Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - # 69 Shawn Baker

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Shawn Baker is a lifelong multisport elite-level athlete and a medical doctor who served as a combat trauma surgeon and chief of orthopedics while deployed to Afghanistan with the United States Air Force. His focus in recent years has been on using nutrition as a tool for health, performance, and overall well-being. Through his Carnivore Training System and private consulting work, he has inspired countless thousands of others to challenge a highly flawed nutritional paradigm and to opt for a carnivorous lifestyle instead. In this episode Shawn breaks down the benefits of the carnivore diet, how the body adapts to it over time, and the controversial cancer research surrounding carnivore. Connect with Shawn Baker: Website: https://www.shawn-baker.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shawnbaker1967/?hl=en Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbakermd?lang=en Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5apkKkeZQXRSDbqSalG8CQ Human Performance Outliers Podcast | https://apple.co/2OOQNrP http://meatheals.com/ Show Notes: The Keto Reset Diet by Mark Sisson | https://bit.ly/2QYL1Wn Shawn Baker on The Joe Rogan Experience | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj_Bc9hdHa0 Shawn Baker on The Paleo Solutions Podcast | https://bit.ly/2Hx2hNt Elephant and Mammoth Hunting during the Paleolithic | https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/1/1/3 Dr. Fasano on Leaky Gut and Gluten Sensitivity | https://bit.ly/2DOiNuA Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit       Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour  Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

All right, guys, before we get started, I want to talk to you about a dope new product we have. It is our grass-fed whey isolate protein. It is hands down the best protein ever made. It comes from healthy and happy New Zealand cows that roam on gorgeous green grass-fed pastures. There's no added sugar, which means it's great for a low-carb diet, which I follow pretty much year-round. Because even in the summertime when I'm eating carbohydrates, I don't want to get carbohydrates in fucking powdered form. I want them from sweet potatoes, starches, berries, real food. That doesn't mean I don't mind getting a little extra protein from powder form, especially when it comes from high-quality cows. And this has got it all. It's got a lot more than most protein powders. We include digestive enzymes that help lower inflammation and help you absorb and assimilate the most amount that

you can possibly take in from this protein. We've also added in probiotics like lactobacillus acidophilus, which is incredibly important for the gut microbiome and our immune systems. Check this product out. You're sure to like it. We've got delicious flavors like vanilla and Mexican chocolate. I know you'll enjoy it. Give it a look. We isolate protein from grass-fed cows. Welcome to the Human Optimization Hour. We got Dr. Sean Baker in the house. You might have heard him on the Joe Rogan Experience or the Paleo Solution Podcast with Rob Wolf. If you haven't, we've linked to those podcasts in the show notes because if you enjoy this one, you're going to want to go back and dive through a lot of his stuff. He did a much longer podcast as expected with Joe Rogan.

Excellent. That was about a year ago. And recently went on Rob Wolf's podcast. They broke down all of his blood work, which was something people demanded because this dude eats only meat. And I would say the vast majority of that is steak. And the vast majority of that steak is ribeye steak. He's a doctor. He is incredibly well-informed. He understands how we've evolved, why we can tolerate meat much better than most any other material,

plants included. And he has some fantastic ideas. Anybody who's this far ahead of the curve when it comes to things like this in health and wellness, they take a lot of arrows. He's a fucking trailblazer. And there's no doubt. I mean, I'll just say this. The first time I heard about it, I was like, that's the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard. And I laughed about it on a Facebook live. I address that in a public apology to Dr. Baker on the podcast. But, you know, bottom line is this dude has a wealth of knowledge and there are a lot of implications on the medical side from autoimmune disease to many other things that can be impacted through doing this diet. And we break down a number of differences that people bring up. What happens to the microbiome?

Is it important? What happens if you eat too much protein? Is that going to cause you to kick you out of ketosis because it's zero carbs, but it's not necessarily ketogenic? But you can make it ketogenic with intermittent fasting and some different practices. So all those things get unpacked in this podcast. I know you guys are going to dig it. If you do, let us know with a five-star fucking review and hit up Dr. Baker and myself online. Thank you.

Human Optimization Hour podcast with my man, Dr. Sean Baker in myself online. Thank you. Human Optimization Hour podcast with my man, Dr. Sean Baker in the house. Kyle, man, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on, man. Fuck yeah, brother. Fuck yeah. I figured we should open. Let me just say this. I guess I'll open with an apology, but you posted something about jumping on the podcast today, I think, with one of the steaks we were eating last night. And somebody was like, remember that time, Dr. Baker, when Kingsboo was on a Facebook Live and somebody asked him about carnivore diet and he just laughed the question off and didn't even answer? And I was like, yeah, man, I do remember that. So this was probably when it was first coming out. I hadn't listened to you on Rogan's, just heard roughly what it was about, eating an all-meat diet.

And like most people, it was like, that's absurd. I thought it was as dumb as being vegan, for that matter. Now, clearly, after listening to you on Rogan's, and then Rob Wolf's as well, which was phenomenal, where you guys broke down your blood work, which is something everyone was demanding. And everything looked perfect, you know, but obviously you are a highly intelligent man. You did not just stumble upon. This is something you sought out. I want to get into all the background as well as what you're seeing on the performance side and all the applications that you've seen with it.

But so much of this is like, it just makes sense. You know, like we, how we've evolved. And I want to talk about that as well. I know I'm jumping all over the table here, but just giving a little intro to, to what I want to lay out on the table. There's not a person on this earth who can't eat meat and digest it well. Right. There's plenty of us that have problem with plants, plenty. And you know, look no further. There's a great book called The Plant Paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry. And you've alluded to that on different podcasts you've been on. Lectins and different phytochemicals and plant substrates that are natural pesticides and herbicides because plants don't want to be fucking eaten for the most part, unless you're a fruit. You're not

trying to be eating my animals. So we'll dive into all that, but first let's get some background. You know, what you learned growing up to become a medical doctor and, you know, and everything, how that tailed into your foray into nutrition and health and wellness. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I mean, I thought it was crazy too. I mean, you know, honestly, I mean, that's a normal response. I mean, you think about, I'm just going to eat a bunch of freaking meat and it's like, okay, that seems a normal response. You think about it, I'm just going to eat a bunch of freaking meat, and it's like, okay, that seems a little odd. Anybody that has that reaction, I think it's a completely normal reaction. Then you actually study it.

You actually see what's going on. You look at the history. You actually do it, and then you're like, okay, well, maybe there's something there. My background has been athletics for my whole life. I mean, I've been in a performance just like you. I want to be as good as I can possibly be. So that's always been kind of the background.

I've kind of went through all different sports over the years. But as far as going into medicine, I think when I was about 16 years old, I started studying for the MCAT, which is like a test you take as your junior year in college. So I was like, I want to do this the whole time because I really thought that stuff was fascinating. And so I did that. I kind of got sidetracked. I was in medical school. I got out to play rugby, went down to New Zealand, did that, came back in, went into the Air Force and launched nuclear bombs for a while. Got tired of playing rugby, get my head kicked in. I remember the last game I was playing, I was playing a team from Russia out in Las Vegas and laying at the bottom of the pile, this guy's kicking me in the head. I got blood coming out of my ears.

You know, kind of like the MMA stuff where you get in there like, all right, fuck this shit. I'm, you know, I'm 30-something years old. I'm like, I'm going to go back to medical school. Air Force was kind enough to pay for it for me. I went in, did my time, you know, did the stuff in the military, did some trauma surgery, and then kind of went from there. But then, you know, as you get older and older, as you find out when you get in your 40s and now in your 50s, you know, you find out that, man, the stuff I could do when I was 20, eat shit, go out and party, and still kick ass, it doesn't happen anymore. So some things have to come around.

And I always thought, you know, I'll eat whatever I want as long as I train hard enough. And that worked until I was about 42, 43. And then it was like, wait a minute, I'm getting sick. And so I started playing with different things. Nutrition was the number one thing. I went through all kinds of diets. I mean, it's not like I just said, I'm going to just eat meat out of the blue. I started eating.

I went on a low-fat diet, high-fiber, almost vegetarian-ish diet with a little bit of meat. And that worked. I mean, I lost weight. I was about 245 now. I was about 285, 290 back then when I was lifting heavy. And so I dropped about 50 pounds in about three months, just because I was eating like 6,000, 7,000 calories a day. And then you drop that down to like normal people food and weight just dropped off me. But I was training three times a day. I mean, I was jumping rope, a couple thousand jump ropes in the morning, coming home at lunch from work, working out, going in the evening, jumping rope.

I mean, I remember on my 40, what was it? The 46th birthday. I remember I was like, every year, my birthday, I'll do like some crazy ass workout. It's like with a number, you know, like I'm turning 40, I'm going to do whatever I did, like 40 reps of 315 pound dead lift or something like that. It was just like, so my 46th birthday, I was like I'm going to do whatever. I did like 40 reps of 315-pound deadlift or something like that. It was just like – so my 46th birthday, I was like, I'm going to do 46 times – 4,600 jump ropes in a row. That sucked, by the way. That was like 55 minutes of jumping rope constantly. So, I mean, I did that stuff, and I lost weight.

But then you get to a point where this is not sustainable. I just can't live this way. I'm just hungry all the time. I'm freaking starving. I'm pissed off. I'm not a happy guy. People at work are not happy to be around me because I'm just like, yeah, I'm fucking hungry. So then I went and did paleo. I started looking at Mark Sisson's work, and I think he's got some great stuff out there. Rob Wolf. Rob Wolf and those guys did the paleo stuff. This makes sense. It's kind of funny because when I was playing rugby about 20 years ago, there was a student of Lauren Cordain's. I was on the rugby team and he was out there eating these nuts. And

he was talking about eating frequent meals and doing these microbots of exercise. But he's doing that early research and payload stuff. And I looked at him, what the hell are you doing? It's kind of a weird dude. Yeah, that is weird. Kind of funny, like 20 years later. You tell me you don't eat bread. Right, right, right. You tell me you don't eat cheese. Exactly, same thing. What the fuck's wrong with you? Things change when you get new information. So then I go paleo, and then I just get in and start reading Gary Taubes' work and start reading some of the low-carb stuff, play with that. Progressively saw some improvements, started applying that to patients, saw significant improvements with patients. Some of them not even needing surgery anymore because it was like their diet fixed their problem, which I had never even thought of.

Before it was just like, you go lose weight and they never do, or if you can't lose weight, here's an injection, here's an anti-inflammatory, maybe we'll stick a scope in your knee. Okay, that doesn't work, we'll go in there and now as they get older, maybe it's time to replace your knee.

And that's the paradigm we're brought up on as a surgeon. So once I started seeing these significant benefits from diet, that really woke me up. And then I started seeing it myself. So then I get into the keto stuff. I did that for a couple of years, felt good. And then I just, for whatever crazy reason, I started reading about a bunch of meat, a meat and eggs diet, like Vince Caronda, back into that sort of looking at some of the older stuff. And then I saw a community online where there were these people doing it and doing it for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and they looked pretty good. I said, well, I'll just try it. What the hell can happen?

What's going to happen? You know, I like steak anyway. And, you know, I did it for 30 days, and I felt pretty damn good. And, you know, then I went back, and I said, well, it was a 30-day experiment. I'm going to go back to eating my keto stuff. I did. I just didn't feel as good. It's like a little bit of joint pain.

Because when you get old, as you know, years of getting beat up, things affect you. Yeah, all those old injuries can resurface fairly quickly. Yeah, and I think your diet impacts that. And so I started saying, yeah, my back was a little sore. I didn't have quite as much energy, didn't feel quite as good. So I said, well, I'm gonna go back to eating meat. And I did, and I've been doing it now.

So in December will be exactly two years. So I started right at the beginning of December, 2016. And man, I get, I continue to get stronger. I continue to feel better. I continue to, you know, I mean, just objectively seeing things in the gym, which I think are a pretty nice way to assess your progress because there's some very, you know, we talked

about objective things you can look at. Am I getting stronger? You know, can I lift more in the bar? Okay, that's a good thing. Can I row faster? Okay, that's a good thing, you know. And, you know, when we look at performance, you know, there's a lot of stuff around, you know, glucose being a preferred fuel for certain activities. But when you look at the whole package for performance and you as a fighter, it's not just one day, it's not the one day that you fight, it's all that preparation that goes into it. And so if you're, you know, if you're lethargic, you don't feel like training, if your joints hurt, you know, if your mood doesn't feel good, you know, those things impact the overall finished product. And so you have to look at what's happening over six months, over a year, over a career, 10 years. And I think this is

somewhere, you know, you get into this sort of, guys like Tim Noakes out of South Africa, I know you're familiar, he talks about the same thing. You know, it's not just the day of performance, it's everything that goes in it. And if you're healthier, you know, as a 50-year-old guy, my joints don't hurt anymore. That's nice. You know, I'm 50. I'm going to be 52. That allows me to train really hard. And we'll go train later today, hopefully.

And we can hopefully kill it. But, I mean, those are the things that I think ultimately, you know, lead to, at least from a performance aspect. And we can get into some of the – there's some recent studies that come out that are pretty interesting talking about why some of the stuff is starting to make sense. Yeah, I'm down. Let's break down some of that. And I also wanted to touch on, you brought up something that is critical because there's a lot of athletes listening to the show. And there's some new, Mark Sisson has Primal Endurance, which is a great book that I read before I did a 50K Ultra talking about the benefits of keto when you're doing more of that very steady state endurance stuff. And a lot of the stuff that Jeff Volokh and Steve Finney came out with were on distance

runners and things of that nature, but there never was like this glycolytic athlete doing these things. And Sisson's new book, The Keto Reset Diet, talks about Louis Villasenor's work, the Keto Gains guy who's worked with Rob Wolf quite a bit. And there's some applications for targeted keto. We were talking last night about just dextrose tablets, right, before you're getting ready to lift, things like that. So you can still hit both of those angles. But truly to get it off from your food makes the most sense to me. And that's something that I've noticed and you noticed, obviously, in that most of your workouts and the world records that you're setting with the Concept2 Rower are very glycolytic. And, you know, obviously, you know, I know you told Rob Wolf you wanted to leave the blood work for him and you can

just refer people back to it. So I highly encourage people, we'll link to your episode with Joe Rogan, we'll link to your episode with Rob Wolf so they can get a further breakdown there. But talk a bit about how the body adapts over time. We know this now with some of the longer-term ketogenic diets, with the ability to mobilize fat in the body, to hold it and store it in the muscle, to have more glycogen on hand. Talk a bit about that from the ketosis standpoint, and then also from the carnivore standpoint, where you've seen fasting blood sugar rise as a means to account for your glycogen output. Yeah. I mean, just to jump ahead a little on this topic. So there was a nice study that I

just put up on Instagram today that Ben Bickman showed me. And it basically looked, it was done in 2018, looking at coupling carbohydrate and protein and looking at restoration of glycogen. And so we see that even in very, very low carbohydrate situation, if you take an adequate protein, which is, I think, one of the nice things about a carnivorous diet, you're getting plenty of protein and you're not lacking for protein, is it shows that glycogen restoration is very good. And so almost rivaling that at a high carbohydrate state. So I think that's something that probably needs further exploration. So I do think you restore glycogen, because like I said, what I'm doing is definitely glycolytic. And so I went and had,

as part of this German documentary, I had my VO2 max testing done and they looked at my, and I'm clearly burning fat, like you'd see with people that are fat adapted through high levels of exercise until you get to that threshold. And my threshold is very, very high

before I tap into glucose. So I can train very hard prior to needing that glucose. So I can hit pretty high levels and then I need the glucose. The nice thing about that, and there's studies like Volokh and those guys have demonstrated it, with ultra endurance athletes,

that when they primarily use fat, their oxidative stress levels are much lower at the end of a race compared to traditional. It's a cleaner fuel. So you don't get beat up as much. And so that's a nice thing. That's why the recovery for so many people is like much, likely much better.

And that's the thing I've found carnivorously that my recovery is awesome. I can train hard day in and day out. And again, ultimately training intensely over time is going to equal performance. So the more time, more often, recovery's important, obviously, but if you're recovering well, then you can train more. And so it's not a matter of sort of overtraining, it's under-recovering. And so if you can go all out and recover and go all out again the next day or two days

later, you're going to end up with a better result long-term. But I mean, yeah, I mean, it's much of the data we have. And again, this is a problem in general with a lot of the research that we've had. The typical dietary protocol study is taking some college kids because they're cheap, right? And what do they normally eat? They normally eat three, four, five, six times a day. They're eating a 50%, 60, 70% carbohydrate diet with snacks. And they study those guys

who aren't chronically adapted to this stuff. And this is a lot of times we see this is they'll say, they do better with a small dose of protein. And this is where all these studies, and they're starting to show that it's not necessarily true. You can eat a whole bunch of protein in one sitting. You can feast like you and I, or we've been doing, and you're absorbing more than the 30 grams that was once gone out there. Yeah, there's that bullshit limits that-

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint. Do we think that prehistoric man was running around with Tupperware bowls, eating 30 grams of protein in a bowl? Six meals a day. Six to eight meals a day, every hour and a half, they'd piece off to the side to make a meal. It's just not realistic. I mean, think about if you're out in the woods and, you know, I mean, even if you're going to cook it, you know, cooking is about 400,000 years old. And even after we invented cooking,

a lot of people still didn't cook. So they ate the stuff raw, which is a different topic. But so you think about how inconvenient it would be to have to light a fire every two hours. I mean, this is not practical. And so we were designed back then, and we can look at like, you know, we'll talk to like competitive eaters. Like there's a guy named Molly Schuyler, right? I don't know if you know who she is. So she is a female, weighs about 120

pounds. Her record for one meal of meat, 22 and a half pounds. Good God. And she weighs 120 pounds. So she as a human being can eat 22 and a half pounds. By the way, it's about the same as what a wolf can do. A wolf can pack down about 22 pounds, about 140 pound wolf. So humans have that capacity. If we look back, like even the Mongolian societies where they would routinely eat 10 pounds in one sitting and they may not eat for two or three days. I mean, that is how, that's not how we're used to doing it now because we have food every time we turn around, there's snacking everywhere. But if we look on the human spectrum, humans have survived by feasting and then fasting. I mean, that's, and I think that sort of goes what we're learning about autophagy and some of the fasting protocols.

And so I like to use intermittent feasting as, you know, just eat until you're totally full. And then when you're hungry, you're going to eat again. It's very simple. And if you think about it, why do we make nutrition so complicated? I mean, there's not any other animal in the world out in the wild that has to have an app or a micronutrient calculator. Just freaking eat, man. It's like my dog. I mean, I don't give my dog a menu and say, what would you like today?

Here's your food. You don't snap a photo of his dog bowl and say, well well this is clearly 400 calories and your output for the day was 350 and you know they'll eat until like like that's why a lot of them will gorge because they don't know when the next meal is coming so they just eat eat eat until they get the next meal and food so like when you go to africa like i was in the serengeti oh back in 2000 and uh you know you can walk you can literally walk up to these lions if they've got blood on their face, because they've had a fresh kill and they don't want to mess with you. I mean, you see little zebras just walking right by,

like they don't care, because they know that this is their eating cycle. And then if they're hungry, you better watch out. So I think, again, there's a sort of thought that humans aren't animals. And I would say, yeah, we're pretty mar. We're probably pretty savage animals. We were very effective hunters. And we go back, and this is a neat thing. If you look at

what the anthropologists, you know, we all know there's cave paintings of bison and, you know, all these, all these megafaunal animals. And if we go back even before we were Homo sapiens, if we go back to time of Homo erectus, and again, this, this presumes that you believe in evolution. There's people out there that flat earth and create you know i don't know i mean i don't know but i mean you know but like i said some odd beliefs you know so you get in all that's the funny thing with this diet because diet affects everything so you get wackos from all over the place i got people that are like you know that we get these people that are like nazi guys that like it there's people that are you know flat earth people that like it there's people that don't believe in any climate change you know

there's all kinds of things. I'm like, I don't know, man. All I care about is just eat a damn steak, right? So, but if we go back to like this, you know, this Homo erectus stuff and we find out what they lived on, basically were these, you know, mostly mammoths, mastodon, elephants. And they, I mean, it's surprising. I put a video up on these guys taking down an elephant. And it's surprisingly easy for a human being on these guys taking down an elephant and it's surprisingly easy for a human being with a spear to kill an elephant. I mean, because, you know, when you go, if you go

to Africa and you, you know, pull up on a, on a, on a, you know, herd of elephants, they don't run away. They just turn, they're big. They look at you and say, what you going to do, motherfucker? They just stand there and look at you, right? And so human beings figured out that they, you know, they could just isolate one of these animals, get them in a, in a vulnerable spot. They don't run away. They use their powerful shoulders, which is what we adapt. That's why we can throw a baseball 95 miles an hour because, and back then, as we talked about,

humans were stronger back then too. So they might even put these guys to shame. Maybe they're throwing even harder. So it's very easy for them to kill those animals. And it showed that whenever they wanted to, there's a nice study, I think it was a 2016 study animals. And it showed that whenever they wanted to, there's a nice study, I think it was a 2016 study out of Tel Aviv, whenever they wanted to, humans could take down an elephant.

So they probably had unlimited fatty meat to live on. You know, and this is in certain parts of the world. So it's like, is that part of our history? Does it make sense? You know, if we wanna say that, you know, not snacking continuously and maybe being in ketosis is a good thing, then I think about what are the reasonable ways human beings could have done that? It wasn't drinking MCT oil.

They weren't eating avocados. They weren't figuring out how to get 80% to 90% fat in their diet. Well, I mean, you know, like I said, just eat a big animal. And that's the thing when we talk about like a lot of, this is the interesting thing because when you look at modern indigenous tribes like the Hadza and some of these other tribes, you're looking at a different subset of people because they have a different selection of food to eat from, from back when we had back then.

So once the megafaunal animals died off and we can debate whether it was climate change or some giant asteroid or human overhunting, it's probably a combination of both. Once those animals died off, 25,000, maybe 15,000 years ago, we're like, what are we going to eat now? So we had to change different strategies. And that's why, you know, like if you look at a wild animal, everybody says, well, look at a lion. They'll go for the organs first, right? They'll rip up. So everybody's got to eat liver and everybody's got to eat a bunch of intestines and stuff like that. The reasons they do that is because the animals they're eating, the zebras, the wildebeest, they're very lean animals by comparison. And so they know they got to get

enough fat. I mean, protein is very easy to get when you're a carnivore. Protein is not hard. I mean, any animal's got a bunch of protein. That's why people, they get rabbit starvation if they're lean and they only eat rabbits. So you've got to get fat. So that was a puzzle piece. How do you get enough fat? And humans solved that initially by hunting these big fatty animals, okay? Then when that ran out, then they started, now they're doing more fat-seeking behavior. They're going for more organ meats.

They're breaking bones to get the marrow. They're eating the brains. And then when that became less of an option, they still got to get energy. So then it's like, now we got to use carbohydrate sources. So now we can harvest some of the starch. Maybe cooking allows us to access some of that. Fruit, obviously, fruit's been around for a while.

I have no doubt that humans would have eaten fruit when available. But again, is it available year-round in every location in the world? How do you get from Central Africa to Greenland? Or how do you get from Central Africa to the Bering Strait and, you know, into North America? You don't get there by eating bananas. I mean, this wasn't going to happen. So, again, the thing they had all the time was some sort of animal. And they followed these animal herds, hunting them with ease, killing them without problem.

And that's how we survived. Yeah. You talked about Weston A. Price on one of the podcasts as a guy that's, you know, for people I've mentioned him before on the podcast, dentist, I think in the 1930s, traveled the globe, looking around at different indigenous peoples. And if you found that they ate something closer to the natural diet and it wasn't westernized, then they had perfect teeth, perfect health. A lot of them didn't have words for cancer or heart disease in their language because it didn't exist. And the second they had been introduced to,

you know, refined flours, sugars, things of that nature, dairy products, they would quickly, generation by generation, get teeth coming in on top of one another, you know, start to have cancer and diabetes and a lot of the things that we see today. And obviously it's very hard, you know, you spoke about language barriers and things of that nature, but it makes sense. And one thing that makes sense too is food availability. If you live closer to the equator, and before we jumped on the podcast, we were talking about Mayan culture typically being, you know, in that five foot, five foot two range for men and, you know, in the four foot level for women, closer to the equator, you have more carbohydrates seasonally foot level for women, closer to the equator,

you have more carbohydrates seasonally available pretty much year round. There's not big temperature swings and much smaller prey. You know, you've got birds and fish and things like that, that they might eat. And then as you get closer to the poles, far less carbohydrates and much bigger animals, much fattier animals, right? So I think it's pretty hard now, even if you do your genetic testing to figure out like, well, mom's German and dad's Irish and I'm both. So that means I should eat this and this. And it's like, no, I mean, if you have five fucking siblings, every one of you will take something different from your parents, right? But across the board, if you look at this, what are the commonalities? we do break down meat very well and very easily. And it's far less problematic than people think it is.

Talk a bit about cancer research has come out because, you know, Joel Kahn was on your podcast and he was on Rogan's with Chris Kresser. Everyone brings up the colon cancer thing. Everyone brings that up. Everyone's talking about, well, can't wait to see your ass fall out. I mean, like we had Chris Bell on the podcast and Mark Bell said, you don't really need fiber. It's not an essential nutrient. And I was telling you yesterday, 200 plus comments came on just to fucking rip them a new one. And one of them literally was, I can't wait for your asshole to fall out. It was like, well, I don't think that's exactly what's going on here. Yeah. So, I mean, just to the early comment, you know, it is, you know, a proxy measure for nutritional adequacy is population health.

And so we know that people, that populations that tend to be small tend to have just less adequate nutrition. And we see that, you know, and I guess you could argue that evolutionary, the people that were, you know, located, you know, like Southeast Asia, were probably, they had more access to fruits and carbohydrate-containing foods, tended to be smaller in general compared to people that were in normal climates. We talk about the Gravedians, the tallest people that ever lived, likely six foot two at 30,000 years ago, which is, you know, if that estimate's correct, that's the tallest population that's ever been around. But as far as, you know, red meat and cancer, you cancer, it's an interesting thing. There's a guy named Klerfeld who was on the committee. So the IRC, which is part of the World Health Organization, or not, yeah, they use those guys to make that determination. And he went through that process

and said it was the most frustrating process I've ever been on because about a third of the members of that panel were vegetarian, by the way, that made this decision. They looked at 800 epidemiologic studies and he said they threw out all of them, but about 18 that supported their conclusion. There was like hundreds of studies that did not support their conclusion. You know, they use a couple rat studies to look at mechanism, but they never really demonstrate that. And the risk, like Chris Kresser pointed out, the, you know, so let's just put this in real terms and real numbers. Just a generic human today has about a 4.5% chance of getting colon cancer, which is not small. I mean, that's a pretty decent amount. It's one of the leading causes of human death among cancer

deaths, you know, behind things like lung cancer, breast cancer. So, but if you listen to their information, they say, well, if you eat a bunch of red meat or processed meat, it's going to raise that risk from 4.5% to 5.5%. So it's going to change the risk by 1%, which really is not a whole lot. And again, that's assuming you believe the epidemiology. So when we look at things that raise our risk, and so that's a relative risk of about 17%. So it's not until you get to about a doubling or a 200% increase in risk, is there any real thing that you can say, this may be something there. So most people that understand epidemiology say you can't even draw, it could be anything. It could be healthy user bias, which we talk about. Maybe the meat eaters also like to eat French fries cooked in vegetable oils

and they like Coca-Cola. Yeah, they got a 40-ounce sugar drink next to them. And they don't wear their seatbelt and they don't go to the doctor and they don't do healthy behaviors. And so we clearly know that. So even if you believe that's true. So let's just say, okay, you've got a 17. If you and I eat a bunch of steak every day, and let's just assume our risk for colon cancer, and believe me, there's lots of other cancers out there where there's no effect. Let's just say that it's a 70% risk and we accept that. Okay, so let's talk about what other things

cause you to increase your risk for colon cancer. Obesity. If you have a lot of central obesity and you're fat, your risk goes up about 300% or 400%. So now you've got 17% versus 300%, 400%. So what happens to guys that eat only a bunch of meat? Well, you can tell me what happened to you. You get leaner.

You lose that body fat. So, okay, you've got one risk factor that says 400% versus 17%. Let's look at things like irritable bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome. There's so many people that have this. Irritable bowel syndrome affects about 15% of the people in the U.S. right now. It's probably even underdiagnosed. There's probably even more. And irritable bowel disease, which would be Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis,

raise your risk for cancer like 3,200 times. So when you get rid of those things, which is also what we're seeing on a meat-only diet, again, where do you draw the line? And the same thing, there's an interesting fact out there that if you have low cholesterol, your risk for colon cancer goes up as well. So again, we look at all these things and say, is it one isolated variable? If I eat a bunch of meat and it raises my risk by 17% because red meat on the epidemiology study shows that, but if I get leaner, if my, the other thing, insulin,

if my insulin gets better, decreases my risk by three or 400% as well. If I get leaner, you know, if I don't have irritable bowel syndrome, all those things dramatically lower it. So we have to balance everything out and say, well, what's the, what's the net effect here? And I think that's what we're seeing. But, you know, honestly, if we look at how protein is digested,

or not protein, meat is digested, we are, I mean, that's why we have, we have a gastric pH of 1.1 to 1.5 based on almost any study you see that. And you can do it, if you do a comparative anatomy on other animals, the animals that have the lowest pH in the wild that approximate humans are things like vultures and hyenas

because they were scavenger animals. And the reason humans probably, you know, at some point of all, you know, initially scavenging, you know, we would maybe follow these big saber tooth cats, which were running around back then, or other lions, find a kill, you know, the meat may have been sitting out for six, eight hours, and then we would go in there and eat it,

and it would be spoiled, or there'd be some bacteria on it. That's why we started developing the low pH because the animals that had the low pH could protect themselves from infection. The ones that couldn't, didn't do so well. That's how natural selection works. And so we developed a super acidic stomach. If you don't believe me, throw up and let your acid burn your skin because you will, but it's clearly known. So we have this, we have all these peptide hormones. We've got trypsins and chymotrypsins and all these different proteases designed for doing that,

but we have specific transporters. It used to be thought that we would only absorb individual amino acids. We'd break it down and we'd see individual amino acids, but it turns out we have diantrite peptide transporters for things like carnosine, carnitine, which are exclusively sound to meat. We have specific transporters for those things in our gut. So that shows us we are very well designed for that. And in fact, the myth is out there that meat's going to rot in your colon. That doesn't happen at all.

We know from ileostomy patients. So the patients have had their colons removed and you can see what comes out their small intestine. When you feed them meat, almost nothing goes out. That's why this myth about constipation occurs, because you don't waste your food. When you're eating a high-fiber diet, 80% of the food you eat just goes back into the toilet. So it's just like you're just running it through and not getting any nutrition out of it. In the United States, we waste about 40% of our food. It goes in a landfill.

And most of that's fruits, vegetables, and baked goods. So you waste all that food. You produce all this food. We waste it all. And then we eat all this high-fiber food, and it goes in the toilet. So it's not a very efficient system, right? We look at gorillas. People say that humans are primates.

We should eat like primates. Gorillas spend 80% of their waking hours eating, chewing. Chimpanzees spend about 60% of their waking hours chewing. Humans, at least ones from the archeologic records, they estimate spend about 4% of their time chewing. So what's the difference there in diet? It's nutritional quality. And so when you're eating a high fiber,

nutrient poor diet, you gotta chew, chew, chew, chew all day long. Another thing that gorillas do is just kind of discussing some of the coprophagia. They eat their own crap, right? Because they have to recycle it, you know, because they can't get enough nutrition from it. So if you want to say we should eat like other primates, then we got to chew 80% of our day and eat crap, which doesn't to me sound like a very effective nutritional strategy, and it's not.

But yeah, so when you look at people that, you know, have, have meat in their diet and they, and they digest it, only a small amount gets, gets out of the small intestine. And that's one of the issues with diarrhea is you, you end up with a small amount of liquid instead of a really large fibrous, you know, solid cell itself. So that gets into your colon. And so now the colon's job, like when you're a baby, right? You didn't eat fiber. I mean, you know, you're drinking breast milk, most likely a formula for some kids.

There's no, I mean, some people argue that oligosaccharides do that, but it's not a plant fiber. I mean, so babies can turn liquid into solid. I mean, that's what babies do. So when you, then you get on a diet where now you've included all this plant fiber in your diet. Now your colon is like a fat out of shape athlete, right? It doesn't have to absorb as much fluid because it's seeing a lot of solid now and the fiber's binding up all that fluid.

But when you go on an all-meat diet, all of a sudden, now you've got all this liquid entering your colon and no fiber. So now your colon's like, crap, I've got to use to reabsorb this. And that's why a lot of people will take several weeks. I know you experienced several weeks where they have loose bowel movements. And then as that colon gets more efficient at reabsorbing fluid and electrolytes, that tends to go away. So, yeah, but I mean, when you think about diverticulitis, a lot of people talk about red meats associated with diverticulitis. Again, all these associational epidemiology studies are just based on the fact that people that eat meat just don't give a fuck, right? We talked about it in the car.

If you eat meat, you're more likely to smoke. You're more likely not to exercise. You're more likely to drink alcohol. You're more likely to not wear your seatbelt. You're more likely not to go to the doctor. So all this healthy user bias stuff sort of falls into that category. But when you actually look at the physiology, when you're eating meat, nothing but liquid goes in there. And so there was a nice study that Dr. Peary did in, I think, 2012.

Her name's Alice Peary. You can look that up. Looking at fiber intake and diverticular disease. And she did, I think it was like 2,000 colonoscopies. The people that ate the most fiber and had the most bowel movements had the highest rate of diverticular disease. So it's like the total opposite. So anytime you test these epidemiology studies, and John Anaitis out of Stanford, one of the most well-respected and quoted researchers in the world, has gone on to say that nutritional epidemiology is completely misguided. And that's where 80% of our nutritional knowledge comes from

is these epidemiology studies. And when you test those, and they've done that where they've tested those, they've taken these nutritional epidemiology tests and they've actually done randomized control trials. And guess what percentage of them actually lined up? Zero percent. Not a single epidemiologic study was shown to be true

based on a randomized control trial. So again, you have to say, where is our data coming from? So my argument would be is we really don't know. I mean, we've got these assumptions we've made. If we go back to the creation of the American Dietetics Association, 1914, 1917, that organization was created by Seventh-day Adventists that were vegetarian-lady. And so we've got this sort of belief that we should all be on a plant-based diet from the very beginning, since 1917, so for 100-plus years now. So again, it's-

And you have subsidies for modern agriculture and things of that nature, and how do we feed starving populations and worry about that shit? And then when you have a big push for that, and we see all sorts of problems with the environment now with monocropping and agriculture, big agriculture, what does that do? It leads us to nutrient devoid food. And a lot of these things, even if they're not, you know, we talked about the vertical diet with Stan Efferding that, and I think it works for a lot of people. White rice is the least problematic of grains because it's not going to have a lot of phytic acid and a lot of the other things that are problematic for people. But at the same time, there's nothing in it other than carbohydrates.

There's no vitamins and minerals. Your body's not absorbing anything outside the carbohydrates with that, right? And that's the least problematic. When you talk about corn, wheat, and a lot of these things, it's an issue. Even if you don't think you have a gluten intolerance, most of those are genetically modified and that's only for the purpose of using more glyphosate, which is a known carcinogen. All these things that we put in our body, if that's the bulk of our food, that's a fucking problem.

And if you think about what we waste in the toilet, it's the same. What we put in our bodies has a huge impact on our bodies. And if we're putting in stuff that is not leaving us more whole and it's taking more work to move it through our body, that's where we start to see chronic illness. No, absolutely. I mean, it is, you know, there's a recent study talking about, you know, there's protein digestibility looking at comparing plant-based proteins to animal-based proteins. And we look at something called the digestibility index of indispensable amino acids, something along those lines.

They look at that and they see that when you compare these plant-based proteins, the viability is much lower, their digestibility is much lower. And the only thing that kind of approaches like whey protein is soy protein when you look at it from just a digestibility standpoint. But at the same time, soy has phytic acid, which we talked about. It has trypsin inhibitors, which again, trypsin is an enzyme that digests protein. So it leads to less digestibility. So you need more of that. You have to eat much more protein on a vegetarian-based diet to get the same amount of nutrition you will from an animal-sourced diet. And that's the thing.

When we look at these environmental footprints, we can make a lot of calories and feed people calories. That's not hard. And in fact, the best crop, the best way to do that is basically sugar, whether it's sugar cane or beets or something like that. That is the most efficient way to get lots of people calories. And so we export that around the world and grains are right up there. And so you can get a lot of people a lot of calories.

You can't get them a lot of nutrition. So we take, you know, animals out of the equation, which some people want to. You can feed a lot of people and they won't starve to death, but they're going to end up just what we see all the time, either malnourished or if they eat too much of it, just fat, obese. And in my argument, obesity is still malnourishment. It's an undernourishment.

You've got an overabundance of calories. No doubt. But you don't have enough protein. You don't have enough nutrition. You don't have enough minerals and vitamins. And so- We had Max Lugavere on the show. Sorry to cut you off.

Max Lugavere was talking about, even if you're thin, if you're putting shit in your body and you're doing like a if it fits your macro style diet where you're loading up on the right number of donuts each day because it's still under your total calorie output absolute bullshit he's like you you might look thin on the outside but you're metabolically obese your body is fucking up on the inside there is there are levels of health right and we know this from a performance standpoint. Obviously, you try to go have a PR in the gym on donuts versus

on some good meat, having steak, like you talked about the old fighters and boxers and Mongols all loading up on meat before they go into battle. There's a clear-cut difference in performance there. And there's no mistake about that. How the body responds to the nutrition you put in, you see that on all levels, but especially in the performance era. Yeah, no, I mean, that is, I mean, again, I know there's people that they really like eating. And I like eating those foods.

I like donuts. I like cheesecake. I like those things. I mean, they taste good. They're designed to taste good. But again, nutritionally, they're devoid of really anything other than some hedonistic pleasure that you might get from

eating those things. But if you think about long-term, these guys that do the Twinkie diet, where they keep their calories under whatever, and they make sure they hit protein. Long-term, that's going to be a problem. I don't care who you are. I mean, if we just look at the modern diet, I mean, what has been added to our system? I think vegetable oils are garbage. I mean, the stuff that was invented in the late 1800s you know it's interesting the the history behind that is you know eli whitney invented you know we all learn eli whitney invented the cotton gin and whatever 18 whatever uh and that's all thing that's a great thing we can do this cotton then they had all this extra cotton seed and cotton seed oil they didn't know what to do it so it was an industrial

lubricant and that's what they used for a while and And then somebody figured out how to hydrogenate this stuff, a German researcher, right? I forget the guy's name. And they were like, wait a minute, this is just like lard. And so they replaced lard, which would have been a staple for cooking for thousands of years in the human diet, lard and other tallow and other animal fats. So we introduced that into the human diet around late 1800s, early 1900s.

And then guess what? This chronic disease epidemic starts to appear. Is that directly related? I don't know for sure, but it's pretty suspicious. The other things we've entered, you know, high fructose corn syrup, sucrose wasn't something we had a lot of access to. And that's why I talk about dextrose,

because if we look at some of these populations, a lot of people will use, people like Japan, will use Japanese and Asian people eat a lot of white rice. Right? That's glucose. It's not sucrose. I mean, it's basically, it's basically starch, which is glucose. And I think we have a better tolerance for that. And again, if it doesn't jack up your guts,

because I think a lot of these different compounds that are in there, we can say that, you know, all vegetables are great and good and there's people that believe that. But I mean, I think you have to be more sophisticated in that you can say it has some compounds that we might need, but it also has some things that we may not do well with. Oxalates are a perfect example. If you eat a bunch of

spinach and eat a bunch of oxalates, if you eat enough, you can fry your kidneys. Now, it's not like most people are eating 20 cups of spinach a day, but I mean, even in low doses, if you eat a lot of it, it might be an issue for you. It might be a gut issue because oxalates perform crystals, which can be very irritating to the gut lining. And so we have to be, you know, a little bit more, you know, circumspect when we look at, you know, when we're recommending certain foods as to how they tolerate different people. Yeah. And how often is that, right? If I have kale once a week, my body might treat that as a hormetic stressor and bounce back from that even stronger. But if I'm having, you know, a Joe Rogan kale

shake every morning, fucking seven days a week, that for some people is going to be a huge issue. And I think that's one of the most fascinating things that we see with the carnivore diet. Jordan Peterson's daughter has been on it and been a huge trailblazer for that as far as her draw. She's a popular person. People know who the fuck she is, and it's getting a lot of people to pay attention. But so many people have autoimmune disease. So many people have things that are going wrong internally, and they see complete turnarounds in their health and wellness. And being able to get off all these fucked up medications that they're prescribed for inflammation, like prednisone and just nasty stuff that has a lot of side effects. Yeah. I mean, that's very interesting. You know, when we talk

about, one thing I know Joe talked about is kale shakes and how when he takes a shake, it goes right through him. He goes, crap. Well, I think, well, maybe because your body doesn't like that, it's trying to get rid of the crap, you know? You can make that argument, right? But, you know, this is interesting stuff. When we talk about autoimmune disease, and there's a lot of other illnesses that go into it, autoimmune diseases probably affect us more than we know, this is interesting stuff. When we talk about autoimmune disease, and there's a lot of other illnesses that go into it, autoimmune diseases probably affect us more than we know, and probably some of the mental health diseases. Some people argue are autoimmune diseases like depression and anxiety and some of that stuff.

But there's some good evidence now showing that that may be related to gut permeability. And so with leaky gut, there's a group out of Hungary called the Paleo-Medicina Group that's done a lot of research on all-o Medicina Groups and a lot of research on all meat diets. They've got thousands of patients they've run through this now. And what they're seeing is certain foods tend to promote leaky gut, right?

And so if we look at some of the things they talk about, some of the things like some of the sweeteners and sugar, some of the, you know, like nightshade vegetables, things like glutens and grains do that. Some of the leg you know, like nightshade vegetables, things like glutens and grains do that. Some of the legumes do that. Dairy can do that for some people. Some medications like, you know, antibiotics. So when you have this leaky gut situation,

you know, we have foreign compounds that aren't supposed to get through, get through, and then we have a reaction to that. So that's probably the basis for that. I know Alessandro, I forget the research name, but Faisano, Alex Faisano, Alessandro Faisano, up in, I think he's up in Boston somewhere. He's done a lot of research around there

showing that he thinks that autoimmune disease is a leaky gut problem. And there's pretty good evidence of that. But the group in Hungary is showing that people, when they go on an all-meat, and they have a ketogenic, they keep it fairly fatty. When they do that and they measure leaky gut through something called polyethylene glycol,

so you swallow some polyethylene glycol, and then you can see what you excrete, and then you can estimate what your gut permeability is. And it's a pretty well-recognized measure of that. And they see that when people go on a meat-based diet, their leaky gut resolves, usually within about two weeks for most people. And they also see when, because they treat a lot of these autoimmune diseases like I've seen all

over the place, is they see that markers of inflammation, tumor necrosis factor alpha, interleukin-6, and some of the other markers of inflammation also plummet. At the same time, the autoimmune symptoms go away. So this is pretty compelling evidence that at least from a, you know, maybe not causative factor, but how do I fix this problem? And this may be why people say, well, caromal production, elimination diet. Sure it is, of course.

Eliminate poison, that's a no brainer. You know, Chris Krister called it a form of fasting. And I was like, yes. And there's all the science coming out on fasting. This is awesome, it works. Right, but it's fasting, but you get nutrition, right? And so instead of calling it a fasting-mimetic diet, there's data out there showing that if you look at zero-carb

or carnivorous diets, looking at insulin and glucose level, it's very close to what you see at fasting. It's not quite as powerful as fasting, but at the same time, you can't fast your whole life. You've got to eat something, right? Yeah. So if you've got one of these diseases and you're really, you know, and it can

be very disabling. I mean, there's plenty of people out there and more and more all the time. This is a very effective strategy to not only fix that issue, you know, but also get you good nutrition. And then there's other benefits beyond that as far as retaining lean muscle mass, performance. And, you know, we've talked, we can talk a little bit about that stuff. I mean, there's all kinds of, you know, look at creatine, right? Creatine is, you know we've talked we can talk a little about that stuff i mean there's all kinds of you know look at creatine right creatine is you know if we look at supplements out there and i know you guys do supplements but if we look at supplements that have a really good history of actually rigorously working creatine is one of them right it's probably the best research supplement that works across the board right and where do you get creatine from from freaking red

meat that's what is in there so i mean you see these, I like to see all these new supplements come out, like collagen peptides. Where do you get collagen? It's frigging in a steak. You know, so all these things that seem to have a benefit for us, you know, carnison, carnitine, it's just in a damn steak.

And so, I mean, I think, and I'll touch on this because I know at Onnit you guys do supplements. So I think from a supplement standpoint, we have to think about normal human health and then getting behind that. Now we talk about performance. Do supplements have a role in performance? And that's where I think certain

plant compounds, maybe glucose. I think from my view, the most effective use of plant food and carbohydrate is just glucose. I mean, I think that is, you're not getting, you know, you can argue there's different micronutrients and stuff like that. I can tell you from living for two years without that, I'm not dying. I'm not dying from some micronutrient deficiency. Your blood work looks phenomenal too. Well, I mean, and again, blood work is, there's one metric, but the more important things I think

are, let's look at chronically what's going on. I had my heart scan done, my coronary artery calcium scan, perfect zero, no disease of atherosclerotic disease there. And so, but again, you can say, well, there's, you know, this and that phytochemical, there's no essential requirement for that. If there were an essential requirement for phytochemical,

we would all have died as human beings. We could not have gotten from point A to point B from Africa to, you know, North America, if we had to eat avocados, you know, or if we had to eat blueberries or we had to have broccoli sprouts, we would have never, you know, broccoli is only a couple hundred years old. And, you know, it's a few thousand years old in certain places of the world, but most of the world was only a few hundred years ago. So if we were saying you have to eat broccoli and leafy green

vegetables to survive, humans would have never survived. Let's think about, you know, think about it from a, from a, just a common sense standpoint. If you're a wild animal, like a wild human, let's say we're wild humans, and our goal is to survive and eat and get energy, you're not going to eat leaves, right? You're just not going to eat them because, one, there's no calories in them. Two, they don't taste very good. They're very bitter. And most of them are toxic anyway. So we wouldn't have pursued that as a strategy. Now, we might have eaten fruit.

We could talk about fruit is going to be sweet. It tastes good. There's going to be some sugar in there. Also looked much different than 100, 200 years ago. Much different. Right. And again, if we look at foraging strategies, the amount of energy, and Mickey Bendora is an anthropologist. He kind of talks about this. We had him on our podcast. We look at how much energy do you have to devote to get calories from gathering some fruits, maybe some starch, versus going out and killing a big mammoth, which has 3 million calories. It's kind of interesting. The mammoths back then were about three times the size of a

normal elephant. I mean, that's a lot of meat, right? So you got to spend maybe a day hunting, one day hunting. You've got food for arguably, it depends how big of a population you're in, but 12 humans probably were clustered around a dozen to 20 people. So you've got food for arguably, it depends how big of a population you're in, but 12 humans probably were clustered around a dozen to 20 people. So you've got this 20 guys can eat for several months on a three million calorie elephant. And so you can contrast that to some berries that you've got to compete with the birds

and all these other animals that are doing that. It's only going to be seasonal. So how much of that nutrition do you think you could have gotten if you had to rely on that? If we were saying that is essential for human nutrition, it's pretty hard to make an argument that humans could have lived in Ice Age Europe. the first humans evolved was when ice age started. And for most of that time, we were going through mostly ice age. And so the climate change is not tropical. It's not Costa Rica. It's not bananas and mangoes everywhere. It's grasslands. And there's not a lot of food in the grasslands. It's animal that's protein-based or not protein-based, it's plant-based,

but there are big ruminant animals. And so that's kind of the strategy we utilized. Hell yeah. Talk a little bit about the microbiome because that's a huge topic everyone discusses. I brought this up. We had a guy, Afif Ghanoum, who runs a company biome with his father. Excellent source of information. And, you know, he even admitted like, look, this is what we look at in terms of what we would call a healthy microbiome. Largely has to do with when we study healthy populations. And I brought up the point, like you can't look at a healthy tribe in Africa and say, these guys have, you know, no incidents of, you know, similar to Weston A. Price. I can't look at that and say, they don't have cancer. They don't have heart disease. They don't have

fill in the blank and they eat a certain way. And their microbiome happens to look like this. So we need to eat exactly what they eat. We need to be outdoors in the dirt. Like sure, all those things will probably be healthy to some extent if we were designed genetically to eat that way. But most people in America are not. There's a lot of European and Northern European ancestry there. And if you're a mixed white mutt like I am, you probably do better eating some animals, right? And one of the things you get, I mean, I'll touch on this genetic stuff before I get back to the microbiome that I find interesting. And I've talked about this with Dr. Anthony Gustin and on a number of other shows is that doing my genetic report and having it run through Dr.

Rhonda Patrick's thing, she'll take it and see whatever snippets look like really important. And I cannot take vitamin A from a plant like sweet potato or carrot and turn it into actual usable vitamin A. I can't take ALA, omega-3 from flax or chia and convert that into DHA and EPA, which are the necessary omega-3s for brain health. I can't do that. It has to come from an animal source. It has to come from egg yolk. It has to come from liver. It has to come from red meat. And knowing that really gives me an idea of how to make the best possible decisions around my diet. But I would venture to say that I think it's at least 50% of the population physically can't take most plant materials and turn it into usable nutrients.

There's that. There is this other component of the microbiome, which there was a study that recently came out that discussed in a ketogenic diet, how much GABA is created in the gut. And you've mentioned before that whatever you're doing, lifestyle, workout, sunlight, all these things impact the microbiome on a very quick scale, like on a daily scale, it'll shift, right? But if you're eating ketogenic or you're eating carnivore, you're going to produce more GABA. And they think that's one of the reasons why it would help with drug-resistant epilepsy in children. GABA being a neurotransmitter that's responsible for rest and digest, calm, sleep, things like that.

So if we can shift to that state and we maybe don't have the variety, because everyone says you need to have a big variety of microbiota in the body and that's what's healthy. Maybe not. You know, I found that when I was in ketosis for an extended period of time, it shifted very much to a fat eating and absorbing microbiome. And I had very few of what people would consider healthy microbiome. From a performance standpoint, felt the best I've ever felt in my life. From a cognitive standpoint, felt the best I've ever felt in my life.

From a cognitive standpoint, felt the best I've ever felt in my life. And I still had good poops. So looking at those factors and knowing like my overall anxiety was less, my stress was down, all those things, or if my inflammation was for damn sure down,

you know, like all these old injuries that had been around from fighting and football since I was 10, just vanished. So, I mean, where do we see this? Because that's a big argument people have is like, what about the microbiome? And, you know, I think new science is starting to show that maybe isn't what we think it is. Yeah. I mean, obviously that's kind of a new hot topic. And anytime we get something new, everybody, you know, it ends up with, you know, we discover a little bit of science.

We make a lot of sales based on this stuff because we don't know yet. But really, one of the thoughts is, we'll talk about this. A lot of people are saying fasting is really good, right? Fasting, everybody that's really behind fasting, what does fasting do to the microbiome? What does fasting do to those fiber-loving bacteria when you don't feed them anything? Well, guess what? They die off, right? And it happens within hours.

This is, the microbiome shifts on an hourly basis, basically. So, I mean, the temperature, the time of the year, your sex, your age, your exercise, your sleep, like you talk about, all these things have an acute impact on the microbiome.

And so it's a very complicated system. We assume that a certain amount of diversity is good and necessary. Again, this is based on looking at tribes like the Hadza. We assume that a certain amount of diversity is good and necessary. Again, this is based on looking at tribes like the Hadza. We say, okay, well, these guys are healthy and they've got a pretty diverse microbiome. Therefore, all human beings on the planet need to have it. That's an assumption that's never been tested. It's never been proven.

So I don't think we are anywhere close to saying you need to have X bacteria in this concentration to do that. Additionally, there's some recent studies that have come out looking at things around probiotics, but what they're finding is when they do stool samples to test your microbiome, like you send a stool sample off the biome or you biome, and they'll say, well, you got this, this, and this. We know that many of the times you send two stool samples, it'll be very different.

The other thing we'll see is they just saw where they actually took biopsies of the gastrointestinal tract and compared it to the stool samples and they found they didn't even correlate. So we don't even know. I mean, it's such a guess. It's such a shot in the dark. And so the thing about, you know, one of the reasons we want to eat this fiber is because, you know, our body will, the microbiomes in our colon will convert that fiber into short-chain fatty acids, things like butyric acid, and that will somehow nourish those enterocytes, the cells that line the colon. Well, guess what? Those short-chain fatty acids are converted into ketones,

and those ketones are what's potentially doing the help. Well, guess what? If you go on a ketogenic diet, those cells get ketones anyway. So it's like it doesn't matter how you get it there. So again, it's something that we are making assumptions based on very little data. We've been studying cholesterol for over 100 years, and we still haven't figured it out yet. And this microbiome, which is orders of magnitude more complicated, I mean, there's billions of different cells of different species.

We're going to sit there and say, yeah, we solved it. This is what you got to have. I'm calling BS on that. We don't know yet. And I think, you know, we had a good research, Paul Mason, Dr. Paul Mason from Australia. Very nice talk about this. And the same thing, the short chain fatty acids are made if you're on a ketogenic, you know, the benefits from that are made the same if you're on a ketogenic cell diet. So a carnivorous diet, as you probably found out, will produce ketones. So I don't think it's an issue. Yeah, that was another interesting fact.

I mean, I only did the diet for 17 days. I do want to run it back. I ended up stopping because of a rash that I got that went away when I stopped. Keto rash is fairly common among some people. I never experienced that in ketosis, but experienced it in the carnivore. What I noticed, I mean, that was the only con. That's why I threw in the towel. There were many pros, one of which was my energy levels were sustained throughout the day from the fucking jump, from day one. And that might've been placebo,

but I felt better on the very first day from a mental standpoint, cognitive function, energy throughout the day, my ability to not have the mid-afternoon lull that so many people experience. And I never experienced any keto flu or drop, you know, and I haven't experienced keto flu often when I've dropped into ketosis, but every now and then I will, if it's been a, you know, particularly a longer period without being in ketosis. And that didn't exist on carnivore. Also, I was purposely trying to push myself into more glycolytic states. And I, this is within 17 days. This is not, you know, we talked about that with some of the failures of ketogenic studies being only two or three weeks long. And we've seen now with longer term studies coming out, how much the body adapts and

changes with that. No doubt that would be the same with carnivore. But just in that short period of time, I could blast through one minute skier all out, you know, and do multiple rounds of that and just crush my body. And there never was like a, oh fuck man, I hit the wall, you know? And I've experienced that with the ketogenic diet before, but as you alluded to on Rogan's and Rob Wolf's, maybe the fact that we have gluconeogenesis, that that might be the most efficient way to carb up because we're never going to get more than we need, right? The body is very intelligent in how many carbohydrates it needs. It's not like you eat protein and a certain percentage of that is going to get converted into glycogen. It doesn't work that way. It takes what it needs. And then from there you're topped off, but you're not overdoing any

of these things that are so problematic for people. Yeah. That's, that's something as a good point. You know, glucose is important. We need glucose in our blood. I mean, we, we, we, it's not to say we don't need that, but the nice thing about it is we want to be able to regulate it very tightly. And so that's the thing about when you make your own, when your body makes your own, it's demand-driven. I mean, this is pretty well demonstrated by anybody that's been on these diets. You can sit there and eat, you know, 200 grams of protein. You know, like we ate last night, you and I had about, what, two and a half pounds of steak each, right? That's a couple hundred grams of protein. If you take your blood glucose right after that,

it's probably going to bump very minimally. You know, it's not because it's just turning it all into, like some people say, chocolate cake, right? It doesn't do that. And so at worst case scenario, your body will say you've got too much protein. We'll get rid of it by the recycle and we'll just piss it off. But in general, to stabilize your blood glucose,

and I've seen this with type one diabetics, including type two diabetics, including type 2 diabetics, but type 1 diabetics who have to really, you want to maintain that. When they go on a carnivorous diet, once they get it dialed in and they're used to it, their glucose is flat. I mean, it doesn't go up and down. And so it's very well regulated. And arguably, these big spikes that we see in glucose are problematic

not only for diabetics and pathophysiology, but just on how we behave. You know when you're on a carbohydrate diet and you're frigging hungry all the time because your glucose is going up and down. Yeah, you're a slave to your appetite. Right, right, so now you can sit there and you could put something I really like, a nice piece of cake in front of me,

I'd be like, eh, I don't really care. So I think that is a very important feature of this is that probably gluconeogenesis is the best way to regulate your blood glucose. And we do see with certain athletes, and I saw it myself, higher blood glucose readings around types of activity. And so if you fast, we had Jason Fung on the show the other day, if you fast, your glucose will go up. And where's that glucose coming from?

Your body is making it. And why is it making it? Because your body needs it. It's not because it's there to damage you. So the same thing about, you know, anything your body generally makes is there for a reason. Something like cholesterol. You know, why do we have cholesterol? It's not there to give us heart attacks.

We have cholesterol for a reason. That's why, you know, we see more and more studies that are coming out that people with really low cholesterol, often artificially suppressed through a low fat diet or medication. Crestor, Lipitor, that kind of crap. I mean, their risk of dementia goes up three, 400%. Depression. Depression goes up. Sex drive tanks.

Sex drive tanks, hormone production tanks, violent crime goes up. There's one study out there showing that your risk for ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, goes up 100-fold by taking certain statin drugs. And so we have to question ourselves, well, why do we have these materials? And I know that that's a hotly debated topic about when is cholesterol bad, when is it okay? If it's rising in response to a crappy inflammatory diet, seed oils, a bunch of sugar, a bunch of processed grains,

your cholesterol goes up. That combination is probably bad. And the wrong cholesterol, right? Well, it's not even the wrong cholesterol. Well, yeah, you could argue, is it oxidized? Is it glycated? Those things are probably becoming more important. Which particle?

And I think the old paradigm of it's just your total cholesterol and the LDL are high, you're in bad shape. Doctors that are still doing that are like 20 years behind. I mean, they're so far behind. And the problem is, this is a problem. Chris Kresser and I talk about the modern health care system. It's a five-minute assembly line. You know, get in, get out, check the box, type in your electronic medical record, get the guy on his way with his next pill.

And that's, unfortunately, what we've kind of devolved to. And that's unfortunately what we've kind of, you know, devolved to, and that's got to be changed. But, you know, the nice thing about this sort of situation with this, you know, this new social media and podcasts and people getting information, other sources, is they're starting to look at this and see what, you know, get some skin in the game. Because, I mean, you know, who cares about your own health? No one cares about your health as much as you do, or that's how it should be. Even physicians, I mean, they've got you for 10 minutes. I mean, who cares about your own health? No one cares about your health as much as you do, or that's how it should be. Even physicians, I mean, they've got you for 10 minutes. I mean, they're like, okay, this is the best I can do in 10 minutes. Yeah.

And no one, I think the issue too is that we don't want to be responsible for our own shit. And so many people want to put that on someone else, like the doctor will fix me. No, motherfucker, you fix you, right? And a lot of times that takes searching and figuring out what works best for you. That's why I gave the carnivore diet. I'm not going to fucking have a comment from the bleachers on if this diet works or not. I know it works for a lot of people, but let me give it a go. Let me see how I feel and let me report back on that, right? And I think

that's part of the invitation for people who are listening to shows like this is give this shit a try. Give it a try. Tell us how you feel. And maybe it's not, if you're not willing to go all meat, you know, you go keto for a period of time or you cut out like a lot of times that I've noticed this too, when I was looking back on being ketogenic, the times I felt best were when it was strictly fat and meat and maybe the tiniest amount of vegetable matter, you know, some spinach, not giant heaps of cauliflower and shit like that, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's, again, what percent, you know, because this is, and I'm guilty of bias because, you know, I see good stories all day long.

I mean, literally, you know, on my emails, my social media, I mean, every day I get a dozen or more stories of people saying my life has changed. I'm so much better. I've lost weight. I've gotten leaner. My joints stopped hurting. My depression went away. You know, I got a guy, he's not suicidal anymore. I mean, this is powerful stuff.

So what percentage of the population is it effective for? I don't know yet. It may be 5% of the population. I'm just seeing that. And 95% of the population it doesn't work with. But I don't know. I mean, hopefully we'll be able to find that. I suspect it's higher than that. I suspect just, you know, the nice thing about it and the critics of this will say, well, you just get rid of crap. Well, who cares? Great. If you just get rid of crap, that's good. You know, maybe you can do it on another diet too, but this is one tool

in the toolbox. And it's a very simple one. It's not like, you know, it's overwhelming. It's like, okay, just go eat a bunch of steaks. How hard is that for somebody to figure out? That's the beauty of it. And I do think that's probably how humans live for a long time. I mean, it's a wild animal diet. It's like, you know, a giraffe goes out and eats acacia leaves. It doesn't need, you know, a variety of foods.

It just eats kind of the same thing. And it's very easy to navigate. And I think it's very effective. And, you know, again, if you want to, you know, we all live in a modern society where we have all these other things around us and, you know, you're kind of weird when you just eat meat, you know, sort of, you know, I would argue maybe other people are more crazy, but, you know, eating junk food, you know, you're, you know, no, no one's going to... Like I was talking to Matt here. If I go to a restaurant and order a steak and I put two sprigs of broccoli next to it, no big deal. Everybody's happy. You take the broccoli away, oh my God, you're crazy. Same thing you go to McDonald's,

you order a hamburger and a Coke, that's normal. You take the bun off and you throw the Coke away, oh my God, you're crazy. So know, so we've got this perception that, you know, eating nutritious food, and I would argue meat is probably one of the most nutritious food on the planet, is somehow not normal. And it's certainly not typical, but is it normal or not? Or is it, you know, and again, we go into the, what is the normal population? What is healthy? You know, there's a lot of people where you get older, your back hurts, your blood pressure goes up,

your sex trance goes down, you get fat. That's normal. That's really common. But is that normal? Is that healthy? And I would say, hell no, it's not. You should be in your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s. You know, you look at some of these, you know, African tribes.

I mean, the guys are out there. I saw a post from an Inuit guy I follow up in Nunavut, you know, and he's talking about a whale hunt they went on. And the oldest guy in the whale hunt was 92 years old. And he's still out there hunting whales, you know? And so it's like, this is what the human experience is supposed to be. You're supposed to be, you're not supposed to have arthritis as you get older. And I'm somebody that sees that all the time. It's just, it's so common. You know, one of the criticisms about when we talk about, well, when we talk about evolution, you know, well, those people only live to be 30 years.

That's not true at all. What we do know, and this is the interesting thing about that, you know, we know they had higher child mortality rates, infant mortality rates. You know, if you have a baby, half of them aren't going to live. You know, it's like, if you look at wild animals, most of their infants just get killed. They get eaten by a lion. You know, if you're looking at, you know, prey animals. But if we look at that, the way they date those skeletons, they'll look at, you know, they'll look at an adult. And with a kid, it's easy. You know, I can look at an X-ray on a kid and say, yeah, that kid's about five years old. You can date it within about a year pretty quickly.

But when you get to an adult, it gets really hard to date those skeletons. And they admit the same thing. They say, well, this human was probably at least 30 years of age. So what they'll do is they'll write, okay, he was 30. And that's how they calculate. But in reality, he could have been 50, he could have been 60, he could have been 70. Especially if he had healthier bone material. Right, right. And that's the thing. We assume that the assumption is made is they age the same way as people eating a grain-based carbohydrate diet. And I think those people, their bones age more, their joints wear out quicker. I think it's a dietary problem.

And so we've got these skeletons. And we know people 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago lived, I think Da Vinci lived into his late 80s or 90s. So we have people that have made it a long time. So there's no doubt that people living 20,000, 30,000 years ago, probably many of them lived to the seventies and eighties. And, you know, it's just that, you know, because so many kids died early, we assume they didn't live very long. So I think there's a fallacy and I

think there's, I think that's hopefully taking hold there. Yeah. Couldn't agree more with it. Well, shit, brother, we did it. Where can people find you online and what's the name of your podcast? So our podcast is not far from yours. So it's a human performance outliers podcast. So Zach Bitter and I, you know, Zach is a, you know, Zach, you know, he's a, he's a I don't know him personally, but yeah, I've followed him for a while. He just broke the world record for a hundred mile trail run. That's awesome.

And he's eating like two, three pounds of meat a day, doing a little bit of carbohydrate here, but he's very low carb. So just broke the world record. He ran a hundred miles in two minutes, two hours, eight minutes. I mean, just, just killed it. I mean, the previous record was two hours and 44 minutes and he beat that by like, what is it? No, it was 12 hours. Sorry. I was going to say two hours sounds like the flash ran that. 12 hours and eight minutes. And it was 12 hours and 44 minutes. So he beat that by like 26 minutes.

So he just crushed it. So Zach and I, human performance outliers, Instagram, Sean Baker, 1967. It's S-H-A-W-N. I'm on Twitter, S Baker, MD. And then I've got meadheals.com, which is a good website where I've taken all these different people who've cured all these issues

and we've kind of categorized it. So if you want to look at arthritis or gastrointestinal issues or mental health issues or autoimmune disease, you just got to look at the search bar and it'll show you all the people that have revolutionized their health by that. Yeah, I like that. You coined a term that really made sense for me. Instead of N equals one n equals many yeah right and that's awesome because so much in our previous culture in western medicine

is this n equals one doesn't mean shit you know we need us we need a larger population but it is n equals many it is all the people that have come through with their own health issues and healed them through diet and lifestyle choices where you can look at that larger population and say, yeah, this is applied. Yeah, this is what's called a democratization of medicine. I mean, we're seeing that via social media. I mean, there's a lot of bullshit on social media. There's idiots, trolls, knuckleheads, a lot of catcalling and fighting.

But within that framework, there is a goldmine of information if you know how to try to bring that together. And so these N equals one studies, I mean, that's a hypothesis generating situation that is just, in my view, just as relevant as an epidemiology study. Because an epidemiology study, all it can do is generate a hypothesis. So can an anecdote.

You can have a guy that, you know, like when they discovered H. pylori was a reason for gastric ulcers. People said, no, no, it's impossible. It can't be an infection. For hundreds of years, no, it's stress. It's acid overproduction. So one doctor said, I think it's impossible. It can't be an infection. For hundreds of years, no, it's stress. It's acid overproduction. So one doctor said, I think it's this. And so he made himself sick.

He drank a bunch of bacteria and proved it to the rest of the world. Changed everything. So these little anecdotes can literally change how we think. So now the question is, I mean, the funny thing about this carnivore diet is two years ago, people thought it was just totally crazy. Like you, like I, it's just totally crazy. Now people are saying, wait a minute, there's something here that works. So now the next step is let's start testing it more formally. And I think that's hopefully where

we'll see over the next year or two. But you don't have to wait. That's the thing. That's the important thing. You don't have to wait for a 20-year study to come out before you take action. If your health sucks and you want to do something, this is one tool. It's an extreme tool. And I would argue, and this is somewhat controversial, but I think moderation and balance doesn't get you very far. It's like you make a little minimal step. I know people say little steps at a time, but ultimately to make a big change, you have to make a big change. Yeah. And you look no further than our performance, right? If I get in a cold shower versus a 32 degree ice tub, the difference is in one, it's uncomfortable. In the other, my body thinks it's going to die. And if I stay in there long enough, it will die. So from a fat loss standpoint, from a brown adipose tissue standpoint, from a mitochondrial health standpoint, much bigger gains. If I'm squatting with the bar each day and I never add weight to it, there'll be some benefit there. But if I'm going max effort PR on a back squat, my body's going to fucking respond to that. Right? So completely in agreement there.

Dude, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. We'll run it back for sure after I get a longer stint in the carnivore. Much appreciated. I'm a huge fan of your work and thanks for being out here, brother. Kyle, my pleasure, man. Let's go work out, man. Hell yeah. Let's get a good one in. Yo, yo, yo. Thank you guys for listening. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Make sure you check out the links to his other podcasts, which I think are critical and essential. And even though we piggyback on some of the topics, he can take a much deeper dive into his bloodwork with Rob Wolf and a much deeper dive into his background on John Rogan's. Outside of that,

10% off all foods and supplements at onnit.com slash podcast. Thank you for listening.