Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 322 Pt. 2 - Carnivore Diet Long Term Effects ft. Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

What are the long term effects of the Carnivore Diet? We are back with part two of this four part series with Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino, two guys leading the way in the Carnivore Diet Community. Today we are discussing weather or not quality of meat matters, the differences between grass fed and grain fed beef and what are the long term effects of the carnivore diet on the human body. This is part two, please go back and watch part one and stay tuned for parts three and four! 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 "POWERPROJECT10” at checkout for $10 off $40 or more! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject  ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject   ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok ➢Power Project Alexa Skill: http://bit.ly/ppalexa FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Hey Power Project, we're back with part two of a four-part series from a conversation we had with Sean Baker and Paul Saladino. In this installment, we asked the two whether or not there's a difference between grass-fed beef and grain-fed beef. We asked them if processed meats are bad for us and what really are the long-term effects the carnivore diet has on the human body. It's only right that this episode be brought to you by our friends over at Certified Piedmontese. You guys know we absolutely love Piedmontese beef. And when it comes to quality of meat, Piedmontese is second to none. We are ecstatic to announce that we now have a Jacked in Tan Pack and a Power Project Deluxe Package. Head over to piedmontese.com right now to check that out. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com.

At checkout, enter promo code power project to receive 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two day shipping. Again, this is part two of a four part series. So if you are discovering the series for the first time on this episode, please go back and check out part one and stay tuned for parts three and four. Enjoy the show. What about a quality meat as it pertains to nutrition? You know, because when I hear people talking about like a keto diet and a carnivore diet, you know, they're, I don't know, they're always promoting like healthy fats and they always kind of throw in quality meats. And I just wonder like, how much does that matter? And like, I could just use

myself as an example. I'll eat some salami here and there. I'll eat some different things here and there. And I try to buy the ones without nitrates and stuff, but I don't think that has any, from what I've heard, that may not have any bearing either. Is there a real difference between, I always kind of also say better is probably better.

Just use common sense. Some high quality beef that you bought is probably better than a hot dog but do you guys think it really makes that big of a difference if we're throwing these things in kind of occasionally yeah i'll let paul i'll say my part and i know paul will disagree somewhat but i think that we have to put it in relative context and there's big battles there's mountains and there's mole hill mole hills and so when i was like raising a kid. Well, when I was on Rogan's show and he asked me, I said,

look, I think grass finish and probably regeneratively finish is a top. And then the grain finish guy is probably the number three contender. When we're looking at the overall picture, if you want to use a UFC analogy, now there's people out there saying that grain finish meat is poison and you shouldn't eat that slop and it's going to kill you. I don't like that language. I think that's misleading and I don't think it's going to poison people. What's going to poison people is continuing eating the Oreos and the Doritos and the Cheetos and that crap. And to put just meat in general in that category, I think that's

a huge disservice to a lot of people. Is there a difference? We can't prove it with studies yet. Probably when studies come out long-term, if we can ever get enough carnivore studies, we might see a difference, particularly in certain people for certain conditions. The data is really not out there yet. Texas A&M did a couple studies a few years ago looking at some biomarkers, blood lipids, and the difference were not really different at all. I mean, even the grain fit was even slightly better, but I don't put much import into that study.

There are people anecdotally that absolutely will say, I feel a lot better when I include grass-finished meat or I include organ meats. But equally, there are people that don't have a difference. I did a survey on 11,000 people on a carnivore diet, and I asked them what they're eating. Basically, it didn't seem to make a difference in their overall outcome as a general rule. Just as many people were getting off their medications, losing weight, getting rid of their medical conditions. And so on a macroscopic level, it's probably not enough to say a big difference,

but probably for individuals, it probably definitely makes a difference. I'll let Paul add to that. The main problem I have with grain-fed meat is not necessarily the nutritional content differences, but the potential for moldy grains, mold toxins, glyphosate, 2,4-D, things that are sprayed on the grains. I haven't been to a lot of feedlots, to tell you the truth. But legally, what I've read is that they can feed them all kinds of junk. They can feed them plastic chips and orange juice and Oreos and cookies and candy. and plastic chips and orange juice and Oreos and cookies and candy. I mean, I would personally, and then I haven't seen any actual studies of dioxin levels in grass versus grain-fed animals, but I think the main concerns I have,

which are primarily theoretical at this point, I'd like to study it more, are that the fat in the meat, glyphosate is a water-soluble toxin, so that's going to end up probably in the meat. There are other fat-soluble toxins like atrazine sprayed on corn. Could those end up, you know, could the pesticides bioaccumulate in the fat? Could poly, could dioxins and

persistent organic pollutants end up in the fat of the grain-fed animals more just because they're eating a diet that could be potentially more tainted? I think that, you know, when I was at White Oak talking to Will Harris, he talked about, he was previously, one of the things that was so cool about him, he's brave. He's been doing regenerative for 20 years, really ahead of the curve. But before that, he was a mainstream

rancher and he was feeding his cows chicken shit. He told me, he's like, I fed them chicken shit. And cows aren't supposed to eat chicken shit. And so he said they would get sick and they would need antibiotics more and you need more stuff. And so he said they would get sick and they would need antibiotics more and eating more stuff. And so I think that the health of the animal matters to us as humans. I don't know that we can necessarily see it in nutritional profiles, but I think we could see it in the fat and we could see it in the bio accumulation of other potential toxins.

And maybe that's my concern. Maybe a little bit of the equivalent of, you know, somebody's cooking you a steak and they drop it on the ground and it gets all full of dirt and they just like wash it off well i like that kind of steak i like that and they like you know serve it up to you but you didn't know about it right but it just got like you said tainted it got dirty like it and maybe these foods these salamis and sausages maybe they're not like that wouldn't hurt you at all like if it had if it landed on

the ground and had you know some stuff on it from the floor or whatever but you wash it off right but if you were to eat stuff like that uh you know not knowing like what it's going to do and stuff like that maybe over a period of time uh maybe you know just like i was saying earlier better maybe better is better i don't know i think it's cleaner yeah i think it's cleaner and i think that's what will is seen in this cattle and the cattle are healthier and yeah and you just probably try to match that up with your budget as well right yeah and i think that comes back to an interesting conversation which is kind of philosophical vote with your dollars and what's important to you right so i heard in this podcast they were talking and it was a father asking his son would would you take a hundred thousand dollars if if i let you if i cut off

your arm you know i'll give you a100,000 for arms. No way. What about a million dollars? No, I think my arm is worth a million dollars. The father's point was like, hey, you're already rich. As humans, we're just not very good at appreciating health before we lose it. We're already all rich and I think that we just have to think

about what we invest in and what it's worth to invest in. And as Sean kind of suggested, there's not a lot of things that are more expensive than being unhealthy and getting sick. And I'm not necessarily saying that grain-fed meat is going to make us sick, but I do think that the better the quality of the food we eat,

the more chance we're going to have of being as healthy as possible. Yeah, and I was just going to say that, you know, Paul pointed out that there's these compounds, glyphosate and glyphosate, rather, and atrazine. Some of these things are sprayed on these foods. And so they're sprayed on all the foods. So you're exposed to that with almost everything in the diet, irrespective if you're eating carnivore or not. And so the grain-fed may put you at a slight higher risk.

Animals eat toxins all day long. They're human toxins. And some of those, the animal has to process, has to detoxify. Does that end up in the fat? Does the oxalates and the things we talk about as carnivores, those animals are ingesting those all day long. And do those end up in the fat? And are we exposed to that?

And so the question becomes, is it concentrated enough to make a difference? I don't know. I suspect, like Paul says, and you say, if it doesn't have any, that's probably your best option. But does it make a 1% difference or a 50% difference? I don't know. I suspect, like Paul says, and you say, if it doesn't have any, that's probably your best option. But does it make a 1% difference or a 50% difference? And my suspicion is it's probably closer to this 1% difference. At the end of the day, though, I think we should still be all pushing for better food, better quality long-term. Because if we don't stand up, I can tell you that the food manufacturers don't care. And they're going to do its most, you know, even the big meat companies.

And now big meat is now big protein. They're investing in plant-based, Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and Mafford. These control 90% of the beef production in the U.S. They are all protein companies now. They're going to invest in artificial protein. I don't know if we have time to get into lab-grown meat, but that's going to be the next thing coming down the pike. They're going to be pushing for us to do it.

They're going to be cutting beef with soybeans and peas and saying this is healthy environment. It's already happening. We see meat that's cut with plant products in there, and they're greenwashing it. Oh, it's healthy for the environment. Eat a 50-50 burger. This is what's coming.

Unless we step up, and I don't know who's listening to this, but I talk to these influencers, grow a pair of effing balls and stand up and stop capitulating and virtue signaling and buying in this plant-based pea protein stuff because it's not going to help you long term. And basically, to kind of tie up that thing about kind of processed meats,

it most likely won't interfere with your body's ability to lose some body fat, which is probably the number one problem in America. People are just, they're too heavy. They've been over consuming food for too long. And, uh, in many cases, they're sick kind of based off of that. Do you guys feel that that's correct? I think in most cases, I think that, uh, that, that, you know you've got to get people in the door, make the barrier to entry as low as possible. If they get in the door through going in and out, maybe it's not a bad thing.

I think as long as we can present a clear message for where the goal is. I think that it gets confusing because people will criticize us for that, saying, oh, those guys are eating Wendy's burgers or In-N-Out. I think there's a lot of nuance there. You normally don't do anything like that, do you?

I don't do anything like that, no. Did you in the beginning at all? Never did, no. I've always been kind of... Weird. Yeah. You know, that's how I roll. Yeah, so I think that as long as we try to just bring the messaging for people

that, like, okay, you're in the door, this is step one, but this is where we want to get you to. Like, it's not the best thing longterm. It doesn't support the right messaging. You know, like I think people need it in a pinch. Okay.

You want to get people on the door doing that. I think it's a good step in the right direction, but it's always good to be reasonable. Yeah. But then I think you've got to give them the clear indication where you're going. You know, this isn't the end game. The end game is not Wendy's all day.

The end game is not in and out all day. Like that's not, that's not the end game. So just give them something to shoot for. A lot of people that are like looking into starting off the carnivore diet, I still get a lot of individuals that are like, Oh, there's been no longterm research on people eating only meat. And they're still very afraid of that. I know you guys have addressed this before, but I think it's still something that we can talk about just a little bit. Anecdotally from what you guys have seen, like what's your hypothesis on the longterm effects of someone having a carnivore diet? I'm assuming it's positive.

Well, I mean, there has been one study from 1930 with Willemur Stefansson. It was two people. It was at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He went to live at the Inuit. They thought he was crazy when he came back saying you could eat animal meat all the time. And they put him in Bellevue Hospital. They actually locked him in the hospital for a month or two, and then they let him go out. But he continued to eat a carnivore diet for a year. So this study gets criticized because it was done in 1930, but they measured kidney function, they measured liver function, they measured blood pressure, they measured weight, they measured mood, they measured pooping and overall health. And so we have a solid year-long study of somebody eating a full carnivore diet in very detail. And that looks pretty darn healthy. Now,

I think that there's other things we can use to approximate that. There are plenty of cultures that have done, you know, primarily meat-based diets for six months, you know, eight months during winters. I mean, everybody above the, probably the 45th parallel, you know, in the United States, like all the Inuit, all the Norwegian cultures, all of the Siberian cultures, everyone far from the equator did for long periods of time. And we just came out of a 15,000-year ice age. So the follow-up question I have to that is what are people worried about? Are you worried about fiber? Are you worried about cholesterol?

Let's address the individual things on term. The other thing is like do we have long-term studies on the safety of being a vegan? I'm not sure we do because I'll tell you what, it doesn't look very safe to me if you look at the moddy composition of vegan doctors, Michael Greger and Joel Fuhrman and, you know, and, and, you know, Neil Barnard, his neck is, I mean, I've never seen anybody with a smaller neck. It's pretty crazy. So, you know, I'm like, show me a study on the long-term safety of a pure plant-based diet. And people want to say like, it's not safe long-term. And you think, well, what's long-term? Is it three weeks?

Is it two years? Like, what are we measuring? Are we measuring kidney function? Are we measuring renal function? Like, it all seems fine. I mean, I check my labs frequently. I've got tons of clients and patients we check labs all the time. I guess I want to know what they think is unsafe about it, you know?

And we, you know, I think Sean and I have both addressed pretty much every potential criticism multiple times over. Is it fiber? Is it the microbiome? Is it LDL? Is it lipids? What the heck is going to kill you about a carnivore diet? You tell me. Is it long-term ketosis?

We need fiber, though. Like oatmeal, it's got the little heart on it, right? And it has fiber in it, right? That's what we're taught. We need some of these grains and oats and stuff, right? Yeah, let me just piggyback on Paul's comment. And so this is, and Stephanson and Carson Anderson did a study, they survived a year. That's not long-term. People want to see what they want to see. And I would ask you, like the people that criticize the carnivore diet,

and I say, what would it take to prove to you that it's safe? And you would hear somebody say a long-term RCT. And I say, well, show me any diet that has had that done. And none of them have had that. We cannot say with any degree of certainty beyond some very weak epidemiology that any diet is going to make us live long, it's going to prevent us from getting heart disease, cancer, so on and so forth. I had Gordon Guyatt on my podcast. He's a guy who invented evidence-based medicine.

He literally came up with that term in 1991 when he offered that paper. He developed the GRADE system, which is a way to evaluate nutritional evidence in 2000. It's been accepted by 110 organizations. And when you apply that to red meat, which they did in the Nutri-X Consortium, six papers that came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine on October 1st, they basically said there is no strong evidence whatsoever to suggest that red meat will cause cancer, heart disease, or any other disease. Now, there's been tremendous pushback from the vegan communities, from the Walter Willits at Harvard and so on and so forth, that they don't like the conclusion of saying, let's

apply rigorous criteria to your evidence and see what shakes out. And when you apply rigorous criteria, the evidence just falls apart. And so I think it's the best thing we can say is we're never going to have a study that's And when you apply rigorous criteria, the evidence just falls apart. And so I think the best thing we can say is we're never going to have a study that's going to show us what diet is going to make us live the longest. The best we can do is take people that are diseased and move them into the not diseased category and keep them there as long as possible. And I think that's the best you can ever do. And so all of us in this room are basically not diseased. I mean, I was 10 years ago, I was fat. I was, I had hyper, you know, hypertension. I had sleep apnea. You know, I had metabolic syndrome. I don't have any of that anymore. And so I've improved my health. I mean, not to mention all the subjective things, libido,

lack of joint pain, function, strength, body composition. So I think that's what you have to focus on. I think sort of rolling the dice and saying, oh, I'm going to worry about what I'm going to die from 20, 30, 40 years from now is silly because we're never going to know that. And anything that tells you that you can do that by eating a plant-based diet or a Mediterranean diet is basically just yanking your chain. And to add to that as well, I do think we need some pilot studies with a carnivore diet. I think people are right.

I think that for the medical establishment to take it seriously, we're going to need... We got something going on, right? Don't we have some studies coming? Yeah, we talked about this. So David Ludwig out of Harvard. I know I slander Harvard a lot because of the Walter Willett part of Harvard, but... And T.H. Chan. Yeah, T.H. Chan. The T.H. Chan. Yeah, T.H. Chan.

The T.H. Chan School of Epidemiology and Public Health is highly funded. I talked about this on the podcast I did on my podcast with Brian Sanders, and we were talking about the James Wilkes Chris Kresser episode on Rogan. That school is highly funded by plant-based interest. Right, sure, sure. Appropriately. Anyway, so Ludwig

is going to do an initial carnivore study, and I think we'll see who signs up for it, but I suspect we'll have thousands of people that want to share their story. This will get in there. It'll be criticized. I mean, Neil Bernard will probably be lobbying the FTC to have it retracted like he did. You know, Neil Bernard's a vegan doctor for the— Thin neck.

Yeah, yeah. Thin neck. So that's going to happen, and then that's going to empower more and more physicians. Because I know Paul and I, I get lots of physicians now that are putting patients on a carnivore diet for selected conditions, whether it's Crohn's disease, also colitis, autoimmune disease, which it seems to be uniquely powerful for treating. You know, you can fix diabetes and obesity and metabolic syndrome with a lot of different ways. But I think the carnivore diet, in my experience for those particular conditions, is uniquely powerful. I mean, it almost sounds like a panacea where it fixes just about everything. But to be honest, it seems

to. I mean, it seems like my, and this is sort of a reality of who we are. I think humans were freaking savage animals. And we ate every animal we got the chance to do. And that's how we are. I think humans were freaking savage animals and we ate every animal we got the chance to do. And that's how we survived. And that's how we became human. And we ate a few berries here and there, but I mean, basically this is what our human food is. And when you eat a human appropriate diet, guess what? Good things happen. You, you sort of maximize your human potential. And I think, well, I mean, you're, you're experiencing it right now. You can make your own comments. I know Paul and I will share that we probably feel the best we've ever been, and Paul was stupid enough to become a vegan for a while, I think.

I never did that. I've got to say, one of the reasons why I was so excited to get to know you guys and to learn more about your message is that neither one of you guys are a pussy. That was a big thing for me. I don't want to listen to people that get up there and their fucking hair is a mess and they've got teeth falling out. A lot of the times these doctors and these scientists are so smart in some of these areas that they never take care of the rest of their body.

And they're not exercising. They're not doing. You guys are living it. And seeing you the first time you came into my gym versus now is fucking amazing. And you've always, well, it seems like you've been lean for quite some time, but you're making big improvements too, and you're doing jujitsu, you're lifting. I mean, both you guys are out there doing it. And as far as how I feel, I'm 25 days into handling this pretty strictly,

and I'm thinking, I think on day 15, I'm like, I'm doing this the rest of my life. You know, there might be some variations, and, you know, Mark Smellybell is a very fat person on the inside, so there'll be some peanut butter cups and stuff like that along the way, and there'll be some pizza and ice cream, but I'm going to take this thing all the way. Yeah, I mean, I think just my honest input here, because people are like, what would you do?

Don't you miss broccoli? I'm like, hell no, I don't miss broccoli. I mean, I think a carnivore diet with an occasional bowl of ice cream is probably a pretty damn good diet for the most part. I mean, we can argue about setting you off and you're carb addicted and you go back to that stuff. But I mean, honestly, if I was going to, like I said, a lot of people ask me what I'm going to cheat with. It's not going to be some bowl of spaghetti. It's going to be a frigging… You're not going to a salad bar.

Oh, my God, it's amazing. But that's a very sustainable thing to do. And you find out that meat is where it's at. And when I look at it, I say, get all your damn nutrition from animal products. Nutrient-dense animal products are the winning goal. If you can tolerate and have room for something else you know maybe in a performance standpoint a carbohydrate do that but get your nutrition from meat you're and i know it sounds stupid people think i'm an idiot when i say that you

cut human beings open we're made out of friggin red meat if you want to build red meat you eat you eat the building materials and you know we paul's talked about very eloquently talking about the likeness of our human molecular structure and getting the same thing rather than these foreign compounds that we have to really work hard. You know, the default setting for all animals 800 million years ago was carnivory. The first animals that began, these multicellular animals, started out by eating smaller single-cellular animals. And that happened and that happened. Finally, eating plants became another adaptation as the different niches were filled.

I think when the grasslands developed 100 million years ago, we started seeing these primary herbiferous animals. The animal default setting is eating other animals just because it's easier. It's more efficient. Your digestion is so much easier. As a human being, we are well set up for carnivory. We've got some minor capacity to still hand out plants, but we do better with animal products.

Hey, podcast, it's me sneaking in at the very end again. I just want to say thank you to everybody that's been rating and reviewing. If you've gotten any value from any of the podcasts that we've done, any value from any of the guests, the absolute biggest way you can say thank you is just to simply go on iTunes, give us a five-star rating, and give us a review. Just like our boy Modest727. He says, the O'Hearn episode. This episode hit me in the

feels. As someone who grew up in the 80s being dyslexic, I experienced things much the same way you guys did. My path has been different, but I'm blessed and thankful for all the success being different has brought me. My daughter has autism and I catch myself focusing on the trails that wait for her in school. This episode made me flip the switch and focus on the positives and how being different changed my life for the better. Love your content and your elbow sleeves. Keep it up. Modest727, thank you so much for sharing that with us, for being open and willing to share something like that with us. We really, really appreciate the review. If you, the listener, would like to hear your name and

your review read on air, go to iTunes right now, look us up, give us a five-star rating, drop us a review, and you could hear your name at the end of one of these podcasts. Thank you guys so much. We'll catch you next time.