Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 222 Live - Paul Saladino

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

Dr. Paul Saladino is 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. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

yesterday. You were really flexible. Gotten all sorts of weird moves. Has anyone ever told you like how, you've probably heard this forever, but like how ironic your last name is? I know. Yeah. But here's the deal. There's also Dino in there. Is it Salad Dinosaur? Salad and Dino. There is. I didn't realize that. It is the version 2.0. You think, oh, Salad. Dinosaur Salad. Salad. Salad. It's completely ironic and then you think, wait, there's dinosaur in there too. I'm the T-Rex.

Dino salad. Where are you from? I feel like you're from the East Coast. I'm from the East Coast, my man. Virginia. Hell yeah. Virginia. Where are you from?

I knew you had something going on over there. Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie, New York. Virginia. Essentially, I was born just south of here, Port Hueneme, California. I'm like a salmon returning to my roots right now, going down to SoCal to live in San Diego. But my dad was in the Navy and was a doc in the Navy. And we lived in Port Hueneme for a little bit and then Kentucky and then most of my life in Virginia.

What's going on in San Diego? San Diego is where I've got a medical practice starting. So, yep, going to go there and- Have you moved yet? Last time we talked, you were like about to move, I think. I'm in the process. If you go out in the parking lot, my truck is packed to the gills. I am on my way and you guys were so important to me that I stopped here in Sacramento to come hang out with you guys. Your car is packed with clothes and liver. Liver and egg yolks. Yeah, I did an Instagram live. I was joking.

You can see the back of my car. It's boxing gloves, an X3 bar, and four surfboards, and the rest of it is just clothes. But I said it's actually all liver and egg yolks. What do we do with the egg whites? Where do those go? To the egg white companies. To hell? In the garbage.

You sell them to Lauren's or whatever. What is the yeah Laura's Lana's Egg Whites Lana's Egg Whites Egg Whites International those are all

just ship them to her I just I just have I have that's what's in the back of my car I have three gallons of egg whites from all the egg yolks I've eaten in the last year

sell it to bodybuilders they love it well we want to that's what I'm saying we talked about just selling financing just selling yolks

we gotta just sell yolks we should just sell yolks call it yoked getting yoked yeah i love it see you guys have a good creative over here man you guys have a good business mind what did you come up with yesterday the vertical diet oh yeah what was that though what was it the fat vertical diet the fat vertical diet we can talk about it the we're gonna yeah substitute fat for the carbs yeah the vertical diet actually we need to talk about that. That was fascinating, that conversation. Yeah, we'll talk about it.

I don't know if these guys will buy it, though. We'll see. We'll see. You can talk about it right now. So basically, the idea was I was asking Paul if you could equal your performance. So when I started a carnivore diet, my performance didn't go down at all. But I'm not really a high- performing, you know, professional athlete. I'm just kind of lifting and.

Yeah, but you have gotten stronger and you've gotten in better shape. So, yeah. So I guess what I'm asking, I was asking Paul is like, hey, what do you what do you think if somebody like Brian Shaw, for example, went on a vertical diet, but used instead of using carbs, if you used fat as a fuel source. but instead of using carbs, if you used fat as a fuel source. So basically you'd be just doing like, it'd be like a nose-to-tail carnivore diet, but sort of like in that kind of way. And it brings up this really interesting question that the bodybuilders love to ask. So like in this realm, it's particularly relevant.

And it's the idea or the question, which I don't think we know the answer to, which is do you need carbohydrates to be maximally strong? Is there a strength promoting effect of carbohydrates or is it about excess calories? And I think that is a fascinating question. And I thought, oh man, Chris is onto something here. And so my feeling, and again, this is my opinion, my hypothesis, I would love to see the experiment happen with Brian or some of these other strongmen or people in the powerlifting community. And you're sort of a testament to this. You didn't lose strength when you cut out carbohydrates. And you were able to gain strength without carbohydrates, which I think is the first part of the equation. I don't think that we need carbohydrates to gain strength as a human.

And the second part of the equation is, can we become maximally strong? Can we become optimally strong or optimally big without any carbohydrates? Could we do it on the vertical diet? So hat tip to Stan Efferding. And so this gets into this really interesting concept that what we're looking at here, and this is what I believe, that protein is building blocks. That for our human bodies to work, there is a sweet spot for the amount of protein that we can take in. I think you can go too high, and we certainly know you can go too low.

When you go too low, you get sarcopenia, you get muscle wasting, you get osteoporosis. I think a lot of the issue for women and men who are developing osteoporosis is too little protein in their diet. And a lot of that could be corrected with more protein. But I think we can go too high on protein, which is a particularly challenging perspective, especially for someone like myself who believes in a nose-to-tail carnivore diet. And I think what you will see in someone that goes too high in protein is that you'll convert that protein into sugar. So my concern on a diet that is too high in protein is that you're actually running on carbs. And I really think that carbs or fat are the fuel for the car. They're the fuel for humans. Protein is building blocks. So if you can get into, the way that I would formulate it now is get your body into the

optimal amount of protein, get the sweet spot, and then run the car on either carbs or fat. I think Stan has done some amazing stuff by running his athletes on carbs, and we know that works really well. What I would suggest, an alternative hypothesis is, and this is the vertical diet, the fat vertical diet, is what if you get to the optimal range of protein and run the vehicle on fat? Why would you want to do that? Well, number one, you'd be in ketosis, and there are a lot of advantages to being in ketosis. An epigenetic perspective, which means our DNA is activated differently. Mental performance benefits.

I think there may be recovery benefits. Dom D'Agostino's done a lot of great work in terms of ketones and muscle performance. We know that ketones are muscle sparing. I think there's a really fascinating possibility that running your body on protein and fat could be a more optimal state than protein and carbohydrates. The tricky part here for the strength athletes and those wanting to gain weight is they have to get enough calories. And I think that there's a built-in mechanism for your body to not want to overeat protein, but you can overeat fat. And we can qualify the type of fat that I would recommend people eating,

but I think there's a real interesting idea here. Maybe the optimal for a human or another way of doing optimal is to do just enough protein to make the building blocks and adding good quality fat. Run the car on fat. I love the back to the future analogies. I love them. I love this. You run the DeLorean on fat, right? You can run the DeLorean on carbs or you can run the DeLorean on fat.

But I think, I suspect that the DeLorean does better with time travel, is more efficient in many ways when you run it on fat. I would say fat is cleaner burning. You get maybe a hundred miles per gallon on fat. You get maybe 15 miles per gallon on carbohydrates. And we know that long-term, carbohydrate may have problems for people who are carbon-tolerant.

So that's the fat vertical diet. I found a flaw with this already. Oh, no. It's a major one. The DeLorean in Back to the Future runs off of a lightning rod. What about in Back to the Future 2, where they have the Cuisinart in the back? And they put the banana peels in it?

In that case – Oh, yeah. Ran on some carbs. Right. It can run on carbs or they can put – Damn. They got to watch out for those banana peels. They can put fat in it.

We actually – Mark and I discussed this a little bit this morning and I think you were saying that you think that you need carbs to be maximally strong, right? So in my opinion, you need carbohydrates for certain things. I'm also a believer that your metabolism is a moving target. So somebody that was once 250 and overweight and had a, you know, really, you know, bad body fat composition, now they're 200 and they're in good shape. I believe that they may be able to tolerate some carbohydrates more. And I think carbohydrates can be a good source of energy. What I also think is that in my own experience, when I have taken carbohydrates out for periods of time, I've noticed that the muscles feel kind of flat, especially with some like fasting and especially with kind of just mainly being like keto felt

didn't feel great at all. But however, being on a carnivore diet felt a little bit better. Now, I would also say that I perhaps may not have done this long enough to really feel what you're supposed to feel because, you know, it doesn't take a month or two. You know, it might take several months to really feel the way you're supposed to feel. I have felt really good doing a carnivore diet and I felt great and I felt like it was easier to maintain a lean physique. it was easier to maintain a lean physique. But in terms of strength, it didn't have that. For strength purposes, it's almost like you want the muscles to be full. And in powerlifting terms, you kind of want to almost, and strong man, you almost want to be a little bit bloated in a sense.

You want the carbohydrates to help hydrate the muscles, and you want to have the muscle bellies be like full, it helps with leverages. I love this. Chris and I were talking about this the other day. He's making eyes at me over there because he knows what I'm going to say. This is so interesting. And you actually got me thinking about this, Mark, because we had- Yeah, I called him up one day and I was like, dude, you got to try this. You got to try to eat like 400 carbs a day just to see what happens. He's like, dude, I can't do it. I'm like, you won't understand though, unless you actually try it, you won't understand what I'm talking

about. So two important points here in the studies that have been done with ketogenic diets, and usually a nose to tail carnivore diet is going to be ketogenic. It takes people three to six weeks to keto adapt. So if people are going to try a ketogenic diet, whether it's a carnivore diet or a traditional ketogenic diet, they need to realize that they're going to develop some biochemical machinery over about six weeks. And their performance is going to decline and then go up to what it was before or better, at least in terms of the studies. Yeah, so at first you might be like, Paul's full of shit. Right, right, exactly. But give yourself, there is an adaptation period for keto. So sometimes I work with athletes and

professional sports and I say, hey, do this in the off season. Keto adapt in the off season. Don't do this. Don't switch over in the short term. The other key here, Mark, and this is what I was thinking about since you had talked and I talked to Chris about this, is I think you're totally right about the water. But there's another way to do that on a carnivore diet, and it's salt. And I think that that's exactly what you're talking about, that you want the muscle bellies to be full. You want the blood volume to be robust and this is a really interesting thing about ketogenic diets that volek and finney have talked about and we know this from our increasing understanding of ketogenic physiology there's something called the naturesis of fasting which is a super geeky term for the fact that you waste sodium in a

fasting state you waste sodium on a ketogenic diet. So many people notice on ketogenic diets, they feel flat. Their electrolytes get a little funky. They may feel a little difficulty with sleep. And a lot of this is not enough salt in our diet because we're wasting salt. Sodium is a nutrient. A lot of people don't realize this. Sodium has been vilified for years, but sodium is crucial. Animals in the wild will seek out sodium like crazy. When I was on the Pacific Crest Trail, the deer would seek out sodium so much that they would come and drink our pee. Immediately after we peed, they would just walk out of the woods and drink our pee, right? And this happens all the time.

And when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail also, we had sweaty mats that we slept on. And we went up to hike Mount Whitney one day. We left these foam mats at Guitar Lake, which is a beautiful part of the Eastern Sierra. And we came back and they were all chewed up. The marmots had chewed our mats, not because they were trying to get foam. They were trying to get salt. Humans need sodium. If we don't have enough sodium, we become more insulin resistant. And so I think a lot of people who are having this effect on ketogenic diets or carnivore diets will do well to increase their sodium. We also know that if we don't get enough sodium, we're going to increase aldosterone, which is a mineralocorticoid, and that's going to cause potassium wasting.

So if you don't get enough sodium, you'll become insulin resistant. In order to hold on to sodium, your cortisol will go up, your aldosterone will go up, and you'll waste potassium. So a sodium deficiency can cause sodium problems, potassium problems, and probably magnesium problems. And so I think that one of the experiments that I would love to see you and other power lifters do if they wanted to go on the vertical diet is to make sure they're getting enough sodium. And then you'll get more robust blood volume.

And maybe, maybe not, but maybe you would feel more full and everything would be more sort of engorged and you get the pump more. Yeah, I've taken in pretty large amounts of sodium, but I don't know like what that number would be. You know, I've tried to add it to water and add it to my food. I'm not sure, like I never really measured it. So I don't really know how much I would need. It's a big number.

It's probably more than... a few grams, right? It's probably 12 grams or 14 for somebody your size, maybe even 13 or 14 grams. Would that be like a couple of tablespoons or something? It would be like a full tablespoon or more. It would be like at least two teaspoons of salt. So it's a lot. If you look at the studies that are done, and this is not in ketogenic diets, there's an interesting study showing that, and this is epidemiology, but the people with the best survival have a sodium, not sodium chloride, a sodium excretion of five grams a day, which is equivalent to 10 grams of sodium chloride per day. So just for the general population, there's pretty clear epidemiologic evidence that five grams of sodium in the urine a day, which is a pretty good proxy for how much

sodium they're taking in, is ideal. And that translates to 10 grams of salt a day. So I think people on ketogenic diets, people that are bigger athletes sweating more, could maybe even benefit from 15 milligrams. And every five grams is about a teaspoon. So... I've been messing around with ketogenic diets for a long time. I don't know how much of a difference it makes in terms of muscle growth,, muscle growth, you know, cause I've, I've, I did a keto style diet younger when I was building myself up and I've still have utilized it today to try to hold onto muscle mass and try to hold onto some size. But, um, I just noticed that when I have the carbohydrates, you kind of feel a pump a little bit more. It feels like it does assist

in recovery a little bit from the workouts and stuff, but I haven't really tried it. Like I said, I haven't tried it for months on end with a straight up carnivore diet without amount of salt. Yeah. Well, I also got interested in this after Paul gave me some animal fat, some straight up beef fat. And then the rest of the day, I just felt energized and great. And that's when we started talking about it. Cause I was like, you know what, right now I feel so good. I feel like powerful, you know? And he said, it must be the fat in the liver, you know? So it was, it was something I did. What are your thoughts on this and SEMA? Cause you've done some, you've done some bodybuilding, you help coach a lot of people with bodybuilding. What's some

of your experience? Well, I mean, when it comes to like the kind of sports that I do, I mean, I do jujitsu, I do lifting. Um, there were periods of time that I went lower carb and in those times that I went lower carb, I had to up my fats. Um, and what exactly Chris was mentioning is you had higher fats like yesterday morning, you felt way better, right? Yeah. A lot of people that are doing carnivore might be just having a lot of excess protein and really are not having a lot of fat. And that's probably one of the reasons why they don't feel like they have much energy. Because if you're talking about fat and carbs being the main energy sources, if you're not having carbs and you're limiting your fats and needing a whole lot of protein, of course you're going to feel like absolute dog crap.

Starvation. Exactly. So, I mean, thinking about this from a carnivore sense, like what else are other people missing out on? Like first off, they're not getting the necessary nutrients they have because most people aren't doing nose to tail like you talk about, right? So lacking fats, what else do people that are trying to do a carnivore diet, what else are they missing out on? I think you said it with this nose to tail concept. It's not complicated but not simple. I think I saw Tim Ferriss say that.

You know, it's a great saying. It's not complicated, but not simple. I think I saw Tim Ferriss say that, you know, it's a great thing. It's not complex, but it's not simple. It's just this idea that evolutionarily humans have always eaten the whole animal. There's a lot of elegant symmetry in that when we eat the whole animal, there are places where we get unique nutrients. The muscle meat is incredibly nutritive to humans, but it's not the only thing in an animal. And we were talking about this before the podcast, we were all hanging out in the room and eating liver. We all did a bunch of liver shots together. You know, liver and the organs in the animal are often regarded as the most sacred part of the animal from a nutritional, from an ancestral perspective by indigenous tribes. You know, you mentioned that growing up, did you grow up in Africa? No, I grew up here. But with a Nigerian family, with Nigerian heritage.

They cooked a lot of liver. We ate a lot of liver when I was a kid. Organ meats were a part of your culture. And, you know, I think that— It seems different coming from him versus from you. I'm just saying. I'm not trying to be rude to anybody. You know, right away I'm like, all right, he said he grew up eating a lot of liver. I got to eat a lot of liver, even though you just told me 10 times.

Right, right. It's a cultural thing that a lot of us have lost. But if you look back to many other cultures, whether it's Asian cultures or African cultures or any culture that's not westernized, they often eat a lot of organ meats. And if you look at indigenous peoples, I'm not an anthropologist, but I try to pretend I am sometimes and I try to learn enough about it. You know, what I've learned, you know, Wade Davis talking to Miki Bendor, they eat the liver first. So the nose to tail brings people unique amounts of nutrients and unique sources of nutrients. The muscle meat doesn't have a lot of copper. The muscle meat doesn't have a lot of riboflavin.

The muscle meat doesn't have a lot of folate. So we need the sort of organ meats to complete the nutritional picture. And it's pretty incredible. Like I said, not complex but not simple. When you eat the animal nose to tail, which would be reasonable amounts of protein, a good amount of fat for fuel, and then the organ meats, whether it's liver, kidney, heart, and then thinking about, you know, connective tissue and maybe a calcium source, which we can talk about, you're getting a really robust collection of nutrients. I would argue you're getting everything a human needs to function

optimally. And so I think there are a lot of people doing really well on meat only diets. I just think they could probably do better with nose to tail with more nutrients, but the fat and the fat and fuel piece is super important as well. Yeah. I know we've discussed some of this before, but just tell us, you know, what your diet, what diet you landed on and what you're currently eating just so everybody knows, because sometimes they come in and they're like, ah, who's this guy? Because maybe they haven't heard previous episodes. Right.

So, you know, I've been eating a carnivore diet for about 10 months, and you were asking me before the podcast, I have not had any plants in the last 10 months. And people might think that sounds crazy, but it's been an interesting journey for me. I love intellectual questions. I love going down rabbit holes and asking questions. Your poor heart, man.

You're going to die. I know, right? It's doing okay. We can talk about all the lipid stuff if you want. Basically, I think the idea around the heart stuff is overblown and misinterpreted. But yeah, I haven't had any plans. And what I've landed on is a nose-to-tail carnivore diet. It's seen various permutations over the last 10 months, but Chris saw most of it yesterday. It's pretty simple right now. And the way I eat is not

necessarily the way that everybody's going to find it functional to eat, but I try to think of the basic foods of an animal that I can eat in a day, and then I add to that when I want extra things. So the basic foods I eat from an animal are animal meat, animal fat, and that ratio is important. I try to hit the protein at a certain target animal meat, animal fat, and that ratio is important. I try to hit the protein at like a certain target. What's animal fat mean? Animal fat is actually fat from the animal. So this is really interesting. You go to the butcher or you go, you look at an animal, like a ruminant animal. We never see the fact that there's a bunch of fat around the kidneys called suet or fat lining some of the parts of the animal. It's like wrapped in it, right? Yeah.

We never get that fat. Animals are a lot fattier than we believe them to be, or there are collections of fat in the animal. What we only see is the muscle meat, which has had all the fat trimmed away to make it look red. But I'm eating animal fat. I've actually recently just started sourcing pure fat. It's not tallow. It's not rendered. It's just like suet or trimmings from the fat. So I want the fat from the animal. How do you eat that? Because sometimes like, say like you get like a New York strip, that's like, it's really hard to eat. You kind of just man up. Oh, okay. You just chop it up small and gnaw on it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the New York strip is amazing because it has that, that chewy piece is the collagen. So that's the connective tissue. That's good for

you. That's a good source of glycine. Can we cheat and maybe blend it up or something? You could make a meat smoothie, but the animal fat I think is much more palatable than the New York strip tendon. It's not as chewy. I gave Chris some yesterday. It's a little different, but sometimes it even tastes like a little cheese or something, but it's actual animal fat and you can cook it briefly or I'll end up eating a lot of it just raw. How do you obtain it? How do you get it? There are places online. You can order animal fat. You can go to your butcher and just ask for trimmings. They'll probably give it to you for free or very, very cheap. So when you're eating nose to tail, it's quite interesting because the affordability of the diet becomes much more leveraged. Liver is cheap. Animal fat is cheap.

The animal meat is expensive, but you don't need to overdo it on animal meat. You can just eat sort of a, and I'll define, maybe I can define for people. I think for most people, I'll just say, we were talking about this kind of sketching out with Chris before the podcast. For most people, I think 0.6 to 0.9 or one gram per pound of lean body weight is an adequate target for protein. And that's going to be lean body weight. So you got to look at, say, what's my percentage body fat, subtract that. And 0.6 to 1, maybe 0.7 to 1 is a pretty big thing. But I think you go below that, you get sarcopenia. You go above that, you're going to start pushing some of that protein into glucose, which is what you don't want to do.

And so that's the amount of protein I'm looking for in a day. I'm 170 pounds, maybe 7% body fat. So I'm looking for, I don't know, maybe 130, 120 grams of protein a day. It's pretty easy. People may know that a pound of meat has about 100 grams of protein. So I'm only trying to get a pound of meat a day and the rest of it, I'm going to eat animal fat and I'm just going to maybe eat it fresh, eat it raw or cook it briefly and just chew on it. It's definitely kind of an ancestral type of thing. Eating like a savage. Yeah, people don't have to do it that way.

That's just how I do it. And then I eat liver. I probably eat three to four ounces of organic liver per day. And I'll eat some egg yolks. I like duck eggs right now. I don't eat the whites because of the Avidin. You're on that Michael Hearn train. Yeah, I love the egg yolks.

I love them raw. People don't have to do that. That's just how I do it right now. And I get rid of the whites because the whites have a protein in it called avidin, which binds biotin. And avidin is not completely degraded by cooking. So I just say, I don't need any more of the protein.

I've got my protein covered. There's a lot of nutrients in the yolk. 70% of the nutrients of mostly everything is in the yolk anyway. So that's the basic part of my diet. And then I might add things to that, not plants, but I might add things to that on a daily basis. I might add seafood. I might add low mercury fish. I might add a calcium source here and there. I've kind of experimented with low heavy metal bone meal, things like that. But that's the basic diet.

And then you can add other animal products to that as you see fit. The yolk is really good. I put it sometimes on top of my steak. It's delicious. That's French. That's French style. Why wouldn't somebody maybe want to use beef tallow? You know, so beef tallow is interesting. So tallow, what Chris is referring to right now, is kind of rendered fat. They take the fat of the animal, like I'm getting from the butcher, and they boil it down. So the boiling process is probably going to oxidize the fat a little bit and it makes the fat liquid. And there is really interesting idea that if people have the wrong type of bacteria in the gut, liquid fat, whether it's olive oil, butter, heavy cream, or tallow or saturated fat could

create what are called lipid rafts. And those could transit inflammatory molecules from the wrong type of bacteria in the gut across the gut lining. Lipid rafts going right down the rapids, right into the toilet. Right? Actually, it goes into your body. It takes the lipopolysaccharide right into your body.

So not everybody, but if people have, if people appear sensitive to fat, they could have overgrowth of the wrong type of bacteria in the gut. So the terrain matters. And then I think, you know, people who don't have overgrowth also may find they don't tolerate tallow very well. A lot of people get like diarrhea or loose stool when they have too much loose fat. I just worry about too

much liquid fat. So I don't, I'm not a fan of the liquid fat and I like the tallow, excuse me, I like the trimmings of the animal and the suet. It actually has connected tissue in it, right? Because we want the connected tissue. This gets back to the idea of glycine trying to be nose to tail. I've always wanted to be tendons. And I realized the trimmings of the animal already have some of those tendons and connected tissue, and then there are higher sorts of glycine in there. So I would caution people against over-consuming liquid fat. The other problem with liquid fat is it's often not as satiating as like the other fat. You know, you've talked about- And you can eat a lot of it.

You can eat a lot of it very fast. And it's not incredibly nutrient rich, right? Fat is a macronutrient, but it doesn't have a lot of micronutrients. Now, you know, when we do have the fat from the animal, we definitely want that to be grass fed, right? I think so. We talked about this yesterday. Really interesting concept that a lot of cows are fed estrogenic things. If they're fed corn, the corn is often sprayed with atrazine. Atrazine is a pesticide that has a strong estrogenic activity. So I have a podcast, it's called Fundamental Health. And I did an interview on my podcast with Dr. Anthony Jay, who is a biochemist at the Mayo Clinic and has spoken a lot about

estrogen. And we talked about atrazine on corn. And, you know, people may know that steroid hormones like estrogen are fat soluble. So the concern is that these non-grass-fed animals may accumulate estrogenic molecules, which is something that guys don't want, but also women don't want extra estrogens in the fat of animals. So I think that if we can obtain grass-fed fat, it's going to be better. There's also something interesting I learned recently that for a lot of grain-fed cattle, they're putting mycoestrogens in the ear. It's a compound, something like xerolinone or something. And that is a mycoestrogen and improves the feed efficiency of the cow by sort of putting more estrogens into the body. They're putting fungal mold compounds into the ear. They put a little pellet and it makes it so that the cows gain 30% more weight

on a certain amount of feed. But what they're really doing is pushing more estrogenic mycotoxins into the cow. Again, it's going to bioaccumulate in the fat. So I think, you know, I was just getting it all bloated, you know, you're not sure. Yeah. That cow all bloated up. I'm already Google searching where I'm getting it all bloated, you know, you're not sure. Yeah. That cow all bloated up. I'm already Google searching where I can find it. So you want to, uh, you, I think, I think if people can obtain the grass fed fat, that's the better source cleaner because a lot of the toxins are going to bioaccumulate in the

fat. You know, you mentioned the liver, heart, and kidney. So as being really micronutrient dense. Yeah. So if someone's adding one of these into the carb and water diet, do you want to just, can you just go for one of these? Do any of them have something that the other one doesn't?

Or is it good to have all three? Great question. I think that the liver is the first place to start. And kidneys are kind of like mini liver. So I would say liver and kidneys are unique nutritionally. Heart is kind of like a muscle.

And heart looks a lot like muscle meat. So people don't have to eat heart. If they want to eat heart, they can. Heart is kind of like a muscle and heart looks a lot like muscle meat. So people don't have to eat heart. If they want to eat heart, they can. Heart is usually pretty darn affordable and has a unique taste. It's a little chewier, but people might like, people have, I think there's a lot of people that really like heart. We talked about coenzyme Q10 a little bit earlier and coenzyme Q10 is one of these compounds, one of these molecules in the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. And all the carnivores I work with have coenzyme Q10 levels that are off the charts in a good way. Heart is particularly rich in coenzyme Q10. You don't have to eat heart to get enough coenzyme Q10 on a carnivore diet. But if people are interested in heart, that's reasonable. But

I would think of heart as muscle meat, and I would think of liver and kidneys as a separate category. But liver is a good place to start. It's particularly rich in many of the nutrients that compliment muscle meat. It's quite interesting. There's about half the B vitamins and robust amounts in muscle meat, and the other half are in the liver. So you get B6 is pretty good in muscle meat. Folate is pretty good in liver. It's an interesting kind of, it's like peanut butter and jelly, except not. So if we bring, speaking of peanut butter and jelly, if we bring carbohydrates into the mix, it makes it a lot easier to eat more food.

And then there's like, you know, I hear people all the time talking about these hyperpalatable foods, you know, that are designed to kind of override our system and feed us excess calories, excess macronutrients without the micronutrients. But like when you mix fat and carbohydrates together in something like ice cream, or you have fat and carbohydrates together in something like pizza, or even like a cheeseburger, you know, these different sandwiches, right?

You start, you know, kind of making these transportation systems that have enormous amounts of calories, but it also works with protein. You get protein and carbohydrates together, like eating chicken breast. You know, it's going to be hard to eat a good amount of chicken breast, um, by itself, but with, uh, some rice and maybe even some vegetables, some steamed vegetables. Now there's some moisture to it and it's a little easier to, to eat more food. So that's kind of some of the principles of like this stan efforting uh with the vertical diet he he pairs carbohydrates fats and proteins kind of together uh in like monster mash you know which is uh ground beef or ground bison and and some rice

allows the athlete to eat more for some of these behemoths that he coaches like brian shaw and hapthor b hornson who want to be like really big. But sometimes this plagues us in society when we see things like ice cream and pizza, they can really make us, well not make us, but they can, it's easier for us to overeat on those foods, right? This is a very interesting concept that in nature, fat and carbs are pretty scarce. Protein is pretty easy to obtain in nature, and people may debate me on that. But I think that it's—we were talking about this before the podcast a little bit. There was a great question asked.

If you look in nature, and I believe that humans run on carbs or fat. That's the fuel for the human vehicle. It's the protein that's the building blocks. And if you look in nature, there's a lot of protein. You can get a snake. You can get a fish. You can get a small animal. You can get a snake, you can get a fish, you can get a small animal, you can get a squirrel, you can get a mouse, you can get a bird. Not a lot of carbohydrates in nature, not a lot of fat in nature. Those are the key nutrients that we need and that we've needed evolutionarily to survive as humans. And I think that that's why we're programmed

to treasure those or to respond to those in a very positive way in our foods. to treasure those or to respond to those in a very positive way in our foods. This can work against us. In nature, fat and carbohydrates almost never occur together except in breast milk, which makes sense. When a baby is born, it's uniquely vulnerable, and it uniquely needs to gain weight as quickly as possible. Now, I think that if you look at a lot of junk food in our diets these days, it's a mimic of breast milk.

It's fat and carbohydrate together, whether it's a donut, whether it's ice cream, whether it's a candy bar. It's a breast milk mimic. And that's short circuits. That really hacks into our satiety mechanisms in a negative way and makes it basically impossible to stop eating that. You could also say dairy. I mean, regular dairy, milk, yogurt, it's fat and it's carbohydrates together. That is uniquely difficult for humans to stop eating. And companies know this. I like that you mentioned yogurt because that runs into the area of like kind

of fake health where, you know, we're sold, oh man, it's got calcium, it's got protein. Try the Greek yogurt. What are some of the problems with that? It still has carbohydrates. I mean, there's lactose in Greek yogurt. Even the Greek yogurt that doesn't have any sugar has enough carbohydrates to kind of trigger that mechanism in our brain. It's pretty hard to stop eating. Now, the protein in Greek yogurt, the calcium in Greek yogurt, those are good things, but I think it's important for people to realize that different foods can make it, you know, can trigger our satiety mechanisms in different ways. If we're just eating fat together, if we're just eating fat, it's going to be more satiating than if we eat fat and carbs. And like you said, totally correctly, if you eat carbohydrates with protein, it's going to make that protein way harder to stop eating.

This is what ribs, you know, this is what we go to barbecue. It's like sugar on meat, you know, and it makes it really hard to stop eating fried chicken. That's carbohydrates and protein. So it changes the equation in our brain. That never happens in nature. We're not adapted to that. We're not adapted to that.

And it's a pretty dangerous thing for humans. And from a perspective of wanting to get really big, it's great. You'll get really big. If you're doing a ton of weight and you're lifting a lot of muscle, if you're lifting a lot of weights, you'll probably make a lot of that big into muscle. If you're not doing that, you're going to make a lot of that big into adipose tissue. And that's going to bring with it a lot of the metabolic consequence that we see for people. Why would an athlete want to get rid of carbohydrates? Do you think that, you know, maybe like burning fat and using fat as a fuel source is maybe safer or healthier or something

like that? I do. I think it's much more clean burning. We could think of it like a hybrid vehicle or like an electric vehicle. You know, it's a Tesla. And the implications of it long term, I think, are where we need to look. Like I kind of mentioned earlier, this gets into some esoteric ketone physiology and the way the human body looks, but the human body looks very different biochemically when we are burning fat versus carbohydrates. I think fat has been shown to be less oxidatively stressful. Fat is processed differently in the mitochondria. Fat affects our epigenetics. So this is the way we turn genes on and off in a different way than carbohydrates. It affects it in a positive way. This is during a ketogenic state, right? So I'm talking ketosis versus glycolytic.

I'm talking fat-based metabolism versus carbohydrate-based metabolism. Those do not exist together. You're either burning carbohydrates or you're burning fat. It's kind of a switch. So I'm not saying that you're going to have these benefits if you just eat fat with your carbs. I'm saying if you're in a ketogenic state and you're burning fat, it's cleaner in a lot of ways. If you look long-term, this is a very interesting concept that guys like Volek and Finney are talking about. It appears that perhaps 30% of the population can tolerate carbohydrates, but a lot of the population, perhaps as high as 70%, really doesn't do well

with carbohydrates long-term. And if they run on a carbohydrate-based metabolism, they will develop insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome, which we know is the precursor to diabetes. And that is not a good thing. That's like rust in your vehicle. So I would say, yeah, it's like, you know, you go to the mechanic and they say, oh, do you want synthetic oil or regular oil? Fat is probably like synthetic oil. It's cleaner burning. It's not going to accumulate on your valves as much. I mean, these are obviously very gross oversimplifications, but I think there are many molecular mechanisms where it appears that burning fat is a cleaner burn for the human being. Then you get the mental benefits, the performance benefits from that perspective for people that are sort of reaction athletes, MMA athletes, or jujitsu, if you want to have reaction time

or learning. The brain on fat runs differently than a brain on carbohydrates. And then you think about muscle sparing effect of ketones. So yeah, I think you illustrate the point very well, Mark. Running on carbohydrates and running on fat affect the engine differently. Do you know if there are certain populations, because you mentioned 30% of the population probably doesn't run as well on carbohydrates? I think 70% of the population. But are there certain populations that generally do run better on carbs? Or we don't know about that yet?

There are definitely populations that run worse on carbs. Okay. The Pima Indians. So I went to medical school in Arizona at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The Pima Indians, you know, all of the Southwestern Indians in the United States have this incredibly beautiful heritage. They built things like Mesa Verde. They built incredible structures.

They lived in a part of the world that's inhospitable by many standards. But they thrived, and they had an incredibly beautiful culture. Perhaps because of that environment or perhaps because of their just unique genetic lineage, they are uniquely intolerant to carbohydrates. They have the highest rate of diabetes in the world. It's over 80%, I believe, in the tribe now because they eat carbohydrates, right? Two or three generations ago, the rate of diabetes in the Pima Indians was 3%. In three generations, and these numbers may be a little bit off.

Again, I have to quote these, but I'm in the ballpark here. In three generations, the Pima Indians have gone from 2% diabetes to over 80% diabetes. Is that due to like government funding of some sort or something like that? Well, the availability of carbohydrates. Are they poor perhaps? Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, they're poor.

Yeah. And you can see, you know, the older versions of Pima Indians, they're uniquely healthy people. And then, you know, the contemporary Pima Indians are plagued by diabetes. It's an epidemic. And it's basically a position, an instance where carbohydrates are toxic to this population. There are many Native American populations where carbohydrates are uniquely toxic. They are extremely carbohydrate intolerant. But there are some populations who appear to be able to eat carbohydrates. So that's a population that's intolerant.

I can't think of any off the top of my head that are carb tolerant, but there are people. And then we get a lot of genetic mixing now. The whole world is a melting pot probably for the better. But it's a little bit difficult to draw those cultural lines now unless you're from a very sort of specific cultural region. What do you think about just a low- low carb diet, like a moderate carbohydrates, like you know, on some hard training days you have, I don't know, 50 or 100, something like that. People are doing this in the carnivore world now. I think it's a great experiment.

They're calling it a targeted carnivore diet. And I think it's an interesting experiment. I think it's possible. Again, it kind of goes back to this underlying question. Do we need it? Does it benefit? I don't know. It's possible. Again, it kind of goes back to this underlying question, do we need it? Does it benefit? I don't know. It's possible.

Yeah. No one knows. No one knows. But we need to do the experiment. It's worth doing. And I think that a low-carbohydrate diet or a targeted carbohydrate certainly has benefits over the carbohydrates all the time. You know, speaking of experiments, if you could do anything, wave a magic wand, have a billion dollars in funding, what experiment would you do? I think we would just do the basic carnivore experiment, right?

Which would be set up how? No-satel carnivore diet versus control. So standard American diet, or you could put it against a vegan diet. You'd have multiple arms, vegan, vegetarian. Do the ultimate diet experiment, right? This experiment will never be done in the history of humans because it's too expensive, but I would do paleo, keto, carnivore, nose to tail carnivore, vegan, vegetarian. This is the experiment everybody wants to see, right? What happens when you follow those groups of people versus standard American diet for five years,

for 10 years, and do all the biomarkers, do diabetes, do hypertension, do incidents of cancers, and do all the biomarkers, do diabetes, do hypertension, do incidence of cancers, do lipids, do cardiovascular disease, do strength, do everything, all the metrics. They did one at Stanford, I believe, but I think it was only for weight loss, right? Like where they compared like four different diets, like a vegan diet, standard American diet. And I think Atkins was the thing at the time, and that had come out a little bit ahead, but not by much really.

I think it did come out ahead. And there have been a number of experiments recently that have been published suggesting that ketogenic diets probably do have some benefit in terms of weight loss and in terms of metabolism. I mean, it's hotly debated. Yeah, a couple little edges here and there. But it does appear that ketogenic states, and this goes back to the idea of cleaner burning or different metabolic advantages, but it does appear that there's compelling evidence, though it may be debated by some,

that ketogenic fat-based physiology may actually affect our metabolism at a basic level. So a lot of people think it's just calories in, calories out. And I think at a basic level it can be for weight loss. But there's this magical sort of asterisk there that if you, the calories you put in, the quality of the calories you put in, I would argue for the strongly affect the calories out in many ways. So it is calories in calories out perhaps, but if the quality of the calories you put in affects the calories out, both in terms perhaps of metabolism and satiety. You know, a lot of people are probably listening and wondering no uh why would i do carnivore or

i can do carnivore but why get rid of my fruits why get rid of like like fiber and these type of you know nutrients in these fruits so why should individuals think about even ridding these from their diet i know we've talked about like phytonutrients not being necessary but what's the reason to get rid of it if you don't feel adverse when you have it? Right. This gets back to the idea of signal versus noise. And I think that if people are doing well and kicking as much butt in their life as they want to, who am I to tell them how to eat or to change their diet, right? If you are kicking butt and feeling good, do what you're doing. You know, keep doing it, man. Keep doing it. That's awesome. If people are interested in optimizing or doing the experiment, I would make the suggestion that, from my perspective,

these foods are not a benefit. And it won't be until you cut them out that you'll be able to tell how they may have been affecting you. My story is sort of a subtle illustration of this. I started a carnivore diet about 10 months ago. And within the first few days, I noticed an improvement in my mood and my emotional resilience. Well, you know, I didn't even notice that I wasn't as happy as I could have been. I'm pretty happy kind of goofy guy in general, but I just felt more emotionally resilient within three or four days.

And I didn't even know that. And so I think that a lot of people may not know how the foods they are eating are affecting them, whether it's GI stuff, a little bit of constipation, a little bit of loose stool. Maybe their sleep is just a little bit off. Maybe they're just a little more irritable with their kids or they're not having quite the same amount of performance in the gym. And I think that by doing the experiment and by really simplifying, you can separate that signal from noise and you get this really clear perspective on how you're feeling without it. And then you can add it back in and say,

you know what? That fruit really does give me a little gas. Or that fruit really does mess up my stool. Or that fruit really does change the way I feel. I get a little more anxious. But I didn't notice it until I cut it out. So if we want to do this, if people are wanting to improve health,

if they're in a place where their health is not where they want it to be, or they want to try and optimize, I think it's totally safe. And as we've illustrated or at least suggested in the past, a nose-to-tail carnivore diet, I believe, is the highest amount of micronutrients, the highest amount of bioavailable micronutrients. So I think they're going to be getting more of the best foods. They can cut those other ones out and see if they feel different. And if somebody said, hey, you know what? I cut those foods out. I didn't feel any different and if somebody said hey you know what i cut those foods out i didn't feel any different i like the variety i would say do it like do what makes you happy live your best quality life it's just a suggestion for the

people that want to try it it's all about the quality of life equation right the idea that it's all about people kind of maximizing the quality of their life i don't think a little bit of avocado is going to kill people from a little bit of lettuce you know chris and i have been kind of rapping about this idea of carnivore adjacent or carnivore ish. And I think that's a really cool concept. I'm writing a book right now. It's called the carnivore code. There's going to be a chapter how to be carnivore ish. It's the idea that, Hey, maybe really what I'm trying to do is illustrate for people that animal foods are the highest nutrient dense foods foods the nutrient rich

foods let's just say they have the most bioavailable nutrients with the least amount of toxins but for a lot of people they can eat some plants I just want them to think about which plants may be more or less toxic and help them sort of move the needle as far as they want to move in their own life while always keeping the quality of life as the main goal that's I mean that's kind of I think the role of any physician or anyone in the health space, you guys are the same way. We're all interested and it feels really good to help people live higher quality life. That's what we're all trying to do. I'm not trying to take quality life away from people by making it too restrictive.

I'm a carnivore ish right now. I'm doing, uh, you know, I try to eat over two pounds of meat every day, two pounds of of steak of some sort. I need to get more liver, so I need to get back on that train. And I have about four to six egg yolks every day. And if some other shit gets in my way, then so be it. Right. I love it. That's totally true.

Keep it super simple. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that that you guys have taught me. I think that type of a diet is way more doable for people than a nose to tail card. And my plate is so full, I don't have a room for a lot of other stuff. So like if I, you know, if I am going to, I don't know, end up just saying screw it and eat some like cookies or something like that or pizza, we talked earlier about like try to eat just one. Well, it's not that hard to only eat just one if you're pretty full from everything else you had for the day. It makes it a little easier just to say, you know what, I just want a taste of that. And then I'm good. Then I'm fine.

The other thing is that when you get on a carnivore diet and you have less cravings, you're not a maniac when you do have those little cheats or when you do go off. So I think what the carnivore diet taught Mark and I was a lot of control and to be able to control our own cravings so that we're not just, you know, binging all the time. And we're, we're able to like focus on the diet, kind of stay on it, and then you just go off and it's so easy to just hop right back on. Whereas in the past, it was always hard to get back on. And then also the things that we go, like, quote-unquote, off the diet with might be like potatoes.

Or a Quest bar. Yeah. You know? Like it's, you know, less intrusive to our diet. You know, it's not it's not making it a whole lot worse. Do you feel that this particular diet kind of perpetuates the diet itself? Like, do you feel like this diet is the only diet that you've done? And I don't know if you've done other diets, but do you feel that this is the only diet that you've done that encourages the diet itself?

Like just by doing it, you mentioned feeling better, having more resilience and things like that. So does it make it easier to make better decisions as you got started? You know, now you're deep in and now it's just like, this is your life, right? But when you first started, do you feel like it was like that? It kind of rolled upon itself? I think so. For me, it was reinforcing because I felt better. I knew within the first few days that I felt better. And a lot of people have a similar experience. For some people, it takes a month or a few months for autoimmune issues or... And it wasn't like you were feeling bad, you said.

You were just feeling better. I just felt better. And then you think, wow, there's something to this. That's cool. And Chris illustrates a great point too. I've heard more and more people talk about the fact that it's easier to control cravings on this diet. Ketogenic diets are amazing. And for some reason, I hear over and over from my clients that carnivore diet is less

cravings. It's just less cravings. And maybe it's higher micronutrient density. And that, we talked about that a little bit before the podcast, you know, this idea that micronutrients or micronutrient availability, micronutrient amount may influence satiety. Oh, and then keto people might fall into the trap of doing what everybody else does, which is having hyper palatable foods. So you make these keto bombs and that's like, you just dumped in a thousand calories and you didn't get any micronutrients. You didn't get any micronutrients and fat is fuel. I think people do run better on fat. That's my opinion. And fat is not micronutrient rich in the same way that a lot of the other foods from the animal are. Liver, meat, these are micronutrient rich foods. Egg yolks, very micronutrient rich. Fat bombs, great in a pinch. Great for fat-based physiology, not super micronutrient rich.

rich. You know, on that note of micronutrients, we mentioned, you guys mentioned calcium like twice before, right? When looking into a carnivorous diet, what would be the best ways that individuals could get calcium in their diet? This is a really interesting question. It's something I've gone around multiple times in my refining and permutations in a carnivore diet. I think there are a number of ways. The easiest way is probably dairy for people who are not dairy sensitive. And the caveat there is that there is a significant amount of research. This is not an open and shut case, but there's a significant amount of research to suggest that A1 versus A2 milk are different. There is a protein in milk called casein. And casein is broken down into beta-casomorphine.

And there are different lineages of cows. Wait, and when you say A1 and A2 milk, what exactly is the difference? So it has to do with the way the casein is. Okay. So the casein protein looks different in A1 versus A2 cows. Now, buffalo, goat, sheep are all A2 casein, meaning it gets broken down into a different type of casein. are all A2 casein, meaning it gets broken down into a different type of casein. A1 cows, which are most cows in the U.S., the casein protein gets broken down into a protein called BCM7, beta-casomorphine 7. There's an interesting amount of research that suggests that that protein is

associated with higher incidence of bad stuff. Maybe it's more immunogenic. I don't think, like I said, that it's an open and shut case, but there's at least epidemiologic suggestion that it's associated with more type 1 diabetes, maybe a little more atherosclerosis, maybe a little more hypertension. It's a strange thing. So if I were going to recommend people to eat dairy, I would say, number one, make sure you're not dairy sensitive. Dairy certainly seems to trigger people mucus or skin rashes. I just noticed this myself because I tried to include dairy in my diet in the last few weeks thinking maybe I'll do dairy for calcium. My eczema came back a little bit. It's really mild, but I basically, eczema was the reason that I

started a carnivore diet because I did a paleo diet. I did an organic paleo diet for 10, 12 years. My eczema stick around. I was doing jujitsu. I was getting eczema on my knees. I was getting impetigo. I was like, what the heck? And I thought there's got to be more to this equation. There's got to be more happening here. And so I went to a carnivore diet. When I did a carnivore diet and got it really dialed in, I was able to see that eczema go away from completely for the first time in a decade. I put goat's milk back in thinking I'll do some A2 dairy and experiment. And you know what? It came back in about four or five days. This gets back to the signal and noise phenomenon that I was talking about.

Because my diet is so controlled, it's so simple. It's like that's the one thing I changed. It is dairy. Dairy triggers me. Even A2 dairy triggers me. So a lot of people will find that they have resolution of skin stuff, autoimmune stuff when they cut out dairy or dairy can be triggering. Some people don't seem to get triggered by dairy. And in that case, I would say,

at the risk of getting too granular, consider A2 dairy, whether that's A2 cows, you have to seek that out specifically, or goat and sheep's milk. Dairy, that's a good source of calcium. But for me, it doesn't work at all. Do you feel bad in any way for kicking the shit out of Lane Norton on a previous podcast that we did together? That was a left-hand turn. Where did that come from? I was just thinking about it. That was fun.

Because we got Joel Fuhrman coming in in about five minutes. Oh, yes. Bring him on. Let's go, Joel. I'm ready for you, Joel. He literally said that meat has no nutrients

or animal foods have no nutrients. A bagel and a chicken breast have the same amount of nutrients is what he said lane norton sorry not sorry well with uh yeah joel firman he yeah he kept he kept uh referring when he heard conveniently when he referred to meat kept talking about chicken breasts and i'm like

everyone knows that chicken breast pretty much just has protein in it like doesn't have a whole lot in it everyone already knows that and and then when mark was like well we're hearing that it's the most like nutrient dense youense food that you can have. He's just like, the most nutrient? He's like, the information you're getting is completely false. And we're just like, okay, we'll continue on. And I don't really remember any evolution. He kept trying to talk about how many nutrients are in vegetables.

Epstein is, you know, talk about how many nutrients are in vegetables. And then he was comparing some, like, enormous amount of vegetables in comparison to a, like, lesser amount of meat. And we were like. But what was weird, he was like, see, but that's my point. He can't eat that much vegetables. Yeah. And then you say, that's my point. I'm like, but. But then you're not getting enough protein.

And you're not getting enough nutrients. It doesn't make sense. I'm like, it would hurt your stomach and everything else. I mean, it doesn't make any sense what you're talking about. It's crazy. And this gets back to the key, key, key. That's four keys. Three keys.

Key, key, key, key. Super kinky. Of bioavailability, right? And this is what I believe a lot of the plant-based advocates get wrong. The bioavailability of plant-based minerals and vitamins is not equivalent to the bioavailability of animal-based nutrients. It's just not. That is fact. Joel Fuhrman, case closed.

We were talking about this before the podcast. We were rapping about this as we were eating raw liver. Just look at the minerals. We're talking zinc, calcium, manganese, magnesium, selenium. They're mostly bound to phytic acid in plants. Or they're complex with oxalic acid, which is oxalate, which is found in plants. When you are trying to get any of those minerals in plants, they are much, much less bioavailable than they are in animals. If people will illustrate it, they'll say, oh, broccoli has

as much calcium as milk. That's bullshit. Broccoli may have as much calcium in the plant, but it's only about a third or a quarter bioavailable. So there's a misleading piece there. The same is true with iron. The same is true with selenium. The same is true with many of the plant-based minerals. And then we move on to the vitamins. Same illustration. A lot of B vitamins in leafy greens. Well, the B vitamins in leafy greens are complex to glycoproteins, which makes them only 30% bioavailable. So we're not comparing apples to apples.

And I feel like there are nutrients in plants. Yes, they are not nearly as bioavailable as they are in animal foods. Animal foods are from the same operating system as humans. It's a basic sort of concept I've used to illustrate this in the past. Animal foods are more bioavailable in terms of nutrients. And you asked, what about a multivitamin? I would say multivitamins are even worse than plants. That's the problem.

They're not bioavailable. They're not cofactors for many of these nutrients. So why are we not surprised? Yeah. Do you ever eat red meat or liver and pee like bright yellow? You might if you eat enough liver. Oh, it will happen? Because liver has a lot of riboflavin,

but you'd have to eat a lot of liver. But yeah, if you eat a supplement with riboflavin, you're going to eat, you're going to pee yellow. That's the riboflavin that makes it yellow pee. But yeah, it's pretty rare with liver. It's nothing like a supplement. And you're going to use much more of the B vitamins. It's not complex to glycoprotein.

So this is fact. People can check it. Like I'm not making this up. So if we're just looking, when people try and compare nutrient for nutrient, they may say, oh, look how much is in there. Well, you can't get it out of there. It's locked in a cage, man. And then we're talking about protein. I really had to disabuse Rich Roll of this notion when I went on the podcast with The Minimalist. Protein in plants is much

less bioavailable than nitrogen in plants, much less bioavailable than it is in animals. There's two scores. This gets really granular and super boring. I won't put people to sleep, but there was one called a PD-Cas. Now there's one called a Dias. Basically, the idea is the digestible, indispensable amino acid score looking at plant-based versus animal-based protein. Animal-based protein is at least twice as bioavailable. When you look at a Beyond Burger, which you should never do because it's the devil's spawn, and you look at the amount of protein in a Beyond Burger, you can basically cut that in half or a third in terms of bioavailability. When you look at your vegan protein, your pea protein, which again, you should never eat because it's very high in arsenic, number one, the amount of

protein in pea protein, cut it in half or more in terms of bioavailability. So thank you for bringing that up. That's a really important concept that these are not equivalent foods. It's almost a shame that it has the same name, protein. It's like, it should be something called something different almost because you can't use the plant protein very well, you know? Exactly. We should, I'm sure we'll leave it to Chris Bell to figure it out. By the end of this podcast, Chris, I'm sure you'll think of something that- It's got to be derogatory though. I know. You know, it's got to be derogatory though. I know.

You know it's going to be derogatory. Real quick though, I do want to come back to the calcium that you're talking about. Yeah, let's finish that. So you weren't like, you just mentioned A1 and A2 milk. A1 and A2 milk. So if people are not tolerant to dairy, then you can do bone meal or eggshells. Now I'll have another caveat there, right? Eggshells are not the greatest source of calcium because they can be constipating. But for people that actually find loose stool on a carnivore diet, it may help a little

bit with that. And people don't really want to crunch up eggshells. But eggshells are a source of calcium. And bone meal is a source of calcium. And I think probably the way we would have gotten it in the past, eating bones of small animals. It's hard to crunch on a big cow femur, right? But people eat sardines.

They're going to have some calcium from the small sardine bones. People, if we eat small fish, small animals, we would eat the bones or chicken bones. Those kind of things are probably a good source of calcium. What I will say with regard to bone meal is that unfortunately, and this kind of translates or segues into the discussion around fish, which we don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole, is that we as humans have an impact on the planet. Because we are burning fossil fuels, we are putting mercury and heavyues into the discussion around fish, which we don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole, is that we as humans have an impact on the planet. Because we are burning fossil fuels, we are putting mercury and heavy metals

into the atmosphere that is going into the ocean, that is going into our water supply, and cows are drinking water that has high levels of lead. Because of that, cows are going to accumulate a little bit of lead in their bones. So if people want to use bone meal as a calcium supplement, they should make sure that that bone meal is tested for heavy metals

and meets at least Prop 65 standards. We're in California. Meet Prop 65. You want to make sure that's a low lead bone meal. And I want to make people aware that bone meal can bioaccumulate heavy metals. So basically at this point in my carnivore journey, I'm almost at the point for myself where I'm going to say, you know what? Maybe this is one of those situations where a clean supplement for calcium is the best thing, right? I would eat bones from cows if they weren't drinking water that had lead in it. But I do think that carnivores, people in general, will benefit from calcium supplements. And I can talk about the concerns about calcium in a moment.

But I think that carnivores especially do need calcium. We store a lot of calcium in our bones. We pee a little bit out. And if we get into negative calcium balance, we'll pull it out of our bones long term. We don't want to do that. So we need to get a little bit of calcium in our bones, we pee a little bit out. And if we get into negative calcium balance, we'll pull it out of our bones long-term. We don't want to do that. So we need to get a little bit of calcium in the day. Now, there are some concerns that previous studies had suggested that women, I think especially perhaps men as well, who were taking calcium supplements had increased rates of cardiovascular disease. And I think that that reflects an overall deficiency in vitamin K2 in our diet. So if we are taking calcium, it's just this is an argument to me that we need to get all

the vitamins and minerals, that the body needs vitamin K2, which is maniquinone, and that that is used by the body to push calcium around the body or place calcium around the body in the right places. So I think the risk, I don't think there is any risk to taking calcium supplements, or I should say, in my opinion, I think the risk is much lower taking calcium supplements when you have adequate amounts of fat-soluble vitamins, namely A, D, E, and K, specifically K2 in your diet. And a carnivore diet, a nose-to-tail animal-based diet will provide all those nutrients. A nose-to-tail carnivore diet is very rich in vitamin K2. What if it doesn't feel like you have much of a problem with dairy?

diet is very rich in vitamin k2 what if it doesn't feel like you have much of a problem with dairy then i think it's fine and i would recommend a2 goat goat sheep or a2 uh milk yeah yeah what if somebody's diet is just like so you know for example like like i did i was just doing mainly muscle meat for a pretty long time um and then i started adding in you know some other things uh what do you suggest for people that like they really like muscle meat and they don't for a pretty long time. And then I started adding in some other things. What do you suggest for people that they really like muscle meat and they don't really like that other stuff? How much liver should you throw in?

How many eggs should you throw in to round it out and make it complete? Good question. I think that sometimes these organ capsule supplements, like we talked a little bit about ancestral supplements. Ancestral, yeah. That's a good way to get the organs in if you don't want to eat liver. I would also encourage people to actually try real liver because it's an acquired taste. And if we're not familiar with it

from our childhood, I would encourage them to not just chuck it in the garbage because it's a foreign taste. It's quite nutrient rich. But if people don't want to do that, I think there's a place for those types of things, those desiccated organ complexes for people. If people say they just like muscle meat, that's fine. I think that's a really good place to start. I haven't met many people who don't like egg yolks or don't like eggs. So hopefully people will eat. If you eat eggs and muscle meat, that's a much better thing than muscle meat, in my opinion. And maybe some bone broth? Yeah. Eggs, muscle meat, bone broth. That's a good start. I think liver would round that out.

I do think people will feel better if they watch that protein to fat ratio, but people can experiment for themselves and kind of go from that. But I think just adding a few things to the muscle meat could round it out in some good ways. Just had a guy that came in here to buy something at the super training store and he was asking me about my diet and stuff. And I was telling him that the super training store and he was asking me about a you know about my diet and stuff and I was telling him that you know eggs are good but he was saying that um he went and got a food sensitivity test and eggs are bad for him he's like I'd love to eat eggs but they're bad for me uh is that usually on a food sensitivity test the uh the whites that

are causing the problem it is often the whites it is rarely the problem? It is often the whites. It is rarely the yolks, but it's not impossible for it to be the yolks. I would say just out of the air, I'll just guess maybe 70% of people are sensitive to just the whites and they could try the yolks alone. And a lot of those food tests from what I've heard are not very valuable.

Not super accurate. So if people have a sensitivity on the food test, it's worth cutting those things out to see if you feel better. My problem is that a lot of the sensitivities you may have may be missed by those tests. And those are really only testing one branch of the immune system. They're not testing, they're just testing the adaptive immune system or they're not testing the innate immune system.

They're not testing the whole immune system. They're a poor proxy for an elimination diet. I'm not a fan of the food sensitivity testing. Save your money, people. How do we just help people be healthier? How do we help people maybe just lose some weight, get in a little bit better shape? Let's say they are like, man, that's cool. This guy knows what he's talking about, but I don't know about just turning my life over to meat. Yeah. Join the meat cult. Yeah. They're like, yeah. Turn your life over to meat. Yeah. Join the meat cult. Yeah, yeah. Turn your life over to meat.

That's right. I think I was actually talking to Chris about this yesterday. I think the first step, and you asked me this yesterday as I was working out, and I said, eliminate the processed food. I think that's step two. I think step one is meditate or become work on mindfulness. Because I think that so much

of this happens around our thoughts and our narrative and the reasons we're eating. And this may sound passe or cliche to people, but I'll try and make it a little sexier. Basically, the idea is just that until we get our mindset in the right position and we realize why we are eating the bad foods in the first place, and we realize the narrative that is going on in our head around food, I think it's going to be difficult to make those changes. So I think step one is meditate. Step one is be quiet with yourself. Step one is find time for yourself.

Step one is become more mindful. That's a challenging process, right? I like what you're saying there. And for people that are, you know, again, I'm just always trying to think of the hurdles for people. People are like, all right, meditating is too weird. I'm not doing it. Because people, as soon as you mention'm just always trying to think of the hurdles for people people like all right meditating is too weird not doing it because people like as soon as you mention something they want to check out of it right away like as soon as you mention a certain type of diet they're like well what about can i eat this and you just pointed out

all the stuff they can eat now they're talking about the stuff you took away right so i'm just trying to think get playing to the psyche of our fat fans out there. When it comes to like mindfulness, it doesn't mean that you have to sit on the floor with your legs crossed and hum and chant or whatever. It doesn't necessarily mean all that, although that would be great if you could actually sit down and be still and meditate. But mindfulness of mindless eating, you know, mindless snacking, just randomly snacking. Do you really need the food? Are you actually hungry? Are you just eating because your favorite show is on?

And do you need, does the food have to be such a disaster? Does it have to be horrible for you? Could you make a better choice? Could you, you know, change the bad habit and maybe even not even make it a great habit, but make it a better one than it was yesterday? And then mindfulness in terms of what are you feeding yourself every day? Not just food-wise, not just what's going into your mouth, but what's in your feed, what's in your Instagram feed. A lot of people are following these cooking shows and are following all these fancy foods.

If all that stuff's in your feed, it's in your subconscious mind, right? A lot of people are following these cooking shows and are following all these fancy foods and all this. If all that stuff's in your feed, it's in your subconscious mind, right? And you're thinking about it nonstop. You're already seeing all that stuff. You already have enough negativity going on in your life. There's already enough McDonald's. There's already enough commercials for all that shit on TV. You don't need to be adding to that and making that a whole lot worse.

So I think that's a great place to start. Clean up your mind. Clean up what the hell's going on in your head and realize that you can make a change. I mean, look at the change my brother's made. He's lost, what, 50, 60 pounds. He grew like three inches. His dick's bigger. I mean, everything. He's gotten younger. He's gotten smarter. He's more handsome. The list goes on and on but you can make you can make progress you can make a change and it's going to start with stuff like that i think it starts with a mind and that doesn't sound sexy to people you know but that's the key and like you said that can take a lot of forms doesn't have to be yoga meditation with like you know harpsichord music on in the background but it's critical it's critical for our lives and that when you get

into that mind frame then you're ready to like start making the choices about what you want to eat. And I think if people were more aware of what was going on in their brain while they were eating, that would be an incredible first step. Maybe they're eating for emotional reasons or trauma, or they're eating for pleasure because they're not happy in their life or they have stress. And that's, that's the first piece is seeing that happen. That's when we can really start to change things. What have your failures been as far as, clients go, people you've worked with yet? Uh, have you had any people that have like just bombed out or, uh, you know, didn't call back, didn't come back? Like what, what are the things you've learned through the process of working with people? Absolutely. I've definitely had clients that I think decided, oh, it's too much for me or didn't want to stick with it.

And I had one set of clients. It was a husband and wife. And they said, well, I started doing more carnivore and I'm not losing weight. Well, I'm still doing four drinks a night, a whiskey, and we cheated on pizza over the weekend once or twice. And I thought, okay, there's more going on here. And I think this actually is a great thing to illustrate. And it follows naturally from the last thing we were talking about. I think a lot of the hurdles for people are people who are maybe not quite ready enough.

Their mind isn't in the right place. And that is the problem. And so got to get the mind right first. And if people come to me, I'm not going to be like, how good is your mind? You know, I'm not sitting on top of a mountain being like, oh, you found me. Now your mind is in there. You know, I'm available, man. I'm on Instagram.

I'm on Marfell's Power Project. People can find me. I'll work with people who want to work with me. I'm not going to test them and be like, ah, grasshopper. You have to do this massive gauntlet of things to prove to me that your mind is in the right place. But maybe I should, right? Maybe I should put people through the, the rigmarole or the, the, the trial, the mental trial to make sure that they're ready for the training. But I think that, I mean, people can do that on their own. And that's the idea that if the mind isn't in the right place,

I have empathy for them, but, um, nothing I do, or I'm not, I'm not skilled enough to, you can lead the lion to the herd, but you can do or I'm not skilled enough to. You can lead the lion to the herd, but you can't make them eat. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I can offer them what I have, but it's not going to work for everyone depending where they're at. Yeah.

You know, we're four guys here. And I'm curious because I've heard reports and they're probably maybe having some deficiency. But there's a lot of there's a few women that report, you know, losing their menstrual cycle on a carnivorous diet, um, and maybe having some fertility issues. So are there certain things that women need to think about when picking up a carnivorous diet that is super important that they have? Yeah, this is a really interesting question. Um, I do not believe that a carnivore diet or a ketogenic diet is bad for a menstrual cycle or fertility. I've seen so many examples of people improving fertility that I can't believe that a carnivore diet or a ketogenic diet is bad for a menstrual cycle or fertility. I've seen so many examples of people improving fertility that I can't believe that that is a feature of the diet uniquely. I think that women and men are kind of bring different things to the table. Women may have more reservations about eating fat. Women may

not want to eat salt because they think it's going to make me look bloated. And that's generally been the issue is that women just bring more cultural norms to the diet in different ways than men do. So the lack of fat. Lack of fat, lack of salt would be the first things that I would look at and macros for women too. Maybe even jumping in on training, you know, training really hard, right? Yeah. Along with the diet. Maybe it's a stressor, right? That's causing hormonal issues, right? Yeah. Along with the diet. Maybe it's a stressor, right, that's causing hormonal issues, right?

Yeah. We do know that if women train super hard and get too lean on the body fat, they lose too much body fat, they can have sort of hypothalamic amenorrhea because the body says, hey, you're not fat enough. I mean, you don't have enough body reserves of adipose tissue to support a child. Therefore, I'm not going to have you cycle. So there's a lot of things that are going on there, right? But I think a lot of times it's sort of the cultural stuff that, unfortunately, you know, I've got a sister, I'm pretty aware of this. Women are fed all this body image stuff and they think, I don't want to eat salt. I'm going to get bloated. Or I don't want to eat fat. Fat's going to make me fat. And they're okay

eating protein, but they don't want to eat fat. It's an individual thing, but I think that's what's going on for a lot of people or micronutrients, but it's an individual case by case thing. But it's always interesting when I have a client who's a woman, I think, okay, what's going on with your cycle? Let me make sure it's good. And I've seen enough that have gone in the right direction. And you hear all these stories of people on ketogenic diets or carnivore diets with improved fertility, that I don't think that it's a feature of the diet to abolish fertility in women. And I think that throughout evolution, there were plenty of times when women carried children, when they conceived children,

during times when they didn't have a lot of carbohydrates. You think we'll get to a point where people will go to a restaurant and say, I'll just have the side steak, instead of saying, I'll just have the side salad. You hear people say, people are so attached to that salad being the healthy thing, right? A side steak with, well, I'm just worried about what's on their plate. If it's a side steak, a side steak with their steak. Well, no, just buy it. Yeah, exactly. Just buy it. Yeah. Just buy it. Self-like. I'll have liver and a side steak. People say they'll just have a salad. Right. Like they already, I mean, that kind of insinuates that they already know in their head

that it's not enough, right? I'll just have a salad. It means it's probably coming up short, right? But do you think we'll ever get. It means it's probably coming up short, right? But do you think we'll ever get to a point where people kind of understand, like maybe that's not the best route to go for you? I hope so. Chris and I were talking, you know, he's playing around with ideas. It's top secret, Chris.

I'm busting your idea. The carnivore restaurant, you know, like maybe we could create a place where people can eat and have a little more intention around the availability of meat or the nutrient availability in the foods and not use vegetable

oils and things like that. But I hope, I hope people will get there. We can make a big uphill battle. We can make, uh, like meat vegetables, you know, like, cause you know, they're, they're doing it the other way around, right? We can, yeah. I love this idea. I love this idea. This is actually broccoli made from liver. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Broccoli liver. Psych. Get all the vegans. Get them to finally eat some meat. What you got over there, Andrew? I'm just curious, how much liver should we be eating per sitting?

I don't think anybody really knows. There's some concern in the media sphere that you can eat too much liver, and I don't share that sentiment. I think that a good amount of liver for people starts at about an ounce a day and probably goes up to three or four or five ounces of liver a day. What's the fear? You get too much vitamin A? Too much vitamin A. And that's based on supplement studies. So there are studies that would suggest that if you supplement, if you over supplement with vitamin A palmitate, you can have problems.

And these are massive doses of vitamin A palmitate, probably in people who are already deficient in the other fat soluble vitamins. What we realize, and this is again, a recapitulation of this idea that we need the nutrients in balance. And if we're out of balance in the fat soluble vitamins that, you know, too much of one might be a bad thing. I never recommend vitamin A supplement to my patient. I always want them to have vitamin A from food. I never recommend vitamin A supplement to my patient. I always want them to have vitamin A from food. I've never seen a case report of anybody having too much vitamin A from food. But there are, with almost every supplement on the market, niacin, all these kinds of things, there are perspectives, there are examples of people having bad reactions from

over-supplementation. But in terms of food, there's no case reports of niacin toxicity from food. There's no case reports of vitamin A toxicity from food that I am aware of. We talked a little bit about vitamins. What about supplements? Are supplements worth anything? Is omega-3 fatty acids from a fish oil capsule or a liquid form, are those of any benefit? I think that the list of supplements that I would suggest are valuable is very low. And I think that there is a utility for these.

We mentioned maybe a calcium supplement based on the world that we're living in now. So still more like a vitamin rather than like anything, right? Anything different than something you'd get from food. I think we should think about food first. Right. Absolutely. The omega-3s are a great example of this. I do worry about omega-3 supplements and I generally dissuade or discourage clients from continuing omega-3 supplements. What do you use for that? Salmon roe? You can use salmon roe or, you know, grass-fed meat actually has a pretty good amount of DHA in it and egg yolks have a good amount of DHA. I think that humans can get enough omega-3 if they're eating organ meat, grass-fed meat, grass-fed fat, and egg yolks. I think you humans can get enough omega-3 if they're eating organ meat, grass-fed meat,

grass-fed fat, and egg yolks. I think you'll get plenty. But the grass-fed beef, they say, isn't a great source of it. Like it has some in there. It's in the fat. Yeah. So the grass-fed fat is going to be a bigger source of the DHA than the grass-fed meat. And this gets back to an interesting concept that maybe we'll touch on here in a moment.

But the idea that if you look at a healthy human, one of our muscle biopsies, you would not see intramuscular fat. And so it's so interesting for me that the USDA likes to grade meat based on marbling. And the more marbled a meat is, the more prized it is. Wagyu beef, very highly marbled, lots of intramuscular fat, when in fact that is a reflection of metabolic problems in the cow. If we did a muscle biopsy on Mark or me and we see intramuscular fat, you go, you shouldn't have fat in your muscles. That's not a good cow. And I mean, whatever, it tastes good, yes. But I think it's a reflection of the fact that when they feed cows a bunch of grains and put estrogen pellets in their ear, they're getting a little bit metabolically unhealthy in that. And so it's okay for me that grass-fed meat

doesn't have marbling. It doesn't have fat in the muscle. What it does have is fat around the kidneys and fat other places, but there's not fat in the muscle of the meat. So yes, grass-fed meat isn't going to have a whole lot of omega-3 because the omega-3 is in the fat. But if you get the grass-fed trimmings,

you'll get more omega-3. And I think that there's a lot. I really think that the story on omega-3 is premature. It's very clear that humans need some omega-6 and some omega-3 in our diets. I think the optimal amount is far from delineated. I think it's very clear that getting zero omega-3 or zero omega-6 is a bad thing. You cannot make these. Going back to the plant discussion, it's very clear that we can't make EPA or DHA from the alpha-linolenic acid, which is the omega-3 in flax seeds. But I think people can over-consume omega-3 in that we know that over-consumption of omega-3 can change clotting parameters in the blood, et cetera, et cetera. And it puts a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids into the body, which are highly

oxidizable. So I don't think people need to be supplementing with fish oil. It's highly oxidized already and you can get enough from a well-constructed diet. I'd also feel fish oil is such a big business. Oh, it's a big business. It's huge business. And it's, um, it's not going anywhere and people don't want it to go. You know, the people that are running it don't want it to go anywhere. And it's, it's huge. I mean, everybody says, well, you need fish oil, you need fish oil. We've been hearing it, you know, forever. So I think that drives a lot of the conversation. We're completely convinced. And I'll tell people, Hey, look, I've looked at the studies. I needed to take about 10 times the amount that you take in order to get any sort of heart benefit or any sort of, you know, joint benefit.

And people still don't care. They still buy it. People need something to take because, you know, they know that they're not healthy, you know. And so it's almost like a prescription drug in a way. Omega-3s or CoQ10 or vitamins that they recommend for eyes. And, like, there's so much. You can target any age group. You can target the young with, we grew up with, like,

Flintstone vitamins, the chewables, right? And they have chewable vitamin D and all these different things. They have gummies for old people. You could target, yeah. And then the older people, like, they really think they're doing something good for themselves. They're like, I'm going to start walking, and I'm going to start taking my thing of vitamins.

I got 10 different vitamins I take every day. And they think they're all fired up and excited about it. And it's great that they're making that effort. I just, I fear that the narrative is- Probably not doing much. Yeah. And probably potentially hurting them. Right. I see a lot of people get better when they go off the vitamins.

I had a client the other day who had a high level of tin in his blood. And it's probably from one of the supplements he was taking, you know? So these things are a real- Tin like metal? Yeah. There's contaminants in a lot of the things. We mentioned pea protein, really high in arsenic, omega-3 fatty acids, often highly oxidized. And I think people hear omega-3 is going to help your heart, but the studies on cardiovascular benefits of omega-3s are actually much different. We don't have to go into it, but they're very different than what people are told. There's benefit perhaps for secondary prevention of arrhythmia in Omega-3, but not a lot of people fall into that category. And you can probably get enough DHA and a few pastured egg yolks to achieve that benefit. You don't need an oxidized Omega-3 fish oil.

There's been some more bad news or bad press towards red meat and TMAO and stuff like that. And you were just talking about that stuff just came out recently, right? What's new and hot in the carnivore space right now? Well, this was something that I really hoped to talk about on the podcast. Most of the listeners will not fall into this category, but I do feel that one of the things we should be talking about every time we talk about meat is the way that studies are fed to us, the way that media presents studies, and the way in which the media can create an unclear message. You called it fake news. There's a lot of fake news, a lot of fake news about meat in the press. And a lot of what's being presented to us

is epidemiology, or more specifically, observational epidemiology, but I'll just call it epidemiology. There was a study that came out on the 13th of June this year, and the headline was, half a serving of red meat per week increases your chance of dying by 10%. This is total fake news, people. This is something that I'll do my best to illustrate this in a clear way. This is epidemiology. When they say that, people don't know exactly how the study was done. A lot of people are architects or they're engineers. They didn't go to school to know how an epidemiology study is done, but that's not an interventional study. And I'll tell you what, I've never seen, and I mean, I'm using superlative here and I'm using it

with confidence. I've never seen an interventional study with red meat suggest a negative thing. I've seen the reverse and I'll talk about those. Now, interventional versus epidemiology, let's talk about it. There are very few studies where they give people red meat. You asked me, how would I design a study? I would give people red meat and follow and see what their outcomes are. Almost all the studies we see in the press are not that study. They are surveys. They'll either do retrospective, which is in the past, or prospective surveys of people. In this study, I believe it was a prospective study, meaning they took a survey of people at one point in time and they asked them, how much red meat do you eat? And they look at them over the next five to 10 years

and see how many people die. Well, the statisticians are going to do a lot to control for some of the variables, but there's this problem is they cannot control for all the variables. And the idea is that people who eat more red meat generally have different behaviors than people who don't, because in the westernized world, we've been told for 70 years that red meat is bad for you. So who eats more red meat? Rebels, James Dean types, ride motorcycles, smoke. They can usually control for that in terms of the epidemiology. Exercise less, less sun, right? And what do they eat the red meat with? They can't control for that in terms of the epidemiology. Exercise less, less sun, right? And what do they eat the red meat with? They can't control for that. This is a simple questionnaire.

Five years ago, how much red meat do you eat? Who died in five years? Who eats red meat by themselves, by itself, right? There's red meat with potatoes, red meat with French fries, red meat with hot dog buns. We were in Walmart yesterday. What did we see? The first thing we walked in was a sweet hot dog bun.

Oh, yeah. It was a Hawaiian. A Hawaiian. And then a guy was like, you guys got to get these. They're really good. These are really good. And he was wearing a Bo Jackson Jersey. And I was like, I like that Jersey. He's like, I just sewed it back up myself. That was amazing. Sweet hot dog buns. So this is the problem with the studies. And what I would say to people is anytime you hear a study online on news media, whether it's Fox News or whatever, red meat is bad for you. Ask yourself, ask the person sitting next to you, is that an epidemiology study? Please show me an interventional study. There have been a few

interventional studies where they actually gave meat to people. What do they show? No increase in inflammatory markers, no negative effects. Those are interventional studies. And the reverse is also true. And this is the crazy thing about vegetables and stuff. We've been told forever that vegetables are good for you, that polyphenols are good for you. Well, when they do the interventional studies with vegetables, with fruit and vegetables, there are a number, there's like five or six that I'm aware of. They give people, there's two groups of people, control group and a group with a lot of fruits and vegetables, maybe a pound of fruits and vegetables a day. They look at them four to 10 weeks later.

So a month to three months later, and they look at inflammatory markers, markers of oxidative stress, markers of DNA damage. And one group has no vegetables. One group has a lot of vegetables. What do they see? No difference. A pound plus of vegetables per day, four to 10 weeks, no change in inflammatory markers, no change in oxidative stress saying, where's the magic in your vegetables, right? So show me the

interventional trials. I hope that's not too complicated for people. I just want to illustrate that all the studies, they're really fake news. You said it best. They're showing you epidemiology and you really have to be a scientist or this is where we help to show people what does that mean and what do they do in the study? because a lot of times they're not doing the intervention yeah i think all of our information is coming from that you know like when you hear um you know these uh daily allowances of of uh you know percentage of vitamins that you need or certain amount like these all these things i think are coming from uh like who are they studied on like who like who knows what the rDA would be for a carnivore

diet? That would change everything, right? The amount of like vitamin C and calcium and potassium and zinc and all this stuff would probably be different if you were very healthy. It changes stuff for sure. I still think that you can get a guide. And one of the things that's quite interesting is that if you do a nose totail carnivore diet, you can usually meet all of your RDAs with ease because the nutrients are so rich in animal foods. But I think it does change some of our requirements, and we know that. Like we said, you maybe need more salt, right? That's an example where it increases the RDA. And also the problems of those requirements aren't accurate anyway.

We don't know how accurate they are. Right, right. There's so much dispute about that. There's a lot of dispute. I don't think we should ignore it. But isn't this something like if you were to eat all of what's recommended every day would be some enormous amount of calories? Yeah, I think so, too. There's like it says based on a 2000 calorie diet, but it's actually if you add it all up, it comes out to be way more somehow. I don't I don't know. I have somebody who's talking about.

And then if you adjust it for how not bioavailable those nutrients are in plant, then you'd be screwed. That's what I was saying that we need. We how not bioavailable those nutrients are in plant foods. Oh, then you'd be screwed. That's what I was saying that we need. We need a bioavailability chart to really show people where food ranks. Because that's really how a food should rank, right? That's really what's important is how much of it you absorb and use. How much of it you use. How much protein's in it, how much fats and how many carbs, and how much of those things are going to utilize, the vitamins and minerals.

Right. We're talking macronutrients and micronutrients. And if we had charts clearly showing people micronutrient content and bioavailability, woof, paradigm shift. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I think that's how we get people to start looking at these things differently. You know, they talk about changing the nutritional guidelines, but even putting things in better context would help a lot of people.

What do the kids say? Woof? Woof? I don't do the kids say? Woof? Woof? Woof? I don't know how kids say that. They're like, woof. When they're like, wow, woof. I don't know. Like a microphone drop.

They say, like, yeet. Woof. Is that a new thing? I don't know. Is that like on fleek or something? Yeah, on fleek. Oh, they say yeet. Yeet.

Y-E-E-T. Yeet? Yeet? Yeet? Yeah, they say yeet. That's what the kids say. So, woof. That's the first time I heard it.

I'm not allowed to ask my kids about this stuff. They get so mad. Well, he's Cringe Lord, by the way. Yeah, I'm a Cringe Lord. That's what they call me. I don't know what that means. Ask your kids about woof. I will.

Woof. I'll say it tonight. They'll be so mad at me. Just walk in the house and be like, woof. And Quinn will be like, what? They'll just shake their head. There's a lot of people that are probably listening that are curious because if we were – because the way you eat your meat, a lot of it's like fairly raw, right? Or close to it.

I've been experimenting with it recently. I do care about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic amines, yes. Everybody does. So first off, what should people be thinking about in terms of all the meat quality for the meat they grab? And then in terms of maybe cooking liver, because we just ate liver raw. If people get liver, what do they need to be paying attention to in terms of the quality liver they get? And if they don't get high quality liver, should they cook it a little bit more? Right.

So meat quality and the cooking preparation is the next level. I will say this, and it will not make Joe Rogan or Peter Attia or Ben Greenfield happy, but I'm not a fan of the Traeger grills. And the idea with the Traeger grill is that you're creating a whole bunch of smoke and the smoking is going into the meat. And the problem is that that smoke is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic amines. And yes, it tastes delicious. And yes, it's probably not good for you, right? So the way that we prepare our food is important. I've recommended to people, they'll often say, oh, I sear the meat in tallow. And I say, ah, it's not a good idea.

Like, I think at this point, I start to sound like just a boring guy who's talking about who doesn't want anyone to have any fun or to have anything that tastes good. But I also want to give people a sense of where they might run into problems. And there are such things as advanced glycation end products, and a different category is the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic amines. Advanced glycation end products are formed when you cook anything. When you cook meat, when you cook vegetables, when you cook bread, you get advanced glycation end products.

Bacon is particularly high in advanced glycation end products, so I'm not popular among people who love to just eat bacon. I'm just not a fan. I don't think that advanced glycation end products are a good thing for us to be over consuming. Every once in a while, probably not a big idea. It's cumulative accumulation. What do they do? What does who do? The advanced glycation end products? Yeah. They probably create oxidative stress and they're linked to accelerated aging in humans.

So yeah, probably the best thing for us to do would be to eat all of our meat and animal products raw like a lion. But that's probably not a great thing to do from a health standpoint, from a sanitary standpoint. So how do we mitigate that? Well, the first thing is maybe don't grill your meat in a grill where you close it and it soaks in all these compounds that go into the meat. That's what's happening in a Traeger smoker. That's a really bad idea. People may say, oh, that's fine. I only do it

every once in a while. Okay, you do it every once in a while. That's great. You do it every night. You're getting meat, which I like, and you're getting animal products, which I like, but you're getting them and they're accumulating these polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So an experiment that I've been doing personally, I don't recommend it to anyone, is doing raw or mostly raw products. I really like raw liver. We can talk about the safety of that. I like raw egg yolks. We can talk about the safety of that. I've been eating my meat raw or I've just started blanching it, just cooking the outside of it briefly to get rid of anything that's on the outside. I'm not as worried about the interior of a steak. If we're thinking about food safety, people need to be aware of the quality of their meat. People can definitely

get sick eating raw ground beef. I would not recommend that to anyone. Regular conventional eggs are going to have a much higher rate of contamination on the shell of the egg. That's a thing. If you're getting organic eggs, if you're getting eggs from your garden or your farmer, those are pretty clean and they're pretty safe to eat raw, especially the yolk. The problem with an egg is that the contaminants are on the shell. Well, if you are eating a raw yolk, the shell isn't really touching the yolk. It's pretty safe. But again, if people are weak or they're frail or they're sick, cook your food. I would never recommend anything that's raw or undercooked to a pregnant woman or to someone that already has a disease. Cook your food. It's okay. You're going to lose some of the nutrients.

Think about how you cook it, but it's not going to lose all of them. What about something like an air fryer? Air fryers, they do accumulate a lot of the advanced glycation end products and the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. They're cooking at high temperature. So is that yes or no? No. I just wanted to simplify it.

It's a no. You never get simple answers with me. I know, right? That's my problem. Yeah. I'm working on it. I'm still in progress.. It's a no. You never get simple answers with me. I know, right? That's my problem. Yeah. I'm working on it. I'm still in progress. I'm hurt, man.

I love using the smoker. And of course you love it because it tastes good, but this is one of the problems, and this is, again, a whole other rabbit hole we don't have to go down. For whatever reasons, evolutionarily, humans have developed a taste for these products of cooking. They're malliard products,

whether it's advanced location end products or the polycyclic aromaticiard products, whether it's advanced glycation end products or the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. And it's pretty clear they're not good for us. We like toast because it's brown. That's advanced glycation end products. You like crispy bacon. That's advanced glycation end products. So it's like, ah, for some reason,

we like these things, but they're really not good for us. I'm not saying never eat it. I'm not a complete party pooper. I just want people to be aware it's not the best thing to eat all the time and there's a good amount of evidence. You know, I don't want people to think

I'm saying eat your meat all the time, grill it, make it, you know, make it charred. I'm not, I don't believe in that stuff. You know, I went on a podcast with Stephen Gundry and he said, oh, he doesn't believe in that. I said, wait a minute, Stephen Gundry. I believe in that. I want people to be aware

of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heterocyclic amines, mitigate them, don't ignore them. I don't think it's a reason not to eat meat, but I think we have to be aware of that. So the air fryer, yeah, but there is sort of a, there is a backend there to be aware of. And I know it's been what you said, 14 years since you've had something kind of like off the diet,

but do you do anything to kind of like chase the, like it's a pretty cool term that I like. It's called mouth pleasure. But like to get like something crunchy or, you know, that sort of like, you know, like, yeah, it's like mouth pleasure. Yeah, before the podcast, Mark asked me when the last time I'd had like junk food was,

and it's probably been about 14 years for me. I'm kind of an alien, but, you know, the mouth pleasure gets back to the thing we were talking about earlier. And it's a subtle segue to this idea, are we using food as entertainment? And I think that it's a bad idea to use food as entertainment too often because I'm not saying we can't enjoy our food, but using food as entertainment leads us down a tough road. And so if we want things that are crunchy, yeah, have some bacon and make it really crunchy,

but don't do it every day. And there are other ways to do it. You know, liver jerky is kind of crunchy. Although I bet if I gave you liver jerky, you wouldn't say that was mouth pleasure. It's crunchy though. And there are people who are more creative I think of the science I'm kind of a geek in that respect I'm actually working with a couple of folks right now to develop

a cookbook and they're more creative there are ways to do it I'll send you a copy of the carnivore code cookbook my friend sounds good man yeah

these women are amazing they're super creative and they came up with like carnivore taco shells yeah not made out of cheese either carnivore taco shells things like that there's out of cheese either. Carnivore taco shells, things like that. There's definitely ways to do it and make it more approachable.

I'm not the most creative person in that respect. And I kind of just. We had a pretty good question coming in. And I know it's really hard to overeat on a carnivore diet. But do you even monitor calories when you're eating all meat? I don't. Yeah. I don't.

monitor calories when you're eating all meat? I don't. Yeah. I don't. And I think that this goes back to the idea that if you're eating whole animal foods, you're going to have a lot of trouble overeating. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty hard to overeat. That's kind of what I told him. Yeah. Do you know what your calories are? I don't. I mean, everybody always says to me, you should estimate. So if I'm just off the top, back of the envelope calculation, I'm eating about a pound of meat a day. That's about'm just off the top, back of the envelope calculation, I'm eating about a pound of meat a day. That's about 100 grams of protein, which is 400 calories. I would say that I am eating about a half pound of fat per day, which is about 225 grams of fat a day. We'll just call it 200 grams of fat. We'll say 10 calories per gram. It's actually nine calories per gram.

grams of fat will say 10 calories per gram. It's actually nine calories per gram. I would estimate I'm doing at least 2000 calories of fat per day. So I would guess that at five, nine and a half, five, 10, 170 pounds, I'm getting 2,500 to 3000 calories a day. That's good. Something in there, probably. This is a guess. I'm trying to think if there's any other source well then i'm also getting egg yolks and is that like a maintenance for you like you've been um have you been getting i i think you got leaner since i last saw you you said you don't know but uh well when you say lean i hear skinny and i think no i i think you look i think you look a lot more jacked now like now um than last time i saw you but i don't you know i'm just going on my own observations yeah are you trying to do anything special or just kind of hang in there just want

to be i kind of like my body composition where it is i mean you know i was sitting the punching bag here yesterday and i like i like mobility yeah yeah we. Yeah. So I'm happy at 170. I'm not trying to gain weight right now. Maybe 168 to 170 generally. And I haven't lost weight as well. I would be more concerned about losing weight. I wouldn't want to lose muscle mass. I used to be a big runner and I was a skinny dude. You did ultra marathon. I did a long time ago. Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah. What's the furthest you ran? Uh, 53 miles. It was in the san juans in california in colorado really cool race called the san juan solstice and i ran 53 because i went off the trail and i got messed up or something i ran extra on the trail it was a 50 mile race and i think i

ended up running 53 but i'll tell you what happened at the end so i was in flagstaff and i was ultra running and my buddy this is right before i went to medical school. My buddy sat me up with this girl. I like go over to his house, we're having a barbecue and you know, nothing happens. And afterwards he goes, dude, she said, he's kind of cute, but he's really skinny. Oh man. You got to show him how to put some weight on, man.

But when I was an ultra running, when I was running a lot, I was probably 30, 25 pounds lighter. Wow. Yeah. so you can imagine like you know yeah you were at 145 140 145 and so i was like oh boy and were you doing um jujitsu and stuff no no no i was not doing jujitsu then i did jujitsu in medical school similar weight to now maybe a little bit lighter yeah once i started running i once i stopped running i put more, what do you recommend for people for activity, like lifting training? Should

everybody be lifting? I definitely think weight bearing exercise is a good thing. And I think resistance exercise is a great thing. I mean, you guys are more of the experts on the exercise stuff. I think do what you like, you know, do what you like, you know, if you like, if you like hula hooping, do that. You know, if you like riding a skateboard, do that, you know, do what you like, you know, if you like, if you like hula hooping, do that, you know, if you like riding a skateboard, do that, you know, don't do stuff you don't like, but be just move and do that. I guess that's my point too, is like when you're on a carnivore diet, what's so great is your diet. So like dialed in that, uh, almost anything you do is productive and helps you to like lose weight or maintain, you know, your physique. So you don't

have to do a whole ton of stuff because you're not trying to burn a bunch of extra calories. Yeah. You don't have to over, over exercise. I definitely think you can over exercise. We know that exercise is a, an environmental hormetic and it's an experiential thing that is a stressor that can increase your abilities long-term. But if you do too much, you're going to get overworked. And I definitely over-trained when I was an ultra marathoner for sure. Yeah. We still over-train all the time. Yeah. Right. I love it.

It's part of the plan. I wouldn't have it any other way. I want to make sure I finished Seema's question because you asked about the, what were you asking about? It was like food quality in terms of meat quality, what you should be thinking about. Yeah. I don't think he ever really answered how he prepped it. Did he? He said blanching. Blanching was the main thing. Blanching or searing quickly. So that's what should be thinking about. Yeah, I don't think he ever really answered how he prepped it, did he? He said blanching. Blanching was the main thing he said.

Blanching or searing quickly. So that's what I'm doing now. Yeah, yeah. But I just want people to be aware. So we got most of it. We got 90% of that answer. Just the idea that people should be aware of the way they're cooking the food.

And I would not cook in oil. I would not deep fry. I would not smoke. I would be careful about grilling. Every once in a while, fine. Every day, not a good idea. This is the point that I wanted to get to., that, you know, slow cooking sous vide, sous vide, you're going to have to use a plastic bag. So they make these like polyurethane plastic

bags that are probably better than the polyethylene plastic bags. They're called like the stasher bags. I think those are probably better. Sous vide is slow water bath cooking. I think cooking in water is boring in some sense, but that is probably a way that you're going to accumulate much less of these oxidation products of cooking or these mallard products or these other reactionary products of cooking. You don't have to cook in water all the time,

but if you want to make a stew or a slow cook, probably less of these, way less of these than pan frying or searing or air frying or Traeger smoker grill. So that's, that's what I wanted to get to. How can this diet help us in other areas of our life? We've talked before on the podcast about it potentially helping with depression and anxiety. And I, you know, we hear a lot of people having issues with that.

We've had a older brother that had an issue with that. How can this diet help? Do you know the chain of events that occur that kind of help with that? I think that I've got some pretty strong theories. So as you guys know, I just finished my residency. I'm formally trained in psychiatry as an MD. So the mental health stuff is pretty close to my heart. I really think that if you look at mental health, if you look at depression, if you look at anxiety,

there's good evidence that for a lot of people this is brain inflammation. This is the overactivation, the incorrect activation of the immune system in the brain. The old school hypothesis, which is really going away now, is the idea that it's an imbalance of neurotransmitters and you need to just put more neurotransmitters in the brain. And I think that the new school, the new understanding or the increasingly accepted understanding is that this is inflammation in the brain. And as we see with a carnivore diet,

and what's so interesting to me is that this type of eating starts to leverage what is causing the inflammation. Could it be plant toxins? Could it be lectins? How are we activating the immune system? And we see this. We see these type of diets, whether they're elimination diets that are carnivore or elimination diets that are non-carnivore or ketogenic diets.

What's most interesting to me as a physician who practices psychiatry and functional medicine, I don't just do psychiatry, is looking at ways that we can affect inflammation in a positive way, meaning getting rid of inflammation that's inappropriate in the human body through diet. And I think that what we see very clearly, I think perhaps one of the most striking effects of a no-sale carnivore diet is psychiatric improvements. I have seen so many incredible transformations, anxiety, which is really hard to treat.

Anxiety gets better. Depression gets better. Even there are case reports of people with bipolar, psychotic disorders getting better when they eliminate plants. And, you know, maybe for people, they don't need to eat all the plants. But I think a carnivore diet represents that good sort of very sharp tool for an elimination diet. So I would argue that is happening through abrogation or elimination, amelioration of inflammation in the brain. And that would suggest that inflammation

in the brain may be driven by things in our diet. I believe most of it's coming from the gut, right? Everything we're putting in our bodies is going into the gut. This idea of leaky gut is not even fringe anymore, but I think it's pretty well accepted or at least hypothesized that the foods we eat may create inflammation in the gut, and we know that inflammation can affect the brain in a big way. So it's so powerful for psychiatric things. I experienced it myself in a very subtle way, but that was very powerful for me, and I've seen it in more striking examples in my own practice as well. So lately in an attempt to lean out, I've been eating a lot more protein, higher protein diet and a lower fat diet.

And it's been working pretty good. But, you know, to tell you the truth, it's harder. You're more hungry, you know. And then yesterday we were talking about, you know, using a glucose meter and you wanted me to do some stuff. Can you explain what you want me to do? Because we never actually went over it, but I think it'd be good to hear what you want me to do and why. So if we're looking at carnivore or high protein diets, one of my concerns is that there's a

question now, and I don't think this is fully clear, whether gluconeogenesis, which is the conversion of protein into glucose, is demand or supply driven. One of the concerns I have about people doing high protein diets, that would be protein that exceeds that one gram per pound of lean body weight diet, is that some of that protein gets pushed into glucose. Your body has to do something with it and it pushes into glucose. That would suggest, that would be in a demand or more of a supply driven paradigm for gluconeogenesis. It does seem to happen on carnivore diets. I saw it in myself. I've seen it in other people.

People that are doing a lot of meat, a lot of protein, do see a higher fasting glucose and lower ketones. Now, the level of ketones in the blood are individual between people. But what I was suggesting to you is that as you move that dial, right, maybe dial protein back a little bit, not too right? Maybe dial protein back a little bit, not too low, just dial it back a little bit, dial up the fat, watch your fasting glucose and watch your ketones. What I saw for me was my fasting glucose came down 20 points, 15 to 20 points from about 90 to about 65 or 70. And that the ketones went up. And then I was seeing ketones

are 2.3, you know, higher levels of ketones. up. And then I was seeing ketones of 2.3, higher levels of ketones. Ketones are a little individual, but it gives you a metric to get a sense. What I caution my clients about is when I see people on carnivore diets, I have a lot of clients on carnivore diets, and I see a fasting glucose in the 90, I think, ah, it's too high. It's too high. I don't want it that high. I want to see an A1C that's lower. I want to see a fasting glucose in the high 70s or mid 70s. And I think that what we're seeing there, and this gets into kind of some esoteric stuff,

is that excess protein getting pushed into glucose. So that's, I think, just a metric for you as you're tweaking that fat to protein ratio. It'll be interesting for you too, Mark, if you're eating two pounds of meat a day. When and where, what do we do to test this? What are we doing? Oh, so we use, there are a number of blood ketone meters.

The one that I like is Keto-Mojo. They have glucose and ketone strips. It's also the cheapest one. It seems to work pretty well, yeah. It seems to work pretty reasonably well. The strips are a buck or something, right? The ketone strips are about a buck. So they're not cheap.

The glucose strips, I think, are cheaper. Are cheaper, yeah. Yeah. And you don't need to do it forever. They actually sell them at, just so everybody knows, they sell them at GNC now. So you can kind of get them anywhere. I think the idea of CGMs, of continuous glucose monitors, is really cool. You know, Peter Atiyah uses one.

Ben Greenfield uses one. You can see the glucose excursions. I did a recent podcast on my podcast with Tommy Wood. We talked about how the research is now showing that the fasting blood glucose is important. Your overall glucose is important. But they call them the median amplitude glucose excursions, meaning the way that your glucose moves after a meal are also very important. It's the overall area under the curve of the amount of glucose or your blood glucose in a day

that is probably most closely linked. So on a carnivore diet, you're not going to really have any of these mages, none of these median amplitude glucose excursions postprandially, but these CGMs will help people. You'll see what the blood glucose is all day, and we're trying to mimic that in a little bit easier fashion with a keto mojo. What I suggested was four times a day, morning and post-prandial, which is doctor speak for after your meal, about an hour after your meal. And then when you go to sleep, check blood glucose and ketones. Do that for a week. You'll have a lot of data, a lot of data, and you'll get a really good sense. And this self-quantification really helps you get a sense

of where you're going with things and if you're going in the right direction. So in the morning and then each time after I eat? One hour after you eat. So postprandial. Each meal? Twice a day. Twice a day. Yeah.

And then the fourth time is before sleep. Yeah. Those are just loose recommendations. And then I want it to be mid-70s, but if it's not mid-70s, what do I do? Just keep dialing the protein back? Yeah. Next meal have higher fat? Yeah. If you're seeing the blood glucose in the 90s or higher, and the postprandials are going

to be a little different than the fasting. So the fasting blood sugar, I want to see mid 70s. Postprandials, I want to see probably around 100, maybe even a little lower. Yeah. Oh, postprandial will be like around 100. And that's one hour after you? One hour after you, yeah. How do you help people? Because you said you know a lot of your clients do carnivore and before you were doing carnivore you're doing like a paleo diet But even when you're doing that paleo diet, you were still very strict with the foods that you allowed yourself to eat So you probably come across a lot of people that they're trying to diet

They eat a lot of these trashy foods that we talked about and even though they enjoy the carnivore diet They're still like I really want to eat this, you know, ice cream or pizza or whatever. So how do you help people deal with that? I mean, I know the carnivore diet helps with cravings a bit, but what's your process for, you know, helping them with that? That gets into kind of the stuff we were talking about earlier with mindset. Yeah. Say, what is it? Why do you want that? Okay. What's it doing for you? And I do think that in the beginning, depending where people are coming from, they're going to have more or less cravings.

People always ask me this on Instagram. How do I get rid of the carbohydrate cravings? I go, you just get through them. I mean, if you are glycolytic and you are eating carbs all the time, I'm sorry, but there's no easy way out of that. There's really no easy way out of that. You could substitute better carbs. You could maybe do rice or less high glycemic,

lower glycemic index carbohydrates as you transition off. We're going to taper you off carbs. We're going to do methadone for carbohydrates or something. But for people, if they go straight to keto from a high carbohydrate diet, they're going to get carbohydrate cravings as they're adjusting. And I would work with people to say like, okay, well, maybe we'll do a lower GI carb, like a lower glycemic index carbohydrate. We're going to get healthier carbohydrate. Don't eat the ice cream,

eat a sweet potato, right? And kind of transition them off and taper, but have a conversation with them and say, what does it mean for you? Why are you doing that? You know, do you think, and once people start talking about it, it gets easier because I think a lot of people say like, I'm craving it. I need it. And I say, you're not going to die. Do you think there's more nutrients in there? And they think, actually, no, there's probably not. I don't think you're craving it because of micronutrients. I think you're craving it because of your physiology and your hormones. And I can say, well, how are you feeling?

Do you think you can get through this or you need a little crutch? You want to do a sweet potato crutch or something? Sweet potato crutch. Sweet potato crutch. I like that. Yeah. I mean, you can even do a white potato crutch if you wanted to. Just a lower glycemic index carbohydrate.

What's the mission here? What's the overall mission? What are we trying to do? Jacked and tanned, bro. Trying to get everybody jacked and tanned? I'm in. Just count me in. Jacked and tanned.

You know, I think the overall mission is to ask questions and to advance the field, and to advance the field, to not be complacent, to not accept the status quo if we're not happy with where we're at, to constantly evolve, to learn, and to move forward, and to be wrong, to try things, to be wrong, to be right, to contribute. That's what feels good. The mission is to create. I think we're all artists, and it feels good to create something.

I'm trying to create. I'm trying to all artists and it feels good to create something. And so I'm trying to create, you know, I'm trying to create content. I'm trying to create ideas, trying to help people by offering something, by creating something new. And everything new is sort of a recapitulation or, you know, nothing's really new, but it's art, right? We're trying to make art and we're trying to offer art to people in hopes that it'll help somebody else's life be better. How about kids? Because like we were talking about that in the break room a little bit, kids and having like carbs and fruit, et cetera. What should parents be thinking about if they want to maybe have their kids or try a diet like this? Super interesting, highly controversial. You know, there's a lot of interesting questions here that I don't think

we know. I was hanging out with the guys from ancestral supplements recently in Austin when I was there for paleo effects and they're super intentional and they were saying, well, we want to feed our kids fruit and carbs sometimes because we want them to have IGF one. We want them to have the growth hormone. And I thought, well, maybe there's something to that. You know, I definitely think I'm not convinced the kids need carbohydrates. I don't think they need them all the time. I think that basically where they'd end up is that the kids would get carbohydrates occasionally. I think we probably overfeed kids carbs now and we could moderate carbs for kids.

I'm not as worried about it for kids. I think you want to give your kid, you know, a piece of fruit when it's seasonal. Sure. Teach them about it. Use it as a teaching moment. Say, hey, here's a strawberry. You know what? We're going to get the organic strawberry because the non-organic strawberries are number one on the dirty dozen, the highest amount of pesticides. So we're going to get this organic strawberry. We're going to avoid pesticides.

Use it as a teaching moment. You know, I saw a picture of my niece the other day who's one in a few months and she's the cutest thing in the world. She's just eating this huge strawberry. And I was like, that's just super cute. You know, I don't think kids need to be super strict on fruit. I'm not super excited about kids eating junk food and Twinkies, but if we want to feed kids carbs, kids carbs, sure. But I also, you know, one of the things

I mentioned to my sister is kids are going to ketosis real easily and it's probably not a bad thing for them either. You know, cycle it, be reasonable about it. Teach kids about seasonality with fruit and maybe, you know, let the kids determine what they want to eat. And I think that the trick thing there is that if you give a kid sugar, whether it's a fruit or a, or a donut, their brain is off and running and that's all they're going to want. So, you know, but I think it's something you

could leverage with children and people, there are examples of people raising children on ketogenic diets in a healthy way. But I think it starts to get super, super tricky. And, you know, I don't have kids, but maybe if I did, I would probably give them some fruit occasionally and then, you know, teach them about and let them make their decisions later and see if they wanted to try low carbohydrate. But I wouldn't force them. People out there that have kids just try to, you know, pick your pick your poison or help your kid pick their pick their poison. They're going to want carbohydrates.

They're part of this kind of social. They don't want to be weird, and they love the taste of these foods. Maybe instead of the apple juice, maybe they are eating something that they like better, and you explain it to them. Say, well, you said you wanted ice cream later tonight, so let's not have that now. Those kinds of things. It's all stuff I've done with my kids, and it's worked pretty good. They still probably eat too much.

They probably eat too much carbohydrates for sure. But it's like how do we just kind of like mitigate some of this? How do we teach them that we're not going to eat at, you know, 3.30 or 4 o'clock when we know we're going to have dinner at 5. You know, we're not going to have a big bowl of cereal at that point. You know, those kinds of things, little things. Kids are pretty resilient too. I didn't have a great diet growing up. You know, my parents tried, but I ate junk food and, you know, I turned out okay. I probably could be better, but thanks mom and dad. Your dad was a doctor, right? So how did you grow up eating? I would say a little better than one standard deviation better than the standard American diet,

which is a very doctor way to respond to that question. But I would say a little better than the standard American diet, but I definitely had ice cream and occasional McDonald's and Wendy's. My memory is foggy from my childhood because it was a while ago, but I don't remember thinking about micronutrients when I was a kid. So there were a lot of teaching moments that I think could have happened. Um, that didn't, I mean, my dad's amazing. My parents are amazing, but I think that I would have benefited from some teaching about that when I was a kid, you know, Hey, what do you think about this? You know, here's a Wendy's

hamburger. What are we getting here? What is this made out of? What kind of nutrients do you think are in this? Why do you think you like that so much? Do you think you like the bread or the burger more? You know, what do you think about that bacon? What should we do here? You know, a lot of teaching moments there that were possible that I think could be used in the future. Hey, Andrew, is Joel Fuhrman coming? We're still waiting on Joel. I don't know. I think he stopped at a bagel shop real quick. He bombed out. Yeah, he bombed out. I was going to ask you, because you had touched on like fertility for women. What about for male? Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. It's a little different because we don't cycle in quite the same way hormonally, but there's pretty clear

evidence that diet is linked to male fertility and sperm quality. So this is a study that I wanted to talk to Gundry about on his podcast and I forgot, but if. So this is a study that I wanted to talk to Gundry about on his podcast and I forgot. But if you, this is a little bit off the topic, but I'll get it in there because I love talking about this study. There have been a number of studies now done on sperm quality, so male fertility quality,

and they compared omnivores or meat eaters to vegetarians and vegans. And there was a specific one done in Loma Linda, which is one of these blue zones. And what they found was really was a specific one done in Loma Linda, which is one of these blue zones. And what they found was really striking that the sperm quality in Loma Linda among vegans and vegetarians was pretty abysmal. So they don't have great swimmers.

They looked at motility and they call it the hypermotility of the sperm. And it didn't look very good. So I think male fertility, sperm count, hypermotility of the sperm is a good indication of male nutritional status. And the studies that have been done on vegans and vegetarians are pretty sketchy. So take that, Joel Furman. Even if they just eat pineapples?

We've got to have you two have a friendly conversation. I don't think pineapples are going to get your sperm to where it needs to be. But she said, I mean, never mind. Hey now. I don't think... I couldn't help it. I wonder where the information even comes from. Chris is in the dark.

We'll tell you after. Adult conversations. Earmuffs. Yeah, male fertility is important. I wish we used it as more of a measure. The perfect study that I would design, Chris, would have female and male fertility. We would check male fertility by looking at sperm counts.

It would be incredible to see somebody with not great swimmers get better swimmers. It's a really good indication of nutritional status. And what we see in blue zones, well, what we see in Loma Linda, which is one of these supposed blue zones, is pretty bad sperm quality. And that probably is related to a lot of things, potentially DHA. We know that in men who have DHA deficiency, so this goes back to the omega-3, they have poor sperm quality. You can't get DHA from

alpha-linolenic acid either. You won't get good sperm from flax. You'll get good sperm from egg yolks and grass-fed meat fat. So you're writing a book, right? And what else is there to tell people other than just like, eat some animals? I'm trying to tell the whole story from the beginning. The book starts off, the book is called The Carnivore Code. It's going to be out in a few months. I'm working on on it write some of the chapter maybe tomorrow afternoon um the subtitle is unlocking the secrets to optimal health by returning to our ancestral diet and i want to give people the whole story because it's hard even in a two-hour podcast to give people the whole story i start out with sort of the evolutionary story where we've come from what we know evolutionarily the agrarian

revolution where we went wrong i talk about plant know evolutionarily, the agrarian revolution, where we went wrong. I talk about plant toxins in more detail and why we might not want to eat a ton of plants. I talk about bioavailability and nutrients in more detail. I've also got a lot of references for people that want to look at studies or want to share studies with people. Then I go into the nutrients in meat and I talk about how bioavailable those are. I've got a whole section of the book where I debunk a lot of the myths about meat saying, oh, TMAO is going to cause a problem or meat's going to cause cancer or you need fiber. So I debunk a lot of the myths. And then in the end of the book, I talk to people about how to construct a nose to tail carnivore

diet or how to be carnivore-ish. And I give people some things to kind of take away. We're going to have a few recipes in the book and some meal plans, and then we're going to do a cookbook as well. So I'm going to try and bring people through the whole journey and give them something to walk away with and hopefully add a lot to the discussion. You know, the first three fourths of the book is going to be, these are why the discussion you've heard is not complete. This is why the whole discussion you've heard has a lot of fallacies and fake news. Yeah. A lot of fake news out there. A lot of fake news. Are there some events you're going to coming up

where maybe people can run into you? I'm going to KetoCon at the end of this month, so I'm going to be in Austin. If people want to hang out with me there, I'll probably. And me. Yeah. We're going to hang together. I'm going to be hanging out with Chris.

Tummy sticks. Yeah, tummy sticks. Oh, yeah. I can't believe you said that. Yeah, you're excited. It was your joke. It was my joke. It was the one that told us about it.

It's tummy sticks. Don't worry about it. He's a doctor. Don't worry about it. He It was the one that told us about it. What's tummy sticks? Don't worry about it. He's a doctor. Don't worry about it. Trust him. Don't worry about tummy sticks. What about anywhere else? Maybe going to be at Low Carb San Diego.

And I think the Ancestral Health Symposium or the Ancestral something is going to be in San Diego in the next few months. But those are the main- Low Carb San Diego is July, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. And I should be there too. Yeah, I'll probably be there. I'm speaking at KetoCon. If you want to come out and see me in person and touch my abs, you can do it in person

there. You got to pay- Hey now. Yeah. Five bucks. You got to pay a dollar to touch my abs. I'm trying to get five. Let's play tummy sticks.

What is tummy sticks? You're going to be excited. You're going to be super excited. It's like this. It's better than thigh wars. Two guys. And then it goes into the tummy. Yo!

So those are the events I'm going to be at. I told you you'd be excited. It's like a boner drawbridge. Kind of. It's true. We covered a lot of ground on. Kind of. That is true. It's true. It's true. We covered a lot of ground on this podcast today.

Yes, we did. Yeah, we did. Yeah, we should probably end it with a boner joke, you know? Might as well. We got to tell people about, so I told people about my podcast. I'm not getting out of here before I get to plug my shit. Yeah, yeah, no, plug your shit. I'm plugging my shit, you guys.

So I got a podcast, Fundamental Health with Paul Saladino, MD. I'm writing a book. You guys should look out for that. And then you can look at me on my website, which is paulsaladinomd.com. As Seema pointed out, my last name has salad, but also has dino. So my last name is S-A-L-A-D-I-N-O. So paulsaladinomd.com. Instagram?

Instagram is at paulsaladinomd. Twitter's mdsaladinoino but you can go to my website they're linked there I do work with people individually I do see clients I see clients in person in San Diego I see clients virtually if people want to work with me they can contact me through the website and yeah check out my podcast too I'm trying to make it good it's fundamental health I just really good man thank you good job I'm just getting started I'm learning from these guys but I'm trying to get interesting people on, um, just released one today with Peter Ballerstedt, who is an environmental scientist, kind of debunking a lot of the

fake news about the environmental impact eating meat. We didn't even talk about that. He's the sod, the sod father, the sod father, the leader of the Ruminati, the Ruminati. Yeah. Good dude. So that's my stuff. You guys. All right, man. Thank you so much. Strength is never weakness. Weakness never strength. Catch y'all later.