Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 262 - Vegan Gains Calls Out Stan Efferding - Our Reaction

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

We stumbled upon an interesting video of popular YouTuber Vegan Gains talking about our boy Stan Efferding. We break down some of his arguments and try to make sense of it all. Subscribe to the Podcast on all platforms: ➢https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 15% off your order! ➢Quest Nutrition: https://www.questnutrition.com/ Use code "MARKSQUEST" at checkout for 20% of your order! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

I guess we're thinking about Little Nas X. You ever heard that song? Yeah, everyone's heard that song. Yeah, everyone's heard that song. I love that song. People are like, that song's played out. It's never played out. I like it, man.

Yeah, me too. He's got other good songs too, man. He's got some good stuff. There's a song called Panini that he came out with, which I just can't get behind. I don't understand it. Does it make you hungry? It just doesn't.

I don't get it. It's like Panini. You don't want it. Does it make you hungry? It just doesn't. I don't get it. It's like panini. You don't want to promote bad carbs? Maybe you'll get it in 10 years. Maybe he's ahead of his time. Hey, maybe he is ahead of his time. Probably. A lot of these artists sometimes are.

Be like, damn, he was talking about panini back in 2019, man, before it was even cool. Now panini is the national food of the USA. I still can't get over just how he took someone else's name in an ad. Right? Little Nas X. What's his actual name? I can't be Little Tupac X. You can't do that to Tupac.

No, you could be. If you were good. True. Maybe his name has an NAS somewhere in there. No, he could be. If he were good. True. Maybe his name is like has an NAS somewhere in there. No? What's his name? I don't know his name. Yeah, see just the nickname. And he doesn't even look like Nas. Like I don't get it. It's all good though. It is what it is. Hey, he's not doing bad I don't think, right? Oh, he's doing great. He's doing awesome. All right, so we're about to kick off this podcast think, right? Oh, he's doing great. No, he's doing great. He's doing awesome.

All right, so we're about to kick off this podcast. We've got some cool stuff to get to today. We're going to talk about some of them vegan gains. Uh-oh. I'm excited to get into that. But before we get to that, we've got to talk about our sponsors. Hell yeah. And I've been still cooking up that Piedmontese.

I ain't getting tired of it. Cooked up two burgers last night as I waited for my wife to cook up dinner. I know that sounds really fat, but I was on like 18 hours of fasting. So I cooked up some burgers, threw some cheese on them, grass-fed burgers. Piedmontese has a lot of great options. I've been digging the ribeye, the filet. And I'm hearing that the sliders are really good. I haven't gotten around to eating sliders yet i'm getting excited about that but i had uh some of the hamburger patties last night

and they were awesome yeah i had a ribeye yesterday again i think it was a ribeye cap that's what it's called it's like a ribeye cap steak um i love it man they're so good i know uh fat little smokey's been talking about the sliders a lot. Yeah. And now Mark just mentioned sliders. So I think this week I'm going to put in an order for a bunch of those sliders. Sliding right into Piedmontese's DMs and asking them for some sliders. But I do need more, like, real talk, I need more ribeyes. Like, the ribeyes are out. They're so good.

I'm done with the ribeyes. Like, yo, we need some help over here. Yeah. Piedmonteseese they're doing something different somehow they added extra protein to their meat but took out all not all the fat they took out a lot of the fat in comparison to what you would get at a regular like grocery store it's laughable how much better it is if you guys want to get in on that it's piedmontese.com that's piedmontese.com checkout. Enter promo code power project.

That'll get you 25% off your entire order. And if it's $99 or more, you get free two day shipping order today. You'd be grilling by Friday night. And what about those quest bars, quest cookies, quest chips, quest pizza,

all the yummy stuff from quest. Again, another thing that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, how it's so good, but how it's so healthy. I don't know. Don't want to ask questions, though. Lots of fiber, too. Well, the stuff tastes good that we have to control ourselves with it.

If I'm going to have a Quest bar, what I normally do is I normally just take one home from here. Yeah. Because if I have a box around, I'm going to end up in the same position I'd end up in if I had a box of cookies. I'm going to end up eating them all. But they have a reasonable amount of calories, moderate amount of fat, very low carbohydrate because it's primarily fiber and has a good amount of protein in it. So I've always loved Quest Nutrition's products. They have a lot of great products. They have the regular kind of old school Quest bar, and they have tons of flavors.

One of my favorite ones is the donut one. And then for those of you that have never tried a Hero bar, you got to get rid of those zeros and get yourself a Hero. You know what I'm talking about? That shit's good. Those things are really good. Those might be the best bars on the planet Earth, people. At expos or following Mark

with a camera around, oftentimes I have survived just off of Quest bars. And it sounds like I'm saying something bad, but it was actually kind of awesome. Those days I actually look forward to. If you guys want to get in on that, head over to questnutrition.com

at checkout, enter promo code MarkSQUEST for 20% off all of these bars that we're talking about. The chips, the protein, the cookies, everything is delicious. And you can get that all for 20% off. Yummy. And then we also got our boys over at Perfect Keto. Yeah, buddy. Appreciate their support. It's great to have MCT oil that doesn't blow your butthole out.

They have MCT oil powder. For those of you that have tried MCT oil before and you're like, Nuh-uh, I can't have that ever again. The powder seems to have a much different reaction with a lot of people. So that's a great product. They have whey protein. They have collagen protein that tastes really good. They have keto bars. It's hard to find snacks They have whey protein. They have collagen protein that tastes really good. They have keto bars.

It's hard to find snacks on a ketogenic diet. It's hard to find not even a snack but really just anything that's sweet, anything that's just different that's not. Most of the food you're going to eat is like savory. It's like eggs and meat, and those things are great, and those things hit certain parts of your palate that make you get excited, get you fired up. But, you know, with Perfect Keto, they have some options to get rid of that sweet tooth. Yeah, like that cinnamon bar.

Oh, the cinnamon roll. Cinnamon roll. Yeah, just the texture and the consistency of those is really good. And I do now see what you're talking about in terms of the cookie dough one. It's cookie dough, right? I see what you're talking about. It made a comeback dough one it's cookie dough right yeah i see what you're talking about it made a comeback yeah it's like um i can't explain it it doesn't have the same consistency as the cinnamon roll but it's because of that there's something to it it's got the the big old chunks of chocolate chips when you when you bite into it just like oh like that crunchiness to it and it's there's there's bites where i'm

like okay i got nothing but chocolate there's no way this is okay to eat yeah it's freaking delicious yeah it's got like 11 grams of collagen in it have you guys had the collagen protein mix with like uh yogurt no oh my gosh yeah the salted caramel i mixed that in some uh just regular plain yogurt and it was amazing a little light your face on fire. Hey, try that out. Yeah, it's amazing. If you guys want to give it a go, head over to perfectketo.com slash powerproject at checkout. Enter promo code powerproject. That'll get you 15% off everything we just talked about and whatever else they got on the website.

It's kind of amazing. I need to start hanging upside down over here or something. My stomach is still rumbling. I feel fine. It's like my stomach's just making noise. It's must be something in the air because like i said on the way in today yeah wave number two so the the second wave is not like the uh you know that that's not the like oh no like i can't believe that no that's definitely gonna happen to me but the fact that it was so violent and then once i actually got here when i got to the bathroom

was like so compacted because i've been holding it for so long it yeah it didn't flow like it normally would straight science son yeah i haven't even had my first you know i haven't gone today yet oh that's because you had a healthy ribeye and probably nothing else right i feel okay like something i just haven't had any like i haven't had any coffee or caffeine so so it'll come soon. Maybe in the middle of this podcast. We'll see. Oh. We'll see.

That'd be a treat for all of us. So, Andrew, what were you scouring the internet and you found this vegan gains guy? Yeah, well, so like every so often, like maybe every other podcast, someone in the live stream is like, when are you going to get vegan gains on? And so I was talking to Nsema and I'm just like, what do you think, man? Like, are we going to make this happen? And he's like, dude, you should see what you just said about Stan Efferding. I was like- Stansema, and I'm just like, what do you think, man? Are we going to make this happen? He's like, dude, you should see what you just said about Stan Efferding. I was like, Stan Efferding's our boy. I was like, uh-oh.

I'm curious to see this. You can't have people saying negative stuff about Stan. Stan's our boy, right? Yeah. Come on, man. He's our boy, yeah. But I don't know. I wanted to see if you guys wanted to kind of go over what V and Gaines were saying.

Stan Efferding. If you guys wanted to kind of go over what the games were saying. Stan Efferding. 800-pound squat, 600-pound bench, and 800-pound deadlift. The guy can do no wrong in my eyes. Professional bodybuilder, world-class powerlifter. World-class guy. World-class guy.

That's a great thing to say. I was just going to say on top of all that, he's super nice. Yeah, he's super nice. Super nice. But Vegans Gaines says that he wants to kill people. He does say that. Not Vegans Gains wants to kill people, but he thinks Stan Efferding is murdering people

with the vertical diet. With cows. Yeah. I'm going to kill you with a cow. You won't. You can do it in Worms. You can. You can throw a mad cow at someone and it explodes. Worms is such a good game y'all are still talking about this worm we're gonna stream that very very soon all right let's see what let's see what our buddy has to say here those of you who don't know what beef tallow is it's literally

just fat from a cow so you know when you're eating a steak and there's those big chunks of fat that you don't want to eat and you just cut it away and throw it out that's beef tallow really appetizing right and it's very similar to pure butter the saturated fat content is nearly identical so what he's talking about here is uh stan efforting says he he'd rather he would rather cook with beef tallow as a or right i don't know if he says over anything but he just says he cooks with that and so vegan gains is like well why don't you just use butter instead so i don't know why stan would think beef tallow is preferable to vegetable oils there it is especially considering major medical institutions are all telling us to avoid saturated fat the american heart association for instance released a report where based on randomized trials replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated vegetable oils

reduced cardiovascular disease risk by 30%. Man. Yeah. Here's some of the deal. I mean, you know, so just to, like, I don't understand a lot of this. You know, when people start talking about studies and people start getting deep into the weeds,

I'm not a scientist or doctor and I don't follow it and I don't know how your cells in the body react to it and all that stuff. Nor do I claim to know. But I do know something about like cooking temperature. You're like if you were just to cook with if you're just to cook with let's say let's say you were to try to cook something with fish oil and try to cook something with fish oil, uh, it might oxidize and become rancid because fish oil is pretty sensitive. And even when you cook fish, you're not supposed to like overheat it. And you gotta be kind of cautious on how you cook it. And so some oils just don't do well when you heat them up and they can turn into, uh, trans fatty acids and things like that. And so that's why some people are moving over to using things like coconut oil, which is

primarily saturated fat, macadamia nut oil, avocado oil, some of these other oils, olive oil, sort of beef tallow. Certainly you could cook them at pretty high temperatures without them getting too rancid or too messed up or too oxidized or whatever the words are that you want to use. And it's my understanding that sometimes when you're utilizing some of these vegetable oils, that they can be overheated and then become harmful to the body. And so that's some of the stuff that he's talking about. Now, I'll also say this, they're called PUFAs and you can look them up, Pu-f-a and you could do kind of your own research on them and people have gone

crazy about them to the point where they think they're more damaging to us than sugar poofa yeah why is this the first time i'm hearing about this i don't know you've heard of it polyunsaturated oh okay okay polyunsaturated fatty acids. Fatty acids. Yeah, but it's just, yeah, some people call it that, right? But I would also say that there's research that shows that it's unhealthy for you. There's research that shows this, right? But I also think that it may have been overblown, may have been overdone, just as many, many things are overdone. Now, I'll also just say this like a blanket statement between vegan gains and what Stan Efferding has going on and vegan people versus people that eat meat. I'm seeing a lot of people get great results going on a vegan

style diet. That is not a style that I would do. It's not a style that I would suggest. It's not, it's nothing that I've ever tried before. So I don't have any idea how my body would react to it. And anybody that I help, I don't know what it would do for them or how it could potentially harm them. I'm not sure. I'm not against a vegan style diet because I have many friends that do it. I have many friends that have tried it and it seems like they're flourishing. Yeah. Rob Bailey. It seems like they're doing well with it. And most of these people have come from trying other diets in the past and then they landed on this vegan diet and they feel good from it.

So I ain't got no problem with it. Now, on the flip side of that, I got my friends telling me that they've tried, you know, mainly primarily eating vegetables and they've had great results. I got other friends on the flip side of that that have said, hey man, I switched over to primarily eating meat and I feel really good. I think in both cases, people are after the same thing. People want to be healthier. They want to try to find a way to live longer and they also want to try to find a way to perform better so the only thing the only strike i would have against a vegan style diet is i i don't have the understanding

of because i've never tried it and because i don't have a lot of experience with it i don't have the understanding of how a vegan diet could potentially help an athlete uh more so than what stan efferding's suggesting having like like Brian Shaw or Hap Thorpe or Arnson shift over to like a vegan diet, I can't see how it would be helpful. Now if we're talking about longevity, I think the jury's still out on that. You can point to evidence on either side and make up whatever evidence you want for each one. Yeah. And the thing is you hit the nail on the head there.

Like vegan gains wants to help people become more healthy. So does Stan Efferding. And yeah, does he though? I mean, it's like he, he kind of, he kind of comes at people, right? Like he gets people on his platform and he seems to like be really breaking them down. In my opinion, maybe a better way of doing it would be for him to get an interaction with Stan Efferding. maybe a better way of doing it would be for him to get an interaction with Stan Efferding. Maybe that would be great. Try to get him on the horn and try to zoom with him and be like, dude, I think you're killing people.

Like, how do you respond to this? Cause I think people should eat vegetables. Yeah. But instead, I mean, he's kind of, he's like mocking him.

It seems like. Yeah. And, and, and at the end of the video, I mean, I guess he, he does say like,

Hey, hit me up on Twitter, hit me up somewhere like let's get on you know like yeah let's get on a video and let's debate this okay but at the same time he does say like you're killing people like you're an idiot like he said uh i forgot what he said but he really went after him pretty hard and so like i mean i don't know i know stan but i don't know if he'd be willing to you know kind of go to that level of being like well you you called me out and like you you talk shit about me i'm not

gonna go on your platform and help you out you know even more with more views and stuff but that's the thing it would it would be huge yeah so to keep it an even playing field they should both come on this podcast debate but but debate. But this is the thing. Vegan Gains, okay, he does go about it in a very inflammatory way, partially because a lot of his viewers enjoy that. He knows that. Maybe he enjoys going about it that way, too. But people like to see that. People like to see.

That's true. Yeah. People like to see. Conor McGregor. They like people to stir shit up. Exactly. And in that way, because it's true. Yeah. People like to see. Conor McGregor. Right. Like they like people to stir shit up. Exactly. And in that way, because it's entertaining. But like Vegan Gains, he cites a lot of research in a lot of his videos, a lot of research that is like promotion in terms of his view.

But at the same time, like Stan and a lot of the people that we've had on this podcast um that even that there was one guy that was vegan what was his name or wasn't vegan but um charlie was vegan well charlie's vegan but there was another one that we had on um for older for dr firman oh yeah all of these individuals cite so many studies that prove their point of view and this is why i can see why people can be so kind of just i guess hearty about their side because they're like well i have this this this this and that says that this is right and cholesterol is bad oh well i have this this this this and says that cholesterol doesn't have any effect on the heart wait so what what what do we do here then like yeah i feel like the the saturated fat versus unsaturated fat has

been like i've heard it so many times now that i I still can't think that people would think that unsaturated fat is better for you at this point. Let's maybe like try to make some sense of some of this stuff, right? So just for sake of argument, I'm going to say that the following things are fairly healthy. healthy meat eggs um vegetables fruit uh and some like starchy carbohydrates potatoes and rice right maybe there's a couple things that i'm not thinking of but that that covers most shit right um i would say some in some cases uh when you eat some cases it's great to eat meat in some cases, it's great to eat meat. In some cases, it might be great to eat like fruits and vegetables. I think sometimes the benefit of vegetables is the fact that it's not meat because maybe, and I don't know, but like maybe we can overdo it with meat.

Like maybe there's a limit. Maybe we can have too much saturated fat. And maybe when we start to talk about too much food, we're just talking about an overindulgence of overall energy. And that's when stuff gets to be harmful. So again, eating vegetables can be great simply because it's not meat and it doesn't have a lot of caloric load. So if Encima wants to eat four pounds of meat every day,

because he's a big guy, right? Maybe it would be in his best interest for longevity purposes to eat more like two and a half or three pounds of meat. And he still has vegetables. He still has a potato. He still has some fruit, or maybe even it's a lower amount of that. That's where some of this stuff where I'm like, okay, I can make, that sounds reasonable to me. That makes a lot of sense. Joel Fuhrman was kind of of the belief that the majority of the food that you eat should be fruits and vegetables and beans. And he had his certain type of like onions and some of these things that he thought you should really consume quite a bit of and only maybe like 10% of your diet should be like any sort of meat or fish.

Yeah, more of like a supplement, he said. Yeah, more as like supplemental just because it's a nice little boost in protein. But anyway, like I can understand some of that. I can understand being on the flip side of that and being more like 80 or 90 percent meat and having you know occasional vegetables and stuff to me that's how a lot of this stuff makes sense and uh vegetable oils sugar um anything that's going to be intrusive into your diet or anything that's going to be negative have a negative impact on your body is probably only going to have a huge negative, or not only, but you'll probably most likely only have an impact on your body negatively

if you consume too much food. That's probably when we're going to start to run into the majority of issues. And, I mean, I think there's been quite a bit of research to show that a lot of people, like individuals that just have a lower caloric load in general, tend to live longer. Right. You know, if you're not eating an insane amount of food. And that's why, like, in a sense, like a lot of athletes who do have to have a very, very high caloric load. OK, that's not the best for longevity, but it's the best for sport.

I can understand and see why guys like Thor and Shaw, a lot of these strongmen, bodybuilders, athletes in general, they expend crazy amounts of energy. So they need to replenish that with also very high calories. Most of the population that doesn't do sport to that extent probably doesn't need to eat that much food anyway. Let's see what else he had to say. Yeah, I saw he was saying stuff about If you take a look at this video clip, there's some text on the screen saying that athletes like Brian Shaw have been following Stan Efferding's

vertical diet. Well, that has recently been proven to be false. Brian Shaw himself uploaded a video to his YouTube channel saying that he's switching his diet. He's no longer following Stan's vertical diet because he has had a massive decrease in performance. In the last video, I mentioned that I was going to be making some changes after the competition. The biggest one of those changes is my diet. So this is something that I've actually been struggling with for quite some time.

Let's pause it right there. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of this is interesting. You know, Brian, there's a lot of reasons on why Brian Shaw has gotten beaten on some of these World's Strongest Man platforms. Number one is Brian Shaw,aw i think was so good at world's strongest man he helped draw more attention to it and more people came into the sport more people came uh more people took pride in winning the world's strongest man or in uh winning the arnold classic and people came at it harder and you started to see the competition level rise and you had a really

awesome um back and forth between um brian shaw and sojourner savickas for a long time and then coming up through the ranks was hapthor bjornson and eddie hall and some of the guys that you're starting to see today some of these younger guys that are starting to win and i think that you know maybe four or five years ago, Brian, A, he was younger. B, he was really in his prime. It was very clear that he was the guy to beat. He was the man, right?

And we see that a lot in a lot of sports where just because you were kicking ass for so long, it's very, very hard to stay on top. And strongman is a sport that's very difficult to stay on top. And then also you can kind of make an argument of maybe Hapthor just wasn't ready yet. Maybe he wasn't mature enough. Maybe he didn't have enough experience to win the title and to start to take over. And now it seems like Hapthor is in the running to win Arnold

and to win the World's Strongest Man nearly every single year because he's on a great path. So they were both on the same diet too. So I don't think the diet is the only thing, but also Brian knows his own body. He's really, really smart and he's really sharp. He's tried other things in the past from a nutrition standpoint and that is what happened. He did switch diets and he has performed worse obviously we can all say that we can believe that the diet probably isn't the only factors by a few other factors in there again having hapthor you know follow through on the vertical diet he's winning um so it's probably just more of a comfort thing for brian he's like man i need to switch

back to what i used to do because i used to feel a little bit better then. But we've also had Brian on the podcast and he said he spent a lot of time sitting on the toilet and that his stomach used to bother him a lot. So I bet you that he's going to try to find a happy medium between what he used to do and maybe what Stan had him do. Yeah. I mean, we were there, Chris Griffin and I filming him like a couple of years ago, like eating eating i forgot how many thousands of calories and yeah he was putting down a ton of food like it was you think he's like eating like 30 something eggs a day 20 something some crazy number it was a lot yeah yeah and if i'm looking at that and i'm looking at the vertical diet i'm like okay the vertical diet's very much healthier

than what he was doing it was like the vertical diet concepts that bright was yes you know in terms like utilizing the meat and then like the ground beef or whatever but like when you look at the vertical diet itself it's like that's not what most that's not what a majority of people do you know it's not even close yeah and then the other underlying issue um not issue but you know thing is uh the vertical diet that's a it's a they also have a meal prep company and stan i'm not i don't i don't know i think it's out there now um he's now with another company so that could also be the yeah brian shaw yeah is accepted a contract from another company so yeah maybe there's a factor in there as well maybe they who knows

maybe in that contract he can't be with Stan. Correct, yeah. Because that doesn't work. So, yeah, you have to kind of put something on your YouTube channel, right? You can't just one day tell all your followers, I'm with this company now, because then they're going to be like, hey, what the hell? Right.

Yeah. And he probably also just felt honestly that he needed to make a change. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. All right, what else we got? Let's see here so again uh the intention with stan's diet was to by the way just help people live a short just like because people can't like vegan gains is actually a pretty jack dude like he he he works out he actually lives he has like just saying he's in good shape he's in he's in a good he's

in really good shape so you know order life you know it's designed to kill people so it's not great for athletes if you want to maximize athletic performance i'd say stay away from stan's diet but if you want to shorten your life if you want to uh die sooner great diet i don't think there's any other diet that i can think of that will put you in the grave sooner. Yes. And we don't really see that from the other side. At least I'm unaware of it maybe. I'm not seeing that from people that are carnivore people saying that vegetables are going to kill you.

Or like we have some evidence that vegetable oils can be harmful, but I haven't seen anybody make a video on vegan gains saying how he's killing people with vegetable oil. Maybe somebody has, but we're not. So that's where I'm always kind of confused. And as we said, like it's entertaining and it's fun and it's kind of ludicrous toorous too right for him to say like you're killing people and he shows that uh apocalyptic picture with stan efferding and the cow and the pretty catchy though yeah joel furman also said that like he's like oh the people you're having here are killing people like yeah he said he said you gotta throw dr baker in jail and uh uh our other partner paul saladino saladino yeah you gotta throw those guys in jail. They're killing people.

We'll just throw Tufano in there too. Oh, let's not even go down that road. Yeah, so that's weird, right? Yeah, real aggressive is the right way to put it. Yeah, aggressive, but I don't think that's a good way to get through to people. No. Well, you know, that's the thing though. The question is like, is it a good way to get through to people?

Because this audience loves it. Yeah, there's people that are listening right we're talking about it now yeah exactly we're talking about it now who's all maybe the content yeah the debate is important what do you honestly think in sima about a vegan style diet um back in college sac state when i was playing soccer i tried it out out. And I'm not going to say it was vegan, because it was more so pescatarian. I wasn't eating meat, I was eating fish. And what I wasn't doing was supplementing a lot of things that I wasn't getting from a lot of the food. And because I wasn't paying much attention to that. I lost quite a bit of weight. I wasn't feeling as powerful on the field. But that's the thing. It's like, if I maybe spent more time with the diet, I know I could have performed at a better level, but I definitely don't believe I could have performed at the level I do when I have ample meat in my diet and good amounts of animal source protein in my diet.

So again, like we all know that you can go on a vegan diet, but you just need to make sure that you're supplementing what you don't have from the diet. You have to do that. If you don't do that, then you won't last long. The people that are doing vegan diets, well, they feel great and that's okay. A lot of other individuals also, it's a moral type of thing. They don't want to eat animals, which is also okay. So I think that you can be healthy on that style of diet, but like literally from everything that I've learned from having all the individuals on this podcast, talking to them and like just talking to other people about this, you can do great in the middle. You don't have to get rid of meat, nor do you have to eat five pounds of it a day. I mean, I mean, I'm sorry, you don't have

to get rid of meat. Um, but you also don't have to like get rid of all vegetables either. You know, you can eat a moderate amount of meat, you can have vegetables and fruits. And if you're eating just moderate amounts of these foods, you're going to be perfectly healthy as long as you don't overdo anything. Right. It's just I just don't know. Like, I get why people are on either side, because just like, you know, workout routines. There are some people that are, you know, all all powerlifting all weightlifting there's still certain divides within these groups because they have their own like it's almost like a religion in a sense right you know so i hope carnivore

doesn't become like for some people like a religious type deal where they're like oh fuck vegetables no can't vegetables just because vegetables really aren't that bad for you like chill you know and here's where we start to go out of bounds I think too is like I posted some pictures like some hot dogs and stuff. Now, these are like 100% beef and they don't have as much bullshit as a lot of other hot dogs. But it's still a hot dog, right? And I think you can do the same thing on a vegan diet that you can do on a keto diet. Maybe like your fault would be overeating stuff, uh, that you shouldn't be eating, like still ending up in the same position and overeating.

So like there's vegan snacks, there's vegan, you know, there's a lot of vegan stuff, right. That you can, um, there's like muffins and shit that, that don't have any animal product in it. And it's like, that's not free of calories. Like that has a lot of calories. Now on a carnivore style diet, it would be more rare for you to overeat on something because there's really not like a, there's not junk food versions of that. You know, you primarily eat meat. So I just think that whatever diet you're following,

whether it's keto or carnivore or a vegan style diet, you have to make sure that you're following, whether it's keto or carnivore or vegan style diet, you have to make sure that you're still finding ways of not overeating. Now, I think that if you overeat occasionally with healthier foods, I think it has less of a negative impact on your body. That's my own personal beliefs. And I could be wrong. Somebody could show me a bunch of studies and say, look, these people ate too much fruit. And, you know, they ended up, you know, with heart disease or whatever. But I don't believe that to be true. And I think that you could probably overeat every single day as long as your food choices are of high quality.

And I think that your body would just adjust to it. And I actually think over a period of time, your body would probably start to figure out ways of burning it up. And if you're active and you're exercising, I think that you're more than likely okay. But I think, just again, whatever diet you pick, make sure you're not falling into that trap of just, you know, people are just, they're like, I'm on this diet, so it's game on.

That says it's gluten-free, so I'm just going to eat 40 of them. It's like, no, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, like are Oreos still vegan? I think so. Yeah, I don't know. Or is that paleo? Isn't there dairy in Oreos, like milk product or whatever? There's probably no milk in there either.

But the cream, isn't there? I mean, it's all fake. Yeah, but there are a bunch of weird vegan stuff like that that people are like, it's vegan. You know, I was just saying the other day, like if I held up, like if I had a hot dog in one hand and a Pop-Tart in the other, which one's healthier? Which one's more dangerous? You know, it would start up a huge conversation, right?

Well, is the hot dog from Piedmontese? Yeah, right. And that would be all the questions. Yeah, what kind of Pop-Tart is it, you know? Are you eating both of them at the same time or, you know? Are you putting ketchup and mustard on the Pop-Tart? Pop-Tarts? Dude, I know people love Pop-Tarts, but they're really not like the outside is all dry.

The outside is not very good. Pop-Tarts aren't really that good. It's just they were the food that started the movement. But even out of the food, sorry. One second, I got to ask. Even out of a toaster, you guys aren't down with Pop-Tarts? I would eat the shit out of a Pop-Tart. Yeah, no question.

But they're not great. That's the thing. They're not as good as a cookie or a donut. I agree with you. You know, when I was eating Pop-Tarts back in the day, I was eating them partially just to show I can eat Pop-Tarts. But I wasn't like, oh, yeah, Pop-Tarts. Like, here's a picture of my abs and here's my pop here's my yep oh god it's a it's a good breakfast though okay stan is actually

trying to like kill people so uh for his first claim eggs are nature's multivitamin we'll just go to chronometer. Eggs have very little nutrition in them. They have a little bit of protein. They have a little bit of selenium B12, but not much else. Well, compare this to nutritional yeast. A comparable serving of nutritional yeast has more protein, also has more branched chain amino acids like leucine. This kind of stuff, I think that's great information.

And I think that I'm sure that he's still swaying things a certain way to prove his point. But I like stuff like that. To me, that's like sticking to the facts, laying off of like I think you're killing people or getting into a debate with someone and say well i just think you're an asshole you know or you're done you're you're uh you're what you're saying is stupid it's like that's not a debate like this that opens up a debate like oh wait he's got some good points here okay there's more nutritional value in some of this yeast maybe he's got a point yeah what is what did he call it? Nutritional yeast. I can rewind. It's it actually used to be a supplement. Nutritional yeast.

Selenium B12. Eggs have very little nutrition in them. They have a little bit of protein. They have a little bit of selenium B12, but not much else. Well, compare this to nutritional yeast. Yeah. So there's something called brewer's yeast is very common. And people used to just throw them in.

There's actually some old school bodybuilders and stuff. They still just throw them in their protein shakes and stuff like that. It's just I think people cook with it as well. But I don't know what the hell brewer's yeast really is, but it's just loaded with vitamins and minerals. I don't know how good or bad it is for us. But hopefully people just understand like eggs aren't bad for you. Eggs used to be demonized because of the amount of cholesterol that they have in them. But like, again, there's research to now show that like literally eggs aren't bad for you.

And cholesterol isn't as big of a deal as it used to be back in 2008. Like. Yeah, we have Dave Feldman scheduled to be on the podcast, I think next week, and he's going to rip apart all this cholesterol stuff for us. Sick. Dietary cholesterol does not necessarily lead to your cholesterol in your body being out of whack. It's actually normally it's a combination of just – it's really – most things just boil down to overeating. I'm just going to leave it at that. I don't want to complicate it for anybody, but it normally just boil down to overeating. I'm just going to leave it at that. I don't want to complicate it for anybody,

but it normally just boils down to overeating. And then what do we have a tendency to overeat on? We have a tendency to overeat things that have multiple ingredients. A lot of times those ingredients include sugar, fat, salt, that kind of stuff. That's where we're going to get ourselves in the most trouble. Also, Ken ken baker when's he coming on is he also next week or uh oh the uh the uh barry barry oh my god ken barry and baker

it's a dr sean baker yeah he's coming on really soon and uh yeah we're working on a bunch of bunch of awesome guests i'm excited for that yeah, I've never really messed with a vegan diet. I'm glad that you tried it because you- Pescatarian. So like anyone who's actually vegan that's listening, they're like, you're so vegan. Have you worked with athletes? Have you worked with people?

Because you work with a lot of people. Have you worked with anybody? There's a few I've worked with that are vegan. You just slap them upside their head. No, I don't. I don't make them switch. I just make sure that they supplement what they're not getting a lot of. That's it.

And that's very few clients. The two that I was working with, I'm not working with them anymore. I was working with them for an extended period. But they were doing fine as long as they were making sure to get enough protein in their diet. Obviously, carbohydrates and fat were okay. But they just had to supplement and they felt okay. And I like whenever somebody has come to me saying, Oh, I'm vegan. It's not a problem. It really isn't. You can, you can make positive changes to your body composition being vegan. You can get stronger being vegan. We know that

you just need to just make sure that you're doing it in the best way possible. Five years ago, I come to you and I say, dude, you need to try this diet. And you're like, okay, cool. What is it? And I tell you, you're going to do intermittent fasting. You're going to fast for like 15 or 18 hours a day. And you're going to be shocked at how well you're going to perform. You're going to be shocked at the body composition changes, how good you're going to feel.

You're going to feel awesome. You know, here's a couple things you need to be aware of as well. Because, right, like you're saying with the vegan diet, it's like, okay, we can't just hop into a vegan diet. You can't just hop into a keto diet. It's like there's some shit that you should know. Like you're going to need salt, right? But if I went to you years ago with this concept of fasting, you'd be like, no, dude, I ain't trying that. It sounds crazy,

right? Yeah. That shit was, that shit was dumb to me when I like, seriously, when I first heard about intermittent fasting years ago, I was like, y'all are fucking retarded.

I'm sorry. That's literally what I'm going to go all day and not eat. Yeah. Fuck you. But like, again, like again, doing it now,

trying it out. Like I, it, it has helped me with my food habits. My, my former overeating habits, control over my appetite. Like it's helped with all those things. And again, when I've trained fasted, I don't feel bad, you know, training fasted or with

food in my system, it doesn't bother me anymore. So there's a lot of like, I feel like a lot of lifestyle benefits that's come from intermittent fasting. I just want to make sure everyone knows, like there's no magic to it. Like we're not talking, like we're not saying that it's, you know, some new magical diet or anything. It's just a way of, you know, it's a way of eating your food. It's a way of getting in your calories. So do you have any idea of where your body fat levels, like where, when you've competed before, have you ever gotten body fat tests when you were that lean

based off of my last DExa scan when i was um 240 here like recently i'm around like i think it was 7.8 on the dexa uh when i was competing i was around 229 and leaner so my assumption is i would have been around five yeah like anywhere between like 4.5 to 6 between there so you're able but and then um typically normally what do you think your body fat percentage was maybe about two or three years ago just that would be post show i was probably like 260 i'm i was ranging between like 14 and 17 so it's like 260 something you're almost at i mean i know your body you mentioned you think your body fat percentage may have gone up slightly from where you were a few weeks ago or whatever

but like yeah um you're managing almost half of your body fat percentage now and it's and you're not in bodybuilding starvation mode and you're not in a 20 week or however, how many weeks? It was a 42 week prep, 42 week prep with cardio in there too. Right. With cardio. Like I was like, I wasn't, I was always hungry because I was in like at a deep deficit. I was counting my calories, making sure that I wasn't eating an insane amount of foods put me over. Um, and I know when my prep, when I was two 40, I was voraciously hungry. I know that now I'm pretty sure I have a little bit more muscle in my frame than I did when I was prepping then at 240. But at the same time, the last time I was like this body fat percentage in prep, I couldn't hold my appetite. I mean, I had to control it, but it always felt like a chore.

I was always thinking about what I was going to eat next. It wasn't something that was sustainable. That's the thing. It wasn't something that was sustainable. That's the thing. It wasn't sustainable. What I'm doing right now, I can maintain this body composition, this leanness. I can perform well in the gym and at jiu-jitsu, and it's sustainable. I'm not tripping. I hope people understand what I'm trying to get at right here is that there's shit that was only – it was just a few years ago that Nsema and I, who both have been lifting for a very long time,

we think that we have some lifting intelligence and lifting education and nutritional education, and we just don't because there's a lot of shit that we don't know. And there's a lot of things that maybe we haven't tried enough, or maybe we haven't tried hard enough, maybe we haven't tried something long enough. So, you know, like I think everyone should try to be open, you know, keep your mind open. Once you start to make like concrete statements, it's like you just shut your mind off to it. And I always just say with a vegan diet, I don't have any idea how I'd respond to it. I have an understanding that I don't believe that I would like it because I do like to eat meat. And just in some small experiments that I've done with like taking stuff away from myself for periods of time, I tend to want to bring them back in because I'm like, I kind of dig that.

And I don't feel like I have a problem with it. So I'm going to like coffee, you know, or alcohol, you know, some of these things. I'm like, they improve my life. My life's more fun. My life's more fun when I go out with my wife and have a few drinks, um, as opposed to when I don't, but I don't do it all the time because that doesn't match up with my goals the right way. And so hopefully you guys can find something that you can land on that's manageable. Andrew, what, you know, you've tried, you know, bodybuilding style diet carnivore diet um you tried all kinds

of different stuff what has been like maybe the easiest most sustainable thing for you uh without a doubt the vertical diet um i feel really really good just even with like a cup of rice um i don't know like my you guys know my stomach's all jacked up but rice probably doesn't hurt your stomach right and rice makes me feel better like even mark and i have talked about this in the past but like even just like one slice of bread like just something to thicken or like to absorb like a protein shake feels really good versus drinking just a protein shake my stomach gets a little bit upset uh but having just some some type of carb to like i have no idea what it's actually doing, but it feels like it's absorbing like the nutrients and then I'm able to actually, I don't know,

kind of hang on to that stuff versus. I totally understand what you're saying. Okay, cool. So like a couple of weeks ago, I was following like a pretty strict keto diet. So, you know, messing around with a bunch of the perfect keto stuff. I had a lot of fatty steaks and I just like, I, I always felt like a, almost like a sick, hungry feeling like, Oh, I got to

eat like a little bit more steak or I got to eat another perfect keto bar, like whatever it was. And like, I just, I couldn't really feel like, I just didn't feel great. You know, I felt fine. Like I wasn't starving, but I just feel like, oh man, like it could very easily be like I was used to having a lot of carbs and then I pull those out. So now my body's like, hey, what's up with those carbs? But the other issue was, again, not a big surprise, but I was running to the bathroom every time I ate. And that could just very well be because I'd switch the diet up and my stomach's like, hey, we had a good thing going here. Why'd you stop? But for me, having the vertical diets, one-to-one carb to meat protein ratio, it's helped me out so much because I'm able to maintain a lot of the food that I'm taking in.

And I just feel better. And it's super easy to follow. A really simple thing for people that want to have some carbohydrates in their diet try having an equal amount of protein per uh grant you know in grams per pound of body weight and then just do the same thing with your carbohydrates and then cut your fat about in half see how you feel with that see how you're reacting to that and then you can kind of adjust you can move the fat up or down if you need to. Most likely, if you're trying to get really lean, you might need to pull the fat down a little bit, but just kind of see how you feel off of that base. You know, if you weighed, if you weighed 200 pounds, it would mean you had 200 grams of carbs, 200 grams of protein, and you'd have about a hundred grams of fat. The hundred grams of fat is a little bit on the high side probably. Uh, but it's, it's a good place to

start. I was listening to paul check yesterday and those of you that don't follow paul check on instagram and on youtube and stuff you're really doing yourself a disservice guy has a lot of great information and i know sometimes he can appear kind of weird because he's uh into all kinds of different stuff but you know back to my point of like being open he's open-minded he's open-minded to the fact that if you think positive and have positive energy and you're accepting of positive energies that you can be more positive in your life and i agree with that stuff and i that stuff vibes well with me too but an interesting thing that was just posted on his instagram uh andrew maybe you can pull it up it's too long for

us to listen to the whole thing but if you can just let it play without the audio even would be good. He talked about long and short digestive systems and people from certain regions of the world. And this is like this is all like kind of newer shit. At least it's newer shit to me. Who am I looking for? Paul Cech. Oh, sorry. Paul check.

Oh, sorry. So anyway, cows have, I think, five stomachs, and they have stuff in their stomach to specifically break down grass, specifically break down the stuff that they're eating. I see that Honest Vegetarian clip there. And even if you just let it play, I think it's on Instagram TV. You'll see some diagrams. So it's going to show you. Is Paul vegetarian, by the way? No.

No? No, he's not. He eats meat. But he does talk about the powers of fruits and vegetables. And he's really big into clean eating. This piece right here is wonderful. I think it even talks about sustainability. It goes on and explains a lot of stuff or at least maybe the other post did but anyway um this is um really really compelling information about you know maybe uh maybe when someone eats meat and they

they have a uh shitty response to it they're like man i was on the toilet all day i'm always kind of baffled i'm like how could you be that way for me? Because that doesn't ever happens to me. Well, maybe you have a, um, you know, maybe you have a short intestinal track rather than a long intestinal track. If you have a longer intestinal track, then your body is designed to eat more vegetables. I don't know how much proof there is to any of this. This is just stuff that I've seen. And this is just, uh, something that popped up in this case. And it's showing the difference between humans and pigs. We are 90, I believe 98% similar to chimpanzees, I believe.

Like 98%. And then like 90 chimpanzees aren't that jack but so let's uh think about gorillas they're strong as shit though yeah rip your arm off rip your nuts dude i'm not trying to say i think i could beat up a chimpanzee because i know i get fucked but but a gorilla has a ton of muscle right and that's usually like people are like oh gorilla you know they they eat vegetables right they have stuff in their stomach that's designed for that. They have a certain, they have certain types of digestive acids that help them to digest the amount of shit that they eat. And we don't really have that in us. But a lot of these animals that eat

vegetables, they either have like multiple stomachs or they have kind of a longer intestinal tract so these are all just things to consider again i'm not saying like i've seen like proof of this because i'm not a researcher i'm not a scientist or anything like that this is just stuff that comes across and i find it interesting i'm like man maybe maybe that's like the difference maybe Maybe through heritage, maybe this person's family, because of what was available, ate more vegetables and more fruit and maybe they got used. Like our body will never be prepared to digest like sunny delight or something like that, right? Like human evolution most likely would never make that. I mean, I don't know. No, we didn't have access to that much sugar in that density 150 years ago.

Yeah, so like 500 or 700 grams of sugar every day. Like the human body most likely will never prepare for that. But you could imagine this. If all the animals were wiped off of planet Earth and all we could eat is vegetables, I bet you that we would all adapt to it. And we would adapt to having different types of acids in our stomach. Or let's just somehow say all the plants are out of here and the reverse happened. I could see and understand over X amount of long-ass time that maybe we would evolve to handling stuff like that. But we'll never be designed to handle a peanut butter cup, unfortunately.

That's very true. I'm so interested, though. I'm curious because you mentioned you said that different people in different regions have different lengths of intestinal tract or yeah digestive systems yeah that's i'm i wonder like i've never heard of any of this yeah me neither yeah that's cool that's really interesting what it just makes i mean it makes sense you know like that you know i don't even like i just i don't know half the shit but like it makes sense that a long ass time ago that my family was eating certain types of food. Yeah.

And then those people got used to these foods. We're still not all that different, right? We're still very, very similar in a lot of ways. But it makes a lot of sense. And that your family was eating something different. Andrew's family and heritage was eating something different. I mean, that has to be true, right? I mean, we probably are from different regions of the world.

Yeah, we were eating lots of refried beans. They're so good. I don't. I'm not going to make a joke. The taco. It's all good. Not a question. Potato chips?

Never mind. The taco. The quest chips that are taco flavored. The quest chips that are taco flavored flavor you can't put those in front of me why you'll eat them all well eat them and then i'll steal all the other ones oh my all right peeps uh thanks for listening appreciate it strength is never a weakness weakness never strength catch y'all later