Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 384 - No One Is An Expert on CV19 ft. Paul Saladino

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Dr. Paul Saladino is the author of the book, “The Carnivore Code”, a medical doctor specializing in functional medicine and psychiatry. He obtained his M.D. at the University of Arizona with a focus on Integrative Medicine. He is a certified functional medicine practitioner (IFMCP) and recently finished his residency at the University of Washington. He is passionate about correcting the roots of disease and exploring WHY such systems are out of balance, often focusing on the gut, chronic inflammation, and nutritional biochemistry. Find Paul on IG: https://www.instagram.com/carnivoremd/?hl=en Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting our sponsors! ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/power25 Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 25% off and free shipping on orders of $29! ➢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 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: 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 ➢ https://www.facebook.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 FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Power Project Crew, welcome to today's show. This episode was recorded on May 5th, so feliz cinco de mayo to everybody. Today we have the salad man, Paul Saladino, aka CarnivoreMD. As you guys know, Paul is a huge proponent of the carnivore diet. He has a book about it. He's been on our podcast several times talking about the carnivore diet and all the benefits of it. And surprisingly, he has recently started incorporating carbs just to kind of run some tests on himself. And when I say carbs, I mean, the worst of it all was like honey and some sweet potatoes. So, nothing crazy. He's not having pizza, although that would be funny. But he's just kind of going through his experience and really seeing what it does to his

body physically and even metabolically. And that's actually a huge topic of this episode was the metabolic health of Americans and why the coronavirus has been running through and affecting so many people in this country. And he gives some great examples on how if we had attacked the virus the virus, you know, nutritionally and metabolically, we might be in better shape than we are now, as opposed to just going straight to lockdown and the quarantine. He goes on to say, you know, unfortunately, like cereals and processed foods, junk foods, all those sales have gone up. And that obviously is not helping anything. However, maybe if we were to eat whole foods, we might be in better shape.

This was a really good conversation with our boy, Paul. And, you know, as Mark puts it, he doesn't really say anything that's too controversial. I don't think anybody can really disagree with much of what he has to say today. So, again, this was, you know, I think this is going to be one of the most valuable conversations we've had on when it comes to nutrition and the coronavirus and how we can kind of get out of all of this mess. So thank you, Paul, for spitting all this knowledge and taking the time out of your day to be on our podcast. If you guys appreciate what he's schooling us on, please find his social media links

down in the YouTube and Facebook description, as well as the iTunes show notes. Hit them up and let them know what you guys think. And ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy this show with our homie, Paul Saladino. Rolling, rolling, rolling. Happy Cinco de Mayo. Yeah. Oh, that's today? That's, yes.

What are we supposed to do? Roll up a burrito and smoke it? That would be good. that would be good that would be good it is i just saw somebody had posted uh it's such a bummer that for the first time in who i don't know how calendars work but sink of the mile lands on taco tuesday and everything's shut down damn just there's still gonna be a lot of lot of people getting takeout tacos and partying at houses. People are still doing that. Yeah.

Oh, antivirus named after a Mexican beer. Do you guys know anybody that doesn't like tacos? No, man. No. No. No, man. No, no. So I, I don't think you're allowed to do this like by law, but I think I need to like return my son back to like wherever you can bring back kids that are broken because he doesn't like tacos. And I'm like, dude,

like you're the only person like it's, it's not that he, um, I would say that some people are like, yeah, I don't really care about tacos. Right. And then other people like, I love tacos, but he, he hates them. Wow. And I'm like, this, this can't be like something went wrong. Like what, what happened in your life? What's been so traumatic? What's, what's so wrong with this situation? Like how, how is this possible that you don't like tacos? What's wrong with you? I mean, I looked him up and down.

I couldn't figure out what's wrong with him. But clearly, clearly he has something wrong with him, right? Where did you go wrong? I don't know. What the hell? I did everything I saw in the videos and then some, and I guess it didn't work. Well, does he like burritos? Breakfast burrito so what does he dislike about tacos has he mentioned that yeah is it like a handling issue is it uh the flavor profile i i think he's had some bad

experiences i think i think i i just think that he doesn't like know, like, I think he's eaten like tacos at school before, like the hard shell taco deal. And so now he just doesn't understand like, no, there's so much more to tacos and those crappy ones. I like that. Oh God. Yeah. School tacos, school tacos are absolutely disgusting. So I don't blame him if that's all he's experienced. Yeah. I mean, there is like a line between like a real taco and then like a jack in the box taco. Those are really good. But, you know, like if I say like, oh, you got to try this taco and I give you like one of those, you'll be like, hmm, that's what everyone's talking about. It's like it's a little different. But you think, Andrew, like full on 100 percent authentic or do you think a little spice of fatness from the united states can help a little bit with mexican food it can definitely help oh yeah yeah but i mean so someone's like that's not authentic sometimes oh i don't care like um i don't know what it was like when you're

in italy but i'd imagine you know getting like authentic pizza might be different than like pizza hut you know i i i don't care but what about like having a taco with like maybe uh pete montee's flat iron steak for the meat oh man i know i had some uh we cooked up some steaks last night uh cooked up some filet and new york strip and then andy had them all like cut up and, and, uh, they were freaking great. We love, love having that P Montees. We had some, uh, potatoes too. We had some yummy potatoes that, uh, she cooked in the oven, which, uh, just went, everything went together really well. So really good.

Yeah. I might, I might grill up some, uh, some flat irons, cut them up real, real thin, get some tortillas and have my own cinco de mayo here at the crib you know enjoy that so i i know it's mixing in like uh nebraska and mexico but i don't think i'll i'll get uh deported anytime soon for doing that um if you guys want to take advantage of piedmontese beef it has the highest protein lowest fat you're ever going to find that be um on it you know in any type of meat uh you guys got to head over to Piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com.

Check out Enter Promo Code Power Project for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 more, you get free two-day shipping. And it's only fitting that we talk about Piedmontese because we got a carnivore coming up. The salad man. The salad man. Yeah. Salad, right?

And his name. How weird is that? It's so weird. He's probably heard that joke so many times at this point, though. I know he's really gone against the grain, right? With his last name versus the way that he eats. But I'm excited to talk to him today.

He's got a lot of great stuff. He and I talked a lot when I was in on his podcast about vitamin D and getting it from the sun. And, you know, you can get vitamin D from a bottle. You can take supplemental vitamin D and that may help a little bit, but really all it does is just when you, when you get your blood work, you'll get a little extra pat on the back because your vitamin D levels will be higher, but it's not the same thing. You can maybe think of it maybe a little bit like ketones. If you ingest ketones, it can maybe turn on some things in your body that could be beneficial to you, but it's not doing the same thing as like putting yourself

through the process of getting into ketosis. So once again, unfortunately, you know, the things that we do for ourselves are always going to be more powerful than the things we do to ourselves. You can't really just get it from a pill, but if you do live in an area where there's less sunlight, you can, you know, supplement some vitamin D here and there. But your best bet is to get out in the sun. Oh, my God. Put those things away. Holy.

What the hell? Wow. What's up, you guys? Are you on carbs now? Look at that. Andrew, you forgot to hit his entrance music entrance music i know my bad way the way that he popped in with that double bicep you know nothing is uh less impressive than a poorly done uh double bicep pose what's going on man what do you got going on over there oh you know just

trying to uh hide from the hysteria, talk some sense into people, write some more books, all that kind of stuff, you know, good things. Good luck. What made you dive in full blast, full bore more recently to talking a lot about the coronavirus? I don't even know. I think it's just no matter what's going on.

Are you fascinated by it? I am interested in it. And I'm interested in the human response to it. And I'm interested in the epidemiology and the virulence of the virus. And I think it actually presents us with a model system. Or it's the kind of thing for me that's dentists with a model system. Or it's the kind of thing for me that's very similar to many things that we're going to face in society. It's something that's going to challenge our health as a population. And just from the beginning, I thought that the response was a little strange. There's always going to be infectious insults that we're going to encounter. And why are we hiding so much from this one? Is there a real reason to do that? And the further I got into it, the more I thought, man, a lot of these pieces of this equation don't make a whole lot of sense to me. And the way we're structuring

the response doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And yes, people are going to die from it. And yes, it is a virus that can harm people. Well, there are other viruses out there that are harming us. And there are many other viruses and other infectious things that we're exposed to. So yeah, it's been an interesting journey to just kind of think about it from my own perspective as a non-virologist, non-epidemiologist, non-infectious disease specialist. But I do think that there's a lot to be learned from it. But you also have rubbed elbows with some experts on your show. Kind of more recently, you've had all different kinds of people getting different data together and getting different information than you yourself diving in and researching, correct? Yeah, absolutely. And here's the funniest thing about the coronavirus

pandemic. Who's an expert? Who is an expert? Who has seen this before? And I saw a doctor on Instagram that did, you know, a really satirical, funny thing. And he was also a psychiatrist or he was practicing in psychiatry. And he said, I'm getting a lot of hate from people. They're saying, stay in your lane, man. And he said, okay, so I'm going to let the world's most preeminent virologist take the stage. And he shows just a bunch of videos of Bill Gates, who's become the world expert on coronavirus, or the person we listen to. Or it's Dr. Oz, who hasn't seen a patient in 25 years and is a talk show host. Or it's David Sinclair, who I've had on my podcast and is a super smart guy, but he's a geneticist from Harvard.

So I'm not saying any of these people is unqualified to talk about coronavirus. I'm saying they're all qualified to talk about coronavirus, and they're all qualified to share an opinion and to think independently, as am I. So anytime that somebody tries to break any of us down, I think that it really just exposes that person as someone that's appealing to authority when in this situation, we just need ideas. What appears to be the most common thing amongst people that are getting the coronavirus and are, you know, getting very, very sick from it? So looking at the data, as I've seen it, the major risk factor is age, but the major risk factor for dying is also age. So death is, you know, the major risk factor for dying is age. So beyond age, and we can speculate as to why age may be the main risk factor for coronavirus, Beyond age, it's very clear that metabolic dysfunction, and I will clarify what that means, metabolic dysfunction is a huge risk factor,

potentially 10x, 8x risk factor for severe course of COVID-19, which is the disease associated with SARS-CoV-2. So if we go back to age, age is the biggest risk factor for coronavirus. And in medical school, in all of my training, we are always kind of sold this subtle propaganda that humans are just meant to break down and become decrepit as we age. It's this inescapable march toward decrepitude that humans are supposed to get as we age. It's normal to get high blood get as we age. We're supposed to, it's normal to get high blood pressure as you age. It's normal to have a heart attack as you age. It's normal to get cancer as we age. And this is, I guess, one of the reasons I got so interested in coronavirus because the narrative seems so similar to what I'd heard before around a carnivore

diet, around animal-based diets, around human health in general. And a lot of that narrative seemed to be built on this assumption that humans are just supposed to get weak as they age. And I've rebelled against that from the very beginning. If you look at indigenous peoples, they really don't get the same diseases of modern society. They don't get the same chronic diseases that we do. So we know as they age. So we know that age is not really the main issue here, that age is not necessarily as big of a deal as many people want to make it out to be. Now, certainly we all die. Eventually we have a finite life, but to say age is a chronic disease or that age is inevitably associated or inextricably associated with chronic, you know, weakening and illness.

This is a narrative that I've never appreciated because that's a very slippery slope to people just taking lots of pharmaceutical medications and not taking things into their own hands by making lifestyle changes and dietary changes and staying as strong as possible for as long as possible. So when a lot of elderly people are suffering with coronavirus, I think the assumption is immediately, they're old, that's normal. And I think about it differently. I think what is common in elderly populations? Comorbid conditions, chronic disease is certainly common in elderly populations, as is nutritional inadequacy. If you look at the way that the general population eats as we age, if you look at the way that the general population eats as we age, it gets to be worse and worse.

It gets to be less and less nutrient dense. How many 75-year-olds do you know who eat steak? How many 75-year-olds do you know who even eat just whole foods and plants or vegetables? And obviously, I'm not a huge proponent of vegetables, but how many 75-year-olds do you know who are making their own food, who are preparing food, whether it's of plant origin or meat or animal origin? It could even be chicken. But I think that as we age, perhaps because of the way we've been eating our whole lives, we tend to eat more convenient foods. And the adage we had in medical school was a tea and toast diet for elderly people. And that leads to tons of nutrient deficiencies. So I think that we're saying that obesity, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance are huge risk factors for severe COVID-19. And we're also saying that elderly people are at risk. But I think elderly people are at risk for the

same reasons as everyone else because they're metabolically unhealthy. They're more likely to have nutrient deficiencies. And as I've talked about in my podcast a lot over the last six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks, these micronutrients are critical for proper immune function, as is metabolic health, as is insulin sensitivity. And we can get into all of that. But I fear that,

again, and I've talked to you guys about this before, so much of what we think about in modern society is based around calories and macronutrients, protein, fat, and carbs. And those are hugely valuable levers, but it's missing this incredibly large body of knowledge around micronutrients. That was how I got interested in the carnivore diet of knowledge around micronutrients. That was how I got interested in the carnivore diet. And these micronutrients, in my opinion, are the real magic. They're the real spark. They're the real sort of ghost in the machine that either makes us vital

or our biochemistry isn't working well and our immune system isn't working well if we're deficient in them. So how many of these elderly people are deficient in micronutrients? Many. That's one of the reasons why, honestly, I've seen you post about this stuff. And then I see individuals, when they see you post about it, they're like, oh, these zealots are saying the carnivore diet is going to cure coronavirus. And obviously, that's not what you're saying. You're not saying the carnivore diet is the cure to coronavirus, but you're just saying, hey, if people eat nutrient-dense foods, build a healthier lifestyle, they're going to be less likely to be able to contract the core.

They'll be able to fight it off easier. So I don't understand how something so basic is being so warped into another type of narrative. Yeah, me neither. And that's okay. I'll keep fighting for it. And I'm glad that the message is clear because I see those criticisms from people and I don't want to ignore those criticisms. I don't want it to seem like I'm saying, hey, if you get coronavirus, just eat a steak and you'll be fine. No, that's not the case. And your diet isn't going to change whether or not you come in contact with the virus or whether or not you get the common cold or SARS-CoV-2 or the flu. But as you say, Nsema, it certainly could affect

the severity of your course with that illness. And we'll probably get into this today. There are millions, and I think we can discuss how big that number is, there are millions and millions of people who will come in contact with SARS-CoV-2. And the course of that illness, the severity of that illness is everything. Because some people have it easy and they move past it in a few days, or there are some people who are even asymptomatic and some people end up in the intensive care unit on a ventilator. So what's the difference? That's the key. That's the key. What's the difference? And that's what we're talking about here. Tell us about your shirt there. It says, eat whole foods, change the world. What's that about? This is my buddy, Justin Nault. He's got a company called Clovis. He's a great guy. And

this is his saying. And I was thinking about it. I was like, what should I wear today? He's like, well, I got my strong super training shirt over here. I was like, no, I'm just going to wear the Eat Whole Foods Change the World shirt today. I really just, I love Justin. I went hunting with him in January and what a great idea. It's not even about a carnivore diet anymore. For me, it's about ultra processed food. And I mean, of course, I'm still interested in the carnivore diet and I wrote a book about the carnivore diet anymore. For me, it's about ultra-processed food. And I mean, of course, I'm still interested in the carnivore diet. And I wrote a book about the carnivore diet. And that's what I, you know, carnivore, carnivore-ish diets, animal-based diets are what I believe to be optimal for humans. But at this point, I released a podcast today with a cardiologist

from Britain named Asim Malhotra. And in that podcast, we talked about the fact that this epidemic is really, I mean, let's just not mince words here. This epidemic is really targeting, this pandemic is really targeting people who are metabolically unhealthy. How do you get to be metabolically unhealthy? You eat food that's not whole food. Like, let's just make it very simple. So who is behind coronavirus? Have you guys seen that meme? And it's from Scooby-Doo and it's, you know, it's one of the characters from Scooby-Doo. Oh yeah, pulling off the mask. Who is behind coronavirus? And he pulls off the mask. And in the meme, it's Zoom

behind coronavirus. But when I pull off the mask, who is behind coronavirus? I see Nestle and Cargill and Bayer Monsanto and agribusiness and processed food. Because ultra processed food is really what's causing this metabolic illness. And this is- Yeah, or it could be yourself, right? Exactly. For allowing those foods to enter your home. We have to have some individual responsibility within the equation as well. But we can talk about that. It's an interesting nuance. But I think that this isn't really even sexy to say anymore. It's passe, but maybe we just have to keep saying it. The foods you eat are going to affect your metabolic health. So eating donuts all day is not a good defense against coronavirus. And eating processed food

and ultra processed food is not a good defense against coronavirus. This is a horrible idea. And for anyone to deny that food is connected with metabolic health or that food is connected with immunity or that metabolic health is connected with immunologic resilience is just to put on blinders and to say, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And to your point, Nseema, I think a lot of people that come back at me with criticisms, you know, believe in a paradigm in which micronutrients are not important or believe in a paradigm, which is macronutrient focused or macronutrient driven and believe in a paradigm that really ignores overall food quality and have publicly come out and said things like, you know, it's okay to eat pop tarts as long as you take a multivitamin. And you think like, it doesn't really make a whole, you know, so it's consistent with their

paradigm and I'm just challenging their paradigm. So they get all, you know, triggered. Yeah. What about, you know, just to play devil's advocate, you know, you said eat whole foods, avoid the processed stuff. Lettuce doesn't seem to be processed too much. So, technically, could you be vegetarian and still be protected or a little bit stronger to face COVID and all that? Absolutely. As long as you're getting the nutrients you need. It's very hard to do that, in my opinion, on a vegetarian plant-based diet. Very, very hard. And that's what I talk about in my book, The Carnivore Code. People will be familiar with that. If you're not, you should check it out. But if you look at plant foods versus animal foods,

number one, animal foods have been incorrectly vilified for decades now. And number two, in terms of nutrient bioavailability and nutrient adequacy, it's really hard to get the nutrients we need from plant foods, which is why I kind of suggest in the book, plant foods are probably just survival foods for most humans. If you eat them in a pinch, that's okay. But generally speaking, if you want the most nutritious foods, your diet should be composed of a lot of animal foods. That's where we're going to get those micronutrients from in bioavailable amounts. So it's a great question, Andrew.

Also, too, I think, you know, if vegetables or even other foods, if they assist you to if they encourage you to eat more meat, then that might be a really good thing, especially for people that kind of struggle to eat. I know for myself, if I have some spinach sometimes with some meat, it just makes it easier to eat the whole thing, you know, or if I make an omelet and it has some vegetables in it, it just, it makes the, it enhances the experience of the omelet. So I do understand, you know, there's anti-nutrients in there and I get all those things. But again, if it's going to encourage you to eat, to stay more on plan, to stay more on point, to eat more meat based, then it might be something to look into. I know for yourself, you more recently have made some changes and you've started to incorporate some carbohydrates. So you're off the team. You know, that's why we got this Zoom call going. We wanted to officially announce that you're off the team. You know, that's, that's where we're here. That's, that's why we got this zoom call going. We wanted to officially announce that you're off the team, but you made some changes, uh, to your carnivore diet. Is that right? Yeah. I've been doing some experiments over the last few months and, uh, I'm going to be doing a podcast soon looking at my continuous glucose monitor readings. So here's the deal. As I got

further and further into the carnivore diet, I ate what we could call strict carnivore. I don't like to be dogmatic about it. Contrary to what the haters on Twitter would say, I am not carnivore zealot. I try to be open-minded and not to be dogmatic. But I was strict carnivore for over a year and a half. And what I began to see, guys, was a lot... I saw in other people a lot of dogmatic belief regarding keto and ketogenic diets and low carb. And I thought, you know, I really want to challenge this a little bit because personally, and the more I dug into the literature, I just couldn't reconcile this idea.

And I hope this came through in the book, but it'll probably come through more in the cookbook that I'm writing for later this year. Insulin resistance, metabolic dysfunction, these are all synonyms and they're synonymous with prediabetes. Carbohydrates per se do not cause insulin resistance. And I want people to understand that. And I think that within the carnivore community, there are many people who get kind of dogmatic about that. And they think, I saw too much messaging around this idea that in order to fix insulin resistance, you had to go low carb. And though a low carb diet can help for that, it's not the only way. And carbohydrates in and of themselves do not cause insulin resistance in humans. There's a nuance here. And so I wanted to do some of my own experiments as a carnivore, as an animal-based

proponent, as the carnivore MD with carbohydrates to prove this to people, to show them that I'm not going to get fat, I'm not going to get unhealthy, and my blood glucose isn't going to get completely out of whack, my inflammation isn't going to go up and my fasting insulin is not going to get disordered. My fasting insulin isn't going to rise by including carbohydrates in my diet. And so I did one 10-day period with a continuous glucose monitor and I've got all those readings. And during that period, I did carbohydrates and I included things like coconut water, like sweet potato, like squash, and honey. And what I found were some really interesting things. But overall, what I found was that it didn't cause me to explode. I didn't get fat. I didn't get sick.

My sleep didn't suffer. And I actually kind of liked the way I felt with some carbohydrates in my diet from time to time. And there's some nuance there. And again, Mark was on my podcast recently, and we talked about this during that conversation. Within the parlance, within the colloquial sphere of discussion, we talk about carbs. And I realized that means like junk food carbs. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about carbohydrates. I'm talking about a macronutrient that is found.

You're still talking about whole foods, yeah. Yeah, I'm talking about whole food carbohydrates. And even within that discussion, there's nuance around what source. You know, are you getting your carbs from white rice? Are you getting your carbs from wheat? Are you getting your carbs from grains? Or are you getting your carbs from fruit and starch or honey, which is raw and organic? Do those affect humans differently? I believe they do. Certainly, everyone listening to this will know that there's very good evidence that

carbohydrates coming from sugar affect people differently than carbohydrates coming from whole food. And at the risk of getting a little granular, I'll just share a study that I saw recently and reviewed in my podcast with Azim Malhotra. So it was a study done in pre-diabetic obese children. And it was done by Robert Lustig and a number of people. And Robert Lustig has been an outspoken critic of fructose. And they took these obese pre-diabetic children that had disordered markers of insulin sensitivity. And over nine days, the study was only nine days, they took out all the sugar in their diet and all of the sugar sweetened beverages in their diet. So all they did was take out processed sugar and processed sugar-laden drinks. They kept macronutrient ratios the same.

They didn't make these kids low-carb. And they kept calories the same, isocaloric. Isocaloric, same macronutrients, remove fructose, remove sugar-sweetened beverages. Within nine days, they saw improvements in every single marker of insulin sensitivity. So how there can be studies like that and people can say that processed sugar is the same as carb is a carb is a carb, that just boggles my mind because it's clearly not the case. The quality of your carbohydrates matters just like the quality of your meat matters, just like the quality of your fat matters. The

quality of the foods we eat matters. So when you replace the processed food with the whole food in nine days, you see improvements in insulin sensitivity in obese kids. And so this wraps back into the coronavirus conversation. We can reverse metabolic syndrome or significantly improve it in just over a week. And we could probably improve it faster. So we've been in quarantine for nine weeks or eight weeks at this point. How many thousands of people, how many millions of people could we have helped if that were the mainstream messaging? And how many thousands of lives would have been saved from severe COVID-19 if we'd been talking about the connections between metabolic illness and severe immunologic compromise, severe courses of COVID-19.

And that could have been done just by removing the ultra processed foods. It's not rocket science. We can't deny this at this point. Have you looked into any of this stuff from Ray Pete, where he talks about, I've heard him talk about utilizing carbohydrates even against diabetes and even using like fruit. And he just has some really interesting things that he says, but I haven't seen enough of his stuff to really truly understand what the heck it is he's talking about, but he does have a lot of interesting concepts. Have you ever looked into anything from him? Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with Ray Pete's ideas.

And some of them I think are fascinating and others of them I am in a little bit of disagreement about. I think he's, I don't know if he does interviews anymore. I'd love to get him on the podcast and kind of talk to him about stuff like that. But Ray Peet, I believe is of the opinion that gluconeogenesis is somehow harmful for humans. So that gets into the school of thought where people who are acolytes of Ray Peet, Chris Masterjohn, other people like this, they seem to have this opinion that not having any carbohydrates, being in a ketogenic state is harmful to human physiology. I don't go that far, right? That's like the other side of dogma, in my opinion, that we should never be in ketosis and

that we need this constant drip of carbohydrates into our body all the time. Well, that doesn't make any sense to me just intuitively thinking about times in our evolution that we would have been fasting, that we would have had periods where we were very low carb because there were no carbohydrates in nature and we could only hunt animals. This is kind of the idea of a classic carnivore diet that it's totally reasonable and I believe consistent with normal human physiology and healthy and probably very beneficial long term to have some periods where you don't have carbohydrates in your diet. This is ketosis. This is the massive amount of

literature and interest in ketogenic diets. And I think they're very beneficial. And as we know, they do seem to turn on a lot of genes involved in autophagy, involved in metabolic health. Now, again, we're back to kind of that beautiful middle ground. I didn't want to become a ketogenic dogmatic person. I didn't want to become a zealot with regard to a ketogenic diet. And I've realized that it's totally fine to go back and forth between ketosis and carbohydrates. But I also don't take it the other I've realized that it's totally fine to go back and forth between ketosis and carbohydrates. But I also don't take it the other way and believe that ketosis is harmful for humans, because I think that we know there are many benefits to not having carbs all the time. And in fact, what I'm doing now is eating honey in the morning. I'm going to put another

continuous glucose monitor on here in the next couple of days. What I discovered with my CGM, my continuous glucose monitor, was that I was more insulin sensitive in the next couple days, what I discovered with my CGM, my continuous glucose monitor, was that I was more insulin sensitive in the morning, which is normal human physiology. As we go through the day, we become a little bit less insulin sensitive. Now, whether or not this has any clinical correlation is questionable, but I could see that for an equivalent amount of carbohydrates from an equivalent source, if I ate them in the morning as opposed to eating them at night, I would have a smaller blood glucose them in the morning as opposed to eating them at night, I would have a smaller blood glucose response in the morning and a larger blood glucose response at night. Now, what this has led me to do or experiment with right now is I'll eat the majority

of my carbohydrates in the morning. And then in the evening, if I'm going to eat carbohydrates, I usually eat about two meals a day. I'll eat a smaller amount of carbohydrates. And then when I wake up in the morning, I'm going to be in ketosis. I'm going to have used my liver glycogen overnight. I do a time-restricted feeding window. I end my day with eating early in the afternoon or mid-afternoon. I like to have a long amount of time before I go to sleep. So I eat breakfast and a late lunch. Usually by 2 or 3 p.m., I'm done eating for the day. And so, if I'm doing an intermittent fast that lasts from 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. until 8 or 9 the next morning, that's definitely going to put me in ketosis. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't

think I'm harming myself by doing that. I think that's normal human physiology to say, oh, we're going to flip the switch back and forth. We're going to do some anabolic. We're going to do some catabolic. We're going to do some mTOR. We're going to do some AMP kinase. We're going to do back and forth. And I think that makes more sense to me to go back and forth. And I think that humans could go long amounts of time in ketosis without any carbohydrates, but it was really eye-opening for me to bring them back into my diet and see how I felt. And clearly, I got super fat. Did you set up the... it was really eyeopening for me to, to bring them back into my diet and see how I felt. And, you know, clearly I got super fat.

Did you set up the, no, go ahead. Did you set up the earlier eating window because you were more insulin resistant in the morning or was it more so something to do with having better quality sleep? Was it for the, was it like for this reason?

For both reasons. Yeah. For both reasons. Yeah. So again, I'm more insulin sensitive in the morning. And most humans are because as you go through the day, your melatonin goes up. And as you, melatonin and insulin are a little bit antagonistic. So in the evening, even at 6 or 7 p.m., you're starting to get melatonin being produced. And that's going to

interact with your insulin a little bit and make you a little more insulin resistant. Now, it doesn't matter. Does it have a clinical correlation? Hard to say. This is what's so cool about a CGM, but it helps with sleep and I get less of a blood glucose response when I eat at 2 or 3 p.m. or get the majority of the carbs at 8 or 9 in the morning. Cool. How long had it been since you've had like just normal carbs like that? Well, it was over a year and a half. Yeah. What was it like? The first couple of days were a little funny and I wish I'd had the CGM on those days. Because by the time I put the continuous glucose monitor on, I had been doing carbs for a few days.

And it's kind of the reverse of going into ketosis and coming out of ketosis. few days. And it's kind of the reverse of going into ketosis and coming out of ketosis. So when you're in ketosis for a long time, you get this phenomenon called physiologic glucose sparing or physiologic insulin resistance. But it's so much different than pathologic insulin resistance that I think that that term confuses people. And I don't like to use that term physiologic insulin resistance. It's more glucose sparing. You'll see people talk about this on both sides of the equation. Sometimes people who are anti-ketogenic diets or pro-fruitarian diets or pro-vegan or plant-based diets that are high carb will say, oh, if you're low carb, you're going to get insulin resistant.

And it's not the same physiology as pathologic insulin resistance driven by overconsumption of mixed macronutrient ratios like fat and carbohydrates together. Totally different physiology. I went into a lot of detail with this when I debated a couple of friends of mine who are fruitarians on my podcast a while ago. People can find that one on my podcast, which is Fundamental Health. But what you start to see is during ketosis, your body says, hey, the muscles don't need glucose because they can use ketones. So they start refusing glucose. Now, technically at the level of the muscle, that is insulin

resistance, but you're not insulin resistant everywhere. You're not insulin resistant at the level of the brain. You're not insulin resistant in other places. You're not insulin resistant everywhere. It's a little different physiology and it's not driven by inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction in quite the same way that it is when you're overeating foods, when you're eating junk food, or when you're eating processed carbohydrates and vegetable oils. It's a different physiology at the level of mitochondria, nor is it accompanied by hyperinsulinemia or hyperglycemia. When people are pathologically insulin resistant, we see hyperinsulinemia. We see high levels of fasting

insulin. When you do a ketogenic diet, your insulin goes way down. You get low fasting insulin and your blood sugars are pretty low. In fact, they're flat across the day. They're very low. So very different physiology, very different clinical presentation of those two things. But what I was saying is that a physiologic glucose sparing is what happens in a ketogenic diet. And when you reverse that, if you go from being keto for a long amount of time to giving your body carbs, for the first couple of days, your glucose is going to be a little higher than normal because your body has to wake up and say, oh, I've got carbs again. Okay, let's bring them in.

But then it'll adjust and it looks just fine. And right now, the CGM readings that I've had are pretty fascinating. The blood sugars are really stable. I'll get a little spike once or twice a day when I eat honey with my meals. And I'll usually eat about 100 grams of carbs a day now, maybe 120. I don't follow it that closely. And I'll get small spikes in blood sugar when I eat that. But generally, the blood sugar is between, I would say, 70 and 90 all day with a few spikes for the honey when I eat it. And that's it. And the spikes generally only go up to 120 or 130 milligrams per

deciliter. So, they don't even go that high and they come back very quickly. Again, I'll do a whole podcast on that. As you started to experiment with some carbohydrates and as you started to maybe become more open into trying it again yourself, did you kind of maybe realize and look around and kind of think, oh, that guy has always had some really good points and I never recognized that before. Maybe somebody like a Rob Wolf or something like that. Of course. Of course. Right. We're all learning from each other. And yeah, it's eye-opening and humbling. And I think that we all get into our little idea echo chambers. And I always say that I've tried to not be in an echo chamber, but of course, I'm guilty of it like anyone else. And so, yeah, it's been good to kind of to do that kind of stuff, to be open minded about it.

And diet is one of those things that's so interesting to me that, of course, it's possible. And of course, I was guilty of being a little bit closed minded, but it was fun. It's been a fun experiment and been interesting to kind of explore that stuff. It's been good. I don't know that my sleep was pretty good on carnivore regardless. Um, and now I just kind of go back and forth. Some days I won't eat carbs and days I will eat carbs. Most days I won't eat a lot of carbs at dinner, but I mean, there's so many other people out there with great ideas. It's, it's nice to be able to appreciate them all. Have you seen, you know, with the glucose monitor, have you seen your glucose get real like jacked up? And if not, are you willing to maybe try to experiment

just to see what that would look like from a performance standpoint? Like maybe you have a strength training session the next day and maybe you try to boost it up or you have any desire to kind of play with it that way and see how it might maybe amplify performance? Yeah, I could. It would be interesting to see if it were any different. And I don't think we really know all the details with regard to glucose. There was a paper that just came out, I think on either May the 1st or April the 30th, about glycemic variability and COVID-19 outcomes. And it showed that the more glycemic variability you have, the worse your blood glucose control, the more insulin resistance, the more metabolic dysfunction, the worse your

outcome with COVID-19. So I think that when we're thinking about carbs and when we're talking about carbs and we're looking at things like continuous glucose monitors, ideally what we want to see is an absence of glycemic variability, even if you are eating carbohydrates. And again, when I do the full podcast on the CGM, that'll make more sense to people. But you don't really want to see the blood glucose spike super high. At least that's what we believe now. We're still learning. You definitely don't want to see the blood glucose going like this up and down all day. That's not a good thing. And you don't want to see a huge spike. And some of the

cutoffs are a little arbitrary right now. We don't quite know. But I think most people would agree that you don't want, ideally, you don't want your blood sugar to spike more than 50 milligrams per deciliter, 5-0 milligrams per deciliter after a meal. And you don't want it to stay elevated for more than 45 minutes or an hour, meaning you want it to return to baseline at 45 minutes or an hour. And that's a much more stringent criteria than we use in medicine for OGTT or oral glucose tolerance testing. We have a much more lax

criteria than that. The criteria in medicine allows your blood sugar to go up almost 100 milligrams per deciliter and to remain elevated at 40 minutes or two hours. And I think that's too lax. I think that if you're seeing that type of behavior, what it looks like normally, what I think the blood glucose should look like normally if you're eating carbs is, you know, a bumpy line and you eat some carbohydrates, it goes up maybe 30, 40 milligrams per deciliter. Then it comes down very quickly within an hour and then it goes back to baseline. And a disordered pattern would be a much fatter curve where it would be going like this, maybe

with a little more glycemic variability than a much bigger spike and a much broader peak, more area under the curve, that's where you start to say that's not good. So when I was doing it before, I did experiment with different amounts of carbohydrates. I'd certainly be willing to do it. But if I'm seeing my blood sugar spike 80 or 90 milligrams per deciliter, I think most people would say that's probably not super healthy. Now, could there be a trade-off there with strength potentially, but it's like something I've got to weigh. I think that for me, including 120 grams of carbohydrates in my diet was like, that's a huge difference. You know, that's totally changing my physiology

because I'm probably not making ketones right now, whereas I was for the last, you know, two years exclusively. It'd be interesting to maybe load up on some carbohydrates, maybe post-workout and see if, I don't know, see if you restore your glycogen more efficiently or something like that. See if you could put on more muscle mass. To me, over the last couple of weeks, your physique is looking better from what I've noticed. And I, you know, I zoom in a lot. I zoom in and I screen capture and then I zoom in again, if you know what I'm talking about. But yeah, I mean, I'm noticing some differences in you, but I think it's hard sometimes to know with someone like yourself because you're very strict on your nutrition as it is. So that could just be a progression of your training and continuing to get good sleep and continue to have good habits.

I gained a little bit of weight, but not much. So when I was strict carnivore, you know, I would weigh like 169, 168, 170. And now I weigh myself and I'm anywhere from 173 to 175. So it's totally possible that I, that that could all be liver glycogen. So that could be water weight in my liver. I'm not as sort of focused in the gym. You know, I'm not doing like deadlifts, you know, religiously. I don't have these benchmarks that I can follow as much. I'll do deadlifts and I'll do squats. But most of the stuff I do, you know, it's kind of like, I like to do weird stuff. I like to do weird movements and mobility stuff and hit the punching bag and kick stuff. So, I don't have benchmarks to be like, oh, I got so much stronger. I definitely feel good in the gym doing this. And I like the way

it feels. A lot of the metrics right now are subjective, but I think it would be nice to have some objective measures and follow them moving forward. Subjectively, I'm going to go ahead and admit that I think I feel a little better with carbohydrates, but I don't have objective measures to prove it just yet. No, people are probably curious. You may have mentioned it and I might've missed it, but you mentioned that you're using raw honey. What are the other exact like carbohydrates that you're using or the exact foods that you might be using right now? Yeah. So I'm going to talk about a lot of this in the upcoming cookbook. Within the plant kingdom, I do think there's a spectrum of toxicity. And when I was thinking about which carbohydrates to trial or which carbohydrates to use as

that lever intermittently, I wanted to try and do the ones that were less toxic. And personally, I believe that's probably going to mean avoiding grains. And evolutionarily, I mean, Mark and I have had this conversation for a while. I think Mark has been texting me for eight months saying, Paul, don't you think fruit is beneficial for humans? Don't you think fruit is beneficial for humans? And I would say... And you told me it was porn. I did. Fruit is porn. You're like, it's food porn. And I'm like, don't we want some?

We might. We just might. It's good to get laid every once in a while. That's right. So yeah, it's so funny. So I think that evolutionarily, and again, this is just my speculation, my independent thought, that fruit would have been the main carbohydrate we would have sought out seasonally. We wouldn't have over-consumed it. And honey certainly would have been something that we would have eaten when we could get our hands on it. It's freaking delicious. But grains, I think, are probably not going to be the best carbohydrate source for people. I love Stan Efferding. I'm not convinced that white rice is the best source of carbohydrate

for humans and you could test this with a cgm you could test this with a blood glucose response monitor and there may be individual variation in terms of how you respond to different carbohydrates i've heard of this before and i'm only an of one, but in the company I'm working with for the CGM, which is NutriSense, I've talked to the dietician there, and she's shown me blood glucose monitor readings from a variety of people eating the same food, and they have different blood glucose responses. So people may need to do some testing to see how they respond to different carbs, which is kind of wild.

And I'm good friends with Anthony Gustin, who's done the same thing with his CGM. He can say, he's even told me, oh, I can eat these cassava tortillas, and I don't really have much of a blood glucose response. But when I eat a sweet potato, I get a much bigger blood glucose response. Happy Cinco de Mayo, right? Right. Oh, that's right. So there's some nuance. For me personally, and in general, as an overarching general schema, I think that the non-sweet fruits and some of the fruits are going to be the best choice for people as a starting point. These would be things like squash, sweet potato, fruit, and honey, and people can decide how they want to do it. Personally, if the fruit is too sweet, I don't really like it. When I eat oranges and stuff, I don't like the acidity in my mouth.

I actually feel like I can feel the acid on the enamel of my teeth. I don't like the way it feels. I'm not a big fan of oranges and the super acidic fruit, but I mean, watermelon might be good and people might scream, oh my God, there's so much glycemic index for watermelon. And that's very different between people. The glycemic index of a food is going to be very individual. So, I think some of the non-super crazy sweet fruit might be good for people. I really like honey. For me, it's one of those in-between things. I'm going to say that I can still be carnivore with honey because it's not actually a plant food. It's a bee food is it it's just it breaks the model is it is it plant is it animal what is it i think i might have asked you before but like what about like olives and like avocados like where do those

things where do those things kind of fall in because we've talked about all these kind of weird foods we've talked you and i've talked about honey before and uh avocados and uh olives are fruit as well but they don't have, I don't believe they have hardly any fructose at all. They don't have much at all. And I think that, like I said, I think that fructose, there's a nuance with fructose. It's not so much to fear fructose, it's to fear fructose when it's processed. And this is, I think, where Robert Lustig goes off the rails a little bit. I think that we're going to find this, and I know I've heard my buddy Ben Greenfield talk about this on his podcast too, that I think that if you did the same thing with these kids who were obese and you gave them fruit instead of starchy carbohydrates,

they probably would have similar improvements in insulin resistance, but that's an experiment that needs to be done. So it's questionable whether it's fructose in and of itself or whether that's the form that the fructose is in. And the reason it would be different is because of the incretins, the hormones in our gut that are released when we eat a whole food versus when we eat a processed sugar. Because I think people will think like, what are you talking about? It's metaphysics. Fructose is fructose. Well, not quite. There's different physiologic reactions when we eat a food that's a whole food because there are hormones released in the upper gut and the lower gut. And if the sugar is absorbed immediately or isn't packaged in the right way, then it's going to have different

hormonal responses in our body. And believe it or not, honey appears to have a different response in our body than high fructose corn syrup, especially basically only if it's a good honey, probably a raw organic honey. So much honey is now adulterated. I've heard statistics. It's like 70% to 80% of honey has added syrups. So you have to get a good honey. I have no stock in the honey industry yet, but I should. Dr. Paul's Carnivore MD Honey coming soon.

So I think that there's a lot of nuance there in terms of how you respond to all of it. There's cofactors too. Like when you eat an apple, there's going to be approximately five grams of fiber in it. So that's going to slow down the absorption. There's also potassium, which can have an impact on your insulin and the way that you handle the glucose that comes along with the fructose that comes along with with the apple so again like I agree with what you're saying there like because high fructose corn syrup's not going to come with any of those co-factors it's going to come

you know straight in the form of juice that you can sip and then on top of that when you think about like these liquids that have calories in them you know think about a kid a kid with like a little juice box, like how long is that going to last? You know, the kid's going to drink that and, you know, probably maybe like, I don't know, 90 seconds, you know, and it's 30 grams of sugar just bam, just smashing you. Whereas it would take a minute to eat an apple or take a minute to eat the equivalent, you know, take a minute to eat three apples, right? So I think those are all factors that have to be equated into the mix. And when I thought about honey, you know, it's funny, you write a book. And the minute you publish the book, you think, Oh, I should have written that differently. I was wrong about that. So basically, like a few days after i published the carnivore code i have a

good friend uh al dannenberg who's a periodontist so he's a dentist that does maybe he's not i mean you know it's like i don't want to call him something he's not but he does like the gums teeth and gums so he's like a he's like a super dentist right because he's the periodontal guy and he sent me a bunch of studies about honey and they've done studies showing that it's anti-cavity and antibacterial in the mouth, which I thought was so wild that you could give somebody so many of the ideas around food. I like to think about it in the context of oral health and dental hygiene, because I don't want to miss any piece of it. I like to think about things holistically. And so when he sent me studies showing that honey can be antibacterial and that honey can be used to improve uh gingival health in humans i thought well isn't that fascinating

because high fructose corn syrup will certainly not do that so there's a difference between these foods and that's actually one of the reasons that i've cautioned against over consumption of fermented foods when you eat things like sauerkraut and kombucha, they're very acidic. There's a lot of acetic acid in those foods, and that can actually erode the enamel of the teeth and hurt the gums. So people will often say to me, what about sauerkraut? What about fermented foods? And my response is, yeah, I think evolutionarily, our ancestors ate those because that was how we detoxified foods. You can detoxify some plants by fermenting them. We know that, and I talk about that in my book, that the glucosinolates, the precursors,

these plant defense molecules are degraded when you ferment many foods. It makes them more digestible. So if you have to eat plants, you probably want to eat them fermented. But if you're always eating fermented plants, or you're eating a lot of sauerkraut or a lot of kombucha or a lot of lemons and limes that are super acidic, that can be harmful to the enamel of the teeth. And I've always thought, wow, would something be good for us and bad for us at the same time? It's possible, but I don't think so. And it gives me pause. And I think, I don't want to overconsume those super acidic foods. I don't think humans should over consume sauerkraut or over consume the citrus fruits for those reasons. I'm pretty excited about the, uh, this whole honey thing

because honey is amazing, but it's really easy to eat a lot of honey. So how much are you consuming per day? Um, so one tablespoon of honey has between 15 and 18 grams of carbohydrates. I'll usually aim for people to love this. I mean, I'll definitely eat a hundred plus grams of honey in a day, you know, and, you know, a hundred grams of honey in a day is going to have a little less than a hundred grams of carbs. You know, honey isn't gram for gram sugar. So I'll probably eat 120 grams of honey a day. You know, it's a couple of, it's multiple tablespoons of honey a

day. But that's the only carbohydrate I'm eating right now. And I'm waiting for my teeth to fall out. They haven't fallen out yet. They seem like they're doing okay. But that's been the best one for me. Again, because perhaps I'm so adapted to not having fiber in my diet that when I eat a lot of fiber, I don't like the way it feels. I don't really get gas and bloating, but it just feels very full. And to be honest with you, I really like the way I feel after eating meat and organs. So everyone knows I'm a huge fan of eating nose to tail and eating liver and spleen and pancreas. And I don't want to fill my stomach with less nutrient-dense foods like squash if I can get honey and meat. That to me is like, oh, that's great. And I don't feel

hungry, but I also don't feel overly full. My body would probably adapt and maybe my stomach has shrunk because I'm eating these low residue foods like meat and liver. But when I eat squash with my meat, I just feel very full. And I don't really like that feeling. It means I can't move around. I can't exercise. I can't do things. But if I'm eating honey, which doesn't have any fiber, I actually think that's a good thing that it doesn't have fiber because as I talk about in my book, the fiber can bind other nutrients or bind hormones that we're supposed to do enterohepatic recycling of. So I'm thinking that it's probably a good thing that honey has no fiber and it doesn't

make my stomach feel distended. It's antibacterial in my mouth, works for me. But yeah, I'm eating a significant amount of honey a day. And there's a couple of them that I really like that are organic and raw. Back to your original point or one of your earlier points, Mark, Ray Peet is not a couple of them that i really like that are organic and raw back to your original point or one of your earlier points mark ray pete is not a fan of honey is not a fan of excuse me i misspoke is not a fan of fiber either so he and i would agree on that and that's why ray pete recommends things like ice cream which i'm not gonna go that far because it's got processed sugar in it but ray pete would say eat animal foods and eat, you know, eat carbohydrates without fiber

because he's doesn't think the fiber is terribly beneficial for humans either. So we were similar on that respect, but I don't agree with him on the dairy or the processed sugar piece. He's a completely amazing to watch. Anybody that hasn't listened to Ray Peet, you should check him out on YouTube. He's like polarizing, but he doesn't sensationalize anything he's he's an older guy he's probably in his 90s now so whatever he's doing uh is probably working really well I think the truth of it is I think in some categories um this guy has studied stuff that uh maybe other people just haven't uh quite gotten yet. Like he's very, very smart in a specific category. But I think maybe when he starts talking about like ice cream

and stuff, maybe he's starting to speak in some areas where he's not as knowledgeable. You know, he's definitely super knowledgeable when it comes to like the hormones in your body. It seems like that's something that he studied for decades. Yeah. And I mean, I would disagree that he's a big fan of orange juice and I'm thinking, Oh, I don't know if I want to do, I don't know if that's a, you know, like, do you really get everybody happy? You know, everyone's like ice cream and orange juice. This is an amazing diet. Where do I, how do I find out more about Ray P? Where do I sign up? Basically? I think his diet is ice cream orange juice bacon and steak which is you know like what a what a genius it is he's brilliant i don't know yeah i'm surprised you know more people don't know about him i know you're super passionate about uh

regenerative agriculture and we have talked about that uh in the past on this podcast but something that uh the world being on pause has uh showed is that maybe what cows are doing maybe isn't as detrimental, maybe as as we as we thought, because the cows are still here. But we stopped our transportation and all of a sudden the skies are opening up and things that haven't been clean in decades are now cleaner, which brings back to my dad's theory that the environment is indestructible. When I was a kid, I asked my dad about, I was like, I asked him something because we were learning something in school. And he's like, you know what? He's like, the environment is pretty much indestructible. He's like, if we were to chop down all those trees over there on that mountain, he's like, by the time we got to that other mountain, those other trees would be growing back. I don't know if what he's saying is a hundred percent

true. Obviously there's damage that we can do. There's damage that we are doing that that's not great for the environment. But I think it brings up some interesting things like, you know, could certain areas, certain cities shut down occasionally to be more environmentally friendly? Like, is it too much to ask to say, hey, you know, this area, you know, take take this weekend and no one drive their car? You know, like if we really care about the environment, maybe these are things that might be useful, might be practical. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's really interesting. I mean, cows are still burping and we're seeing a decline in atmospheric CO2 levels.

Now, this gets to be a pretty controversial topic. And you and I talked a little bit about this on the podcast that we did for my podcast recently, but I think it's pretty clear from what's happened with transportation and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere now that you can stop transportation or you can decrease transportation. And I haven't seen any statistics regarding the actual decrease in transportation, whether it was 50% less cars or what it takes to actually make a meaningful dent. But it does illustrate this incredible point that, hey, you can just stop driving your car and we're going to see a big difference, which is kind of counter to most of the plant-based

narratives saying, oh, cows are the major contributor, or cows are contributing a ton to climate change, or a ton to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, people could say, oh, well, cows are still contributing and we took the cars off the road. So, of course, we're going to see an improvement and we could see an even bigger improvement if we got rid of the cows. But as you all know, I disagree with that one pretty strongly. And I could send us some nuance regarding the carbon cycle and the way that methane from a cow is going to cycle and has a different life cycle in the atmosphere than the carbon dioxide. So we're talking about CH4 coming out of the mouth of a cow or the butt of a human. We produce methane too, and so do termites and bogs in

Africa and wetlands and landfills versus carbon dioxide coming out of the tailpipe of a car, it's a much bigger equation than the mainstream media would lead us to believe. There's a very large cycle called the carbon cycle in our environment. And it always has been this way. There's always been carbon dioxide in our environment, in our atmosphere. We need that. The more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the more greenery there is on the Earth's surface historically. That levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if they drop too low, plants can't breathe. Plants can't use the carbon dioxide. So to want to get rid of all the carbon dioxide doesn't make any sense. And I don't think the media ever tells us that the major carbon dioxide sink or the major places where carbon dioxide or carbon are stored are the oceans and the soil.

So there's always this cycling of carbon moving around. And I've always been struck by this idea that when you burn fossil fuels, you're adding new carbon dioxide to the environment. But when a cow is burping or a baby is farting or a child or you or I are farting, although we all fart much less now that we eat many fewer plants, we're all contributing methane to the environment, which then becomes carbon dioxide. And that is then fixed into the plants as carbohydrates. And it's part of this moving around cycle. It's the same carbon atom. It's not a new carbon atom. Whereas when you're burning fossil fuel, you're liberating new carbon atoms from deposits in the earth and

you're adding new carbon to the environment. Whereas carbon coming from you or I, carbon coming from a cow is cycling carbon. It's the same carbon dioxide atom on different molecules of carbon dioxide or methane that have been cycling in the environment for hundreds of thousands, millions, billions of years. So there's a very different story being told here. And that's where regenerative agriculture comes in. This idea that, hey, look, bison, buffalo, elk, pronghorn, deer, there were 250 million of them in the US in 1850. They've always been walking on the land and eating the grass and pooping and peeing. And that poop and pee is an integral part of the ecosystem of that land. And that fertilizes the land. That's how

the land stays fertile. They eat the grass, the grass becomes poop and pee, and those nutrients go back to the ground in their poop and pee. And then when they die, they die on the land. There's no nuclear reactors here. We're not destroying elements. We're not destroying, you know, phosphorus or potassium. They're all sort of wrapped up in the same ecosystem. When an animal dies on a prairie, all those nutrients go back into the land. And that's what regenerative agriculture seeks to recreate, this kind of ecosystem's perspective of raising animals.

Ruminant animals have always been on the face, well, not always, but for the last tens of millions of years have been on the face of this planet grazing as part of ecosystems. And a regenerative agriculture system is just creating an ecosystem on a farm where animals graze and live and die on the land and poop and pee on the land. And we're not putting them in CAFOs. We're not putting them in clustered animal feeding operations. So we're allowing the soil that they're walking on to be enriched with all those nutrients from those animals. I saw this one thing yesterday. I'm really into surfing. And one of the best surfers in the world

is named John Florence. And he has a video series on YouTube called Vela, V-E-L-A. And they're, they're sailing this boat. It's a catamaran. And they sail this catamaran from Hawaii where he lives to these islands, Palmyra Atoll, um, Fanning Island that are way out in the middle of Pacific. They're in the middle of nowhere, but they show up at Palmyra Atoll. And it's really, it's so beautiful to see. It's this island in the middle of Pacific. There's 26 people that live on the whole island, which sounds a little crazy to me. And they're all just researchers from the Nature Conservancy. But in this video, they do such a great job of describing the ecosystem on that island. Basically there's birds, there's plants and there's fish. And the way it works is that the

birds eat the fish, you know, the birds eat the fish you know the birds eat the fish and then the birds fly up onto the island and they poop and then the poop goes into the soil and you know makes the soil rich so that plants can grow and then there's runoff from the island and the poop and the nutrients from the soil and the bird poop goes into the ocean and that feeds microplankton and a little little algae that the fish can eat and the fish and that feeds microplankton and a little algae that the fish can eat. And the fish get eaten by the birds again. It's a closed loop. It just works, right? It's not that the birds eating the fish is a bad thing or the birds pooping on the ground is a bad thing. It's that every piece of that is an integral part of the equation. And it's the same

way with ruminant animals. They eat the grass, they poop on the grass, and then the grass grows bigger because they pooped on the grass. So it's just a beautiful ecosystem. And if we disrupt those, we're in trouble. But if we let the natural world do it, it's pretty ingenious. Guys, does Dr. Paul Saladino, does he have the record for saying poop on the podcast? Do you guys think? I think so. Probably official. Congratulations. Congratulations. How many times did i say poop yeah yeah poop counter it's about 37 i was doing internal count so many so many i like poop i don't know if we're like we're gonna stay on this topic of regenerative agriculture but i did want to go back to um the when we were talking about coronavirus,

because you were talking about how one of the big issues is just individuals, their metabolic syndrome and the type of foods that they're eating. And that could be something that if it was mainstream, that could help people. But the thing is, it's not mainstream, right? is mainstream that could help people. But the thing is, is like, it's not mainstream, right? And we didn't really get to ask like, what your thoughts on like the approach to the quarantine are, because since that message isn't mainstream, and since we have so many unhealthy individuals, right? It doesn't, what do you think there would have been a better option to this than what we're currently doing? Because like, we are where we are, right? We can't really change it. So what do you think would have been a better idea for where we are?

Right. This is a tough one because it's not really fair to Monday morning quarterback it. And there's still a lot of speculation and a lot that's unwritten about all of this throughout the pandemic. I've been vocal and I've not been quiet about the fact that I'm a little skeptical of the quarantine. And I'll just say at the beginning, this doesn't mean that I want people to die. I don't want my mom and dad to die. I don't want your mom and dad to die. I don't want anyone's parents to die. I don't want anyone to die from a coronavirus. But it's okay to say that I'm skeptical of a quarantine and also not be saying that I want people to die,

that we're looking at lives versus lives and what's the cost of a quarantine and what is the effectiveness of a quarantine has been my main question. So if we just back up and we think about this, it's a little bit hard for me to wrap my head around as well. But if we think about the effectiveness of a quarantine, of hard for me to wrap my head around as well. But if we think about the effectiveness of a quarantine, of the effectiveness of what we're doing right now,

I'm not convinced that we have data to really clearly say that a quarantine works, that what we're doing works, that a lockdown really works. And of course, it's easy now to say, hey, look, there's been 70,000, I think this morning there were 68,000 deaths in the US from coronavirus. It's easy to say, as Trump wants to say, hey, that was supposed to be 2 million. I saved 1.99 million lives, which is, of course, complete baloney. We can't say that. That's all speculation. There's another, there's an epidemiologist from UW, from the University of Washington, where I did my residency now, making rounds on Twitter, he did an editorial in the New York Times, saying that herd immunity isn't viable,

because we would potentially get something called overshoot. And that would cost us millions of lives. And what he's talking about, well, herd immunity is the idea that if enough of the population gets exposed to a virus and develops antibodies, the virus can't really spread anymore because there are so many people that really can't harbor the virus, that can't spread the virus. And most epidemiologic models suggest that at least 60, at least 60% of the population has to be exposed to the virus to get herd immunity. Now, we don't actually know right now how many people in our population have already been exposed to the virus to get herd immunity. Now, we don't actually know right now how many people in our population have already been exposed to the virus.

But this epidemiologist is now saying, hey, herd immunity isn't going to work because it's not going to stop at 60%. If 60% of people get exposed to the virus, then probably 80% of people are going to get exposed to the virus because so many people are going to expose to the virus that it's just going to move through society, which is true. But he is basing his figures on these case fatality rates, which are inaccurate. We don't actually have a good case fatality rate number because we don't know how many people have been exposed to coronavirus. And so his speculation to me is more fear mongering. And I was really disappointed that he was publicizing this and kind of gaining some traction and saying

herd immunity isn't going to work. And I guess his idea is that all that we can do now is wait for a vaccine for the next 18, 24 months, which to me doesn't sound like a viable strategy either. So when we're thinking about a lockdown, we have to imagine like, what is it actually doing? It's preventing people from coming into contact with each other. So theoretically, it could slow the spread of a virus. But eventually, the virus is never going to go away. We have to remember that this entire pandemic across the entire world began with a handful of cases in Wuhan, China. So we don't actually know where the virus came from. There was an article in Newsweek recently suggesting that potentially this came from a bioweapons lab in China. This is Newsweek. It's not a controversial magazine. We don't know where the virus came from.

It could have moved from a bat to a pangolin to a human. It could have been released from a lab in China. We'll never know the answer to this question. But regardless, it does appear that a worldwide pandemic, worldwide, began with less than 20 cases in Wuhan, China. I don't understand how we believe that this virus is not going to cover the earth eventually. I think that before it's all said and done, in the next year, in the next six months, almost every single person on this planet is going to be in contact with coronavirus. It doesn't make sense for it to happen any other way. And you can say, oh, well, that's why China did the lockdowns, is they didn't want it to spread more. And they locked it down too late. And if we hadn't locked people down, if we had locked people down sooner, it wouldn't have spread

to the whole world. Well, guess what? We're saying we're doing a lockdown. We're saying we're doing a quarantine, but we're really not. You know, a lockdown is a lockdown. You put everyone in a shipping container and let them live there for a week, and that's a lockdown. We still need to have garbage. We still need to have people working on utilities. We still need to have doctors and nurses in hospitals. We still need to have people at grocery stores.

We still need to have planes in the air. People still have to live their lives. We simply cannot bring the earth to a grinding halt, which means that if we can't bring the earth to a grinding halt, are we really just paying lift service to this concept of a quarantine and just pretending this is slowing infections? We can't say that because we don't know the alternative situation. And if you look at the data, there's all sorts of ways to analyze the data. You can do it up, down, sideways, right, left, you know, fold it into origami, do whatever you want with it. But if you look at the data, it's really not that clear that in the locations in the world where

a lockdown was instituted quickly and instituted very strictly, there's really any consistent correlation with a lower death rate. You can look at Sweden, for instance, and Sweden is like the topic of everyone's conversation. Sweden's death rate is in the middle of Europe. They didn't really do a huge lockdown. They let people go to bars. They were young people out and about. They said, shelter the old. Don't let the old people get exposed, which is probably wise.

But let's all go about our lives and be reasonable. We're not going to walk around sneezing on each other. I'm not going to lick my hand and lick every doorknob. And if you want to walk six feet from people, that's fine. Do that, but let's not shut down the economy. Let's not do a full lockdown. And their death rate is not astronomical. It's on the order of the United States. It's actually significantly better than seven of the hardest hit states in the US where lockdowns were swift and draconian. It's better than about half of Europe. And it's worse than about part of Europe. People say, oh, Sweden is twice the death rate of Finland. Well, Finland is a much more northern country, or at least the majority of Finland is

north of Sweden. And it's a much less populated country. The majority of the deaths in Sweden are in Stockholm. So again, it's so tricky to compare these. Everybody wants to pretend that they know what's going on or that they can say the lockdown worked because X, Y, Z. But there's really no correlation that I've been able to see in any of the analysis that I've looked at between the swiftness or the severity of a lockdown and case fatality rates across the board. It's all over the place. You can see places where there was no lockdown and they didn't really have bad outcomes. And you can see places where there was a swift lockdown and they had really bad outcomes. Iceland is another model that we can look at. Iceland has a pretty small population, but it's an island. And you could say,

it's not a very clustered island, but Iceland has tested a lot more of the population. On April 21st, they tested 12 to 13% of the population, which is massively more than anywhere else in the world. And per that 12%, like based on those numbers, they had a much higher infection rate than we do in the US. But they had a much lower death rate too. So why is that? They didn't really do a lockdown in Iceland. I think that the data, the more you crunch the data, the more that I look at the data, and of course, I'm open to everyone's interpretation of this. I don't see a pattern between lockdowns and quarantine and death rates. What I see is a pattern between the overall metabolic health of a country

and death rates. And to me, we're all going to get exposed, just like most of us are exposed to the flu, just like most of us are exposed to the common cold. And so this epidemiologist at UW is saying, we can't do herd immunity. And I'm saying, you're going to get herd immunity, whether you like it or not. That's the only way forward. We're not going to have a vaccine in 18 months. We'll probably have a vaccine in two years, maybe, but maybe we'll have a vaccine in 18 months, but it's not going to be in six months. I mean, Trump is saying by the end of 2020, that's complete. I don't know. He's just talking out his bass right now. We're never going to have a vaccine by the end of 2020. So if you look at the data, it's just not clear that lockdowns are changing anything other. This is the point of a lockdown to prevent healthcare system overwhelm. And if you are not overwhelming the healthcare

system, I have struggled to find any other benefit of a lockdown because most of us are going to get exposed. And there is a possibility that that's the best thing, that if you're going to get exposed to coronavirus, you want to get exposed casually. This is one situation where casual exposure is a good thing. You want to get exposed casually. You don't want to get a is a good thing. You want to get exposed casually. You don't want to get a big inoculum. You don't want to get exposed in a hospital. You want to get exposed at a grocery store and get a small amount of virus that's going to just tickle your immune system and maybe generate some antibodies. And again, this is hard to kind of quantify, but that's how it usually works. That's how these viruses move around.

You don't want to get a big exposure and, you know, letting kids go back to school. Kids may or may not be transmission vectors. Like this is all very delicate to say that the lockdown work is just, in my opinion, complete conjecture. Did I answer your question? That's kind of a complicated one. No, I think that was awesome. I, you know, I wonder, you know, this is a crazy proposal and obviously nothing like this would happen. But imagine if it did. Imagine if they just quarantined us from junk food. You know, then it would be a question on what's junk food and what's not.

And I kind of understand that battle. And a lot of the companies that sell candy and sell frankenfoods and stuff like that would be upset. But maybe that would have been the best, would have been the best bet. Hey, we need to be healthier because America is so fat and we were so metabolically messed up. Uh, everyone has to work out the same time every morning. And, uh, and we're, we're dishing out these foods only like, these are the only foods you can get. You can't get junk food at this time. Can you imagine what would happen? There'd be riots in the street. And, but I think that's, you know, the data supports that as much as the data supports any of the models of coronavirus that were, you know, used to generate a lockdown or

a quarantine. The data very clearly supports the metabolic on health is a huge risk factor for coronavirus. So that's been, I mean, that's brilliant, Mark, Mark Belfort, president. I wonder if that was a factor, you know, in when they started having discussions, if they said, okay, look, you know, these other countries are getting it, but we're one of the most unhealthy countries that there is. And we better protect the people from themselves at this point. Maybe that was, you know, maybe that was something that was factored in there. But we kept the liquor stores open. Right. And I think we talked about this on the podcast that you and I did together a few days ago. Junk food sales are up. Cereal sales are up. All the, all the processed food sales are Andrew. I like Lucky Charms. I'm sorry. I can't help it. Alcohol sales are up too, right? Yeah. In SEMA.

Yeah. Just joking. Well, that's what I was going to ask. So, is the population in Sweden just significantly healthier? Therefore, their strategies wouldn't have worked here anyways? I mean, I'd have to look at it. I don't know the epidemiology of the Swedish population. What we do know about Sweden is that a lot of the deaths are in elderly people.

The deaths in elderly people are represented in a higher proportion in Sweden. And I think 58 percent, I could be a little bit off on the number, I think 58 percent of elderly people in Sweden are cloistered in elderly homes where they're in high density environments. people in Sweden are cloistered in elderly homes where they're in high density environments. And so if you have all of the people who are susceptible to the virus in places where they are near other people, where they could get transmitted to the virus, then in that case, you could see a higher rate of death in elderly people. I think that the Norwegian countries probably do have higher or better health than America. And you bring up a great point, Andrew, like, would those strategies not have worked here because we're so metabolically unhealthy?

Possibly. But my counterpoint to that is, hey, look, I have not seen anything, and I could be wrong about this, but I've not seen any evidence to the contrary. Number one, that we're not all going to get exposed eventually. You know, remember, this infection began with five people in China. If there are five people left in the U.S. with this infection after the quarantine, why couldn't it just happen all over again, right? Are you telling me that after the quarantine, there's going to be zero cases of SARS-CoV-2 left on this planet? At some point in the next two months, we're going to have to open the planet.

People are going to be traveling again, just like they were before. And so this began with five cases in China. There's going to be five cases left. In fact, there's probably going to be 10x that or 50x that or 100x that or 1000x that left in the world at that point. And we're going to open up and everybody's going to start traveling. It's just inescapable. My point is not that we should continue the lockdown. My point is that it's inescapable that this virus is going to move through the population. Therefore, those who are susceptible will have to deal with it. And how do we become strong in the face of a virus? Well, we think about our immune system, sleep, exercise, diet, period.

And it's not about hiding from it because I just don't think we'll be able to. Yeah, the lockdown, you know, negligible if it is, you know, everyone's like, oh, it's flattened the curve, blah, blah, blah. But it's definitely causing a lot of other issues. And the more recent one that I've seen was like on the news, they're saying like a possibility of like a meat shortage. Are you concerned about that right now? I got a bow, bro. Yeah. I figured you're probably, yeah. But I'm just wondering. But I do think so. I mean, people are talking about the meat shortage more and more. And I think, ah, this is why farms like White Oak,

Belcampo... This is why you started to eat carbs. It's why I know how to fast. I'll be fine. If there's a meat shortage, I'll just go out. I mean, I'm going to Texas anyway. I'm moving to Texas at the end of this month. I'm sure there's some deer out there. I can eat, I can eat deer and honey all day long. You know, I'll go hunt some elk. We'll, we'll take out the bow. I was just shooting the bow yesterday. I'm getting, I'm getting ready for the meat shortage. Um, and I'll just comment on that one thing you said, you know, again, to Encima's question, we can't actually say that that the quarantine has flattened the curve it's possible but again what is the point of flattening the curve the point of flattening

the curve is to not let the health care system get overwhelmed once your health care system capacity has not been exceeded you don't want to keep flattening the curve beyond that sweden's icus were never more than half full they never got close to being overwhelmed i did a podcast has not been exceeded, you don't want to keep flattening the curve beyond that. Sweden's ICUs were never more than half full. They never got close to being overwhelmed. I did a podcast on my podcast with Kirk Parsley, and he made this very good point that if you look at the flattening the curve graph, it has a steep curve, which goes across the dotted line, which is the theoretical ceiling of the healthcare system. And you have a more flat flat line or you have a more gradual slope, which is the flattened curve. Well, the whole reason you're flattening the curve is to not

break the healthcare ceiling, but you want to get that line as close to the healthcare ceiling as you can because the area under both of those curves representing the total number of infections is the same. And if you go too slowly, you're just going to draw this out forever. is the same. And if you go too slowly, you're just going to draw this out forever. So there is a possibility that if you flatten the curve too much, you're just delaying herd immunity, which is what we're all going to get eventually. And as you're saying, there are many ramifications to flattening the curve. There's economic implications, which are catastrophic at this point, or hopefully not, but 30 million people unemployed, like we're not even doing the math. We're not weighing this, right? Like it's crazy. 30 million people unemployed. What is the

cost of that monetarily in terms of lives? And then if people can't work, what if the food system, you know, what if the food systems are not available, then we're going to lose a lot more lives and a lot more people are going to suffer. So yeah, I think that there's a potential that you can flatten the curve too much. And, you know, there are lots of people who are zealots. They're flattening the curve zealots now who just want to keep it locked down forever. And I'm thinking, I don't understand that. That's a horrible idea. And the meat shortage situation, do you think there's really much truth to that?

I mean, to me, it still seems like there's still going to be cows and there's still going to be meat. It's just that the ranchers and stuff like that, you know, my understanding is they have to kind of kill these animals at certain times to get the best prices and to get the best flavor profile of the meat and stuff like that. And that's part of the reason why they're talking about this. part of the reason why they're talking about this. But to me, it doesn't actually make any sense that there would be a shortage of meat because it would just open up some secondary businesses probably because it might impact the real big companies. But local butchers and places like that should be able to be just fine and maybe even thrive and do better than normal. I would hope so. I hope that it would allow the small farmers to do great. Now, the tricky part will be that the small farmers have to get their cows to slaughterhouses. And if the slaughterhouses are controlled by the big

agribusiness companies, Tyson, et cetera, it could be challenging. But I think it's more of a supply chain issue. There's the same number of cows. It's just the supply chain. And again, I think that if push comes to shove and we get anywhere close to that,'re gonna have to say hey we can't have a shortage of food like we need people to eat and in that case it's very clear that that that the lockdown and the quarantines are really not worth it that the cure is worse than the disease but so much of the speculation there i mean i just saw someone on twitter post an article today saying the number of lives that could be lost by reopening the economy. And it's just like, this kind of articles just make me so frustrated. I think like, you just don't know that.

Like, everyone is just living in fear and speculating about how many lives will be lost. People continue to say we're going to lose millions of lives if we reopen the economy. And it's like, well, we're going to lose millions of lives if we don't reopen the economy. And those projections, whether it's the epidemiologists at UW or the projections that millions of people are going to lose their lives, it's all based on numbers that are probably very inaccurate. And it's really become divided now. There's two groups of people here saying, Hey, look, the numbers are inaccurate. We need to reopen. Other people saying the number we're going to lose millions of people.

We can't reopen. And the second group, I'm just kind of like, I don't understand it. Like, what do you, what do you want to do? Like, what are our options? Are we just gonna stay in our homes for the next 12 months? I don't get it. You mentioned how like this is one of those viruses that probably a majority of the population, if not all the population, is going to get at a certain point. There are some people that have

mentioned treating this like a chicken pox party where people go someplace and they just contract a little bit of it. We had a guy, Dr. Batar, who was like, I actually want to try and get it early. And then you mentioned just getting it casually in a grocery store if you were going to get it. Now, do you think there is any type of validity into purposefully trying to contract it early on? Or do you think just do what you can, you get it, you get it and keep moving on? I think you just get it in your normal life. I don't think we need to go to chicken pox party level. But you know what, this is such an interesting point. And Mark has spoken to this

on his social media as well. So the number, what we're talking about here is the R-naught, which is the fancy medical word for how many people will you infect if you have the virus. And we know there are some people who are asymptomatic and they can shed when they're asymptomatic. And if you look at the R-naught for the flu, it's low. I think off the top of my head, it's 1.2 or 1.4, meaning that everyone who gets the flu will infect 1.2 to 1.4 people with the flu. Now, we don't really know the R-naught for coronavirus, but I think that when this is all said and done, we may end up with a very high R-naught, meaning that if you can give this virus to a lot of people, if there's a long latency period when you're asymptomatic and you can shed the virus, we may have already seen the

virus move through most of the population. If the virus is as transmissible as it may be, then again, we're not going to be able to slow the spread no matter what we do. And we're all going to get exposed normally, and we don't need to force that. But there's a potential that the R-naught for this virus is even higher than we're expecting now. It could be three to five or more. The high end of R-naught in terms of infectious disease is pertussis, which is 16 to 18. And it probably isn't that high.

But if the R-naught for coronavirus is five or six or 10, it could be much more prevalent than we believe. And it could have expanded very far already, especially because it's asymptomatic. I heard a guy on Joe Rogan the other day, John Carr, talking about this and saying the bad part about this virus is that it's spread when it's asymptomatic. And I thought that's not really the bad part of the virus. That's just the normal part of the virus. It may be a good part of the virus that it spreads like that and that it spreads quickly. I think that it means that it's going to move through the population. It doesn't make it more lethal because it spreads when you're asymptomatic. I think that the majority of the time with these respiratory viruses, regardless of the R-naught, they move through a lot of the population.

The flu has an R-naught of 1.2 to 1.4, and the CDC estimates that it infects 35 to 55 million people in the U.S. every year. 35 to 55 million have an R-naught of 1.2 or 1.4. 35 to 55 million are not of 1.2 or 1.4. If the are not of coronavirus is five times that, we've already infected the entire US population or thereabouts, right? If the are not of coronavirus is three, then we're looking at 150 million people getting infected or 90 or 100 million people getting, these are huge numbers, right? We think about the number of people that get in contact with the flu every year. And we say,

oh, coronavirus is probably more transmissible when you're asymptomatic. But is the transmission when you're asymptomatic as severe? Like we're saying, does the viral load matter? If you get exposed to coronavirus from someone that's asymptomatic, does that affect the severity of the course of your illness? Possibly, it makes it easier. Maybe. We don't know, but there's a very real possibility that it's okay that the virus transmits when it's asymptomatic. And I'll just mention this and then I'll stop my rant. But if you look at these contagions, these inoculums that we know of, the Diamond Princess, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Cook County Jail. They're very interesting. So Cook County Jail has 4,500 people in it. It's a jail, right? Everyone lives in a house. It's the biggest fraternity house ever in the worst way. If the R-naught of the virus is three to

five or more, everyone is touching surfaces. Everyone is moving around. If someone in a fraternity house gets the flu, probably most people in the fraternity house get the flu. If somebody in a fraternity house gets the coronavirus, probably the majority of them get exposed. And we see the same thing with the Diamond Princess and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is a cruise ship and an aircraft carrier. The number of cases in those places is much less than the population. So Cook County Jail had, I wrote it down, 500 cases out of 4,400 people in the jail. But the majority of people in the jail probably got exposed to coronavirus already. Diamond Princess, 2,700 passengers plus crew, there were 700 people who were positive for coronavirus. But probably every

single one of those people came in contact with it on surfaces. And they did tests showing the virus was present on surfaces for days after the ship was docked, before they did the disinfection. So there was virus everywhere on that ship. We've got to believe that everyone on the Diamond Princess got exposed, or the majority got exposed to coronavirus. But only 700 out of 2,700 showed up positive when they did the testing. On the USS Theodore Roosevelt, there were 5,000 sailors. Only 20% came up positive.

And so, again, it's like you can see these inoculum where everyone is spreading it. You're living in a fraternity house. It's an aircraft carrier for God's sakes. Like your bunks are a foot apart. You know, like everybody in the whole aircraft carrier got exposed to coronavirus. I can't see a situation and not, but only 20% were positive. And of that 20%, 20% were positive. And of that 20%, only 40% were symptomatic. So the chances are that we just don't know how it's spreading and how prevalent it is. But it might even be a good thing that it spreads when it's asymptomatic, because that's how a virus moves, and we're all going to be exposed to them. And I think that the reason I wanted to talk about this with the R-naught is that the R-naught is going to affect the way the deaths look. The story isn't over yet. If the flu spreads more quick, more

slowly, then flu deaths are going to be spread out from October to March. If coronavirus spreads more quickly, we may concentrate a very bad flu season into an eight-week period or a 10-week period because it's spreading more quickly, which will make it look like it's killing more people. But we won't know until it's really kind of calmed down. If you look at the numbers, the number of deaths, the number of new cases has started to decline in the US, which makes me think in many countries it already has. Spain, Italy, it's on the downslope, right? And some of these countries have started to reopen and they're not seeing a peak. So if this is really the case, it's possible we've seen the wave.

Coronavirus has moved through our population and it looked so bad because it was so transmissible, because it moved through so quickly that all those six months or four months or five months of flu deaths were condensed into 10 weeks. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I haven't been sick in years with the exception of getting sick in January. And I kind of think I may have already gotten it. I just got sick for a real short period of time.

It was a good, uh, 48, 48 hour, uh, kind of ass kicker. And, um, it was, uh, strange. I remember waking up, you know, on the third day and being like, Oh, that's weird. Like whatever I had, it's gone. I don't recall that ever happening to me before. So I remember it kind of, uh, you know, just being a strange feeling of like, my lungs were clear, my nose was clear and everything. It just kind of like disappeared. But I, I think a massive part of our population, uh, has already had it. And, uh, what I'm hoping is I hope that more information gets out. And I hope that whenever we hear Corona virus, I hope people are a little bit less scared.

Still, you know, take the necessary precautions as you think are necessary. But I think that a lot of times when we hear more people contracted the coronavirus, I think that makes a lot of people's heart flutter a little bit. It gives them a little bit of anxiety. And I'm hoping that over a period of time, um, that, uh, bothers people a lot less because we, we have facts that we can match up to it and say, okay, listen, it is killing people. It has killed people, but so do a lot of, uh, illnesses. So do a lot of viruses, you know, things like that. to a lot of viruses, things like that. Even now, the way we're trending, it's on the same order of magnitude as the flu. It's not to say that it's the flu. And to be fair, it's killed more people in a shorter amount of time than a regular flu virus. But it's not an order of magnitude more deadly, right? You look at the case fatality rates in

Germany that are between 0.3, 0.4. It's on the same order of magnitude, meaning that every multiplier of 10 is an order of magnitude, right? You have one, and then an order of magnitude greater than one is 10. An order of magnitude greater than 10 is 100, etc. So if the coronavirus were an order of magnitude more deadly than the flu, we would say, wow, it's 10 times more deadly than the flu. But right now, it's really kind of the same order of magnitude as the flu. Now, I won't debate that it looks differently. And this is where I think most people get so confused. It seems to be killing people more quickly or in a shorter amount of time. But as I said, we don't really have the story fully written

yet. We're going to have to see how it's going to probably take another six to eight weeks before we really have the beginnings of a horizon, at least in terms of our perspective. But my thinking is that we may see that this is a virus that has a similar lethality to the flu, but spreads a lot more quickly. So it compressed a whole season into two months or a whole season into two and a half or three months. And as I talked about in my podcast with Kirk Parsley, we really won't know until we see the next flu season or the next coronavirus season, because it's possible that the majority of the people, and this isn't to sound crass, but it's possible that the majority of people who would have died from respiratory illness

of one kind or another this year are losing their lives to coronavirus, which means that over the rest of the year, we may see less lives lost from respiratory illness. We may see less of that sort of frail part of the population losing their lives because they've died during this pandemic. And in that case, we say, okay, like, no death is good. It's all tragic. It's all stories. It's all someone's mother or brother or family. But from a population epidemiology level, things start to look a little differently. And we realize that every year, there is a virus of some look a little differently. And we realized that every year, there is a virus of some sort that does this. And this year, we happen to have

coronavirus and the flu. But in past years, when there's been a very bad flu season or a double flu season, the next flu season isn't that bad. Because a lot of the people that were susceptible probably, you know, went to the big barbecue in the sky on the previous year. Does that make sense? Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And it's not, again, it's not to invalidate death.

I know that it's a story of everyone's life, but it's just looking at populations and how viruses move through the population, how illness affects the population. I mean, one of the inevitable things in life is that we will all die. So we're all going to get there eventually. It's the inevitable outcome for all of us. And I think it helps us frame it because, as you're saying, Mark, I don't think the hysteria and the fear is productive. And so much of what I see in the media is a hysteria message, a fear message.

And it's one fear message after another. And the first fear message was millions are going to die. And then when millions didn't look like they were going to die, the second fear message was, you know, everyone's going to get it or, you know, millions could die. And then the third fear message was, we don't even know if you're going to be immune to this virus if you get it or, you know, millions could die. And then the third fear message was, we don't even know if you're going to be immune to this virus if you get it, which doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that that was just, that did not sit well with me from

the beginning. The reports of that concern from South Korea were based on false positives from RT-PCR studies. So, everything we know about immunity is that if the virus doesn't mutate, you will be immune to it. That's how human immune systems work. So that was the next fear-based messaging from the media. And I fear that the next incarnation of fear-based media will be, you know, this overshooting of herd immunity and that, oh, we can't do that. And then another incarnation of the fear-based messaging from the media was that young, healthy people are dying from coronavirus. What is more scary than that?

Young, healthy, then no one is immune. Everyone is susceptible. And I use the term immune loosely in that sentence. But if young, healthy people can die from coronavirus, everyone could die. And that induces panic. Yeah. And there may be some anomalies out there,

but when you look at the numbers, overwhelmingly, the people that are dying from coronavirus are elderly, poor nutrition, and metabolically unwell. So for the media to present this case, young, healthy people are dying from coronavirus, you're not safe, is so misleading. And many of the people who the media is presenting as young and healthy, like Boris Johnson, the prime minister of England are, are overweight and they have insulin resistance. I mean, this is not fat shaming. This is just the reality. So it speaks to so many levels of our conceptualization of what healthy really is. Yeah. They try to scare us with, uh, what's going to happen with the economy.

And then now they're trying to scare us with food. I think water and energy are the only two things left. You know, those will be the next, the next things they, they try to make us, make us panic over. Hey, it was so good to have you on the show. What, why are you moving to Texas? What's going on down in Texas? Oh, I got a lot of kinds of exciting things happening. Trying to get that tax break. I am trying to get a tax break. So I don't know when this podcast is coming out. I can't quite talk about it just yet. I got some exciting projects. I got some exciting projects. Not even to us. What's that?

Not even to us. We're your boys. We made you famous, bro. All right. So you guys know I'm super excited about Nose to Tail Eating. I'm building a business that I'm going to launch in Texas. And it's going to be a business that is going to do, uh, desiccated Oregon supplements. So we're going to make, yeah, we're going to do Oregon. We're going to make the Oregon pills, uh, convenient for people because, you know, nose to tail is my heart and soul. Uh, the name of the company is heart and soil and the goal, we're going to start with New Zealand farms, uh, the best farms we can find in New Zealand to do regeneratively raised agriculture and, uh, make to do the pills. And then we're going to move to a U S based supply chain

for these desiccated Oregon supplements. And that is going to launch in, um, I believe mid June. So people can start getting a made in maid in china right i think they got lots of lots of yeah dude that's awesome congratulations that is that is so cool yeah that is and i just couldn't i just can't handle california anymore too many laws here all i do is just have to run from the police i get arrested or i almost get arrested for surfing and you know like i i tried to go foil board the other night in the lagoon. And, you know, there are people on the lagoon. You can surf on the lagoon, but you can't go to the lagoon through the path that I went on.

Like that path is closed because on that path, you can catch coronavirus. But everywhere else, you can go in the lagoon. But I went in the lagoon through the coronavirus path, and they were going to arrest me. And I was like, oh, I had to like scurry away. You have a practice in San Diego though, right? But it's a virtual practice. So I'll keep seeing clients virtually everywhere.

And, you know, my book is, yeah, my podcast will continue. I'm just moving to Texas for, I've got such good friends there, you know, so many great people in Texas, Anthony Gustin, Kyle Kingsbury, my friend Kurt, so many good people in in texas anthony guston kyle kingsbury my friend kurt so many good people are in texas now uh and it's just a it's a little bit it's a little bit more of a space where i can be wild you know i'm i just yeah i need a little space to shoot my bow and walk around barefoot and do hunting more and i'll be in the lakes on my foil board and there's a wave park in waco where i'll be surfing too but i need a little more space to be crazy you guys come out and visit

yeah uh you know you keep saying nose to tail and i gave you straight gold when you were at st i can't believe you're not going to name the company ass to mouth i know i've used it before it's already been it's already been trademarked yeah there was already a mark on that sorry we were too late yeah where can people grab your book uh you can get it at the carnivore code book.com it's on amazon and the exciting news is that the book was purchased by a big five publisher howden mifflin Harcourt. The book is available for sale now and will always be for sale. But in August, it will be republished with HMH

and have much broader distribution and people will be able to get it everywhere. It'll be for sale at Target and Walmart and Barnes and Noble and everywhere. Right now, it's just on Amazon. And I did record the Audible, the audio book in my voice. Uh, the audible may be down from Amazon right now. We're trying to get it back up, but there's an ebook

and an audio and a print copy. Yeah. The carnivore code, check it out. Awesome, man. Thanks for, thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Where can people find you? Uh, at carnivore MD everywhere. So my website is carnivoremd.com and at carnivoreMD everywhere. So my website is CarnivoreMD.com and at CarnivoreMD on all the socials. I'm following in Mark Bell's footsteps and I also have a race to zero followers because I love that so much. And I think that we should be truthful and authentic and mine isn't going that well either. But every day I lose some people, so I still have hope. Awesome, man. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks a lot, man. Love you guys. I'll talk to you soon. Peace. See ya. The salad man. Yeah, that didn't suck, right? No.

The more people we talk to, it just seems like, uh, like my fear now with the lockdown and everything is we're just prolonging, uh, the, the time between you and I get it between you, you know, your neighbors getting it. And so until the next flu season comes around, you know what I mean? Like, like, let's, let's get it all taken care of right now, you know, and then hopefully get rid of it. And then next year we'll see what comes, but that's my concern right now is you know, and then hopefully get rid of it. And then next year we'll see what comes, but that's my concern right now is like, let's just rip this off like a bandaid. He said something really interesting that no other guests has really touched on that we've had on. And because of like the speed of the spread, right, there's going to be a lot of concentrated

deaths. And then it's almost like, it's going to be like, it's going to hit a lot of the population, a lot of concentrated deaths. And then it's almost like it's going to be like, it's going to hit a lot of the population, kill a lot of people, fizzle out. And by the end of the year, it might have not killed as many people as the flu does. You know what I mean? That's, I haven't heard anybody really mentioned that about it before. So that's really, it's a really interesting thing to think about. You said a lot of great stuff and I don't think any of it's controversial. I liked, He said a lot of great stuff, and I don't think any of it's controversial. I liked, you know, he stuck to some of it was opinion, which anyone can disagree with. But a lot of it was was sticking to the facts. And, you know, that that's a great observation of some of the other countries that haven't taken the same precaution, uh, but they're, you know, have, have had a lot less, uh, deaths. United States is, is, is a tricky thing. You know, um,

we're not Sweden. Um, we have so many more millions of millions and millions of people and, um, just things have been, you know, things are just different in each culture and things are so different in each area that it's hard, it's hard to, it's hard to just say, okay, like, let's just implement, you know, these rules, you know, to, to this area and implement these rules to this area. And so I do think that some of the differences that we've had in terms of how we've handled things, I think are good. I think the quarantine, I think a pause, I think, hey, everyone stay home because we're not sure what's going on. I think that makes sense. What if our country was under attack, you know, from another country? And imagine if, you know, there was missiles to like Virginia and there was missiles to Texas and there was missiles to,

you know, there was like kind of fighting going on in a bunch of different areas or being attacked internally by terrorism or something like that. It was happening sporadically. And it would be logical for someone to say, hey, you know what, like everyone just stay home because we don't know what's going on at the moment. We're not sure what in the hell this is. I think this case is no different. But I but I think everybody is, is in agreement at this point, or it seems like a lot of people are in agreement at this point. We need to get people moving again. And even like the stimulus packages and stuff, I understand, I understand what they're for and why they exist, but I don't, in my opinion, it's never a great idea to give people

something for nothing, you know, and I, some people might say, well, it's not for nothing. It's because we're, we're, we're out of work. But I just don't think if you, if you line that up in the, if you line that up with history of giving people something for nothing, it doesn't usually help. I know my own experience. You know, any, anyone that I ever have given money to all of a sudden I become a, a bank, you know, rather, you know, rather than just a helping hand, you know? And so I think a lot of times when people get something for, for nothing, it kind of can condition them to let their guard down and, and I got this 1200 bucks, you know, I'm going to kind of can condition them to let their guard down

and, and, uh, I got this 1200 bucks, you know, I'm going to kind of chill. Not that you can do much with 1200 bucks, but, um, I think it's time for everyone to build their, you know, keep their minds strong and just get ready, you know, get ready to get back to work and, and get better, get ready to, to, to find a job. If you lost your job, I mean, we have to, all we can do now is try to solve the problems that we have, uh, to find a job if you lost your job. I mean, we have to, all we can do now is try to solve the problems that we have, uh, ahead of us right now. Yeah. And like I said, um, you know, a while ago, like kind of what Paul was saying too about the deaths, like it just, it sped things up. It just did it at an uncomfortable rate. You know, like what he was saying about the people's

respiratory issues, like they were probably going to die this year anyways. It sucks to say that. But, you know, when they contracted the virus, it just happened a lot sooner. And there's no way to comfortably say that or to, you know, say it in a way that doesn't hurt. But, you know, again, just it sped things up at an uncomfortable rate and i think yeah just like ripping the band-aid off and let's just get over with you know get it all over and done with and yeah let's get back to moving around and get back to work dude i gotta say congratulations to both you guys and to everybody that's on the show and everybody that

supports this show because Paul moving to Texas and starting his own supplement company is due in large part to this podcast. I mean, that's, that's powerful. Like that gives me goosebumps. That's so exciting. Like it's legit. It's not, this is not made up and I'm not saying that he couldn't have done it without a, certainly not saying that at all. Maybe he would have landed on some other people's shows and maybe he would have, uh, got some footing through YouTube or through Instagram, uh, or something of that nature. But him coming on our podcast, uh, has been, has been something that has been, uh,

great for all of us because we've gotten to become friends with him. We got to learn from him. Um, I got to grow a lot and learn a lot of great things from him. And, uh, I just think I, I couldn't be more, I couldn't be more excited for him. I think it's great. And, um, you know, it does add to a long list of people that we need to go visit, uh, down there in Texas. So we'll have to get our asses down there at some point. Yeah. And just, uh, for reference, when he came on our show he had 2 000 followers on instagram fast and he had no front teeth and he had tattoos on his neck yeah so i mean look at him now

fast forward and he's even eating carbs now thank you're welcome it's the opposite of joe exotic joe exotic takes people in and he ruins them we turn them into better people i guess savages yeah he's doing jujitsu he's surfing he can move around all weird i don't know if you guys ever seen some of his oh yeah and movement stuff that he can do it's pretty it was like an animal yeah yeah yeah the animal movements right that's crazy about his book too it's about to be like in all those major bookstores all it that's it's fucking awesome so yeah he's killing it huge yeah all right guys uh what you guys got going on for today uh and sema basically has me prepped and ready to go for the crossfit games he sent me a workout yesterday i did it it this morning, and it crushed me.

Orn pit hair. That's okay. You're a man. You can have orn pit hair. But, yeah, my workout was awesome, dude. Thank you for that. He had me doing some dumbbell presses, some push-ups with rows in there. Those are really hard to do, and they were probably the hardest part of the whole workout.

A bunch of pull-ups, shoulder presses, curls. It was, yeah. Yeah, you don't want to ask people that professionally help people with online coaching that program for people. It's not, you're better off asking like your lazy buddy who's going to be like, yeah, man, do like a couple sets of curls and do some overhead presses and that'll be good. And then tomorrow, you know, do some rows and do some pushups and I'll be good. But anybody that's like in SEMA, like whenever I've asked for help with from like Jesse Burdick or somebody like that, it's like it's it's it's a death trap every time.

It's like, why did I why did I I should know better than this. I shouldn't ask. But it is nice to have them uh give you a workout that um that works you you know because if it's if it's if it's left to you you're going to be kind of lazy about it right yeah it is funny because he put like the reps uh 12 to 15 he didn't really have to put the dash 15 because i'm gonna hit that 12 and then move on oh man that's great it was tough man but i got through all the pull-ups pretty good so i was happy about that five by eight so felt awesome it's awesome yeah i got some uh lifting to do a little bit later today gonna um i did some swings yesterday and some overhead presses and stuff like

that i'm uh pretty bad at overhead presses, especially with these triad things. They're, they're a little bit like kettlebells. My left shoulder has been a little weird in terms of just overhead pressing and I've never been good at overhead pressing. So I'm going to continue to, uh, continue to work on that. I figured out something pretty cool with my XD med ball. I've been throwing it up the hill and then it just rolls right back down to me. So I, I've been picking it up. Like, yeah, I've been picking it up and whatever way I can pick it up. Um, you know, sometimes I'll pick it up, uh, kind of like with a wide stance and kind of like deadlifted or sometimes I'll

kind of intentionally, cause it's not heavy tension. I'll kind of pick it up to the side and then I just chuck it whatever way I want to. I might, I might bail it. Like it's not heavy. Intentionally, I'll kind of pick it up to the side and then I just chuck it whatever way I want to. I might bail it like it's a big old thing of hay or something like that or might throw it backwards over my head. So that was actually harder than anything else I've been doing in a while. But I'll probably mess with that again. And then the steeper the hill, obviously, the quicker it's going to roll back down to me.

So basically out there playing catch with myself. That's awesome, man. No, you know, I'm going to tell you guys this. I feel like in the past few days, I've been going a little bit stir crazy inside because I've been working a lot inside. I've been getting my walks outside in some sunlight, but yo, is that why you were maybe like kind of disoriented this morning. You were like Saladino. You're like, what's going on? You know, when I looked at the calendar, I didn't think we had a podcast this morning and I looked at my phone at like eight 30 something. I wait, Paul Saladino. Oh snap. So I was like, Oh shit, is this real? So yeah, but man, I need to, I need to just go spend all day outside or something. It's crazy.

If you need a hand job, I think Andrew can help you out. I'll drive over to his house and he'll help me out. I'm sure we can still maintain six feet apart and I can still accomplish that. Oh, God, that's fucking great. Did they say six feet or six inches? I can't wait to lift today, though. Oh, God, that's fucking great. Did they say six feet or six inches? Huh. I can't wait to lift today, though. I can't wait to lift today.

Oh, man. Well, you guys can always come back up here. Maybe we should arrange that. Maybe we should have you guys come back up for a day or two, hit up some more podcasting and some more lifting. Go hit up those stairs again. Boo. Oh, Jesus Christ.

They're back open. They opened it back up. That's cool. I couldn't go down there for a few days, but I'm going to go down there today and off myself. That's great. All right, guys. Well, Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy.

Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Thank you to Piedmontese Beef for sponsoring this podcast. We were talking about the meat shortage a little bit. So if you're concerned like I am, head over to piedmontese.com and put in an order ASAPO. Please follow the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram, at MB Power Project on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram is at, I am Andrew Z and SEMA where you be. And it's even yang on Instagram and YouTube at and SEMA yin yang on Tik TOK and Twitter.

Mark. I'm at Mark smelly bell. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness never strength. Catch y'all later.