Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #144 Dr. Paul Saladino

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

Dr. Paul Saladino is the leading authority on the science and application of the carnivore diet. He has used this diet to reverse autoimmunity, chronic inflammation and mental health issues in hundreds of patients, many of whom had been told their conditions were untreatable. In addition to his personal podcast, Fundamental Health, he can be found featured on numerous podcasts including The Minimalists,  The Model Health Show, Bulletproof Radio,  The Dr. Gundry Podcast, The Ben Greenfield Podcast, Dr. Mercola, Health Theory, Mark Bell’s Power Project, and many others. We discuss his new book The Carnivore Code and how the diet can help in many areas of your life.   Connect with Dr. Saladino: Website - https://carnivoremd.com/ YouTube - https://bit.ly/38WQGVQ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/carnivoreMD/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/carnivoremd/?hl=en   Show Notes: Pre Order Dr. Saladino's book The Carnivore Code launching February 25th, 2020   https://amzn.to/2SS83ld   Check Out:  Kyle's Inner Circle Course (Private 1 on 1 Coaching) https://www.kingsbu.com/inner-circle   Natasha Kingsbury's E book (30 recipes)   Purchase for $5 at https://www.kingsbu.com   Show Sponsors:    OneFarm Formally (Waayb CBD) www.onefarm.com/kyle (Get 15% off everything using code word KYLE at checkout)   Sated Keto Shakes  https://sated.com/kyle  use codeword KYLE for 20% off Storewide    AMP Human PR Lotion www.amphuman.com/kyle or KYLE20 at checkout (for 20% off)     Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/   Ancestralsupplements - Grass Fed Brain  https://ancestralsupplements.com/brain Use codeword KING10 for 10% off / Only Valid through Shopify Option      Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Website | https://www.kingsbu.com/ ( Supplement List & Newsletter) Subscribe to Kyle Kingsbury Podcast iTunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY  

What's up, everybody? Today's show is a person who I've been following for a while and have become pretty damn close with, Dr. Paul Saladino, better known as the Carnivore Doc. He is a phenomenal guy, a fellow podcaster, and he's just finishing his book, The Carnivore Code, which is available for pre-order and will be out very shortly. It is an absolutely fantastic book, which we will link to in the show notes. Conveniently for you guys, we dive into all things carnivore. We dive into our ancestral history, and we take a deep dive into regenerative agriculture,

which is one of the ways we will stop harming the planet and start to heal the earth. Some really cool conversations. I've been on a hunting trip with him since this podcast. Obviously, both of us are into archery and a lot of other cool stuff. And he's just a fascinating, awesome human who's really demystified a lot of what it means to be a carnivore or to be carnivore-ish, which is a diet that I've participated in for pretty much the last two and a half, three months. And non-dogmatically on my approach, but I think that seeing things come out from the carnivore side with a nose-to-tail, I don't want to say curriculum, but with a nose-to-tail, I don't want to say curriculum, with a nose-to-tail emphasis,

I think is incredibly important, and it is the way our ancestors ate. So very cool science here, very cool discussion with my man, Dr. Paul Saladino. Hope you guys like this one. Remember, check out my website, kingsboo.com. That's K-I-N-G-S-B-U.com. It is really the only way you can contact me now, unless you know me personally, because I have deleted all socials. So you can hit me up there. There's a contact form if you've got questions, things like that. Also, you will be able to receive a monthly newsletter with all the cool shit that I'm into, books that I'm reading. And if you enjoyed me on Instagram, that's where you'll find the meat and potatoes of what I'm into, books that I'm reading. And if you enjoyed me on Instagram, that's where you'll find the meat and potatoes of what I'm actually doing in life now that I've freed up this space

in my life. All that good stuff and more at kingsboo.com. Remember to click subscribe. That way you get to listen to every episode we release, as well as leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show has helped you out in life. the show can grow that way. So obviously tell your friends, your mom, your dad, all that cool shit, but leave us that review. That really helps us out in the ratings. Also check out our sponsors. We've got some good ones today. Sated Keto Meal Shakes are absolutely one of my favorite grab and go delicious and convenient meal shakes that are exactly what they say. They are keto and it is a fucking meal in a bottle. They're absolutely incredible for when you're busy or you don't have time to cook. They come in two ready-to-drink flavors, chocolate and vanilla, with less than two grams of net carbs

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product, which is absolutely incredible. A lot of you know that I eat liver, kidney, and heart on a regular basis. So does bear, so does Tosh, and it's fantastic. But we simply have a hard time getting nose to tail, which is another conversation had with Paul Sal's fantastic. But we simply have a hard time getting nose to tail, which is another conversation had with Paul Saladino. But now we have this opportunity, and grass-fed brain by Ancestral Supplements is one of these incredible ingredients, incredible products that can get you to eat nose to tail with the organ meats, bone marrow, brain, and it's a simple, convenient gelatin capsule. Traditional peoples, Native Americans, and early ancestral healers believed that eating the organs from a healthy animal would strengthen and support the health of the corresponding organ of the individual.

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10 for 10% off at ancestralsupplements.com. It's only good when you go through Shopify, so don't try and buy on Amazon, which is another option on their site. Obviously, you can buy on amazon.com. But to get this 10% off, you go to ancestralsupplements.com and use code KING10 at the Shopify checkout. Today's podcast is also brought to you by Onnit. I've been working at Onnit for two and a half years now. This company's fantastic. Spoiler alert, I work here. But guess what? We make some pretty cool products and product development. And one of the things that you need right now while you're eating a little bit off diet around the holidays is total gut health. This is something that is absolutely essential whether you're eating clean or not. Something that I take with every big meal.

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and you're going to get 15% off everything storewide. That's O-N-E-F-A-R-M.com slash Kyle, 15% off everything storewide. Again, thank you all for tuning in. Let me know what you think. This is a polarizing topic, but there's a lot of science in support of Dr. Paul Celedino and his work, and a lot of that is shown in his new book, The Carnivore Code. So check out this podcast and pre-order his book now. Thank you guys for tuning in, and I'll see you at kingsboo.com. All right, we're good. Let's do it, brother. Sitting with the man, the myth, the legend, Paul Saladino, the carnivore doc. Dude, it's funny. I feel like I'm sitting with the man, the myth, and the legend. It's been a fun day with you. It's been great. Thanks for

having me on. Yeah, I'm bummed we didn't get to go surfing, but considering all the activities we had today, we got a lot accomplished. I think, you know, we'll see how the schedule goes. Maybe after the podcast, we can go jump in the ocean at least. That'd be great. Yeah. Nice little grounding cord after last night's deep work. Damn, there's a lot of questions I have for you, but let me just start with, you know, you were recently into this game in terms of your lifespan. You look young, but how old are you? I'm 42.

42 years young. You got five years on me and a full head of hair. Motherfucker. Maybe that just means I have less testosterone, less DHT receptors. Yeah, that's what Greenfield always says. He's like, you got to see the silver lining. You know, if you got no hair,

it means you got all the androgens going strong. You got tons of DHT and lots of receptors, man. I wouldn't worry about it. It's a good way to flip the coin there. So talk a bit about your process because this is really cool. We spent the day shooting bows. We went to a couple of different outdoor ranges, which are great. The one that we finished with, I wish we could have spent more time at because that was the spot, right? And we had, it was like a, almost like mini golf when you go from like hole one to hole two and you're walking around all

these different places, but it was expanded. It's in nature at Balboa Park and we're shooting from all different angles at targets. That was rad. But you were talking a bit about your process and how it's been not a linear path to get where you are today. So break that down for us. Yeah. I don't think many of us have linear paths, you know? And maybe I'm just starting to realize that now at this point in the journey, like, oh, it's okay. It wasn't linear. But growing up, I always thought it was going to be linear.

My dad's a doc. My mom's a nurse practitioner. I went to college straight out of high school at William & Mary in Virginia, studied chemistry, biology, and I was like, go on to med school. And somewhere around junior or senior year of college, I had this major crisis of faith and realized most of the doctors around me weren't happy. And I wasn't sure I wanted to do that. I kind of felt this calling to something else. So I put press pause and I embarked on a six year kind of gallivanting vagabond journey where I went all over the US, out of the country, Costa Rica, New Zealand, and did all kinds of cool

stuff that I'd never done growing up on the East Coast. I grew up in the suburbs. So thankfully, I had access to some wilderness and I spent time in creeks and rivers falling in and getting wet and getting ticks and, you know, fighting my friends with sticks and sledding in the winter and exploring. And it was the generation ago, it was many generations ago, it was, you know, two generations ago where parents were still comfortable letting their kids just go play. We would go miles from home and play in the woods. So I had this like semi wilderness experience growing up. And I really value that. That was such a big part of my upbringing. But after, after I got out of college, I was like, I need to get back to that. And I did. I went straight back into it. And I went to Maine and worked at an outdoor education camp there that

had an organic farm. I thought whitewater kayaking. And then I went straight West because I'd seen all these calendar pictures of Monument Valley and these amazing places in the West that just looked so cool. I need to go to this magical land. And that was sort of the beginning of six years of ski bombing. I couldn't even ski at the time. So I had to learn to ski, started out telemark skiing. Then I did Alpine skiing. I just did like this big skiing adventure became a total ski bomb. I got so hooked on skiing. Sliding down a mountain in powder was just such a flow state that i'd never experienced before in my life chased it around everywhere went to new zealand to ski hiked the pacific crest trail one summer so i hiked the whole thing from mexico to canada spent

three and a half months on the trail that really that really enkindled or rekindled helped me remember like oh man this connection to the wilderness is so fundamental to what it means to be a human. And I worked in bike shops, did mountain biking, downhill mountain biking, road biking, just kind of was exploring this grand part of my life. Like what do I want to do with it? Structure and routine sounded like death to me. And I had no intention of going back to school. And then one day I kind of woke up and I was like, I like biology. I like medicine. It's time to go back. But my dad was a doctor and I saw him get taken over by medicine. He's an amazing guy and never was great at work life balance. Was always up really late. He was an internist in the 80s and 90s, had his own business

and so just worked his butt off. Was up until two or three in the morning doing patient charts and wanted to do as good as he could for patients, but couldn't find the balance between home life, work life, hospital life. He's on call all the time, became overweight, sleep apnea. I saw this kind of vicious cycle happen to my dad. And I thought, oh man, like, I don't want to be like that, right? I don't want to be like that. So I went to PA school first. So I was a physician assistant for four years and in cardiology, which was cool. And I thought cardiology was neat because I was into running and I loved the drugs. They were interesting to me at the time from a pharmaceutical level. And lipids was kind of a fascinating model system.

But pretty quickly, once I became a PA, I realized, oh, I'm gonna want more autonomy. And that was about the time, once I'd gone through PA school and had my first taste of medicine, I realized that it wasn't medicine that I was interested in per se, because from the outside, you kind of see interested in per se, because from the outside,

you kind of see it differently, right? So from the outside, I thought medicine is fascinating. The drugs are fascinating. Beta blockers are interesting. ACE inhibitors are interesting. Angiotensin receptor blockers are interesting. Statins are interesting. And I got into it and I thought, this isn't my calling. I want to know what's causing this illness. That's what I'm interested in. And immediately I thought, oh man, that means I have to go back to medical school. I think in order to do that in the best way, I'm going to need to finish or to, you know, to go back, to get a doctorate degree, to get an MD, do my residency, and then build a practice kind of on my terms. I did a lot of great stuff as a PA, worked with a lot of great doctors.

And as a PA, unless you can find like your foil, unless you can find your perfect Batman to be your, you know, for you as Robin, to be the sidekick for, it's hard to kind of build something on your own as a PA. Maybe there are PAs now that will be able to do that. And I don't think it's any knock on physician assistants or nurse practitioners or mid-level practitioners. It was just kind of the situation I found myself in. And I thought I need to go back to medical school. And so I went back with just burning, obsessive desire to find, like at least understand or to scratch the roots of what is causing illness. That's just a fascinating question to me. I think I originally went into medicine because I didn't like taking my car to the mechanic. I didn't like handing over

something that was important to me that served a role in my life to somebody that was going to pop the hood and do a bunch of tinkering that I didn't understand. And that became very clear to me with illness. I hadn't had a lot of illness in my life. I'd had asthma and some eczema. I hadn't had a lot of debilitating illness, but I'd seen it in people around me. And I already knew that like, if I got sick or my family got sick or my friends got sick, man, I wanted to be able to be the mechanic, put me in the, put me in the service bay, you know, like I want to pop the hood or at least understand how to do it. And at the same time, I was similarly disillusioned with the model, the paradigm that I was seeing in Western medicine, which is symptom-focused, pharmaceutical-based. And what we're taught in medical school is how to name a disease and then what medicine to give for it.

We're very rarely challenged to ask what is causing it, you know? What is at the root? What is going on here? In other traditions, whether it's business or spirituality, art, they always ask, we always ask these questions, right? Like, I have friends in business and they think, why would you try and solve a problem until you knew what was causing the problem, right? And I think in medicine, we're just not trained like that.

Our paradigm, for whatever reason, we can go down lots of rabbit holes and conspiracy theories about whether this is pharmaceutical influence or just status quo, who knows, right? The beginnings of penicillin being so magically useful to humans and then that pharmaceutical model being adapted incorrectly or expanding too broadly too quickly within medicine so that we're all about medicines and all about molecules and haven't thought enough about the roots of disease from an immunologic or an inflammatory perspective. But regardless, we end up in this position where that's what we are trained to do as doctors. And even as a PA, I saw that and I realized, oh, I don't want to do that, but I want to know

what is causing it. And that was a really interesting question to me. And that's been the beginning of this whole journey that I've been on and started with medical school and then residency and now with these dietary things. But it's always been this really interesting question. Why do we get sick? How do we become well? How do we stay well? And how do we experience life as fully and with as much quality as we can while we're in this corporeal body? I love it, brother. So you touched a bit on obviously your influence from nature and some of the time that you've spent, whether that was connecting to the mountains and the snow or your long trek, which is awesome. I mean, I was sitting here just drooling with jealousy while you're talking about that.

That sounds like such an amazing and beautiful adventure. And you've also talked a bit about what planted that seed. You wanted to understand these things a little bit more. As you started your own practice, what kind of led you to the place that you're at now in terms of, you know, who are the first people that you started to draw this ancestral wisdom from? And you started to look at things more globally and holistically in terms of what health actually looks like. Good question. I think it's been a gradual process. Like so many of these things are, it probably started with my transition out of veganism.

So like, just like Rob Wolf and Mark Sisson and so many other greats that are in, in the space of ancestral wisdom, you go vegan and then you get the, uh. And then you realize that a vegan diet is not very ancestrally consistent. And then you think, oh, maybe I should consider ancestral themes in the way that I live my life, right? So I was looking for health and I was looking for the roots of illness and somehow I stumbled upon David Wolf and these kind of vegan ideas. And at my early level in my training, I think I wasn't even out of PA school at this time, or maybe I was just out of PA school. I thought, oh, these ideas are quite compelling. This is, maybe 15, 17 years ago. Sure, cooking foods creates toxins and no other animal on the planet eats cooked foods, so we should just eat cooked foods. And clearly animal foods are bad for us and causing all the disease, right? And we evolved from primates, which are herbivores,

and maybe we should just be fruitarians or frugivores. And it was an intriguing concept. I have some embarrassment that I dove into it with such zeal, but I was just looking to understand it, right? I think there's a lot of raw, a lot of these raw food ideas are intriguing to people. And it's just like, oh, it kind of looks symmetric. You know, it looks like it's an elegant idea. It just doesn't work in practice, right? So I was running a lot at the time.

I probably had some of my own body dysmorphia. I didn't realize that losing 20 pounds of muscle was a bad thing. I think at the time I was trying to become like a very swift, uh, you know, Ethiopian type runner. And I was never look at the best in sport and you're like, let me model my body. Exactly. Whether it was a tour de France rider, I was, you know, emulating Alberto Contador at the time or, you know, Lance and all of his like really gaunt phases and thinking that's what I want to be like, right. I want to be skinny. I was riding bikes before that and riding road bikes and running and thinking, oh, the guys that are the fastest are really skinny. And it's crazy how the mind works, right? I wasn't thinking in terms of climbing trees or

throwing rocks or shooting bows like our ancestors were. I was thinking like long extended running, you know, experiences or riding this contraption called a bicycle up a hill on a asphalt road, which is not entirely ancestrally consistent. So, but at some point something just clicked. I think I heard a lecture from Jeff Bland, who is one of the original founders of the Institute for Functional Medicine and now has the Lifestyle Medicine Institute or the Precision Lifestyle Medicine Institute. And he was talking about the book of life and what is written in our book of life and which foods are kind of written in our book of life. And it just kind of, everything kind of congealed for me at that moment and coalesced. And I thought, oh, like plant foods are probably not written in our book of life to

this extent, right? I don't think I knew. I had no idea where I was going to go with the carnivore movement and how far I was eventually going to move away from plant foods or how I was going to see plant foods in the light that I do today at that point. But what I realized then was that eating exclusively plant foods didn't really make a whole lot of sense evolutionarily. There's so much anthropologic evidence. There's so much kind of evidence in the way our bodies are built that suggests that animal foods have been a part of our evolution since we moved out of the trees 6 million years ago. And this is a really fascinating story that I'd love to tell in a moment, but that at that point I realized,

oh, I need to bring these foods back. These are written in my book of life. This is what is going to make me healthy. And immediately when I brought animal foods back into my diet, I felt better. I gained weight, I got stronger and then began kind of iterating around paleolithic diets for many years. But what kept me going was that my health issues didn't get fixed, right? I had eczema and asthma from when I was a kid, and I kept having eczema and was so bad on my knees that they were weeping and I couldn't roll or had it so bad on my lower back that it was inhibiting even wearing pants. They would get kind of like all the kind of the serous fluid that was weeping out would get sticky on the pants. It was just really, it was really debilitating how bad the eczema would get at times. And I thought, well, I'm doing this organic paleo diet.

What is it in this diet that is still triggering me? I knew that I wasn't at the place where my immune system was as calm as it needed to be. And though I believe in, you know, an organic paleolithic diet that's informed with those sort of ancestral ideas can be great for many people, it wasn't working for me. And I knew there was something else missing there that I had to keep digging for. And that was eventually what led me to a carnivore diet, right? So I cut out histamine. I cut out oxalate,

cut out FODMAPs, I cut out salicylates, I cut out, you know, lectins and then you cut out, oh, maybe isothiocyanates, maybe I should cut those out, right? And then what are you left with? You're left with like lettuce, right? You know, if you look at the range of plant toxins and you look at, you know, I'm not saying everyone is sensitive

to every single one of these types of plant toxins, but plant toxins are varied. They're widely distributed. And if you start thinking about cutting out plant toxins as part of an elimination diet with the intention of improving an autoimmune condition or an inflammatory condition, or even conditions that are not necessarily considered autoimmune or inflammatory, but probably are like psychiatric conditions or sleep disturbances, things like this, we quickly pull out lots of foods and they're mostly plant foods that we're pulling out. And that was what I did. I just sequentially pulled out plant foods and got down to basically eating like lettuce and carrots and maybe an occasional avocado and meat. And then I still wasn't where I wanted to be. I still would

get eczema so bad that it would just really impair my ability to do the things I wanted to do. And at that point, I think something clicked. I heard, I believe I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan talking about a carnivore diet. And my first impulse was, that's crazy. That is crazy. Like I've been told, you know, at this point I'd done my own education in functional medicine, which is kind of root cause medicine. And I'd been told about the benefits of plants, you know, polyphenols, these magical phytonutrients. Hormetic stressors. Hormetic stressors and fiber. You need fiber, you know, like more fiber, 200 grams of fiber and hormetic stressors and magical plant compounds. And you should just go eat as many plants as

possible. And I thought, that's crazy. You cannot just eat meat but I thought about it a little bit and You know learned about some of the anthropology around some tribes that eat primarily meat-based diets or northern tribes that in the winter Probably only ate relatively small amounts of plants and I thought all right I'm gonna give it a try And it was it was just so striking the results were so striking that you know within a few days I had experienced the mental clarity that I never expected and increased outlook on life. It was like this metric that I never knew existed, which is how likely you are to honk

at somebody in traffic metric, went way down. I was like, man, I'm just happier in my life. What is going on here? Why am I so much happier? And my eczema got better. Over two to three weeks, it completely resolved. It really has not come back at all until, unless I've introduced something like dairy a few times, it's come back mildly and then it goes away as I'm trying to do these reintroduction experiments.

But for the most part, it's been completely gone for over a year and a half now. And I thought, man, there's something to this. And that was, you know, over a year and a half was when I sort of dove into the research. And that's been my journey since then into this space that I never expected to be in, but certainly from an ancestral lens. And over time, I mean, I've, I think other people have influenced me, other anthropologists and other people who think of this ancestral realm, but it's been sort of that, that's the stochastic kind of bouncing around pinball journey. I love it. Well, there's a, I have a bunch of shit running through my head right now. So let me see if I can organize this. First, you touched on plant toxins. So for people that,

my first introduction into this, I'd heard about ox plant toxins. So for people that my first introduction into this, I had heard about oxalates. I'd heard a briefly a bit about lectins, I think really through the way we prepare food. So like phytic acid and things like that, that'll bind to minerals and you'll shit them out. And I think the nourishing traditions book that was written originally, I've just thumbed through that. I'm told you I'm into the kid's book, The Child and Baby Care, but it talks a lot about the ways that our ancestors would prep food to make it more usable in the body. So it wouldn't just strip us of things that we need and cause more harm than good, right? So thinking of that, I always understood like, oh, if there's a way to prep food that's important, whether that's soaking your legumes overnight, dumping them and soaking them again, and then dumping them. If whatever

prep that is, then yeah, maybe there is something there. And so I read The Plant Paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry, which made total sense to me. And it opened up a doorway to look at, you know, lectins and oxalates and all these different things that can cause issues among people. And that plants, and of course, through my own personal journey with the plant medicines, have come to realize or believe in animism, that all things are consciousness. And all things are animated through the same source that I am.

If you want to call that soul or whatever you want to fill that in with, that's fine. But that they are intelligent too, and they don't want to fucking be eaten by other animals or insects. So they have these natural pesticides and herbicides within them to protect themselves from being eaten because they want to fucking live. So that all made sense from a philosophical or spiritual standpoint. And it made sense now that Dr. Stephen Gundry was putting this out.

The thing that was curious to me was that he was still recommending about a palm full of meat and 75% of the plate plant food, right? And so I was like, huh, well he was still recommending about a palm full of meat and 75% of the plate plant food. Right. And so I was like, huh, well, I'll give this a go. And I gave it a go and I felt less and less energy and still had digestive issues. Right. So my plate went the opposite and I would still include a quarter of plants that were low lectin, low oxalate, fill in the blank. But that three quarters of plate of protein and fat actually made me feel a lot better. It's carnivore-ish. Being in a state of ketosis always made me feel better, even though I was eating way less plants and I'd always feel less energy if I added in

more cruciferous because I was worried about the microbiome and things of that nature. So let's dive in here now that I've told everybody my personal story here. Your food journey. My food journey. Let's dive into what's going on in plants that fucks us up, because this goes against the grain of everything we've been taught around this stuff. And of course, you know, Gundry's book is great if you at least flip that model on its head in terms of how much protein you're going to eat and how much animal products you're going to eat. Right, right. I think Stephen Gundry did a great job. I was actually on his podcast and debated

him about this, which was fun, but he did a great job raising public awareness of plant toxins. He did about, he went about 30% into it, and we'll talk about how deep that well goes, but you discussed it very accurately. Plants are rooted in the ground. Everything on the earth is in an ecosystem, and we're all kind of pushing against the person next to us, right? Like plants are getting, trying to get eaten by insects and animals and fungi and animals are getting preyed on by other animals. And unless you're at the top of the food chain and you're an apex predator, there's somebody trying to get you, right? And so animals have developed defense mechanisms, whether it's antlers, motility, claws, or teeth to defend

themselves, right? You know, a zebra gets chased by a lion. They, their, their major defense mechanism is get the heck out of Dodge, right? Um, lions don't have a lot of predation, but if somebody did try and attack them, they could claw them or bite them, this kind of thing. Or if other lions try and fight with them for a mate or territory, they have means to defend themselves. Plants are this interesting organism or this interesting family of life on the planet. They're stuck in the ground. Like, what do they have to defend themselves? And you see this, like we were walking around Balboa Park shooting bows today. We walked by a couple of cacti, right? They make spikes. They make physical spikes to say, hey, you, get away from me, right? It's a very effective means of

discouraging insects, plants, other animals, well, mainly insects and other animals from eating them, right? But what we've forgotten or what Gundry was calling attention to and is really a fascinating sort of rabbit hole to go down is that there are many chemical spikes. And these are the ones we don't see. And many times, and this has been the major revelation that I've come to in my research, looking at plant toxins in a carnivore diet and the context of all that, many times the compounds that we've been told are good for us in plants are actually plant defense chemicals. And we'll get into that as well. But the plant chemicals are plant defense chemicals. They're called phytoalexins and there are all types, but it's because they're rooted in the ground. In my

book, which is coming out in February called The Carnivore Code, I asked the reader to picture this. You go to the beach with your friends and they say, hey, let's bury you in the sand, right? They're going to dig a huge pit. You know, they have to dig a six foot pit for a giant like you. They're going to, I'm going to bury you up to your neck and then I'm going to pack it in, but I'm going to make it really tight so you can't get out. And be like, ha ha, we buried Kyle. His head is sticking out of the sand. And then be like, hey, guess what? I'm going to paint your face like a soccer ball. You're like, what are you doing? Leave me alone. I'm like,, ha ha, we buried Kyle. His head is sticking out of the sand. And then I'd be like, hey, guess what? I'm gonna paint your face like a soccer ball. You're like, what are you doing?

Leave me alone. I'm like, you can't mess with me because you're stuck in the ground. And then all of a sudden, this busload of irascible, hungry, irritable six-year-olds from the soccer team shows up and they start hanging around you. It's like, how do you feel?

You feel pretty vulnerable, right? You might get kicked in the face by a six-year-old because you're stuck up to your neck in the sand and your face is painted like a soccer ball. And the reason I give that kind of thought exercise to people is like, that's kind of how a plant might feel. You know, if you're a plant and you haven't developed spikes, any plant, any animal, any insect can just come along and be like, take a big bite out of you, right? Just take a big bite out of your root, your stem, your leaf, or, you know, whatever, whatever wants to eat, you're just, you're kind of stuck there. And so through the 450 million years of co-evolution

of plants and animals, plants have gotten smart. They've always been smart. They're a life form. Like you said, they're probably sentient in some way, you know, who knows what plant consciousness is like, but they've, we've had to develop this intricate balance with the animals and say, all right, like we're going to use you sometimes to move our seeds around and fruit, but the majority of the time we don't want you eating our leaves and roots and stems. Or if we're going to do that, we're going to put some toxins so you don't eat enough that I'm going to die. And especially in the parts of the plant that are most vulnerable, meaning the seeds and the sprouting parts of the plant when the plant is young or the roots, that's where a lot of the toxins are concentrated. Because if an animal

eats part of a sprouting plant, the whole plant is just dead. If an animal takes a bite out of a plant seed, that seed is never going to germinate. But if a plant is full grown, an animal can munch on the leaves a little bit, but it's not going to kill the plant, right? So those tend to be less toxic. But it's just this, it's this delicate push-pull, it's this delicate arms race, this delicate chemical warfare that's been happening between plants in response to animals, insects, fungi for 450 million years. And it's just, it's been a part of it. And we just have kind of forgotten about it, right? So you touched on a lot of these toxins. There are oxalates, there are lectins, there are compounds that we often think of as beneficial that are not good for us either. And I would classify these as isothiocyanates, salicylates, and polyphenols. And so polyphenols

and isothiocyanates are some of the ones that people think, people think these are good for us. Like you even suggested, we've been told the narrative, whether it's the Rhonda Patrick narrative or whoever's narrative, you know, that these are so beneficial for us. We'll unpack this a little bit. But the oxalates and lectins, most people realize these are probably not good for us. They just debate whether they're actually that impactful. So, lectins are carbohydrate-binding proteins that are found mainly in the roots and seeds of plants, mostly, you know, beans and seeds, but they can be found all over the place. The nitrate family has a lot of lectins even outside of their seeds, perhaps in their skin or other parts of the plant, they can have these carbohydrate binding proteins that can bind to, um, you can, you can have these, uh, these proteins

that are coming from the plants that are binding to glycoproteins in our body and affecting membrane permeability, affecting, um, you know, receptor sites, affecting cellular polarization and doing negative things. The most famous example of a lectin is ricin. You remember ricin from like the 1980s and nineties, there was a guy called the Fallen Angel who sent a number of ricin letters to the White House. And ricin is the most toxic lectin that's known to man. And it's used by like covert operations groups in the Middle East or the Eastern Bloc countries to kill people. Because if you ingest a certain amount of ricin, a amount of ricin it will kill you slowly by binding to the ribosomes so it'll bind this lectin this carbohydrate binding protein comes into your cells binds to the ribosomes and just slowly

grinds all of the gears in our body to a halt and we can't do protein synthesis and we die there's a famous example of a bulgarian sort of dissident who was killed that way they injected his leg with a pellet in an umbrella of ricin so it's an it's like an air pellet in an umbrella they like stuck it in his leg it's like james bond stuff right he's ricin pellets and the same thing has happened like there were scares in washington in the 80s and 90s when people would send letters laced with ricin to the white house threatening to release ricin over the capital if they didn't meet their demands the fallen angel was apparently somebody who had investments in like cross-country trucking and the department of labor was thinking about changing laws to limit

how long drivers could go. And he knew that it would affect his profits, but that's a famous story, the fallen angel and the ricin letters. And there were ricin letters sent to Barack Obama. Anyway, ricin has this kind of decorated crazy history around a lectin molecule. So lectins can be quite toxic. The other lectins we often think of are phytohemagglutinin from kidney beans. The peanut has a very toxic lectin. There's a potato lectin called solanatuberosum lectin. But anyway, there's many lectins that we even know about that can interfere, and Gundry did great work kind of raising our awareness of these things. Oxalates are this kind of two-carbon molecule that's a byproduct of our metabolism. We make a small amount and we get rid of it. It doesn't participate in our metabolism, but plants make a lot of it. They

use it to chelate minerals. They use it in their biochemistry in different ways. But when we ingest a bunch of plant oxalate, what appears to be able to happen is either deposition in tissues or formation of kidney stones. The main kidney stone that people get is calcium oxalate. And there's good evidence that increased consumption of oxalates in food could increase risk of this. And there's a condition called PAH, or I'm blanking on the name of that off the top of my head. It's paroxysmal hyperoxyluria. And people have a defect in the enzymes or mutations in the enzymes in the glyoxylate pathway that make oxalates, and they make more oxalates. And so they have more oxalates going out through the kidney, and these people

have much higher rates of kidney stone formation, deposition of oxalate in their tissues, and they can often progress to kidney failure because it can be so bad. But the level of oxalate that can occur in the urine of someone with primary hyperoxaluria, PAH, can be, you can recreate that by eating four ounces of chocolate. So you can- Hypoxylates in chocolate, kale, all the kale shakes that I was throwing you. Kale shakes. I was slamming back in the day.

Spinach, yeah. So we can get transient hyperoxaluria, and I talk about this in the book, it's documented. We can get transient hyperoxaluria just from eating foods that are considered to be healthy for us if we eat them in excess. There are documented cases of death related to a sorrel. It's like this, you know, this plant that people have, people might not, you know, lamb's quarters or sorrel. It's a kind of a delicacy now in restaurants, but it's very high in oxalate. Rhubarb leaves are very high in oxalate. Spinach is quite high in oxalate and there is a lethal dose of spinach. It's probably on the order of three to four pounds, but you and I could go to the grocery store right now and just give ourselves like kidney failure with spinach that's there. And there's a great, there's a very interesting case report that I talk about in the book where somebody than normal, but with a green smoothie cleanse, she actually went from normal kidney function to needing long-term irreversible dialysis due to overconsumption of oxalates in her green smoothies.

So oxalates are not something to ignore either, right? Yeah. But then we move on to polyphenols and salicylates and isothiocyanates. I'll go over these quickly, and I want to belabor all the plant toxins, but polyphenols, as you were saying this earlier, I wanted to interject, but polyphenols are the one that most people kind of just, you get like the eyes glaze over and their head just kind of blows up. What do you mean? Polyphenols are good for us, right? But most polyphenols are phytoalexants. They are compounds made by plants to defend against invaders. And we're never told this. The narrative we've been told is completely opposite. It's diametrically opposed. It's that these are antioxidants. These are phytonutrients. But

I would offer a compelling, or at least I would offer a competing hypothesis. I would offer a competing point of view and say, these are actually phytoalexins. It's not really debated that they're phytoalexins. We know they are plant defense chemicals. But the way they act in our body has long been misunderstood. Some polyphenols are pigments, like turmeric is a pigment. We don't know if it's actually a defense chemical, but most polyphenols are defense chemicals from plants. Like resveratrol is a defense chemical produced in the skin of grapes and peanuts and other legumes and some berries in response to a botrytis fungus. So it's not like the plant is making these compounds to give to humans as vitamins, right? These are not vitamins. They're not things that are used in our biochemistry.

These are plant defense chemicals. And what we've forgotten as westernized humans is that there are lots of valuable molecules in plants. A lot of medicines we have from plants like aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid are from plants. It's from a willow bark. But if I give you a medicine like metoprolol that's a pharmaceutical, whether it's plant derived or synthetic, I'm also going to have to say there's a package insert without a bunch of side effects, right? And with the plant molecules, we've forgotten that these probably have other side effects too. And that's mainly been what's been so eye-opening to me. When you actually look at the side effects of these plant compounds, they are myriad. And some of them are quite scary. Curcumin, resveratrol, these all have pretty significant side effects that we're never

told about. They're sort of placed in this sacred land of like, this is a beneficial, this is an entirely benevolent molecule from a plant, but it's really not. It's really not. There are a couple of articles published about curcumin. One of them is called The Dark Side of Curcumin. The other one is called The Essential Medicinal Chemistry of Curcumin. People want to look these up. And the authors of both of those studies will enumerate with multiple references the ways in which the

curcumin molecule is known to do negative things in the human body. It affects the enzymes that wind and unwind DNA. It's been shown to cause double-stranded breaks. It's been shown to be toxic to both native and cancer cells and cell culture. It's been shown to affect epigenetically an oncogene called P53, and it's been shown negatively to affect a potassium channel called the Herg channel. So I think this should come as no surprise to us that a molecule from plants might not play well in our system, right? And it's probably not a big deal with curcumin because generally we don't absorb any of it. We absorb less than 1%. Our body just tries to get rid of it. It says it's a plant pigment. I don't want it. I'm going to-

Sorry to cut you off, but isn't that the same with resveratrol? I find this, and I bring this up because I've been patiently waiting here, but I want to bring up Sinclair. So I know you've had David Sinclair on your show. He's been on Rogan's. You think he did three episodes with Peter Attia. Fascinating guy. And I have my take on what he's doing and it's both sides of the coin. I will briefly state that I appreciate anybody who's looking into the field of longevity, a hundred percent. And I mean that. On the flip side of that, you know, it raised my eyebrows just as it did Joe Rogan's, the fact that he's on statins, the fact that he works out once a week, the fact that he's missing some of the very key foundational pieces to what health is right and also i think in my

humble opinion as an outsider the key missing point here is the idea that we can outsmart nature that we're going to figure this out that i'm going to find a fucking pill that does it all for us right but he's big on resveratrol and he's real big he's real big and from what i've read and understood in the science is that it's not well absorbed in the body. Poorly absorbed. Yeah, and that the doses that they're giving to rats, number one, intravenously, so it can get into the body. And number two, that's not the way he's doing it.

But number two, that it's not gonna be absorbed if it's done orally. And it would take much, much higher doses is when you look at the science on what the rat studies or my studies were versus what the human science is. Yeah, there's a little bit of nuance there. When I had him on my podcast, he seemed to believe that if you ate it with a fatty meal, it might be absorbed a little better, but it mirrors what's happening with curcumin. With curcumin, I'll just finish that

and then we'll dive into the resveratrol. Our body doesn't want curcumin. It doesn't absorb it at all. But because we've been told it's so beneficial for us, other supplement companies have gone to extremes to increase the absorption. So this is why it's always packaged with piperine, which is a compound that's derived from black pepper. Well, what piperine does is inhibit a phase two enzyme in the liver that detoxifies curcumin, right? So when you have piperine with curcumin, you are inhibiting our body's natural ability to detoxify it and you get much higher blood levels. Or now Dave Asprey wants to put it in liposomes, right? Let's package it in phosphatidylcholine. Let's make it into a micelle and bypass all of our body's natural methods to say, hey, that's a plant pigment. We don't

really want that. I'm going to detoxify it really quickly. I'm going to glucuronidate it with UDP glucuronisyl transferase, which is the phase two enzyme in the liver that glucuronidates curcumin, but that's what's inhibited by piperine. And so we're just, we're messing with nature, right? Like evolutionarily, how often would we have eaten turmeric? Probably pretty rarely, but even in some cultures, right? But how often would we have eaten turmeric with the seeds of a pepper plant? That's really rare. That's not a good thing to do with our body. It puts these huge levels of this compound in our body. And the only thing that's ever told to us, the only thing that we're ever asked to focus on are the benefits. And we ignore the side effects. The package insert for curcumin has been ignored and it's substantial. And the last thing I'll say with

regard to that is why are we using a medication to affect inflammation and not looking for the root of the inflammation, right? And this is what happens so often with plant medicines. And that's why I mentioned it is that we are trying to use plant medicines in the same paradigmatic way, in the same way that we've done everything in medicine. It's symptom-focused, pharmaceutical-based. And that's what drives me nuts. I'm like, I'm thinking, these are plant molecules. These are plant pharmaceuticals. This is the same as going to a plant pharmacy, right? And we're ignoring the fact that there are side effects, and we are continuing to miss the point that we should be correcting the root cause. So why are we using curcumin to treat inflammation? We should be correcting the cause of the inflammation. Why are we using other polyphenols, quercetin and other things like this?

Why are we using those? Let's understand what we're treating and correct that at the root. We don't need these plant molecules to be better. That's another topic I talk about in the book. Like these plant molecules, it's really not proven in the literature that they do anything for us. That's a net gain. And often we're just using them to ameliorate symptoms, just like we do other pharmaceuticals that are given in the pharmacy that are from pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer.

But these have been given a free pass. And so this is my clarion call. Hey, these are plant molecules. They have value and they're not food. They're plant toxins, right? So resveratrol is in the skin of grapes. It's not well absorbed unless you're eating it with a fatty meal. It's probably not well absorbed at all.

And it binds to a portion of the sirtuin enzyme and turns on these longevity genes. And so that sounds well and good, right? We can use a plant molecule to affect biochemistry in the human body, just like curcumin. We can do it. It works. But the package insert for resveratrol has not been examined carefully enough. And if you look at the studies with resveratrol, it also decreases androgen precursors. So they give it to men to see if it helps prostate cancer. The prostate cancer trial generally failed with

resveratrol, and it decreased androgens, meaning that resveratrol and flavonoid molecules that look like resveratrol activate the estrogen receptor in humans. So this is another interesting thing. All of these flavonoid molecules, whether it's catechins from green tea, or it's the flavonoids from soy, or the flavonoids from chocolate, or the flavonoid-like molecules that are other molecules in the plant kingdom, or resveratrol, they're binding to the 17-beta estrogen receptor and affecting hormonal signaling negatively. They're imbalancing. They're acting as xenoestrogens. So these flavonoids are xenoestrogens, and we know this. They're distributed widely in the plant kingdom, but it's always ignored. Quercetin, things like this, soy, quercetin, et cetera. Resveratrol does the same thing, and we see that in the studies.

It decreases androgen precursors. It decreases DHEA. It's like, wait a minute, okay, we all want to live forever. Why are we going to decrease our testosterone in order to live forever? That's not the right goal. And as I talked about with David Sinclair on my podcast, the cool thing is that we can understand how to do this and leverage it without these plant molecules. In the case of resveratrol, the NAD to NADH ratio in the cytosol of a cell is what turns on the sirtuin genes. And we know that when we're in a ketogenic state, that NAD to NADH ratio rises. And there are plenty of studies to show that, both in humans and animal models. And there are studies to show that the sirtuin genes are also turned on when we're in a

ketogenic state. And then all the genes that the sirtuin genes turn on, FOXO3, metallothionine 2, et cetera, et cetera, are also turned on in ketosis. So why use a molecule that's going to have a package insert with side effects to affect your sirtuins when you can just live what I would call radically, just fast every once in a while, eat low carb on some days, or do a fully ketogenic diet? You can get the same longevity benefits in terms of the sirtuins without a molecule that has other damaging effects. If you look at generally the research with resveratrol, it's not been terribly efficacious. It worsened metabolic syndrome in some trials. It failed to show a

benefit in terms of NAFLD, which is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So it does activate this sirtuin gene, but we can do that without it. And that's kind of the point that I want to drive home to people here, is if you look at these plant molecules, whether it's quercetin, soy isoflavones, genistein, catechins in green tea, resveratrol, curcumin that are in the polyphenolic class, the promises of these molecules are empty because we can get those benefits without them, right? And then we don't have to deal with all the package insert side effects. And I think that my favorite part of the book is describing a series of studies that have been done to show this very clearly, right? So I went on this TV show, The Doctors, and it was a total setup in Hollywood because they're just not ready for the carnivore diet. But I was

saying, you know, there's really not a lot of research to show that polyphenols have a net benefit or a benefit long-term. And one of the guys on The Doctors, one of the doctors, Travis, an ER doctor, just throws his hands up and does this huge Hollywood histrionic thing. So, oh my God, there are hundreds of studies to show that polyphenols are beneficial. And of course, on the show, I wasn't able to show my position because it's Hollywood and they don't actually talk about real studies because then they lose their whole audience. But there's five or six studies that I talk about in the book in which people are, they do it both ways. So, there are two models to this experiment. You can take people who are not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and then add a bunch of fruits and vegetables to their diet, giving them tons more polyphenols, right? Presumably. And they're not just giving them weenie vegetables. They're giving them like Jerusalem artichokes, broccoli, carrots, apples, berries, and they'll follow them for four to six weeks. And they, so they take people who are eating very low vegetables, they give them a bunch of vegetables, a pound to a pound and a half per day. And at the end of six weeks, they look for markers of inflammation, oxidative stress, and DNA damage, things like this, right? And there's

no change. There's no change. So what are the polyphenols actually doing for us, right? And the conclusions of all these studies are, it appears that the body's endogenous antioxidant system is adequate for what we need. And I think that if we're living a life that's radical and living well and doing like you and I do, sun exposure, cold exposure, we're going to go jump in the cold ocean later, right? Heat exposure, exercise. It appears in the research and the system and documented time and time again, whether we're removing vegetables and having the same effect where we can remove vegetables, no change in markers of inflammation or oxidative stress or DNA damage damage we can add vegetables in if somebody's not eating vegetable not eating a whole lot no change in the markers right our if we're

living well we can do all of these things all of these promises of polyphenols are kind of empty and then we we avoid all of these package insert side effects which are probably not good for us long term because in fact these are plant defense molecules. I rambled. Did that make sense? No, it did. It did. The thing you just brought up though, if we remove plants, we're not going to see a big change because of the endogenous or endogenous factors that are going to help our body regulate itself. It appears to, yeah, yeah. Right. If we add them in, we also don't see the change. We've got extra. So my question then is, and this is something I wanted to bring up on the show, was one of the ways that I look through the ancestral lens is through the work of Weston A.

Price and understanding the further you get towards the poles. And I think this is something you talked about with Chris Masterjohn, and I'm sure it's been brought up on multiple podcasts, but as you get closer to the poles, larger prey, bigger animals, and at least seasonally, way less carbohydrate and plant food, right? If there's frost on the ground, you're not eating any plants for the most part. You get closer to the equator, year round, you're gonna have access to plant foods and much smaller prey like chicken, fish that are less fatty, things of that nature, right? When you look indigenously at different cultures,

depending on their location, some of them, most of them are eating some type of varied diet. Some sustain on 90% animal fat. You know, if you're looking at Inuit, depending on their location. Some of them, most of them are eating some type of varied diet. Some sustain on 90% animal fat. If you're looking at Inuit, some people closer to the equator are going to eat a fair amount of plants and fruit year round. And they're also not going to have larger prey, red meat, things like that. Is that because, I mean, would you say that the health of those people has more to do with the fact that they're living in nature, they're connected to the ground, they have adequate sunlight, adequate sleep, they're not dealing with EMFs and all the fucking toxins that we have in the modern world?

And then, and this is me putting words in your mouth, so that that's the way that they can have the health that we assume as Westerners looking at them from the outside in. And then from there, of course, I wanted to bring up the fact that as Weston A. Price looked at all these cultures, the cultures who ate more meat, they were better physical specimens. They had more muscle, they could do more physically, they looked the part. Can you unpack some of that? Yeah, there's a couple of pieces there that I'll unpack. The first thing that often gets misunderstood there is that currently living indigenous cultures are probably not the best proxy for the way it was 40,000 years ago, right? And I talked about this on the podcast with Chris on my podcast, which is Fundamental Health.

So if we look in Africa, for instance, right, and we look at Hadza or Ikung or any of the other San, they are confined to like these game reserves now, right? And they're not allowed to hunt elephants. Sometimes they can hunt giraffe, but they can't hunt the big prey. And so Lauren Cordain published some often quoted papers in the 80s and 90s suggesting that hunter-gatherer quote unquote subsistence ratios were about 50% carbohydrates, right?

And sure, you probably have to eat about 50% higher carbohydrates when the government tells you you can't hunt elephants anymore, right? Or we've hunted the megafauna to extinction. And so a lot of our conception of the way that hunter-gatherers eat these days is influenced by the changing climate on the planet in terms of, not in terms of the actual atmospheric climate, although that could play a role, in terms of the actual extinction of animals.

One of the things that I've talked about on a podcast that I did with Miki Bendor is that as humans moved across continents in our evolution, there you see a sequential decline in the megafauna everywhere we went. We became really good hunters. We are the apex predator on this planet. And it looks like we hunted the megafauna to extinction everywhere. As you and I both know,

if you're going to live on animals, you need fatty animals. You can't just live on rabbits. You'll starve. You need fat, right? So without fat, you're driven to carbohydrates, which I'm not saying are an unhealthy source of food. But what I am suggesting or hypothesizing

is that the carbohydrates in the plant becomes the fallback food. When we can't get the big animals, when we can't get the fatty animals, when we can't get the most prized animals, we can use carbohydrates as survival foods, as fallback foods. And we have an ability to do that as omnivorous humans. But the corollary hypothesis, wouldn't the animal

foods be the ideal foods for humans? You know, like if we could always get the best food, if we could always get a fatty animal, whether it's, I mean, if you think about it, a buffalo is pretty choice, right? There's a good amount of fat in a buffalo. It's pretty big. Well, a woolly mammoth was three times the size of an elephant. I mean, they had like rolls of fat that were a foot thick, you know? The amount of fat on a woolly mammoth was astronomical. And you know this, on a bear, there's inches of fat, right? There's so much fat on those animals. If you can get animals like that, you probably don't need carbohydrates.

But so many of the indigenous peoples we look at today, especially around the equator, have probably been driven to that because the megafauna are not there anymore, right? We have to also realize that homo sapiensuna aren't there anymore, right? We have to also realize that homo sapiens left Africa 70, 80,000 years ago. So before that, we were just basically in Africa hunting the megafauna there. And then people in the equatorial cultures now are probably only a few thousand years old. I don't know exactly how old Amazonian cultures are, but there's no megafauna in the Amazon, man. What do you hunt in the Amazon? And so that's the first point, is that anthropologically speaking, indigenous cultures now are probably forced to do less hunting because they can't hunt the elephant, they can't hunt the

big game. We've actually hunted a lot of the big game to extinction. There are no longer 100 million buffalo on this planet. In the plains, the Lakota Sioux, you know, had this basically limitless supply of buffalo. And the second point that I would like to make with regard to that is that you brought this up earlier. A lot of times when these people eat plants, they process them, they ferment them. They sort of realize that they're eating toxins and they have to process them in a certain way. And so we look at the way people eat plants in the Amazon or throughout the world, it's often fermented and things like this. So I think that it's driven more by relative availability of certain foods

and extinction or scarcity of foods that could serve that large animal role with the adequate fat for us that drives people to do this. It's not out of choice. It would be an incredibly compelling argument if there were huge fat animals roaming around the Amazon and people in the Amazon, and there were lots of plants, and people in the Amazon chose to eat the plants, right? You're saying, hey, there's a huge, like, I don't know, saber-toothed, I don't know, like, woolly mammoth in the Amazon, or who knows, like, maybe it's a hairless mammoth because it's hot there, right? Like a hairless cat. I don't know what kind of fatty animals would be around the Amazon, right? Something out of Star Wars or science fiction novel. But it would be really interesting if there were large animals around

and lots of plants and people still ate the plants, right? That doesn't seem to happen. Generally, when there are big animals around, people are going to hunt the big animals, but these are all imperfect constructs because anthropology is conjecture at this point. We don't have a time machine, we don't know, but at least anthropologically from the record and the fossil record, we have a pretty good idea that humans have been eating animals as the primary source of their food for the majority of our evolution. And that's based even on equatorial regions. So if we go far, far back, right? Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Paranthropus, Australopithecus afarensis, these are all equatorial peoples. And this is probably the story I wanted to tell in the beginning. So this will be really cool to tell it now. If we look at these people, these are equatorial peoples. And what happened was the East African

Rift Valley rose up about 6 million years ago. This is the most favored hypothesis now. We were apes. The primate brain did not increase in size for 30 million years, eating vegetables primarily, although primates do eat some meat when it's available. So the primate brain stays the same size, the same size for 30 million years. And then 6 million years, something started to happen. And the size of our brain takes up a little bit based on the size of the cranium and fossil record. And then about 3.54 million years ago is Australopithecus. And so what we believe happened is East African Rift Valley rises up because of tectonic shift in Africa.

The forests become the plains. And then we're forced to move out on the plains. And there are lots of theories about what happened now, whether it was stoned ape theory and eating mushrooms. I wasn't going to say it. I was trying to keep psychedelics off this one. I mean, it's possible. I mean, maybe they played a role in our hunting prowess, but what appears to have happened is that as we progressed from six to 2 million years, we became better and better hunters. And then if you look at the size of the brain 2 million years ago, I'll show you the graph when we get done with the podcast,

the size of the human brain has this incredible inflection point. 2 million years ago, it goes from 500 to 1500 CC in, in over the course of about a million or 2 million years. So 30 million years of evolution got us almost nothing as primates. And then we become Australopithecus. It goes up a little bit over the 4 million years. We get about a hundred CC, 150 CC from 350 to 500. And then at 500, boom, there's an inflection point. It becomes logarithmic and goes straight up. Right. And what happened then is we began hunting this is really we can't know for sure but there are so many factors that suggest this happened both at the isotopic level looking at teeth and in the fossil record so there's these ashulian tools that start to show up two

million years ago these are bifacial tools and they're clearly like a stone knife that you would hold in your hand with kind of your palm and your fingers. It looks like a large arrowhead, and it's bifacial, used to cut meat off the bone. And if we look at the fossilized remains of animals, there are cut marks on the animal bones where we were cutting meat away from the bones, right? And then there's evidence for cooperative hunting in groups because there are mass burial sites for animals, suggesting that we weren't taking down one animal, that we were hoarding them into a canyon, a dead-end canyon, and then slaughtering them in mass or driving them off a cliff. So that we see the tools, we see the cut marks on the femurs, and we see evidence for mass graves two million years ago. And at this point, we were homo habilis. And again, we're at the equator,

right? We're still at the equator. We're in Africa, right? And then the tooth story is so interesting and it mirrors this completely. You can look at the ratios of strontium-86 to strontium-84 and the ratios of calcium to barium or calcium to strontium, barium to strontium, these sort of like stable isotopes that it's like we can use to carbon date things. We can strontium date things. We can look at barium and strontium levels and calcium to barium levels, or calcium to strontium levels in teeth. Because of the teeth, we have teeth from Australopithecus, we have teeth from an organism which was, or a life hominid between Australopithecus and Homo habilis, which is called Paranthropus, and then we have teeth from Homo habilis about 1.8 million years ago. And what you

see, if you look at the teeth from each of those, is an increasing trophic level in the ratios of these stable isotopes, meaning that as you move up the trophic level, we can see a reflection of what people were eating in their teeth. The isotope levels change when we start eating more meat, and we can mirror that. We can compare to known carnivores. You know, 1.8 million years ago, we can compare to, you know, a hyena or whatever was around then, right? There are these known carnivorous animals from 10 million years ago, from 3 million years ago, 4 million years ago, and we can see that the human tooth isotope

levels looked more and more carnivorous. And Australopithecus probably eating a lot of plants, some meat, and then Paranthropus a little more meat. By the time you get to Homo habilis, it's like mostly meat, at least based on the isotopes. And so there you're thinking, okay, they're at the equator, right? If there were plants around, they're going to eat them, but there's a clear progression around. And then it's mirrored because right at Homo habilis is when the brain goes boom and gets really big, right? And then there are isotopes that we can look at in the collagen or the bones from 40 to 50,000 years ago from Northern Europe, which compare Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that were coming out of Africa into

Europe. So this gets, hopefully this won't be too complex, but I'll try and paint the picture. So we were just talking about Homo habilis 1.8 million years ago. So Homo habilis, some Homo habilis people, homonyms, appear to have left Africa before Homo sapiens, and they became Neanderthals and Denisovans. Denis sapiens, and they became Neanderthals and Denisovans. Denisovans in Eastern Asia, Neanderthals in Europe. And then they kind of did these, there was this split in the human lineage. And then Homo sapiens left about 80,000 years ago and encountered our distant cousins. We've been separated for hundreds of thousands of years, and we interbred with Neanderthals, we interbred with Denisovans. Some of us have each of those

sets of genes, right? I have a very high amount of Neanderthal. I would not doubt it. I would not doubt it in the best way because you're like a Viking. Yeah. But what's so interesting is that if you look at the bones from Northern Europe, now we're fast-forwarding 1.8 to 50,000 years ago, we see the same pattern. Now we're looking at stable nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur isotopes in the bones. And we had the trophic level was that at or higher than carnivores, right? So again, it's as you eat different foods, the ratios of these isotopes will change throughout our body because it's kind of bioaccumulating, right? Because herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat other herbivores. If we're eating carnivores or herbivores, we're higher up the trophic chain.

You can see in the isotopes what people were eating. And if we're looking at the teeth from millions of years ago, or we're looking at the bones from 40,000 years ago, it looks like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, even 50,000 years ago in Europe, were essentially eating the majority of their diet from animals.

And we can't say like 100%, like we can't say they were fully carnivore, but the majority of the diet was coming from animals. And so that's a little bit north of the equator even, but you know, this is coming from a Homo sapiens lineage that was at the equator eating lots and lots of animals, at least based on the tooth isotopes. And so the fossil record, the anthropologic record, the isotopic record tells a different story regarding the relative proportions of animals and plants and our progression to the brain size growth than current observations of peoples living throughout the world. Does that make sense? Yeah, perfect sense. And there's just one more thing I'll add to that,

which is the amylase duplication. I love talking about this because I brought it up with Chris, and I think it's so fascinating. When Homo sapiens encountered Neanderthals and Denisovans, we can tell that Homo sapiens had an amylase duplication, a salivary amylase duplication in the mouth. Well, at least the gene is throughout the body, but the salivary amylase is in the mouth. It breaks down starches in the mouth before they get to the stomach, and that allows the carbohydrates to be more easily utilized. And so we can say that our most recent ancestors, Homo sapiens, when they left Africa, they had this amylase duplication, suggesting that there was some pressure to eat starch at that time. And that's interesting. But what's even more interesting is that Neanderthal and Denisovan don't have it, right? They don't have it, which to me suggests

that for the majority of our evolution, we were not eating starch, right? Because when the Homo habilis left Africa prior to Homo sapiens, we don't know when that was, anywhere from, who knows, 1.5 to 500,000 years ago, or even closer, you know? I don't know when Homo habilis left and became Neanderthals, but we were probably not eating starch, or at least there's a hypothesis or a theory to be suggested there that we didn't get the MLA's duplication until we left Africa. And then perhaps one of the reasons we left Africa was we were forced to eat more tubers because we'd hunted the megafauna to extinction. And this gene became more profitable,

more advantageous to humans. But the endothels and denisomas don't have it. And to me, that is an indication we were not eating a lot of starch. And again, we were at the equator, probably not eating a whole lot of starch, probably not eating a whole lot of plants, whether we're looking at isotopes or amylase genes

in that respect. But it's interesting to kind of construct how it all fits together. Yeah, that's awesome. That definitely went deeper than I thought it was going to. That was fucking great. And so, yeah, I think something that you were bringing up to me was the idea of what is the most optimal way to eat, right? And that can vary for individual to individual,

what that plate looks like. But I think if we consider that and we consider nutrient density, and these are things I want to get into with organ meat and all of that. And obviously you want to save space for regenerative agriculture. And there's a lot that I want to ask you,

but through the lens of why the amyloid duplication, right? Where are the amylase duplication, right? Well, that's a survival thing, right? So if we needed that to survive, that is maybe why we're here today and not Neanderthal or Denisovans. Could have been. Right? So that could have been something that got us through tough times where maybe there weren't megafauna to eat, but it doesn't necessarily mean that white rice is better for you than fucking beef liverwurst, right? I mean, or fucking grass-fed fish or grass-fed fish, wild-caught fish, you know, like anything that you're going to get from nature that has the full spectrum of things that I want to talk to about when we get into organ meats and really nutrient density and bioavailability of foods that we eat. It just makes sense that, yeah, some of these things were around and maybe because we're omnivorous, we leaned on them for a period of time and that

shifted what we have in our DNA so that we could survive on different food products. It doesn't make it healthy or better, right? And I'm not saying that all white rice and every starch is shit. I certainly, I told you I was making sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving and I enjoyed it. But this kind of goes in the argument against soy and a lot of these things, right? And this is something I brought up before. When we had some modern agriculture and we do crop rotations before it became monocropping and what it is today. Soy was used to reintroduce nitrogen into the soil. So that way, because plants pull certain nutrients out, and we see this now in Iowa and other cornfields that have just been using corn and corn and corn,

they lose all their color, right? They lose their corn or their color because there's no more vitamin A in the ground. They can't have anything. Any beta-carotene is going to come out of the ground because it just doesn't, it's not there anymore. So you have to rotate to get different things into the ground. But now we're using soy, which was largely never eaten, as a food product. So let's just, I think, painting that picture and understanding

that these are things that we've used in famine and times of real trouble, but they're not necessarily the healthiest for us. Let's shift gears and talk about what makes animal foods, and particularly eating nose to tail, the healthiest thing that we can put in our body. Yeah. So this is a fascinating, kind of the flip side, right? So the beginning and part of the podcast, we talked about how plant foods are probably not all they're cracked up to be. And this is exactly the way I structure the book. The beginning of the book is about plant toxins. Well, the beginning, the very beginning of the book is about plant toxins. Well, the beginning, the very beginning of the book is about anthropology and the kind of the history of humans that I just told.

And the next part of the book is about plant toxins. And then the second to last portion of the book is about benefits of animal meats, right? Like let's just put animal meat or animal foods. Let's just juxtapose that to plant foods. And I have a whole chapter in the book where I talk about how valuable are plant foods for human nutrition

and how valuable are animal foods for human nutrition. And when you compare them head to head on an objective basis, animal foods win by knockout, man. You know, I draw the metaphor with like a UFC fight or something, which is awesome because I'm talking to you. But, you know, if you look at the bioavailability to start out, right, the vast majority of vitamins and minerals are much more bioavailable in plant and animal foods, excuse me. So very clear, more bioavailable in animal foods. And as we were going to shoot bows today, we were talking about this. A lot of people have genetic polymorphisms in enzymes in our body that are used to make vitamin A, retinol form of vitamin A from beta carotene. It's called the BCMO enzyme. There are enzymes that are used, the D-chaterase enzymes in the conversion of alpha-linolenic acid to

icosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid. A lot of people have polymorphisms there. So, and then why wouldn't we want to just get the nutrients in the pre-formed isoform, right? The pre-formed state that we're going to use them in the human body. Vitamin K1, vitamin K2 are great examples of this. Vitamin K1 is phylloquinone. Vitamin K2 is menaquinone. There are multiple types of menaquinone, MK4, MK7, MK11, MK10, etc. But our body really uses K2, menaquinone, preferentially. And I think that the medical literature hasn't caught up with this. But if we look at studies, and these are epidemiology studies admittedly, we find a real protective effect of vitamin K intake, vitamin K2 intake, that is not found with vitamin K1, where I'm referring to as the Rotterdam study. And they looked at outcomes including coronary artery disease deaths,

deaths, not coronary artery disease desks, coronary artery disease deaths, CBD deaths. The stiff desk. The stiff desk, right? And the calcific aortic sclerosis incidence. And so they saw a real protective effect at K2 in the diet. And I think that their upper tertile was 32 or 34 micrograms per day, which is a small amount of K2. But they found no protective effect at K1. Again, this is epidemiology, but it's pretty compelling and it's been repeated multiple times in other studies that I talk about in the book as well. So in this instance, the plant form of vitamin K doesn't seem to be protective for humans. It's only the animal form. Well, guess what? A lot of us, most of us, we don't really convert K1 to K2 or K1 would have

looked protective as well. We can only get K2 in animal foods. That's actually an incorrect statement. The majority of K2 is in animal foods. We can get it in fermented foods, but it's probably only MK4. And we don't know if we're getting all of the isoforms of metaquinone that we really need. Some people will say, oh, you can get vitamin K2 in natto. And I think, yeah, sure, you can get it in natto. But then that comes with the list of side effects. Right. Then you got soy, right? There's the pamphlet. Yeah. Do you want the soy side effects, right? But technically speaking, we can get some vitamin K2, some certain isoforms of metaquinone from fermented vegetables, but it's probably not as good as animal foods. We see this with vitamin A. We see this with the omega-3 fatty

acids. It's all paralleling, right? And we look at just the actual bioavailability of minerals. Like you said, phytic acid at the beginning of the podcast and oxalates can chelate minerals. Now we're talking about magnesium, calcium, strontium, zinc, boron, manganese. These are held by chelators in plants. They're kind of stacked. A chelator is a molecule that can kind of bite. To chelate means to bite. It can bite onto a mineral and hold onto it.

Well, if we eat plants that have oxalates, phytic acid, which we didn't even talk about, with our minerals, they will pull them out or they will make them less bioavailable. There's a really famous study that was done where they looked at the bioavailability or the absorption of zinc in oysters. And I don't think many people would do this, but it illustrates the net negative or the toxicity, the decrease in bioavailability when you increase oxalates or phytic acid with food. So they gave somebody zinc.

They gave somebody zinc in oysters, which is a really rich source of zinc. And you can see blood levels of zinc just go way up right after you eat an oyster. One oyster has like the RDA of zinc, right? One oyster. So they give them a moderate amount of oysters. And then they fed people the oysters with beans and they fed people the oysters with beans and a tortilla. And the zinc absorption was just basically leveled. It just, it was completely destroyed. There was almost no zinc absorption with both the tortilla and beans. And with beans, it was decreased, I think, 70% the absorption of zinc. And so what you see is if you're eating these foods, and even if the plant foods claim to have zinc, there's only really one plant food that I'm aware of with zinc. It's like pumpkin seeds, but it's probably not going to be that bioavailable because

it's chelated. But then if, you know, almonds are supposed to have magnesium, but how much magnesium are you absorbing from an almond if it's got phytic acid and almonds have oxalates, right? These studies haven't even been done, but they've been illustrated that when you give zinc in an oyster with chelators, oxalates, phytic acid, the absorption is so much more reduced. So not only are the minerals in plants less bioavailable, if you combine plants with these things, and even fiber can do the same thing, fiber can pull these minerals out of us as well. The plants combined with the animal foods can decrease the ability of our body to absorb the minerals as well. So it really ends up being

a pretty net negative and plants pale in comparison to animal foods in all of these vitamins and minerals. It's pretty staggering. Yeah. That was something that I discovered a while ago, having my raw genetic DNA looked at. And for my wife and I and Aubrey, none of the three of us could take vitamin A from carrots or sweet potatoes and actually make it usable vitamin A. We couldn't convert the beta carotene. None of the three of us could take ALA from chia seeds and flaxseed oil and convert it into the usable DHA and EPA that we need. It's a fucking very, very critical piece of brain and cognitive function. It is absolutely critical. And if you're not sure about that, ask a doctor who's about to have a pregnant woman come through what they're

going to say and why they need to take prenatal, right? You have to get that. And then they're not giving them flaxseed oil in the fucking prenatal for a reason. And we know that flaxseed oil has lignans and many phytoestrogens as well. So as we keep coming back to, like, we can get inferior forms of these from plants with the package insert, you know, like what list of toxicities do you want with that plant? And it kind of goes back to the theme, plant foods have served a role for humans throughout our evolution. And I believe that role is a fallback food. It's a survival food.

You can get by on it for a little while, but you're not gonna thrive on it. And that's why we've always fermented it and done other things with it to try and detoxify it as much as possible. We're going, uh, I gotta eat some plant food. All right, well, I'm gonna ferment it and then hopefully I can get an animal tomorrow.

But yeah, these are all great examples. And if we're not getting these things in animals, we're likely going to be deficient. And there are other unique nutrients in animal foods that just can't be found in the plant kingdom. It's not even that they're inferior in the plant kingdom, not as bioavailable. There are many things in animals that just don't occur in plants. Creatine, carnitine, choline, carnosine, taurine, et cetera, et cetera. There's a fantastic study, and Chris Kresser brought this up in the recent debate with James Wilkes on Joe Rogan, and it wasn't really dwelt on with enough detail. If you look at vegetarians, if we take vegetarians and vegans and we give them five grams of creatine a day in a supplement,

which is what is in a pound of muscle meat in an animal, they get smarter. They get improved verbal and recall, mathematic calculating abilities. They get improved memory and cognition abilities with five grams of creatine a day. You can make somebody smarter by giving them creatine. Well, you don't get the same bump in effect with an omnivore because they're already getting enough creatine because they're eating muscle meat. Yeah. Unpack that for a second because I remember Greenfield talking a bit about that. Like creatine is now looked at as a potential nootropic. Absolutely. Creatine, of course, is going to give us a lot more ATP, which is used by everything in the body. The bulk of the mitochondria are within the brain and the heart. So if you're deficient in that thing,

you are basically feeding the mitochondria, which are going to feed your brain and heart first. And then of course, throughout the body. Yeah, you'll see a bigger bump, right? And so it's a strong argument. It doesn't mean that we need to supplement with creatine because most of us saturate at about five grams per day. So isn't that interesting? A pound of muscle meat per day will saturate the creatine stores over time.

If you look at creatine loading protocols, you probably remember this from your days. 20 grams of phosphagen HP with 75 grams of dextrose. Right, right. So you'll do 20 grams a day for five days if you want to load your creatine real fast. And then eventually you just won't be able to pack any more into your muscles. And just piss it out. You just piss it out. But the slow creatine kind of titration is five grams a day.

And that's about as much you get in muscle meat. So if people are eating, you know, more than a pound of muscle meat per day, which most of us do who are athletes and thinking about a carnivore diet or a carnivorous diet or a paleo diet, you are getting enough creatine and creatine supplementation may not help. But if we're not eating a pound of meat per day, creatine supplementation is probably going to help athletic performance, brain performance, all kinds of performance. And how much are vegetarians and vegans getting? Like a kind of a goose egg, man, almost none. You can make a small amount of all these things in our body. We can make a small amount of creatine, but it's not enough. And that's why, and it's

illustrated, that's clearly illustrated because when we supplement vegans with any of these things, they get improved outcomes. Whether we supplement them with choline or carnitine or carnosine or creatine or taurine, we see improved outcomes. And as I detail in the book, if you look at vegetarians or vegans versus omnivores, there's a real discrepancy. There's a real difference with the vegetarians being lower in so many of these nutrients. And so it's just like, we need to call these zoo nutrients, zoo nutrients, instead of phytonutrients, which are kind of fairytale made up Sasquatch tooth fairy things. There are actually real things in animal foods that we can't get in plants. Boom. I love it. Well, let's talk sustainability. Zach Bitter was

just on Joe Rogan's podcast and I have him coming on at the end of the year here. He's flying out, not here, but he's coming out to Austin. And for those who aren't aware of him, he just broke two world records in one shot for the 100 mile. And I think he did a 638 pace the entire time for 100 miles. And he has a podcast with Sean Baker, has been largely carnivore. He does supplement for sport with carbohydrate during his races and longer runs, right? So he's using that as the supplement. So that way he has two fuel systems, but he eats a lot of fucking meat. He eats a lot of meat and we can talk about that briefly. So for athletic performance, this is a huge question I always get asked. You and I were talking about this earlier. You said

that when you were on a carnivore diet, and we can maybe talk about this on my podcast later, you didn't really have any problem with glycolytic activity. Absolutely not. I had fucking energy. There was no ketogenic lull for four or five days. I just snapped right in and I could perform any way I wanted, whether it was sprint work or long form cardio. It's so impressive. And one of the, one of the sort of the criticisms of a carnivore diet is that I'm not going to be able to do athletics. I'm going to get weaker. My muscles aren't going to be as full or I'm not going to do sprint performance. And this is generally a misconception and it's based on high, super high fat, low protein ketogenic diets that were

used for either epilepsy or medical therapeutics or people who are really chasing ketones and limiting their protein. But on a carnivore diet, especially a nose to tail carnivore diet, we didn't even get into the organs yet, but hopefully we can touch on that too. Let's go to the organs and then remind me and we'll drop back on. Again, I'm seeping with questions right now, so I'm firing them out quickly. So many. But if you think about it, like when you get, if you get enough protein, and I talked about this, Chris Masterjohn on the podcast, I really believe, and there are studies to show this, the FASTER study, there are multiple studies in ketogenic athletes who are keto adapted. Zach Bitter was actually in the FASTER study, which was published by Finney and Volek,

I think in 2007 or 2012. It showed that the rate of glycogen usage and replenishment and stores were the same in keto-adapted and high-carb athletes. There's a fantastic graph in there. It shows you high-carb, ketogenic, and high-carbohydrate, and the second group is keto-adapted athletes. And these athletes have been doing a ketogenic diet for about six months, they're fully keto-adapted, right? You can see the baseline glycogen is exactly the same in the muscle biopsy. They do exercise, it goes down at the same rate, and then they eat their respective diets and it goes up equivalently. They look exactly the same, which is just to say that on a carnivorous diet or even a carnivore-ish diet or on a quote unquote keto diet, right? And that term has been used imprecisely. And I think

we need to get more specificity with that. So people really understand we're talking like a one-to-one fat to protein, low level ketogenic diet. It's absolutely possible to have completely full glycogen stores. You know, your creatine stores are going to be topped off because you're eating so much meat and the muscle performance does not suffer. You're going to have full glycogen, which means you're going to be able to do sprint activities just as well. And you're probably going to be better as an athlete because you have the ability to oxidize fat. And your recovery goes up because you're not burning a cheap fuel source. Probably, yeah. Right?

And you have this. So, I mean, and again, I wanted to bring this up too. But when you talk about the FASTER study and you talk about the high-carbohydrate athlete versus what would be a keto-adapted athlete. And then you go even further from what Dominic D'Agostino calls modified keto or modern keto, where he's at like 60% fat, 40% protein into what a one-to-one ratio would be. Technically, you're not in ketosis from the standard of what medical ketosis is, right? From there, you're going to have much higher levels of gluconeogenesis, right? And that's not a bad thing. Probably not a bad thing. Because there is a rate-limiting factor there. Your body intelligently takes protein and turns it into the amount of carbohydrate and glycogen that it needs

for the liver and the muscles. It doesn't go over that and cycle protein into carbohydrates and carbohydrates back to fat. Right. Correct? Yeah. So you have a rate limiting factor there on to top off your levels of necessary glycogen for athletics and nothing more. You're not going to get fat from overdoing it. Yeah. And I think that you're not going to get fat from overdoing it. And if we look at the ketone levels, they're lower, right? But there are levels of ketones.

And so maybe sometimes you wouldn't actually be in ketosis according to the traditional boundaries of ketosis. 0.5 millimolar or higher. 0.5 millimolar, right, right. And even, it was interesting because on the debate with Chris Masterjohn, Chris even admitted that overnight he might have 0.2 ketones in the morning. And so we all generate some ketones at some point, even when we're fasting for 12 or 14 or 16 hours. Even on a high-carbohydrate diet, his body's ripping through the glycogen, right? So my levels of ketones are going to be higher than Chris's because I don't have any carbohydrates

in my diet, but I would be willing to wager quite a bit of money and many ribeyes that my glycogen stores are exactly the same as Chris Masterjohn's on his high carbohydrate diet. And that once our respective abilities were normalized, that there would be no decline in my sprint or explosive performance. And there have been studies on ketogenic diets that show the same thing, that HIIT, so high-intensity interval training, is not affected by a ketogenic diet. With the caveat, you need to have some keto adaptation period and you need to have enough protein. And so that, I think there needs to be a new term for this, right? Maybe keto has become so colloquial that keto is just what we're talking about,

right? It's not a medical ketogenic diet, but the word keto is kind of like the word carnivore. I mean, carnivore could be all meat, it could be meat and eggs, or it could be nose to tail, like I'm excited about, and we can talk about that in a moment. But keto, I think, when we're talking ketogenic, most of what we're talking about in the setting of a carnivore diet is one gram of protein per pound of body weight and about one to one fat to protein, which is probably going to give most people ketones that are 0.3 to 0.7 or one at the max. So I would say moderate level ketosis. And when you're there, you get the cognitive benefits, but the glycogen is, it seems to be right where you want it to be. Yeah, the best of both worlds.

Yeah, you're kind of topped off. And it's not deep therapeutic medical ketosis because we're not trying to treat seizures or necessarily, you know, psychiatric illness, things like this. But I think that the problem people on ketogenic diets, quote unquote, run into is when they go too low protein, too high fat, you can push your ketones way up, but that's like fasting, you know? Yeah. Well, what's that number four, right? Exactly.

The more we mimic fasting, sure, there could be some benefits to autophagy. And I know you have different views of that than that coin, you know, how often is that necessary? And what, where do we know what, where does that lead us down road right yeah yeah um but i just think you know from a personal experience when i was really strict in ketosis to try to help heal my brain and boost cognitive function post-fighting i capped it at 50 grams a day with protein yeah you're gonna feel and i was lifting a lot but my energy even though my ketones were going through the roof i didn't feel the same kick and as i knew i was lifting and probably get away with more, I started to

raise my protein up to 80 grams, a hundred grams, 120 grams. And from there, those numbers dropped on the ketone blood meter, but I felt better. Right. Right. And then I felt, like I said, no lull with carnivore, but there were some other issues that I want to get into with that. So, so let's, let's, let's dive in first. If we can remember this order and order doesn't fucking matter. We're just rolling here, but let's dive into nose to tail. I want to talk about organ meats, super fucking nature, superfoods right there. And then I want to get into sustainability. And then I want to get into ways that we kind of mitigate any issues that come up. Okay. Let's do it before we dump into dive into those, I just want to mention something we touched on

earlier. So I did a great podcast with Stan Efferding. And, you know, one of the things that I don't want people to think is that I'm overly dogmatic. And I believe, you kind of touched on this, there are many cultures on the earth that are pretty darn healthy with high carbohydrate diets, the Catawans, the Tavaroans. They don't have a lot of fat around. They live on an island. There's no mega fauna on an island. So this is kind of just to that. I want to circle back to this point just to make that point that it does appear that humans can thrive or be pretty darn good on high carbohydrate diets, right? But what's also interesting about that is that because there's no megafauna, there's not a lot of fat on those islands. Some of them have coconut, right?

But for the most part, what we see in human diets is that humans that are thriving indigenous peoples don't often do high carb and high fat at the same time. And so if people want to do high carb, I would say do high carb, don't do high fat. And if you want to do high fat, do high fat and moderate protein in both of those situations. And that seems to be a very high level

without getting too granular. It seems to be a reasonable formula for human health. But it's not, I don't believe that people have to be ketogenic. Most carbohydrates are going to come from plant foods, which carry with it their list of potential side effects. But there are examples of indigenous peoples doing carbohydrate-based diets and doing pretty well and not having a lot of illness. And so I don't think carbohydrates are bad enough themselves. But if you look at those things, they're often islanders and they're forced to do that because they don't have access to more resources like bigger animals,

fattier animals. So you got to wonder, right? Yeah. And most of the people, just to be clear, this is another differentiator because we can go back and forth on what's happening across the globe and throughout our history all day long. Most people in this country, if you have white skin, you have some European ancestry. You're not from the equator. You weren't from a fucking island, right? So you had access and you did not have access on the same side of that coin to bananas being shipped from Panama year round. Or mangoes. This is before refrigeration.

This is before shipping. Think of it that way, right? You weren't getting berries from Mexico in December. It doesn't work that way. Nope. So again, for most people listening to this if you're in uh i think the the biggest countries i have are the states obviously uh uk and uh a lot of the european countries and then australia odds are this applies to you right odds are so okay most of those places

yeah i mean tommy wood is our friend and i know you want to get in touch with him brilliant guy and you know he's he's icelandic you know like like he's from, you know, he's a Viking man, and like his ancestors didn't have access to a lot of carbohydrates year round. So, you know, let's dive into nose to tail. So in terms of the carnivore spectrum, if we're going to think about a carnivore diet, you know, if we think, okay, we accept plants are probably not great for us. Maybe plants are survival foods. Animal foods are really the best foods on the planet. In my book, I outlined five tiers of a carnivore diet. And the first tier is just carnivore-ish, right? It's saying, let's think about the plant toxicity spectrum as we select plants and make

the majority of our diet animal foods. And I know you've kind of said that you're doing this now. I know Ben Greenfield has experimented with this. I think most people are going to fall in this range. And the majority of the attention is like, where am I getting the majority of my nutrients from? It's animal foods. Which plant foods are less toxic? I'm just going to be aware of the toxicity spectrum. In my book, I also have a plant toxicity spectrum. On the far toxic side are things like nuts and seeds and oxalate-containing foods. On the less toxic side, although people could be triggered by anything, would be things like non-sweet fruits, olives, avocados, lettuce, cucumber, basic things that have a little bit less lectins and other toxins, but people could be triggered by all plants because avocados have salicylates, coconut has salicylates, right? Most plants have something,

but that's kind of the carnivore-ish diet. And as you progress further, we can think about where would we get most of our nutrients from if we were going to do an entirely animal-based diet? If we want to just cut out plants completely, as I would suggest, it's totally sustainable and reasonable from a nutritional, medical, I mean, you know, like, you know, health standpoint, you can do it. We can do it. That's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. No problem. Where do we get the majority of our nutrients from? It's from nose to tail eating. If you and I are in a tribe, I'd be like, hey, Kyle, throw a spear at that ant. Go kill that ant. Help me kill this animal, you know? We're going to get an antelope or, you know, a caribou or a moose or an elephant, maybe. We're not just going to eat the muscle meat. We're not just going to eat the tenderloin.

We're going to eat the whole animal. And this is where we've gone wrong as westernized peoples. We go to the grocery store. We don't see a, you know, like a respectfully displayed carcass of an animal with like an entrails or a liver or a spleen or a brain or a spinal cord. We just see a piece of its muscle meat from its haunch or its backstrap or something, you know, or its skirt steak. And we're missing the fact that there's so much of the animal that has been left out of our purview. And these are the organs, the tendons, the fat, the connective tissue, the neural tissue, the bone marrow, the brain. I'm not saying we need to eat all these foods, but we need to remember that this is what our ancestors would have done. I was just listening, telling you about this podcast all day today, Glenn Villanueva on Joe Rogan. And Glenn lived

in Alaska, like in the wilderness for a number of years. He was on a show called Below Zero or something up there. And he's describing how enjoyable it was and how he never got bored eating animals nose to tail because there were so many parts of an animal that you could eat. You could eat the tend and there's so much variety. He said, I ate every part of the caribou except its poop. So he's eating the stomach and eating the intestines and eating the heart and eating every bit, you know, eating the eyes and the brain. Genitals. All of it. Yeah. Testicles. You know, we both eat testicles. We haven't eaten them together,

unfortunately, but we will soon. Ben Greenfield and I eat testicles a lot together. I think everyone's introduction to testicles is with Ben Greenfield and I eat testicles a lot together. I think everyone's introduction to testicles is with Ben Greenfield. It could be. So, you know, there's a lot of the animal we're missing. And I think that as we think about a carnivore diet, what I recommend in the book is that we try to construct it with as much attention to nose to tail eating as possible, thinking about tendons as a collagen source. I mean,endons have collagen, which is glycine. We need glycine to make more collagen in our body, to make glutathione. We need to have collagen. We need to have connective tissue. We can't just eat muscle meat. Although

there's glycine in muscle meat, we probably benefit from more collagenous, chewy stuff, whether it's the tendon on the back of a New York steak or other collagenous tissues, like the fat that we were eating today that's pure fat with actual tendon attached to it, very collagenous tissues, like the fat that we were eating today, that's like, you know, pure fat with like actual tendon attached to it, like very collagenous. And then we have other organ meats like liver and kidney, which we both ate today. And then there's spleen and heart and pancreas and thymus and maybe brain. If we can get it, people get a little squirmish squeamish with brain because you have the prion diseases. We don't have to go there today, but when it's so fascinating, this is what we're talking about in the coming back from archery. When you look at what a human needs to function as well, as we know, we can admit that there are probably vitamins

and minerals that we don't know about right now that we're still going to discover. But in terms of what we know, and these are the discussions I had with Chris Masterjohn on the first part of our debate, that you can, we humans can get every vitamin and mineral that we need to thrive from an animal nose to tail. And that to me is such an elegant, you know, such an elegant synchronicity. It's like, wow, that is really cool that an animal is the ultimate multivitamin. You know, if I could just take an animal and, you know, kind of figuratively grind the whole thing up like you do for your dogs, right? You're going to grind up the bones. You're going to grind up all the organs. You're going to grind up the fat. That's going to give that all the organs. You're going to grind up the fat.

That's going to give that dog everything it needs to thrive. It doesn't need anything else. And there's all the minerals we need. There are all the vitamins we need. And we don't need the fiber. There's so many rabbit holes we could go down. But when you look at it, it's really incredible. But we have to get the whole animal,

which means we have to have a source of bone. We have to have the calcium and the boron and the manganese that are rich in bone. And we need to have the liver because it's richer in vitamin A. And we need to have the liver because it's richer in vitamin A. And we have to have the liver because it's richer in riboflavin and kidneys rich in riboflavin. And, you know, the nuance there is more granular than we need to go into this podcast, which nutrients are where. But if we get a collection of nutrients, if we get a collection of organ meats, we get most of it.

The place that most people can start is by thinking about fat to protein ratios. We talked about that a little bit earlier. One-to-one fat to protein with one gram of protein per pound of body weight is a good place to start for people. With the addition of liver makes it much more sustainable. And then if you can do liver and kidney, you're great. And then if you can do liver and kidney and tendon, you're doing even better. And if you can do liver and kidney spleen or whatever, you know. So adding all that in and not forgetting that we need calcium, which is usually in bones. And if we're not going to eat bones, if we're not going to eat either a bone broth, and we were talking earlier, we don't actually know how many of the minerals in bones will come

out into a bone broth. It may have to do with the acidity. And the studies I've seen suggest that bone broth doesn't actually pull many of the minerals from bones. So we probably have to eat bones or other minerals. So if you look at the minerals that humans need, we're looking, I mean, some of them are calcium, manganese, boron. They're not in the animal really in any appreciable quantity other than the bones. But what's so cool is that if you think about eating an animal, notice the tale, you're eating some bones, whether it's ground up bones or bones from small animals that our ancestors would have had or sucking the bone marrow out or carving the bone marrow out

of a bone, you're going to get little bone flakes. But I think it's pretty clear that our ancestors would have had, or sucking the bone marrow out, or carving the bone marrow out of a bone, you're going to get little bone flakes. But I think it's pretty clear that our ancestors would have had some bones in their diet, and that provides more unique nutrients. People will often say, like, where do you get your calcium from on a carnivore diet? Well, you probably get it from eating bones, you know? And where do you get boron from? People don't talk about boron a lot, but it's involved in hormonal regulation. It's been shown to improve testosterone, although the studies are a little bit hard to interpret, and then improve bone density and bone strength. They've actually shown that in regions of the world where they have lower boron in the soil, people are boron deficient and they have more arthritis. And bones from people who are boron supplementing are much harder to cut through,

like in orthopedic procedures and things like that. It's funny. I saw a post that you did on Instagram about boron. And I remember I had started, it only happened when I was over training, but I had blood work done. My sex hormone binding globulin was through the roof. And so I started supplementing with eight milligrams a day of that. And it plummeted back to the range and free testosterone was back. I just felt better. You know, like everything felt better with that. And it's something I'd never even fucking heard of before. I know. Right. And then my functional doc was like, uh, Dr. Craig, he's like, you should take some boron. And I was like, all right, I'm in. And then, yeah, it's pretty safe. It's safe up to 20 milligrams a day. So, but you can also get it in bones, you know? So that's just the, to say that

we can get all the nutrients we need from animals eating nose to tail. The one asterisk there that everybody asks about is vitamin C. So I'll just address that real quickly. Chris and I have debated this. I had James D. Nicolantonio on my podcast to debate this as well, though that one hasn't been released right now. Maybe it will be when this one comes out. But the vitamin C is a fascinating story because I think people can kind of reason this out and say, okay, maybe we don't need fiber. We didn't talk about that today, but we can another time. Okay, I see you're getting vitamin A, you're getting all these omega-3s. Okay, I can get behind almost everything, but they're saying, what about vitamin C? And my response to that is, how do we know how

much vitamin C humans need? Because if we go back to those other studies with fruits and vegetables, they're so interesting to remember that when you take people who are not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, and you can look at the people they're not supplementing for the most part, they're controlling for this, and you add fruits and vegetables to their diet, markers of inflammation and oxidative stress, which is probably where we would see reflection of vitamin C's activity, do not get better, right? So that's the first evidence. The second evidence that recommendations for vitamin C have been overdone are interventional

studies. There are many studies that have been done with 50, 100, or I should say 100 to 500 milligrams of vitamin C, or even a thousand milligrams of vitamin C long-term for cardiovascular disease outcomes, common cold outcomes, many outcomes. And when they're actually interventional, we don't see any benefit to extra huge doses of vitamin C. It's like, well, we know we need some vitamin C, but as we were talking about when you first got here, the USDA hasn't tested animal foods for vitamin C. So we don't know how much is in animal foods. Other researchers have done it. It appears to be about 17 milligrams of vitamin C per pound of meat. People may say that's not

enough, right? Well, if you're eating two pounds of meat a day, you're getting a decent amount of vitamin C and vitamin C is much more concentrated in liver and kidneys. So I'm probably getting 20, I would say I'm probably getting 40 to 60 milligrams of vitamin C a day right now. The point I'm making there is that animal foods have enough vitamin C, I believe, for humans to be optimal from an antioxidant perspective. And if you test, I haven't seen problems. I can check my lipid peroxides. I can check 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine. We don't see these metrics change or improve or decrease when there's extra vitamin C added. And you have to think about this evolutionarily.

Humans have not been making vitamin C for our entire evolution. It wasn't like we just lost vitamin C in 1860, right? The ability to make it. There's an enzyme called GULO, which probably was lost, I believe, 60 million years ago. People debate this. Between 60 and 20 million years ago, there were two lineages of primates, and one lineage stopped being able to make vitamin C, and one lineage continued making vitamin C. So from the first moment that we set foot on the savannah, we could not make vitamin C. If the inability to make vitamin C had been a real detriment to our evolution or if we had had this imperative for vitamin c throughout our evolution or having had

lots of oxidative stress which would have been a major decline or a major decrement or a major um you know detractor from our evolution we probably would not be here because people might say oh i think most people imagine that we were living in some sort of Garden of Eden. Like, you've been in the woods. How much vitamin C is there in the woods, man? How much vitamin C is there in sub-Saharan Africa or the equatorial Africa where we evolved? Like, how much vitamin C is there in the East African Rift Valley? Like, maybe part of the year there's some fruit that has a little bit of vitamin C, but the majority of the time, I believe most of our vitamin C would have come from animals,

and that that was plenty for us. And the studies don't support that interventions with vitamin C improve outcomes. And then when you actually look at oxidative stress markers, when we increase foods that contain vitamin C, they don't improve. So it's just not clear to me that vitamin C is serving the role that we believe it to be serving. This flies in the face of Linus Pauling and all these other people. And it's almost like religious fervor that people believe I need tons of vitamin C. It's this magical compound, but there really are not good interventional studies. And we should be able to see this very clearly. If I am not supplementing with vitamin C, like the majority of the population is not, right? How come you don't have scurvy? How come I don't have scurvy? And then if you're going to, we should be able to

give people 500 milligrams of vitamin C and see a clear improvement in oxidative stress markers. And we do not see that. When you look at the scurvy studies, 10 milligrams of vitamin C cures scurvy. So a dose that you could get in any minimal amount of animal foods. Yeah. Travis Christopherson talks about that in his latest book. I don't think it's out yet, or it might be coming out soon here. But yeah, he wrote the book, Tripping Over the Truth, which largely exposed medicine

and talked a lot about the ketogenic diet. He goes way further into medicine in his upcoming book. I think it's a good one. You should check it out. I will. But we know from experiments in the 1940s that 10 milligrams of vitamin C cures scurvy. And what we do not know,

or we are not, it's not very clearly established in the literature, is that doses, you know, 10x that or 100x that are clearly beneficial for humans. And so what I challenged Chris and James with is show me the data that really shows that we need 500 milligrams of vitamin C or even 100 milligrams of vitamin C. We can look at oxidative stress markers. We can look at things that vitamin C is doing, recycling glutathione, recycling vitamin E. It doesn't seem that there's a problem here. The glutathione levels don't drop. The ratios of oxidized to reduced glutathione don't change a whole lot. And there's plenty of vitamin E on a carnivore diet. And so it's quite interesting

because if the vitamin C, you know, sort of regime fails or the vitamin C delusion or the vitamin C sort of, um, you know, predisposition or just this, this preoccupation with vitamin C falls away. It's going to change a lot of things because why are we all taking 500 milligrams of vitamin C? I don't do it anymore. And so, yeah, emergencies, a gram, people are doing two, three packets. I've done that burning man before. It's like part of our consciousness. Vitamin C has become, in my opinion, like just this magical thing that probably doesn't do anything for us at those doses, right? You can probably get enough vitamin C in just a steak to be optimal. I love it. Well, let's talk sustainability. I briefly mentioned Zach Bitter's podcast on Rogan's. I'll link to that in the show notes. They kind of went back and forth on this. Like, what is the scalability

of that was the argument Rogan used. And we had an interesting conversation around that, right? So I think we should dive in there first. And then I want to talk about what regenerative agriculture can do for the climate and for the world and how we can maybe retrace our steps back to ancestral living so that we live in harmony with the planet? Yeah, this is a super interesting question. It gets brought up so much and it's a very valid concern, right? If we're going to eat animals, what impact do they have on the planet? And I think most of the misconception comes from flawed reports from the FAO that were then retracted and recalculated, right? But this is the problem with what happens in westernized society, is once something is out there in a film

like Livestock's Long Shadow or What the Health or Cowspiracy, people believe it. And it's very hard to undo untruths that have been widely promulgated. And so what happened, you know, in the last 10 years was that untruths, inaccurate statements regarding the environmental impact of ruminant animals were promulgated in these sort of plant-based agenda documentaries, and they were based on faulty data. But people don't know the data was faulty. When the FAO originally calculated the amount or the relative amounts of greenhouse gas emissions for ruminants versus automobiles and other contributors, they were not looking at the entire life cycle of the carbon molecule, and they were only looking at what's coming out of the tailpipes of cars, right? And so when they

recalculated what they realized, and you can look at EPA data, so the Environmental Protection Agency data from 2014 and 2017 mirror the same thing, that ruminant agriculture contributes 1.8 percent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the united states 1.8 percent and uh other and this is inclusive of factory farm animals which we're completely against oh yes this is the inclusive inclusion of the worst type of right raising cattle as we're going to talk about regenerative agriculture has been shown to be carbon negative, right? So it sequesters more carbon than they produce. But this is farm, this is livestock that's in feedlots.

These are CAFOs. These are clustered, you know, animal feeding operations. And 1.8% of the total greenhouse gas is in the U.S. So it kind of makes you ask yourself, where's the other 98.2% coming from? The majority is transportation,

electricity generation, technology, and nobody's pointing a finger at this, right? Nobody's pointing a finger at our gasoline usage. That is the biggest contributor. A cross-country flight is a huge contributor to the carbon dioxide emissions to greenhouse gases. And so in terms of livestock, livestock is about 4% overall, meaning non-ruminant agriculture is about another 2.2% or 1.9%. So that's like monogastrics, like pigs or chickens, things like that. And then if you look at plant agriculture, they contribute about 4.1 or 4.2% to the greenhouse gases, but nobody's talking about that, right? So that's all the carbon dioxide emissions that you're

getting from harvesting plants and everything around the movement of plants throughout the country. So ruminant agriculture is actually less than plant agriculture, right? And we've already talked about how destructive to the planet monocropped agriculture is with regard to the soil and topsoil and depletion of nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil, which are really important. And the genetically modified food being created to use more glyphosate, more Roundup. Exactly, exactly. And so then you look at the other contributors and they're all the things that, you know,

are kind of just a part of our world and we need to think about reversing technology, electricity, et cetera, et cetera. But those are the biggest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. If we dig into the next step, cows produce methane, right? Well, methane is CH4. It's part of a methane cycle. And people will say, a lot of times people will try

and paint this to be cows produce the worst greenhouse gas, quote unquote, right? Well, methane is sort of the most warming gas. There's a metric that we use to say how much of a warming effect does a gas have when it goes into the atmosphere. And methane is the worst. Methane is about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. But methane is only 15 or less percent of the greenhouse gases that are emitted. 85 plus percent of the greenhouse gases that we get in the atmosphere are carbon dioxide. And these are the things, burning of fossil fuels, et cetera, et cetera. So methane is a small amount to begin with. And then if we're looking at methane contributions, the majority of methane comes from landfills.

It comes from the trash that we put into the landfills and it comes from natural sources like wetlands and termites, right? So the majority of the methane that is going into the atmosphere is termites, wetlands, and the garbage from Beyond Burger wrappers going into landfills, right? So it's crazy. And then, you know, ruminants do contribute to methane emissions as part of that, but it's not even the majority. It's a fraction of the methane emissions that are from ruminants. So we've gone, okay, ruminants are only 1.8% of methane. Methane is a small percentage of carbon. Of that amount of methane, ruminants are the minority of that amount. And the majority is actually coming from things that we're probably

not going to be able to reverse because wetlands naturally just burp off methane, right? It just happens. And termites, termite farts. I don't know why people aren't talking about termite farts these days. Damn the termites. And the other thing about methane is this, especially when it's methane produced from cows, it's part of a carbon cycle. And I'm sort of gesticulating a square here to reflect that when a cow burps, right, you're going to get methane emissions. It's usually the burps, not the farts, but people like to say farts. So the methane goes into the atmosphere and over 10 years, the methane becomes carbon dioxide. And then that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere becomes carbohydrates and plants because plants inhale carbon dioxide. They fix it into their carbohydrates,

which are eaten by animals and then rebirbed out. There is no new carbon in this equation. This is a cycle. There's no carbon that is being released that it was not there. There's always been carbon in the environment. There's always been greenhouse gases in the environment because that's why the earth,

surface of the earth would be below freezing. We would not be able to hang out outside and shoot bows in Balboa Park today without being in parkas without greenhouse gases. There's always been carbon dioxide, nitrogen-based greenhouse gases, methane in the atmosphere. We've contributed the majority of it as carbon dioxide since industrialization, but it's always been there, and it's always a part of maintaining the atmosphere of the earth in a realm that actually works for humans. Kind of this incredible, another synchronicity there, right? So the methane from cows is not new. It's just cycling around. It's cycling around. It's always been cycling around.

When there were 100 million buffalo on the earth, they were burping and farting and there was methane cycling around. It was fine. The carbon that we're burning from fossil fuels is different. It's carbon that's not in the atmosphere. It's in the bedrock of the earth, in petroleum. And when we burn it, we add new carbon to the atmosphere. So methane from cows is not new carbon, quote unquote. It's recycling carbon. But methane, or more specifically, carbon dioxide, it should be more precisely, carbon dioxide carbons, so CO2 versus CH4, the carbons on CO2 that are coming from our tailpipes, the generation of electricity through coal, this is new carbon. And that's what we should be worried about is what are we doing with this new carbon

in the atmosphere? We're not worried about old carbon that's recycling. It's the new carbon. It's from fossil fuel deposits. It's from petroleum. It's from dinosaurs that are turned into oil. And now we're releasing it into the atmosphere where it wasn't before. That's the major contributor. And then enter regenerative agriculture, right? What is so

cool about regenerative agriculture? It's that just like the buffalo did hundreds of years ago, people have realized that if we graze cattle properly on the earth, whether it's white oak pastures or Belcampo in California, any of these amazing farms that are doing this rotational grazing, if we graze cattle, these are obviously grass-fed grass-finished animals if we allow them to eat the grass down low but not all the way that they kill the grass and then move on to another part of the field as they would have migrating across different fields then they enrich the soil with their poop they put natural phosphorus natural nitrogen back into the soil. That enriches the root system of the plant, and the plant and the organisms associated with the root system can

sequester more carbon into the soil, and you can actually bring the carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil. And that's, I mean, we can do that with ruminants. That's the magic, is that if you put buffalo back on the plains, or we put more cows that are being raised this way on the earth, we can pull carbon into the soil and actually put it back where it belongs, right? Out of the atmosphere and change warming. And so that's, what's so cool about these farms. Alan Savory is doing this work as well. There's some incredible, there's a Ted talk of his. It's amazing online. You can see that the year they can revitalize land. There's another farm in Texas. The guys from Epic have Rome ranch and they're taking basically land. There's another farm in Texas. The guys from Epic have Rome Ranch. Okay.

And they're taking basically land that has been destroyed, that all the nutrients have been pulled out of, and they're grazing cattle, and it's turning into like fertile green grassland over time. So it's really incredible. So it's actually healing it. It's healing the land as it should, right? Wow.

That ruminants don't destroy the land if they're properly grazing, meaning they don't eat the grass all the way down and kill it. They have enough room to move, then they restore the land. And that's what we need. That's what's so cool. And then you make good animals who have healthy, you know, nutrients and foods for our families and ourselves. Now, I think that what came up on Rogan was the question of, can we do this for the whole planet, right? And you could, those kind of questions I think

are important, but I think those are the second and third questions, not the first questions, right? Because you could ask the same question about plant-based agriculture, which we've already established would not be a good thing because it's making just as much carbon and that's actually making new carbon, right? So plant agriculture is making new carbon, ruminant agriculture is making methane predominantly, or some of it is methane, which is cycled. So not new carbon for ruminants, the ones that people want to talk about. And plant agriculture is new carbon. So if you want to make new carbon, you're going to have a problem. It's not going to change anything to do all plants, and we won't have the most nutritious foods on the planet anymore. So there's no real amazing answer here. There's no clear answer. What we need to do is understand

and put mind to the task. How do we scale regenerative agriculture? That's a political change probably, right? Like how do we move the land differently? And so it's not, can we do it? It's, is this valuable? And if it is, how do we do it? Right. Let's find a solution. I mean, look, Elon Musk wants to put people on Mars. People say he's crazy. Like let's find a solution. Let's put people who are thinking about this. You, neither you or I are environmental scientists, right? I don't think about, you know find a solution. Let's put people who are thinking about this. Neither you or I are environmental scientists, right? I don't think about, you know, like agriculture. I'm not an agronomist.

Like, let's think about how do we do this? How do we make more ruminants on the earth? How do we decrease the livestock emissions that are feedlots? How do we change plant agriculture? I think there are ways to do it. The first question is, let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's realize it's very valuable and then figure out ways to do it. It's just the first question is, let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's realize it's very valuable and then figure out how to do it.

Because it's clearly moving in the right direction rather than the wrong direction. There's only so many directions we can go in, right? We're either gonna go more plants, less animals, or more animals, less plants. And I think that in the sense of regenerative agriculture, going toward more animals and less plants is the right direction.

We can't, there's nothing in between unless we come up with something else, which would be like lab grown meat, which we think is a horrible idea for so many reasons. Many, many reasons. And has its own carbon footprint, right? So if we're thinking about carbon and we're thinking about greenhouse gases, we have to move in some direction. And it's important for people to realize that you move toward plant agriculture, that doesn't solve the problem. I love it, brother. What else? What else? Is there anything, any stone left unturned? I think we got through so much, man. All right, real quick, briefly. People know, I've talked a bit about this before when I had Sean Baker on the podcast. My 100% carnivore venture ended in a giant rash, which thankfully,

as before I knew you, I had Ben Greenfield. I reached out to him, showed him the rash. He said it's likely Herxheimer's reaction. Maybe something's leaving the body. You're probably just detoxing some shit that's going on inside. Sean Baker interviewed a guy from England, I believe, who said it's likely oxalates finally being dumped from the body for a long time. I bought into the scoop of giving my raw kale shake with some berries, which also are loaded with oxalates and a little coconut milk and did that for a long time, probably

daily for the last couple of years I was fighting, I'd say, just to get something quick that I thought was nutritious in my body. So what are some of the ways that people can navigate through? Obviously, you have many layers to this you even have a post on um uh your website on how to get in what what foods to eat on carnivore there's five different levels of the game what are some of the ways people can skirt around some of the side effects like shitting water every fucking on carnivore and then also uh of course if there's rashes and things like that that pop up yeah Yeah, it's funny. We were talking about this earlier in the car, and I agree.

I think that was some sort of detoxification reaction. I think that it would have been reasonable to continue. You were feeling good at the time, which was what you were saying. I was feeling great. Great energy. Workouts were great. So people often get like a keto rash sometimes, and I think it's probably something else, whether it's oxalate dumping or, you know, it's probably not a big deal.

If people are doing a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet and you're getting a rash and you're feeling good, it's probably safe to just kind of push through it and see where it goes. If it gets real bad, then fine, pull the plug and talk to somebody and try and figure out, try and troubleshoot what's going on. I think in your case, it probably was either oxalate dumping or something weird, right? But the GI side effects are common. In terms of the book, so in the Carnivore Code, which is my book, I do talk about, I have a whole chapter on the pitfalls. And the first part of that chapter is all about GI stuff. And I call it disaster pants. I think Dave Asprey or somebody else coined

that term. So disaster pants is basically loose stool, diarrhea. A lot of people get this when they switch to a predominantly animal-based diet. And I think that it's probably due to a shift in the gut flora, not a bad shift, just a shift in the gut flora. I talk about a lot of other places in the book. I talk about how a carnivore microbiome is not unhealthy, how we don't need fiber for increased alpha diversity, how all of this rhetoric around needing lots of different plants for alpha diversity is false. But in terms of the GI stuff, when people get diarrhea, a few things can be going on. It can be this die-off of old bacteria and replacement of new bacteria, in which case sometimes probiotics

can be helpful, or you just kind of wait it out. For some people, it lasts weeks or days. For you, it was lasting like three weeks plus, so it's pretty bad. But it can also be due, I think, to increased production of bile salts by the gallbladder. In the bile, bile is bile salts, cholesterol, and bilirubin. Whenbladder. In the bile, bile is bile salts, cholesterol, and bilirubin. When we eat protein or fat, and to a lesser extent carbohydrates, we release bile, which emulsifies fat and allows pancreatic enzymes to act on the fat. I think that most of those bile salts are supposed to be reabsorbed in the small intestine. If they're not reabsorbed, then they can move to the colon and be cathartic. They can kind of pull water

into the colon and cause diarrhea. So in terms of diarrhea, what I recommend for people is think about if it's a gut flora switch, you know, maybe some probiotics in the short term, maybe. You could think about like lactobacillus GG, biogaya gastris, or floristor have been helpful. If it's a bile salt issue, then you can do things that may help bind up the bile salts a little bit until your body adjusts. Eggshells can do this. A little bit of calcium carbonate in eggshells can kind of bind up the bile salts for the short term, not for the long term.

Or for some people, it's inadequate pancreatic exocrine functions. They're not making enough pancreatic enzymes. And a short course of pancreatic digestive enzymes can be helpful, like lipase. There are a lot of companies that make things like this. So those would be the first three things I would suggest. It's usually self-limited. I experienced that in the beginning, as I was saying, and then it resolved. And now I have kind of pretty amazing bowel movements every day. And it's easy to pass. They're smaller because most of the meat gets absorbed and digested. So that's one of the big

kind of pitfalls is the GI stuff. And you can even think, you know, some people may need extra bile, in which case you could add ox bile, but for people that have too much ox bile, it can make things worse. So you kind of have to walk that line, but something is going on there. You can titrate it. There's an adjustment phase for sure. The biggest thing to realize is that your whole gut flora is switching to like a carnivorous gut flora, which is I think totally fine, totally safe, totally healthy. It's just going to switch over when there's a die die-off, we know that people get GI stuff. I mean, when you take antibiotics, you're killing all the bacteria. You can get GI stuff for the same reason. If you take probiotics, you can affect the bacterial populations. You can get GI stuff. And if you switch your food

radically, you're going to get GI stuff. It's usually gradual, but you were having so many symptoms that I would have said, you know, intervene with something to make you more comfortable so you can keep living your life. If people haven't done a ketogenic diet in the past, they're going to probably get keto flu, which is kind of the switch to the enzymatic machinery of a ketogenic diet. Most of that can be mitigated with just making sure you get enough salt. And that's something that so many people run into problems with is they just don't get enough salt on these types of diet. That was a beautiful conversation we'll link to in the show notes with all the podcasts that you've mentioned on yours that you did with Rob Wolf. And I sent it to my dad immediately because

he's a guy who I would salt his food for him. And anytime he's, he was just in town helping us move and I, you know, salted his steak, hook him up and he, he has to coat it until he can see it. And for the longest time, you know, everyone in my family is like, you're going to die from having that much salt. And I think Rob mentioned five to 15 grams a day. Even more. Yeah. Wow. of sodium per day, which is 10 grams of sodium chloride, which is two teaspoons of salt per day, which is a lot of salt if people are not used to it. I most days probably get 15 plus grams of salt per day. So 7.5 milligrams plus of salt. And so every time you're, if you're talking sodium, double it for the salt because you have sodium chloride essentially. But yeah, I mean, I think

that there's epidemiology, epidemiologic evidence to suggest that that amount of sodium is beneficial for humans and that limiting our salt beyond that is probably detrimental for us. And for a lot of people, they're not used to that. It takes an adjustment. But if people are feeling kind of run down on a ketogenic diet or a low-carbohydrate diet, often more salt helps. And one of the interesting things I've found is a lot of people get cramps.

And I've experimented with potassium and magnesium, and it seems to be mostly about salt. If we get enough salt, and I think it's also about the other minerals we mentioned as well, it's subtle. Nobody talks about calcium, nobody talks about boron, nobody talks about manganese in terms of cramping, right? But I think if we're getting nose-to-tail organ meats and we're getting some bone meal from a source that has little heavy metals, people have to be very careful when they're selecting the bone meal source. But if we're getting those things and we're getting enough salt, the cramps usually resolve just fine without the need for extra magnesium and potassium supplementation. Potassium supplementation can be dangerous. That's why it's only sold in low doses in the grocery stores, because the FDA limits that. So most people would not get to dangerous levels of potassium orally

unless they had kidney issues. But I don't usually recommend magnesium and potassium for most of my clients. They usually do just fine with adequate salt because your body will retain the minerals you need when you have plenty of salt. If you don't have salt, you'll waste them. People will be surprised to learn that meat is a great source of potassium.

It's very rich in potassium. And that most of the magnesium I think we're getting dietarily is probably from our water. There's just not a whole lot of magnesium anywhere, even in plant foods. And like we talked about, bring it for a circle, the plant foods are not that bioavailable in terms of magnesium. So. Yeah. And if it's monocropped, then whatever magnesium was in that plant to begin with. Probably not there. There's not going to be a lot left. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome, brother. Well, where can people find you online and your podcast, your book?

Yeah. Is the pre-order available? Pre-order is available for the book. So you can go to thecarnivorecodebook.com. That's the landing page. You'll see the book cover, which was a lot of fun to make. I've gotten a lot of good feedback on that. Have you seen the cover?

You haven't seen the cover of my book? I'm going to show it to you right now. It's a good cover. And there's a link there to pre-order from the publisher, people that pre-order. I'm really appreciative of that. And I'm offering some special perks on the website for people that pre-order. And then the book should be out in February, 2020. My website is carnivoremd.com. You can find links to all my social media stuff there. Most of them are the same handle, carnivoremd. And my podcast is called Fundamental Health. We're going to get you

on that podcast. And yeah, I talk about all kinds of cool stuff and not all carnivore on my podcast. I don't, I talk about carnivore on podcasts that I'm on. So people will see the catalog of my podcast is mostly things that are not carnivore. Sometimes I have vegans on and I do debates or I debate Chris Masterjohn or I talk to David Sinclair or Stan Efferding. So the podcast, I try to keep a little more varied. Hell yeah, brother. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. Dude, thanks for having me on. What a good conversation. I love you. Amazing, brother. I love you too. Thank you guys for tuning into today's show. Remember, if you've got questions or comments,

you can leave them at my website, kingsboo.com. I am no longer on social media, so you will not be able to contact me there, but you can contact me through the contact form at my website. Also, leave me your email and I will send you one, that's right, only one monthly newsletter letting you know all the cool shit that I'm up to. And outside of that, click the link for my boy Paul Saladino's new book, The Carnivore Code, where you can find out more about this incredible way to eat the way our ancestors did. Check it out. Let me know what you think. And thank you guys for listening. We'll see you in a week.