for pizza. Pizza is a junk food. But just like everything else, pizza can be a health food if it's done the wrong. right way. And I think sometimes pizza gets a bad wrap, but pizza can be an amazing food. So we, right now, we're only doing it once a week because it takes all week. We make everything. So we butcher the animals. We make the pepperoni. We make the sauces. We make the cheese from local milk. It takes three and a half to four days to make the pizza dough, full sourdough. It's a wood-fired

oven. So if you think about that as a pizza, it is, again, a completely different food than dominoes or something else, which would destroy your health. This is something that, worst isn't going to harm you, but at best, I would think of it as a nutritional, a nutritional food. But you can come in the same approach we have to food we're doing with alcohol. One of the worst places for nasty things like artificial sweeteners and coloring agents and flavoring agents are coming in with the mixers. So a mixed drink is a very dangerous place to be if you're trying to eat healthy, right?

Not just talking about the alcohol, about that. So we're making all of our maros, we're making our vermouths. The reason that you had those olives, we're making the olives for the drink. So we do have an alcohol program for I know there's a big piece for sobriety. And it's a very important thing. There's no reason to drink alcohol from a nutritional perspective. Your olives were so salty. Oh, we ferment, I cured them and then fermented them.

That's what they were different, man. You've got to go there for the pizza, for the olives, for the chili, the sourdough bread class. The whole experience, stay a couple days. Yeah, say a couple days. The whole experience, I just think it'd be so cool, especially for homeschool families, which are tons of my audience, homeschool families, I think would absolutely love it. Everybody in your family can find something to eat and you can sit there and feel good about what they're eating. Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. And I did Dr. Bill's sourdough class and we made a whole vlog about it. It's very educational and very fun. So you can see that at the real Alex Clark YouTube channel if you want to get some more from Dr. Bill after this episode. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for all that you do. Don't forget to go watch my vlog of me doing Dr. Bill's sourdough class. It was so fun.

Best bread I've ever had. best lunch I've ever had, and you're going to learn so much about sourdough and what is going wrong every single time you're trying to make a loaf. If you loved hearing from Dr. Bill on the podcast and you want to go even deeper, you need to book that flight to Maryland. Their kitchen is well worth the trip at Modern Stone Age. And don't forget, you can now learn directly from Bill and Christina Schindler inside their brand new online community, the ancestral table. You're going to get weekly live workshops, Q&A's, on-demand classes, exclusive recipes, and real behind the scenes access to how they raise their family to eat like a human.

It is everything that you wish you could ask in person, now just to click away. And for my audience, you're going to get 20% off your monthly or annual membership for a limited time. You can join the movement to reconnect with food, tradition, and community, one delicious nourishing bite at a time. Go to modern stone age.com, click the word community, and then use code Alex Clark 20 at checkout. Please leave us a five-star of you if you enjoyed this episode to learn something new. What was the craziest thing that Dr. Bill taught you? Was it about the corn? Was it about the potatoes? Was it something else? The drinking blood? Do you think your family would go on a family vacation like his did and everybody tries blood? I don't know. I don't think that would have worked with my family growing up. But I love how him and his wife have raised their kids to be just absolutely fearless about food. That's an entire episode that I could do separately with him, I think. It's just how do you get your kids to be fearless about food? I think that's important. on YouTube and anywhere you get your podcast, new episodes release every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m.

Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern. Follow us on Instagram at Culture Apothecary or me at Real Alex Clark. We do put vlogs and all kinds of fun stuff on our YouTube channel. Don't forget about that. And I will see you next time. It's Culture Apothecary and I'm Alex Clark.