Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 154 - Layne Norton vs Shawn Baker

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

We have two doctors in the house today, who are not only athletes themselves, but specialize in different ways of dieting. They are here today to debate Flexible Dieting vs. the Carnivore Diet as a way to maximize health and/or body composition. Dr. Layne Norton is a bodybuilding/figure/physique coach and a proponent of flexible dieting as a way to guide his clients as well as himself nutritionally. He claimed his pro card at the age of 24, and is a professional powerlifter who set the raw squat record in 2015 IPF World Championships of 668lbs/303kg at 93kg. Layne obtained his PhD in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illinois in 2010. Dr. Shawn Baker is a doctor, an athlete, a father, and a proponent of a carnivorous lifestyle. He has competed in Strongman, powerlifting, the Highland Games, and track and field where he has either placed or broke records, and has played in semi-professional rugby. He has a BA in Biology, and obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree at Texas Tech University. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: 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 Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

uh everything you say today in uh today's podcast will be used against you in the court of law i'm sure it will yeah what's going on mark how we doing over there we're doing good we are good to go oh my god just had my birthday got back from my birthday and uh now i got these two animals in the room here so let's uh let's start off with uh mr bio lane over here we've had him on the show many many times lane norton he has uh successfully won a silver medal in powerlifting and the biggest kind of powerlifting meet that you can do uh in uh ipf world championships about uh two three years ago three years ago yeah three years ago. Yeah. Three years ago, ancient history. He is a doctor and he's a proponent of flexible dieting has helped thousands and

thousands of people over the years, uh, obtain the body that they want, obtain the strength that they want. And, uh, he's been a good friend over the years. Somebody I communicate with a lot. There's, um, a lot of debate on how to diet and how to figure out what to eat and when to eat. And is intermittent fasting good? Is flexible dieting good? Is the carnivore diet good? And so today we're also joined by Dr. Baker, the carnivore man. So we're going to try to get to the bottom of this and try to make the most sense of it so that you guys can make an educated decision towards which way you want to lean.

I would have to say that I've tried many different styles of diets. And, uh, the truth is, is, uh, you know, people say this all the time and I think people get frustrated hearing it, but most diets work if you follow them. If you follow some of the information and follow what someone lays out, um, a lot of times they end up being beneficial. So we're going to hand the mic over to Dr. Lane Norton so you can give us a little bit more history on who you are and how you kind of got into all this stuff. Well, basically I always introduce myself as either a muscle head who likes science or a science geek who likes lifting weights. So depending on which, which your preference, I'd say probably more towards the meathead who really likes science, uh, than the

other way, but, uh, kind of about a 50, 50 mix of both. Um, I got into it because I got into lifting like I'm sure a lot of guys did. Cause I was bullied when I was younger, didn't get much attention from girls. So I started lifting weights to try and fix that. It didn't help with either of those things, but I did enjoy with, fall in love with the process of lifting weights. Lifting weights attracts the boys more so than anything else. Yes. My age demographic is 20 to 30 year old men.

So, you know, it didn't really help with the girls thing, but that's all right. I fell in love with the process anyway, but I kind of fell in love with that and bodybuilding originally, uh, when I was just getting into college and I was doing a science degree. Originally at that time, I wanted to be a Marine biologist. Um, and then I really got passionate about this, decided I want to change things. So I changed my major to biochemistry. And, uh,

as I would read, I'm sure like many of the listeners, I got very frustrated because one magazine would say this, another magazine would say that. Sometimes the same magazine would say one thing one month and then another thing the other month. And sometimes the same author for the same magazine in the same issue would say one

thing and then contradict themselves. So it became very frustrating because it was like, okay, carbs are bad. Okay, eat as much protein as you can. Well, maybe too much protein's bad. Fat's bad. Okay. Fat's not bad. And so I kind of got into this because I wanted to start trying to answer some of those questions for myself. And, you know, really the only way I saw how to do that appropriately was by going in and actually doing an advanced degree. So, um, I got accepted to the university of Illinois to do, take a shot PhD, um, in nutritional

sciences and had the fortune. Uh, I was very lucky and I got to study under Dr. Don Lehman, who's still the most, um, knowledgeable person I've ever met to this day on metabolism and, uh, did a lot of research in protein metabolism. Um, a little bit of fat metabolism, a little bit of carbohydrate metabolism. I've gotten more into those since I've been out of research. Uh, and actually now, uh, a lot of, I won't call it research cause it's not research cause I'm not in the lab and I'm very sticky about this, but I do a lot of reading of literature regarding, um, fat tissue metabolism, uh, weight loss, weight regain, what actually causes weight loss, why it's so hard for people to keep weight off, uh, and why

the relapse statistics for weight lossers so striking and why, quite frankly, we have a big obesity problem. So, uh, and I think through that process, um, you kind of learn, like you said, a lot of stuff works, you know. So I always kind of approach it from the question of, all right. Why do things work? And also, you know, what is best for the individual and what's best for the individual? A lot of boils down to what do they feel least restricted on? Right. So some people, they say, you know, I'm on intermittent fasting and it feels like I'm not even dieting, right? So other people say, I do keto and I'm not hungry at all. And it feels like I'm not dieting. Other people, they try that and they hate it. And in fact, I just posted the other day,

a study showing that the keto adherence rates are the same as pretty much all the other diets that are assessed. But that doesn't mean that some individuals don't just don't really enjoy keto. I'm sure they do. And it's easy for them. Other people, you give them the option of flexible dieting and they say, wow, I can eat whatever I want as long as I trap my calories and trap my protein. Awesome. So a lot of stuff works. And I think just being honest about, okay, what are the drawbacks to each method? What are the benefits of each method? You know, I think the uncomfortable truth that a lot of people don't want to listen to is, is there probably isn't one best diet for everything,

for health, right? Because if you do one thing, if you do something that's good for cancer, you might mess up something that's bad for heart disease. If you're trying to become really strong, maybe your endurance, maybe other areas of your fitness suffer. Right.

So the fact is that for every gimme, there's a gotcha. And I just try to be upfront about that and honest about it. And, uh, that's kind of where my perspective comes from is I, I look at stuff and say, okay, what are the drop? What are the plus sides? What are the drawbacks? And then let's make the best decision we can for the individual based on their goals and what seems to work for them. Dr. Baker, give us the rundown on kind of who you are, how you got into the carnivore diet. Maybe tell us a little bit about the old days of the Highland Games and some of those things. Yeah. So I am certainly a meathead by many definitions. Yeah. I mean, I've been around sports and lifting for about 40 years now.

I'm in my early 50s, and so I've progressed through all that stuff. Respect your elders, Lane Norton. You get your young guys. No, so I mean, you know, so I've been doing this stuff. I'll be 40 soon, so, you know. Well, you're getting there. You're starting to mature a little bit. But, you know, I've been doing this stuff forever.

I mean, I went to medical school out of college. I actually dropped out of medical school to go to New Zealand and play rugby. I got offered to go do that because I was, had some success at that level. Went down there, did that for a few years. Came back in, wanted to continue to play rugby. I joined the military, uh, went in the Air Force, launched nuclear bombs for, you know, about five years. And then I got tired of getting my head kicked in.

I was playing a match and out in, uh, Las Vegas, about five years. And then I got tired of getting my head kicked in. I was playing a match out in Las Vegas against a Russian team. Guys were kicking me in the head. I had blood coming out of my ears. Maybe that's why I'm like I am today. Too much brain damage. But so I decided to go back to medical school. The Air Force was kind enough to pay for that. You know, I did my medical career, you know, trained as a surgeon in a civilian institution then went to went to afghanistan spent time uh you know treating uh war trauma victims you know and then i was uh you know civilian for a while uh you know i continued doing sports i competed in powerlifting i mean i was i was decent to deadlift i pulled a 772 deadlift as a drug-free lifter and uh

it was 275s or whatever. I think I was probably 280 when I did that. You know, I always competed. I know you compete in USAPL. That's where I compete. I competed in ADFPA before that. And then I did something like WABDL and then NASA, which was, these are all tested organizations.

You know, that was my thing. But, you know, I did strongman stuff for a while. I did that for a couple of years. Really enjoyed that, but just wasn't big enough to be a, you know, was my thing but you know i did strongman stuff for a while i did that for a couple years really enjoyed that but just just don't have didn't wasn't big enough to be a you know i mean you gotta be 400 pounds 280 290 is not big enough to be a strongman i wasn't strong enough to be strong but i did okay at that and then i then i uh i did the highland games for just a couple years on a whim somebody somebody i had a physician's assistant walking my clinic one day wearing a kilt and he said hey, I asked him what the hell he's doing.

He told me what the Highland Games. You said you look sexy. What are you doing? Well, I said, I said it fun. So I went out and started throwing shit. And then, uh, I got pretty good at it. And then in my forties, I won the master's world championships in that sport, you know, uh, set one world record in the Highland Games.

Did that for about four or five years. And then I, then I started getting this competitive rowing, indoor rowing, and I've set, you know, uh, three world records in that. And then I've got six or seven American records in that. So that, that's kind of what I'm doing now. So it's more, it's less pure strength at this point, you know, it's more strength endurance and, and, you know, quite honestly at 50, 52 now, you kind of worry a little bit more about health and how much you can, you can max dead, deadlift or bench. But how did you end up gravitating towards this carnivore diet? Well, I mean, you know, so, uh, and I agree with a lot of what Lane's going to say. I mean, I think there's a lot more, more commonalities that we share than we have differences,

but you know, for me, it's just, it's just a progression over time up until I was a probably, you know, early forties. I thought, you know, I could eat kind of whatever I want as long as I train hard enough. And that worked. I mean, it really did. I mean, I was, I was able to, to I want as long as I train hard enough. And that worked. I mean, it really did. I mean, I was able to maintain a decent level of body composition. My health was pretty good. Mid-40s struck, and I started feeling, you know, hey, man, I've got to make some pains now.

Weight's not coming off as easy as it wants to despite running sprints like crazy, training real hard. This wasn't working. You know, developing signs of metabolic syndrome. And so I started down this cascade of different diets, and I, you know, what, what I thought was the typical approach, you know, cut my calories. I, you know, ate a high fiber, low fat, you know, lean protein diet. And that worked. I mean, it honestly worked. I think it does work for many people. This wasn't sustainable for me. I mean, I was sitting there, you know, exercising three times a day. I mean, I remember I'd get up in the morning, jump rope a couple thousand times, go to work at the hospital.

On my clinic days, I live right next to the hospital, so I'd go home and train at lunchtime. Then I'd get home in the evening after I put my kids to bed. I'd jump rope another couple thousand times. I had a, you know, decent caloric deficit going on. I got lean. I lost 50 pounds in three months, which was, you know, and I did it fine. But then I did that for, I continued in that fashion for about three or four months. And I was like, this lost 50 pounds in three months, which was, you know, and I did it fine. But then I did that for, I continued in that fashion for about three or four months.

And I was like, this is not sustainable for me. I mean, this dietary regimen. And so I drifted on to more of a paleolithic type diet and tried that for a year or so. And that was pretty good. And then I started, you know, kind of gravitating more to a low-carb approach. That made me feel better personally. And then as I got further and further into that, you know, I looked at athletic performance. And, you know, and while a ketogenic diet for me personally resulted in less joint issues, less digestive discomfort, you know, I felt that there may be something else I could do.

And I looked at adding, you know, one of the problems, one of the problems I think about a ketogenic diet is it under proteins, you know, for many people. The people who classically follow that tend to restrict their protein quite a bit. And I saw that people were having success on a, you know, a meat-based diet. So I tried it for a couple of weeks. You know, I was doing steak and eggs like Rhonda would do, and I do a refeed and yeah, I felt really good on the steak and egg days and the refeed days I felt, you know, not as good, you know? And then I said, you know, know at one point i said i'm gonna do it for 30 days just for the hell of it kind of did as a joke on social media we all kidded around how i was going to get scurvy or my colon was going to fall out or gonna have a heart attack and none

of that happened obviously so that i did for 30 days and then i got done and i went back to a you know more ketogenic style including more foods i just didn't feel as good and so i was like well you know all things being equal i would rather feel good and perform better. And then I noticed probably about two months into the diet. And, you know, this is somebody who's been lifting for four years that my performance just got better. And I, you know, and I use it like a deadlift as a metric, because I've been deadlifting my whole life. And I was, I remember when I was in my mid forties, I was like, well, I'd like to hit 405 for 20 reps on a deadlift without a belt. And I kept get petering out around 15 16 reps and i did

that you know i tried every couple every year you know every few months i tried again try again i always hit 15 16 and i just run out after about two months of being on this diet i hit 18 pretty easy and then the next week i turn on hit for 20 and this is like two months into the diet i was like well it's pretty cool and i didn't change my training style at all and so you know the conclusion is maybe there's something to diet maybe having more protein than that maybe having pretty cool. And I didn't change my training style at all. And so, you know, the conclusion is maybe there's something to diet, maybe having more protein than that, maybe having more high quality animal protein has a positive effect. And I think there's a lot of rationale that that does do that. Was this a coinciding with, uh, the time you were a physician, a physician as well?

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you started recommending the diet. You told me on a previous podcast, started recommending maybe not this particular diet, but you were giving dietary advice to people. And the medical community didn't love that necessarily, right? You know, that's a long story. We can get into that. But, I mean, the short answer is that, yes, I was practicing lifestyle medicine, and especially it's very procedure-driven.

Orthopedics makes a lot of money for the hospital. The more procedures you do, the happier they are. When I drifted away from that, that wasn't well accepted. I ended up surrendering my medical license due to this. I've been asked to reapply. In fact, I reapply. I'll get my license back in either January or February. So, I mean, it's just been a, you know, part of it was naivety on my part,

thinking that, you know, I could just listen to the system and they would be willingly willing to not care about money, which is which is bottom line. And that's just that was that was some silliness on my part with that with that stuff. But but again, but but I mean, as far as a patient stuff goes, you know, one of the things when you have people that need joint replacements, many of them are obese. In fact, a large percentage of them are. and they're at risk for complications and surgeries. Infection risk goes up. Their long-term outcomes tend to not be as good in many cases. It's not that many people don't benefit from that, but the risks are higher. So you try to get them to lose weight. And the problem is they never lose weight. You send them out, you know, you send them to an nutritionist and most of the time they don't lose weight or they try to do it on their own. And what would happen is you'd see them and they might lose a couple pounds and you'd see them,

well, you need to lose 30 pounds to have your surgery. Well, they come back six months later and not only have they not lost 30 pounds, but they've gained three or four and then they're in your office crying and they're just, and they're, you know, not having good success. So, you know, when I started recommending, you know, a ketogenic diet at that time they were having more success and and i thought that was kind of cool you get them ready for surgery but in many cases we saw a reduction in joint pain in many cases to the point where they just didn't need the surgery anymore because the reason you do the surgery because the joint hurts joint stops

hurting right then you're like well why are we doing the surgery and so for me and i continue to see that you know and i know this is all anecdotal. I know there's a lot of criticism around that. But to me, I think there's enough anecdotes out there that it's kind of you can start to form hypothesis. And that's what a lot of, you know, like nutritional epidemiology is just hypothesis generating. And you have to formally test this. And I think Lane will be maybe happy to hear this. I know Kevin Hall is actually going to potentially be doing a carnivore type study. I think he's going to do a crossover, like a vegetarian and a carnivore study.

I don't know the exact details on that, but we will start to get some data on that. And I've been pushing for that, you know, since I've been doing this. Now, you know, it's got to come from somewhere. Something's got to generate the interest. And this is why all these anecdotes, you know, people are, at least there's some people out there saying, hey, maybe there's something here. Maybe we should look into this because why not? I don't see why, why we wouldn't want to do that. So we know that both of you guys are smart. Both of you guys are

highly intelligent in your respective fields. Um, and we know that you're going to come together on a lot of thoughts because that's what intelligent people do. They have the ability to rationalize things and say, yeah, okay. Like that's not, maybe not my style, but I understand that it actually makes some sense. Let's talk about where you guys differ. Lane, what are some things that maybe you've seen that Dr. Baker has posted where you're like, that's just fucking bullshit. Or it's something that gets you, you know, gets under your skin or something that maybe

is inflammatory towards you. Everything. Damn it, Dr. Baker, would you settle down over there? I guess so, yeah. First off, I think one of the things I want to say, just to kind of paint a picture of where we're at, is my PhD was in protein metabolism. I like protein.

I'm a protein guy. My research was funded by the meat egg and dairy industry so if there's anybody who has a theoretical bias towards that stuff it would be me right um the fact that i would ever be here defending plants actually blows my mind to be quite honest with you somebody has to i kind of so nobody wants to eat those damn things i think you know what you're going to find me is i'm going to, you know, give credit where credit's due on certain diets. I think people who are, it doesn't surprise me that some people are having success on the carnivore diet for a couple reasons. Not because I think meat's magic or anything like that, but because one, it's hard to overeat on meat.

Like if you're trying to like overeat on meat, it can be very difficult. One, because it's just very satiating. Um, and two because protein is very thermogenic, uh, very satiating in and of itself. Uh, and it's just like, try it. Like if you try to overeat on meat, it's very, very difficult. One of the techniques, uh, to counteract my fat boyness was the first time I tried a bodybuilding diet. My coach said, uh, you know, at night, if you're hungry, go ahead and eat as many egg whites as you want, or go

ahead and have as much tilapia as you want. I'm like, neither one of those things sound appetizing at all. So usually I just, I just wouldn't eat it. And if I did, I would just get the added benefit of having some extra protein. Yeah. And there's research out there, you know, like people say, oh, you're a flexible dieting guy. Kind of like I've become very centrist on a lot of stuff now for some people being too flexible is a very bad thing. Okay. I think structured flexibility is really good. I think having the option that if, Hey, some event comes up and you'd like to go out to eat, understanding what's in food and having the ability to be flexible is good. But when do we all do best?

We all do best when we're at home, training can be a focus, and we're kind of eating the same sorts of things every day. There's also a lot of data to indicate that if you eat the same thing every day, your hunger goes down because you just, the more food variety you have, the more you tend to overeat. And there's a lot of data on that. So I think there is something to be said for limiting food choices in most cases. Do you think some of that has to do with, you know, things being like maybe hyper palatable, like too many flavors and too many different things? Yeah, of course. It's part of, we have an obesogenic environment. So, but what I don't like is people who take, you know, stuff, say hyper palatability and they try to retroactively

bring that back to sugar is causing obesity you just can't say that based on the data it's a lot of things are causing obesity because any one of these things by themselves you can find things to counteract i guess we could say our phone is causing obesity sure but it's just one small part of it so the and then as far as other people who are i know a lot of people who have uh kind of self-reported autoimmune issue improvements that doesn't surprise me because a carnivore diet would essentially be an elimination diet so you're basically taking out all fodmaps um things that are fermentable by the gut things that can cause a lot of GI distress or cause

some people, we don't quite understand exactly how autoimmune stuff works. It's actually a really understudied field and I'm by no means an expert at all. But you know, you have gaps or tight junctions in your intestinal tract. And it seems like certain foods can, for some people, start to widen those spaces. And when you don't have as tight a junction, inflammation can start. This seems to be a lot of what happens with like irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease. When you peel back to an elimination diet, a lot of those issues go away. But I think where I'll kind of digress and start to point out some of the stuff I don't agree with is you don't have to be on a carnivore diet to do that. You can still have some fruits, some vegetables. The point of

elimination diet is to then add things back in. So the point of elimination diet is to take stuff out to the point where you're doing better, feeling better. Then you add one food in. Go two, three days, see how you feel. Because if you have these issues, usually after a couple of days, they start to surface, whether it's bloating, gas, just lethargy, whatever have you. And then you kind of can pick out, okay, well, that didn't do it, but that thing did. This didn't do it, but this thing did. And so I think one of the things, and I'll throw it back to Dr. Baker so he can give me some clarity on this, because I think it's important to have perspective, is I think you said that fiber, we don't need fiber. Correct. So how do you define need?

Well, if you want to say it's an essential nutrient, essential means you cannot live without it. That's my definition of need. Now, is it potentially beneficial? I think relatively in certain cases it is. And then we can talk about that. But let me go back to some of the things Lane commented on. And I agree with, you know, why do people have success on a carnivore diet?

Obviously protein, having more protein. Most people are going from a, if you go on a carnivore diet, your protein is generally going to go up. And so a lot of people will find meat is very satiating. I know there are people that can overeat it. There are people that get fat on a carnivore diet like any other diet if they eat too much. I mean, I'm not saying the calories don't count. Obviously, there are some slop in that system. You know, protein for one.

You know, fiber is another thing. Those things, when you vary those things, there's going to be a difference. So a carnivore diet is very protein heavy for most people unless you're eating, you know, adding a bunch of fat. So you would both agree that calories at least matter on some sort of diet? Well, sure. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. All calories matter. Well, I mean, they matter, but at the same point, you know, you have to realize there are different effects of food.

Now, we can go into, you know, Ludwig's study. I know you criticized Ludwig's study. You know, I saw your criticism, and I think that's fair, you know, but, I mean, we do know that— Not the study so much, just their change in the analysis of it. Yeah, I mean, okay, they changed the randomization time where they went from pre-weight loss to post-weight loss. But at the same time, you point out that

maybe for a maintenance phase, maybe that low carbohydrate may have an effect. And I don't know if those other 27 studies tested if they tested maintenance or if it was just pure weight loss. Well, it'd be interesting to see

low carb overfeeding because we don't have a lot of data on that. There is some data in animals. The data in animals, now people say, well, it doesn't translate't translate sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't um one of the one of there is uh data showing that even animals on like a five percent carbohydrate diet rats were able to get uh obese pretty quick on a high fat diet now again does it translate to humans we don't know there's not a lot of overfeeding studies i mean i'd like to see

you know where there's protein overfeeding studies. I mean, I'd like to see, you know, whether there's protein overfeeding studies, which we know that, I mean, like Jose Antonio has done several of those, and that doesn't tend to show fat gain. I mean, they're only muscle mass, they don't gain any fat. So protein's almost a free macronutrient. I mean, not quite free, but it's, I mean, you can't overeat protein, but again, it's very satiating. I mean, I guess there's question if it's more satiating than other macronutrients.

I think that's debatable right now. I think protein and actually fiber have about the same thermic effect as well as satiation effect. The thing about protein with those studies is that protein is a very – so I wouldn't say it's a free nutrient. I would say you're probably not – like let's say you's a free nutrient. I would say you're probably not, if you like, like, let's say you took a, um, D or labeled protein. So you took a stabilized, labeled protein and you look at, okay, do those carbons wind up in adipose tissue? Probably not many carbons from protein are going to wind up in adipose tissue because the process to get from protein to fat, because fat's what's stored in adipose, not carbohydrate, small amounts.

But the process to get from a protein to that is pretty long and arduous. One, you can either go, if you have a protein or if you have an amino acid that's ketogenic, you can take it to the ketogenic pathway and it can be converted to fat, maybe. Then it's even harder if you have a amino acid that's gluconeogenic to take it to glucose and then to take it through to novel lipogenesis and to adipose

tissue. That's really long. That's really a long route. But I think more of what would probably happen is those pro that protein is going to be preferentially oxidized because when you have high protein diet, you have high rate of protein oxidation. That means you're more likely to store the other nutrients that you're taking in. Now, I do think that you're probably going to have a lot more, and there's evidence of

this in terms of uncoupling proteins, as well as rates of protein turnover, that it's energetically wasteful. And so, yeah, if you're on a higher protein diet, you're probably not going to store as much as the same amount of calories. We have, we have a lot of studies to show that. In fact, my, uh, my final take a shot PhD, uh, research study was looking at isocaloric diets with different, not even varying the total amount of protein, but just the quality of protein. And we saw differences in, in body fat and, and, and weight.. So I'm totally on board with that. I'm going to bring it back around to fiber real quick, just because I'm not going to

let you off the hook that easy. So when we say an essential nutrient, I think it's still a little bit difficult because if we look at fiber, if you talk about a fiber deficient diet, and actually I think a lot of the studies, because I've seen vegan criticisms of you and whatnot, and I piss off everybody. So I'm going to piss off the vegans now. I think a lot of the problems with when we look at epidemiological research of high-protein, high-meat diets is that they're typically low in fiber, actually. And a lot of the benefits of fiber can offset some of the problems with meat. Like you look at colorectal cancer, when you normalize

for fiber, a lot of those associations with meat start to go away. So you look at fiber like, do you need it as an essential nutrient? If you don't eat fiber, are you going to die tomorrow? No. Are you going to die this week? No. Are you going to die this month? No. Are you going to die tomorrow? No. Are you going to die this week? No. Are you going to die this month? No. Are you going to die this year? Probably not. Are you going to die this next five years? Probably not. But if you start to break it down and you look at the research on fiber, you get a 7% reduction for each 10 grams of fiber for breast cancer, a 12% reduction for stroke for every 10 grams of fiber you go up. And there's a cap. It's not like you can go up forever. Too much fiber is a bad thing too, because then you start to get malabsorption of vitamins and minerals. You've also got like a 20% reduction in colorectal cancer or colon cancer for every 10 grams of fiber you go up. And then even with things like cruciferous vegetables,

broccoli sprouts, lycopene, which is not produced in animals. You can't get that from animals. Big differences in cancer. And so while maybe you're not going to die from meat, but you're not getting the protective effects of fiber. So we always have to think about what is, are we wanting to, how much prevention do we want? Right? So like all cause mortality. And I think what we can say, I'm not one of these people saying saturated fat is going to kill you, but it's certainly not protective.

Whereas if you look at like polyunsaturated fats, fiber, those are protective. unsaturated fats, fiber, those are protective. So I have a hard time with saying you don't, I understand what you're saying in that you don't need fiber in terms of you're not going to die today. You're not going to die tomorrow. You're not going to die this year. Um, I think the problem becomes with how people out there receive that message. What we say as professionals is need, and what they may hear are two different things. So do you need it? No. Is it protective against a lot of diseases? I think the data is pretty conclusive that it is. See, I don't agree with the data that's conclusive. I think there's some epidemiologic study that show associations, and those associations are tremendous. You're talking relative risk know, relative risk, 1.2, 1.4, something like that. That's not tremendously

strong. If we want to look at colorectal cancer, for example, and we look at all the factors that make you at risk for colon cancer, you know, having a lot of visceral fat, being obese is going to be much more strongly associated with colon cancer than how much fiber you intake or how much meat you eat. We look at hyperinsulinemia. That's associated pretty strongly with colorectal cancer. If we look at inflammatory bowel disease, those things would be Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis. If you have that, your odds of getting colorectal cancer go way, way up. So again, how much going on a carnivorous style diet impacts those things. You know, if you get leaner, if you lose visceral body fat, if your insulin levels normalize, if your inflammatory

markers go down, that's what I see. Again, anecdotally, lots of it's occurring. Your risk for cancer has gone down based on those metrics. And so you have to, you have to put the whole thing into big picture. Now, bringing it back around to things like autoimmune diseases. And I think that we have, or irritable bowel syndrome, 20% of the population is estimated to have irritable bowel syndrome. So it's not that prevalent. Autoimmune diseases continue to rise. And so my concern about diet is not so much how lean I get or body composition or even athletic performance. It's more from a health standpoint. And I see that people are, you know, and to bring Lane's point, yeah, sure, it's an elimination diet. And I agree with that. And if, you know, again, if we step

away from social media and soundbites and little tweets and snippets, if we listen to the overall picture, when I tell people, when they ask me about it, I say, do the diet for several months, fix your problems, and then try to add stuff back in. I'm totally on board with that. I don't do it personally because I don't have a desire to do that. And the times I've done that, I haven't felt as good. But I do think that if you can add back in berries or avocados or even rice or anything. I don't think, I don't think carbohydrates are bad necessarily. It sounds to me a lot of times what you're saying, Dr. Baker is if your diet changes,

then maybe a lot of the rules change. Maybe, maybe some of these studies, which are great to have, it's great to have all this information, but maybe those studies are done on just the general pop that maybe doesn't have the discipline to follow something like a carnivore diet. So if you're on a carnivore diet, potentially, maybe the quote unquote need for fiber, maybe it's slightly changed. Well, I mean, I think a lot of the, you know, again, when we look at these associational studies, the thing I always say is in what population and in what situations, because we can say that people that have, you know, increased risk for this or that, you know, generally what they're eating, most of these, most of the data we have goes on what people, what most people eat, which is a,

you know, relatively carb predominant diet. And so I think most of our data comes from that. And so we don't have, uh, you know, good data on this, this cohort. You know, if we look at, I just put up a, uh, an Instagram post today on, you know, good data on this cohort. You know, if we look at, I just put up an Instagram post today on, you know, First Nations people with regards to colorectal cancer. If you look at their numbers in the 1960s, they had extremely low levels of colon cancer. And this has been known in all these, you know, northern populations that eat meat-heavy, very low-fiber diets, that their colon cancer risks were very low historically. After about 1970, those rates started going up dramatically. They've gone up, in some cases, 1,000%.

That is not because they stopped eating fiber or started eating more meat. Those things don't comport well. Again, if we look at, again, there's a 2018 paper study on colorectal cancer in Asia. They look at almost all the epidemiologic studies on Asians. And if we, you know, how many people live in Asia? 4.5 billion people. Most of our planet lives in Asia. So if you look at all the data on Asians, there is no association with red processed meat, cooked meat, uncooked meat, and colorectal cancer. So if you, if we want to ignore the vast majority of the world and say that red meat causes colon cancer. And I think there's some serious problems with that.

I know the IRC came out with that statement in 2015. David Klerfiel, Professor David Klerfiel, was on that committee that recommended it, and he was in the dissenting group. And he said basically they disregarded a significant percentage of the data out there. They completely ignored studies. A third of the members of that voting panel were vegetarian, and they failed to disclose that. He felt people should disclose that. They said, we're not going to do that. And so I know we talk about bias and research. I know you pointed to that, the NUSI study that Ludwig does, and there are some bias there. And so if you've got

a bunch of vegetarians whose lifelong ethical belief is I don't want to eat animals are on a panel and we don't disclose that, I think there's some problems with that. And that, again, that IARC report has been widely criticized by many, many people. And so I think, I think there's, you know, you know, like I said, if you're, if you're lean, if you're not inflamed, if you don't have, uh, uh, you know, a lot of, uh, inflammation going on, then I think you've got to look at that in the whole pick whole package. Now, fiber is beneficial, I would agree, Lane, in many situations. You know, if you're on a high-carbohydrate, high-glycemic index diet and you eat a lot of fiber, your glucose is not going to spike as much.

We can argue whether that's important or not, but I think there's a lot of people who would say that it is. Do we need fiber to poop? No, you don't. I can produce it. I can put some posts on Instagram. Produce some right now. I mean, you know, there's, you know, Peary put out a study in 2012, looking at high fiber diets in diverticular disease, colonoscopies on 2000 patients.

The patients that hate the most fiber and the most frequent bowel movements had the highest rate of diverticulosis. And so that, again, that goes in contrast to what a lot of the epidemiology says. Lane Norton, what you got? Well, I think one to keep in mind that if we start looking at highest quintiles of intake of anything, most things are on a bell curve. So it doesn't surprise me if we look at people who have very, very high fiber intake, if they start to have some GI problems, because that is correct. Um, one problem I have, or no, sorry. One thing I will agree with you on is that we have to look at our priorities in terms of health and people. So if somebody, let's say somebody's obese, um, and if getting on a carnivore diet for them, they say, you know what?

I don't feel restricted on this. I can eat meat every day. I don't feel like the need to go off it and it helps them lose weight. Whereas if for whatever reason they were on trying to eat five or four, I can't think of a reason why, but if they were trying to eat five or four

and they just couldn't stick to it or they found themselves overeating carbohydrate, then losing weight is going to be the single most important thing. And getting out of an obese state is going to be single most important thing towards getting them healthy. Now that said, my point is you can have all that and your cake too, cake being in this cake fiber. Um, you can have all that and then cake too, cake being in this cake fiber. You can have all that and then you get some extra protective benefits because what we're talking about is I'm not talking about dying early. I'm trying to look at longevity. So look at what's protective.

So if we look at protective effects, there is very clear that fiber has protective effects and not just in terms of, well, you guys kind of touched on it, but you add bulk to food. So if you have enough bulk, it helps move food through the digestive tract. And also the change in the gut microbiome. If you have enough fiber, it seems to create a microbiome environment where it's a little bit lower risk for colon cancer. I think the other thing to keep in mind is that, um, and I I'll throw this to Dr. Baker. Um, I kind of perused your Instagram a little bit and there's a lot of posts of meats cooked at very high temperature.

So charred meats. Now, again, this is one of the confounding variables with meat and cancer. So I don't necessarily think that meat in and of itself is carcinogenic. But because if you look at unprocessed meat, it doesn't really have the same associated with cancer that processed meats do. It seems to something to do with curing the nitrates. It seems like there may be something there. We haven't quite worked out the, uh, the details. Now, heme iron, there's some evidence that there may be some carcinogenic, uh, possibilities with heme iron, but then again, heme iron is also more easily

absorbed and better to fight off anemia. So again, that's one of those give and take, right? But when you cook meat at high temperatures, particularly grilling or like sauteing in a pan, when the meat drips onto a grill or whatever you're cooking on and the smoke comes back up onto it. So anytime it's charred or cooked at high temperature, you get formation of what are called heterocyclic amines and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which are both carcinogenic. Now, again, that may be one of the reasons that meat has an association with cancer. Because if you look at things that are, there's some studies looking at like cooking method in terms of like boiling chicken and

whatnot, there's not an association with cancer. So sorry, vegans, that isn't associated with cancer. And the hard part about a lot of this stuff is that we are looking at a lot of associations, but it's hard to do studies on this kind of stuff because one, you're talking about different populations of people. Two, how long are you going to do the study for? And you've got to kind of do cohorts because you can't, people want to complain about how studies are done, but you know, do you have a hundred million dollars to do a metabolic ward study that lasts 10 years? No, you don't. So we kind of got to take and extrapolate out.

And I think this is where meta-analyses become very helpful because you're looking at studies of studies where they have strict inclusion criteria and they're, they're controlling for different variables. So they're standardizing for different variables. And I love meat. I don't think people need to necessarily avoid meat. I think people need to be careful about how they cook it. Don't overcook it. If you do chart, cut off the charred portions. Uh, boiling baking seems to be better. Now I own a grill. I still grill. Um, but I do it kind of, um, not daily. Sous vide. What's that? What a sous vide, you know, you ever, you've done that before. I don't even know what that is. Oh yeah. It's like boiling in a bag. Basically those are, those are legit. And that would, that, that's probably a fine way to cook it. Um, so

again, it's not one of those things where, you know, you eat a piece of people's, you know, the report that came out like eggs are equating to cigarettes or, you know, cooking. That's just complete and utter garbage. I mean, that's what the hell style nonsense that just is not. It's simply not true. But if you look at the preventative effects, I mean, I've got a chart here. Oh, he's whipping out a chart. No, no, no wipe off board. But so these are meta-analyses of all cause mortality, looking at trans fats,

which is the worst. Saturated fat, not as bad as everybody thought it was. Saturated fat really got demonized back in the seventies and eighties. And a lot of that research from the beginning was very biased. And I've talked about that before. That doesn't mean that saturated fat is okay in unrestricted amounts, because at the minimum, it looks like there's some risk for it. And at, sorry, at maximum, there's some risk. And at minimum, it's not protective.

Where if you look at things like monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, you're talking about dropping down 5, 10, 15% risk when you're replacing saturated fats with those. But do I agree that if a carnivore diet helps somebody get leaner and lose body fat, that that's the most important thing? Absolutely. Absolutely.

But again, it doesn't mean, so if we've got, if we can do that, if somebody can have the discipline to stick to that, why not add in some fiber? Why not add in some other things that also have benefits? How have bodybuilders used fiber? I'm not going to say that bodybuilding is the pinnacle of health by any means, but how have bodybuilders, you know, bodybuilders obtain these really, really lean physiques. You've gotten on stage yourself with a lot of success and have helped and coached people to a lot of success. How do, how do the bodybuilding community, how do they use vegetables and fiber? Well, first off, I would say the bodybuilding

community is pretty stupid in terms of like, they don't vary their vegetable intake enough. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that has different benefits. Um, and we just kind of stick with broccoli for whatever reason. Broccoli became the, which broccoli is great by the way way because there's sulforaphanes in that that are anti-carcinogenic especially with regards to prostate cancer bladder castor breast cancer and actually sulforaphanes now there's some there's some uh i'm looking into because my son is autistic um there was a a study done where they showed uh really serious improvements in autistic markers with kids who did this stuff. Now, the problem is anybody who's been around autistic kids knows that you can't just get them to eat vegetables. Yeah, they want to eat certain colors and textures.

Texture is, especially for my son, extremely important. He won't eat it if it's not crunchy. So trying to figure out how to get him to eat broccoli sprouts is going to be a challenge. So all that stuff, as far as bodybuilders go, I think they use it as one, it's just dogma, right? If you want to get lean, eat vegetables, right? I mean, that's dogma, but two, it's very filling. I mean, it's hard to overeat on salad.

You know what I mean? Now I will tell you that I have had people decrease their fiber intake. I had one particular bodybuilder. His caloric intake was very high. So he was eating in excess of 5,000 calories a day in order to just barely gain weight. He had a very fast metabolism. And he kept complaining about GI distress. He was always bloated.

He always felt terrible. I said, well, what are you eating? He was eating 150 grams of fiber a day. He was eating probably two pounds of vegetables a day. And I said, dude, you got to cut that down. Like, that's too much. Like, I'll tell you what, cut it in half. Go down to 75 grams of fiber a day.

Eat some pizza. Eat some, like, whatever, more calorically dense foods and let me know how you feel in three days. And he's like, oh my God, I lost two pounds and I feel so much lighter. I feel better. I'm like, yeah, because you were literally like full of shit. Like you were, you were backed up to here. Like your, your shit was backed up to your esophagus, you know? So it, again, too much of anything is typically a bad thing. And while I'm a I'm a meat guy, I eat meat probably. Oh, I would say.

Probably at least 10 servings a week, you know, and probably at least three to four servings of red meat a week. I think saying that it's that it's. um i think saying that it's that it's i would be very cautious about like saying it has health benefits um i think it is i don't think it should be demonized the way it has but okay let me go back health benefits it does have because you know again anemic uh protein it's high protein containing. Animal protein is excellent source of protein because it's high in leucine. So there are some health benefits to it. So I should go back.

Longevity benefits. Okay. But I also think that vegans take it too far too. So I'm much more of a centrist. I think if you're not consuming any animal products, you're missing out on a lot of benefits, especially when you look at something like dairy, which is associated with lower cancer rates. I've got it somewhere in here, especially colon cancer. Calcium in and of itself seems to have some beneficial functioning for colon cancer. And your metabolism even, right?

Vitamin D, people who eat in the higher quintiles of dairy up to a certain point tend to be leaner, better bone mineral density, and lower body fat. In fact, for a while they were looking at calcium as a possible fat burner. It turns out it's not that. It's probably more to do with the fact that dairy is high in high quality protein. In fact, dairy protein is probably the best quality protein if you're talking about leucine content. So I think we can get a lot of these benefits of the carnivore diet that people are seeing without having to just eat meat.

Yeah, let me just piggyback on some of this stuff. So I know you talked about the highest quintile in the fiber study, but I mean, that was shown throughout quintiles. The lower the fiber content went, the less diverticulosis was, and so the folks reading the least had the least disease, and so it wasn't a sweet spot on the fiber for that particular study. Now, when you talk about meta-analysis of epidemiology, I mean, I think most of us recognize that epidemiology, regardless of the conclusions of them,

they're not powerful enough on their own to make a cause for causation. John Anaitis, professor at Stanford, one of the, largely one of the well-thought of, most well-thought of researchers, most published guys around, has basically broadly said nutritional epidemiology has largely been worthless.

And so any of the data we've gotten from that, you really can't use. And so he's called it for a while. I think that's a strong statement. I think it needs to be supported by mechanistic. Well, that's his statement, that the epidemiology. Now, I agree, you know, the gold standard we're going to agree is a double-blind, randomized control trial, which is hard to do. There is no diet that's ever been done that way. I mean, for a long period of time, I mean, and Lane's exactly right. You know, you're going to

spend a hundred million dollars to lock, you know, 50 people up in a metabolic ward for a couple of decades. It's never going to be done. So we don't have, when we're talking about longevity studies, we were, you know, if I were to tell you, you know, we got a plane we're going to board and it's in, in one of the engines out, one of the wings is broken and, you know, the landing gear doesn't work. And I said, well, that's all we got. So you got to make do it. I'd say, no, that's not acceptable. And that's what I see a lot of this nutritional data out there.

It's just we're making the best guess on a system that's not particularly great. I mean, the problem with nutritional science in general is you can't kill all the people at the end of the study, cut them open and see what happens. And so it's not a pure science. And so it's a lot of guesswork and a lot of speculation. And so I think trying to make these proclamations about stuff, particularly when it comes from nutritional epidemiology, can be very misleading because if you don't fit in that pattern of who they're studying, you know, all three of us are very different people as far as the general population. I mean, we're all on the edges of performance and we've all done stuff with our lives. It's just not the normal person. So I think you can't extrapolate that data to everybody. And so I think the most important test you can do is an N equals one on yourself. You know, and I think you just have to

try what works for you. And so with fiber, many people that put fiber back into their diet, it doesn't work very well for them, even small amounts. And again, I agree with fiber, many people that put fiber back into their diet, it doesn't work very well for them, even small amounts. And I, and again, I agree with Lane, there are potential benefits to fruits and vegetables. In fact, you know, I think, you know, from, if we go back from an evolutionary argument, we've been eating fruit longer, we've been eating meat probably. Meat came in about 3 million years ago. Fruit was arguably earlier. Vegetables, I would argue, probably came in much later. You know you know from a just from a strictly standpoint there's not many calories in vegetables so it's not likely that you know early

man was seeking out a bunch of vegetables because it's not going to be very nutritious for him and so that you know broccoli didn't reach the 19 the united states until the 1920s broccoli was made it to england in the 1800s cultivated around 2 000 years ago in in uh in italy so it's not like these things have been in the human diet for millions of years, a few thousand years at most. So to say they're somehow essential, I question that. When's the last time you had a vegetable? I had Brussels sprouts a little over two years ago.

Maybe that's why, because I had Brussels sprouts. I think it's kind of dangerous to try to infer what the intent of early man was when they lived to the ripe old age of 30. Well, that's not necessarily true, Lane. I mean, if you look at the skeletal remains on these people, and if you look at how anthropologists date these skeletons, they will say that they'll look at a skeleton and they'll say, this skeleton is at least 30 years old. You know, I can tell you as an orthopedic surgeon, when you look at x-rays, when you look at kids, it's very easy to pick. I can look at an x-ray of a kid and say, that kid's about five years old and I can be, I'm always within a year. If you look at adults and particularly with wear patterns, this is what they do to these skeletons. You see somebody with arthritic knee,

I can, you know, Matt Vincent put up his, you know, Matt, he put up his knee the other day. If I were to look at just his right knee, his knee could have been anywhere from 25 to 75. There's no way to tell. And the anthropologists that date these skeletons will say the same thing. In fact, they found skeletal remains of prehistoric man that was, they think, 60 years old, 70 years old, or older. And so much of these predictions on how old people lived was based on infant mortality rates. And it's not, if 50% of your kids die before they reach one years of age, your average population is cut in half.

And so that's what these numbers are. So saying they only lived to be 30 years is probably not accurate based on even what the folks that do anthropology will say. Okay. But so I've got to call you on one thing. So your criticism of epidemiology is it's an inexact science, so we should disregard it. But then we're going to even more inexact science with anthropology and kind of estimating, and well, I can tell, and maybe we have no idea. And now I'm not saying we

should disregard anthropology. I think we just need to understand where it fits on our continuum of evidence. I think it's, first off, even if we discovered Paleolithic man ate a certain way and we were very certain of it, which we're not, I don't really care. I care about what do we have data-wise now that indicates prevention and whatnot. And I agree with you. I think epidemiology is, I cannot stand it when I wake up, open the paper. Well, 20 years ago, when you opened the paper, dating myself, uh, when you, when you go to Yahoo or Google or whatever, um, and there's a new article that says this causes this increase in, no, that's not, that's not how it works. You're talking about risk. Okay. Um, and there's's a lot of there's a lot of inexact science with epidemiology. And I'll give you an example, because I'm going to like I can admit when this stuff is not exact science because I've criticized epidemiology before. In the summer months, ice cream sales go up.

Murder also increases. Do we think ice cream causes murder? Probably not. So why does murder go up? Well, there's a lot of confounding variables. There's more people outside. It's hotter. People around each other.

Probably more irritable. There's a lot of stuff that goes into this. So it's very dangerous to make associations, but that's why anthropology, epidemiology, cohorts, meta-analyses are kind of our gold standard because now you're not just looking at a few thousand data points. You're looking at some of these meta-analyses are hundreds of thousands of data points. So I think just because it's kind of like the people that make the argument that, well, we're not bomb kilometers, so you can't really know exactly how many calories you're getting out of food.

So calories are stupid. No, calories aren't stupid just because we can't measure it exactly doesn't mean we should just disregard it. We just, we just acknowledge that we can't measure it exactly. And when we talk about science, all science is an exact science. I mean, we're always learning new things. We're understanding data more and more. So like 40 years ago, saturated fat is going to kill you. And now we know it's probably not as bad as we thought it was. But there's still, I mean, even like, I think the important thing is

when you find an epidemiological association, then start looking for mechanisms. Is there an underlying mechanism there? So we know that there are some underlying mechanisms with certain fibers. find an epidemiological association, then start looking for mechanisms. Is there an underlying mechanism there? So we know that there are some underlying mechanisms with certain fibers, that there's, that there's antioxidant benefits, that there's benefits on the tight junction, also inflammation, those sorts of things. Now, for some people, for some individuals, Now, for some people, for some individuals, they can get aggravated because of bowel issues. But that doesn't mean that everybody should not be eating fiber, right? And I think we've got to be really careful when we point out anecdote.

So everybody, drinking game, take a shot whenever I say PhD and take a shot whenever Sean talks about anecdotes. People are going to So, uh, people are going to be hammered by the best podcast ever. But, you know, because everybody knows somebody who ate fast food every day and smoked and lived to be 95. We've all, that doesn't mean everybody should smoke. So we got to be really careful about this stuff. So when I talk about this, I'm not saying if you as an individual don't eat fiber, that you're going to die of colon cancer. I can't say that because I don't know that. What I can say is that you're probably increasing your risk,

but you may never get it because maybe there's certain genetic underlying factors that make you more protective. Are there any laws in nutrition? Like, you know, I know if I drop this pen, it's going to fall because of something called gravity we're we're fairly certain it's going to fall that's true pretty pretty high yeah who knows we're spinning and yeah you know i start my talks out like that have you ever seen my talk i take a pen i always have a pen as a prop and i say you know you can never prove anything in science there's just certain things that we're we have a high degree of certainty about right and i I dropped the pin and I'm like, Oh, look, it worked again. So, but nutrition is pretty like my friend, Jeremy Lindeke always says there's data. I'd really be willing to put my toe on

my leg on or my toe on my foot on my leg on and my life on. So you bet your life on gravity that we're, we probably got that one, right. But you know, some of those nutrition stuff, it's tough to work out, but that's why we talk about it in terms of risk. And we talk about it in terms of, you know, that's, that's why I'm not making absolute, I'm trying not to make absolute statements here. So I think scientists make the mistake of looking at the average and always trying to apply that to every individual because there are outliers.

I think where anecdote has the problem is a lot of people, because it worked for them, they think it should apply to everyone. And I see this a lot with people. Well, you get excited and you want to share it with everybody. Like, this is what worked for me. And to be fair, I was that way about flexible dieting because for me, that was the hack, right?

That was the hack that worked for me. And then after working with enough people, I go, man, some people just can't really can't do this. Now, I think everybody should track their food at some point, because otherwise you have a really hard time understanding what actually is in food. I think that's a useful example. But for some people, that just isn't sustainable. In fact, I've got a new book coming out. Here comes the sales pitch. Fat Loss Forever, where'm talking about, you probably need to find the diet that for you feels the least restrictive because that's going to be the one that you can probably sustain. So for you and Chris, it was some variation of low carb or carnivore or whatever. That was something that you guys could stick to. And you probably felt less restricted than you did on something, say flexible dieting, where you're having to track everything. Almost everybody I know that has lost a significant, significant amount of weight and has kept it off. That's kind of what they've said is like,

it doesn't feel like dieting. It didn't feel that hard. You know, it felt pretty easy. It was something I could adapt to pretty quickly. Right. But I think it's always, so I always say,

watch out for people who identify themselves with a certain diet in their bio, right? Or it's in their like handle where it's like keto this or vegan this, like probably don't listen to them because if your identity is wrapped up in a diet, you're not going to listen to reason. It's not going to be a reasonable discussion typically because you're already sold on this. So you're not going to be honest about the drawbacks of stuff. Here I am, my research, here you go, vegans, come get me. Sponsored by the meat, egg, and dairy industry. And here I am talking about some of the drawbacks of meat. Dr. Baker, you were talking about, you know, performance and

health benefits and stuff like that. And there's a lot of people, you know, doing this diet and, uh, we don't really have a way of like knowing, you know, whether they're eating peanut butter cups in the middle of the night or whatever, but, uh, just from like, you know, what's, what you've seen, uh, out of the millions of, or thousands of people that contact you about this diet, um, is it, is it possible, you know, from this particular diet, are people that you've seen, are they getting health benefits, body composition is improving, and they're getting better performance? I know that's been your experience, at least it appears that way from following your Instagram and seeing you go crazy on the rows and the deadlifts and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I get contact with a lot of people. And, you know, certainly anecdotally, and again, we can have a drink with that.

Take a shot. Yeah, take a shot. You know, we get a lot of people that flat out say, I've gotten stronger. I hit a PR on my deadlift. I banged out the most push-ups I've done in years. You know, I feel 20 years younger. My joints stop hurting. And I think those things go into performance.

If your joints stop hurting, that helps you train. I mean, it really does. If you don't have back pain, you're going to be able to squat more. You're going to be able to deadlift more. Absolutely. Those things are very important. So I think there's a lot of things that are going on that support this. I've got one of the world's best rugby players on the planet doing the diet,

and he's been doing it for a year, Owen Franks from New Zealand All Blacks. There are several professional athletes that are doing this now. They're getting good results on it. So I think, again, some people are doing it. Now, I think, and I agree with Lane on this point, I don't think anybody should pick one particular diet. Pick what works for you. I don't sit there and tell everybody.

I think it's a problem. So I got up on social media yesterday, and I looked at my tweets, and this guy, Joel Kahn, he's a vegan cardiologist. He tweets me and he says, hey, some a dick pic to a to a vegan doc and i'm like like it's like my fault so he's going on and back and forth about you know why i'm not why i'm not condemning this that was from lane by the way maybe it was but i mean but this is a problem you know you have people that follow eight i'll take it well okay but but i mean there's people that follow. If it's above eight, I'll take it. Well, okay. But I mean, there's people that follow you that, you know, they're saying whatever they want to say. And so that doesn't necessarily, you know, mean that's what you want to say.

I mean, there's people that follow Lane's diet that eat garbage, that do flexible dieting and they're eating donuts and all this crap and posting pictures of it. And I'm sure Lane would say that's probably not the wisest idea. Now, let's go back. If we go back to the evolutionary argument, I agree. It's an inexact science. We can't predict, you know, what people ate, but we can predict what they didn't eat, right? They weren't eating vegetable oils. Vegetables outdoors did not enter the human diet since for about a hundred years ago. I mean, that's clear. They weren't eating high fructose corn syrup. That's clear. That didn't enter the diet until about 50 years ago. They weren't eating

a lot of grains. I mean, that didn't enter the diet until about 10,000 years ago. They weren't eating a lot of grains i mean that didn't enter the diet until about 10 000 years ago they weren't eating a lot of dairy so we we can we can know what they didn't eat and so we can say if we look at uh some of the uh disease incidences particularly the last 100 years we look at the cancer incidence has gone up dramatically you know over the last 100 years we've seen heart disease go up dramatically over the last 100 years and so to say that you, you know, meat was the cause of that, I'm saying humans didn't start eating meat a hundred years ago. They started eating all this other crap. And so I think there's some, we have to be cognizant of the fact these new food, novel foods have entered the diet, run pretty closely with some of the observation with diseases. And so, you know, Stefan Gana,

again, I know you've quoted him before, put out a study in 2015 looking at the incorporation of linoleic acid in human body fat. And so all these omega-6 fats that we've been eating, you know, through the diet show up in our visceral tissues. And we get things like oxylipins, which are oxidized versions of that. And that's associated with cardiovascular disease. It's associated with tendon, tendinopathy. And so all these people that, you know, I got tennis elbow, I got Achilles tendon problems, I've got rotator cuff pain. I'm seeing anecdotally when they're clearing those things out of their diet, and this goes back to the elimination part of the diet, that, you know, they are, their pain's going away. And it happened to me, you know, I'm very well

versed in tendon problems. I mean, that's what I did for a living. And so, you know, again, does it need to be studied? Of course it does. Hopefully more studies will come from this. But if you say, what did humans may or may not have eaten 2 million years ago or 10,000 years ago, we can debate about that. We can say they weren't eating Twinkies. They weren't eating donuts. We know that for sure. And so I think that's an important concept.

Do you personally eat anything other than meat? Yeah, I mean, I eat eggs. I'll eat some fish. I'll eat a little bit of dairy from time to time. Butter, right? Yeah, I'll put some butter on steak. I mean, that's generally the diet. I mean, I'm not opposed to adding, and I tell people, if you want to add some fruits and vegetables to your diet, go ahead and do that.

Just because I don't personally do it doesn't mean I don't support that. You think those people are weak? No, no, I don't. I think they're smart. I think if they want know, I think if they want to add that, but I think they need to be objective about how it affects them. If they add that back in, they have all kinds of gastrointestinal issues or their joints start hurting again. And I think that's something you need to take, you know, you need to take an account and say, do I need to wait for a randomized control trial over 20 years to tell me to not have achy joints when there's something I know that potentially

causes that? I don't think that's something you should expect people to do. And I agree. I agree. Studies need to be done. Hopefully they'll be done. Hopefully the damn beef industry will pay for them because I think it would benefit them to do so.

You know, but they're very conservative. And so we'll see what happens down the road. When I look at some of your, uh, Instagram, you know, when people will sometimes say, you can't, you know, only live on meat. And I, I always think that that's weird. Cause like, I don't know, like what, what did we live on? I mean, there, there must've been periods of time that people had to just survive on whatever the hell they can get their hands on. Right. that people had to just survive on whatever the hell they can get their hands on, right? Can I jump in?

You can. There is actually some strong evidence from new, and again, I'm not a big fan of anthropological stuff in terms of reliability, that we had access to grains and whatnot a lot longer than we thought we did. Because if you think about meat, you got to hunt you gotta hunt it down it's a it's a high risk right some areas that people grew up there weren't a lot of game around uh second you can't keep it because it spoils very quickly you know so like being able to save meat is a relatively new thing so it is likely that we did eat a lot of other stuff. But I don't really spend too much time on that. I mean, you know, one of the first things is so there was criticisms of

epidemiological research, but then we're talking about things that are associated and making big jumps here. So I think that that's, I get what you're saying, but I think it's, it's kind of two-sided to, to, to say we shouldn't worry about epidemiological stuff, but then we say, okay, well, this is associated with this and it fits my hypothesis. So we're going to go with it with, I want to point out something and it deals with flexible dieting as well as what we would call, it's not exactly right, but I would call it selection bias. So we have a lot of people report to us who are in our circle, right? So a lot of people are emailing Sean or on his Instagram or on his Twitter and they're saying, hey man, I'm getting great results on this diet.

I get the same thing with flexible dieting. What I don't get is people saying, I couldn't do this. This worked shit for me, right? Because they're not going to tell me that. I wasn't strong enough to follow the diet and I folded up quick. So, so we're always in the same thing with vegans or any kind of diet, keto, whatever have you, you, we call it an echo chamber, right? So it's important to step outside that echo chamber and say, all right, what else is going on here? So like I said, that is every time I've been certain of something in, in science, um, something happens

that makes me go, fuck, I didn't know about it much about that as I thought I did. Right. So again, I think that there's some valid points being made, but even with like the anthropological stuff with like high fructose corn syrup, um, no, we didn't have access to it. We didn't have access. Some groups had access to sugar cane, but obviously you could argue, well, that's raw sugar cane. It's a little bit of a difference. But one thing a lot of people don't know is high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are really not that different. Sucrose is 50-50 glucose and fructose. High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose, 45% glucose. So if people want to argue that that 5% difference made a big difference on the obesity crisis, I would say no. I would say the way that high fructose corn syrup is packaged when you talk about sodas,

because if people drink soda, they don't eliminate other stuff out of their diet. It's not like they say, well, I just got 40 grams of carbohydrate from soda, so I'm going to cut out those potato chips I was going to eat later. No, of course not. They don't do that, right? It's an overall, this is why we talk about an overall obesogenic environment, right? And this isn't, I'm not referring to you, Dr. Baker, but people who talk about, um,

uh, people like sugar addiction, that sort of thing. Right. And they, they use examples of cakes and cookies and all this. So you realize there's actually like more calories from fat in those than there is sugar. Right. So are you really addicted to sugar or are you at what you're, if we look at fat by itself and sugar by itself, neither one tend to be in foods that we typically think of as people overeating. Unless we want to talk about sodas. Let's put those off the table, though, because that's a liquid and liquids are not satiating for the most part. There's some evidence that milk is satiating. But people don't really overeat. I just can't stop eating bananas.

I can't stop eating raw honey, you know, or whatever have you. And people don't say, well, God, I just can't stop eating butter. What they can't stop doing is they can't stop putting a bunch of butter on a baked potato. Or mixing peanut butter and honey together. Right, exactly. So that's like, cause if you ever, have you ever tried to eat like a, like a plain baked potato is actually like the most satiating thing. It's really hard to eat. Try to like a plain baked potato is actually like the most satiating thing. It's really hard to eat.

Try to eat a whole baked potato without butter on it. Like now you add butter to it. No problem. It's a little bit of sugar, you know, some, some brown sugar or whatever. Now it's super palatable. Right. But yeah, I think that the, my point I'm trying to make is that it's really difficult to isolate things out.

And that's why I'm talking about overall environment and different risk factors, right? And again, there might be for every gimme, there's a gotcha in terms of, okay, well, I eat a higher protein diet. I may be exposing myself to some risk in one facet, but eliminating risk in another. But again, I think the one thing about especially red meat cooked at high temperature is it's at minimum not preventative. And there is evidence of mechanisms through which cancer can occur, even right down to, for example, saturated fat makes you produce more bile acid as part of the digestive process. And it can produce secondary bile acids, which have been shown to, now again, this is kind of animal research data, so

take it for what you want, because we can't just like throw a bunch of secondary bile salts or acids in people, but has shown to contribute to colon cancer. So again, we're looking at risk examination of epidemiological research and tying that back into, all right, what kind of risk are you willing to assume? Now, again, we got to weigh these two things. If a carnivore diet helps somebody lose weight and that is sustainable for them, then I would say that if that's the one diet they can do, then that's probably better than anything else. It's probably better than them eating vegetables and staying fat if that is the dichotomy that

we have, right? I would agree with that because the vast majority of benefits you get from various diets are just explained by the weight loss. There was a meta-analysis done by NOUD in, I want to say, 2015. And they looked at, now it was comparing different carbon-fat ratios. But they found that at minimum, about 95% of the health benefits that they measured, so again, they could explain from the weight loss. So again, I think Dr. Baker's point of, hey, this is better than them staying fat, 100% agree.

But again, I think that for most people, and to your credit, you acknowledge that, that if they can put back in some fiber and some other things, they can also get the benefits of those other things. Where would somebody start, like if they're, you know, following, you know, some of the stuff that obviously have a book out and stuff like that, but like, where would you ask someone to start? Would you ask somebody to start with maybe trying to eliminate some foods from their diet?

Or would you just simply have somebody like, Hey man, I just want you to like write down, you know, what you ate and give me an idea of your calories. Like, is that kind of where you would kick somebody off? It's so hard. Like, you know, assuming I had unlimited time and resources and you just gave me one person, let's, let's take that example for a minute. Like we'll be completely optimal. I'd probably follow them around and just see what their lifestyle is like. Right. So how much do they stand versus sit? Um, how much do they really exercise? How much are they really eating? How much do they snack? A lot of the research I did in this new book was, um, like looking at, okay, what are the characteristics of people who don't, aren't

able to keep weight off? Cause most of us, six out of every seven people who are overweight or obese will lose a significant amount of body weight in their lifetime, but 95% will put it back on eventually. So what are the characteristics of that 5% who actually managed to keep it off? One of the things is they practice self-monitoring. So they're weighing every day for the most part. They do some sort of cognitive restraint, whether it's calorie tracking, low carb, something. You have to have some form of restraint. People always want to find the diet where they don't have to do anything and it just works. Well, there's going to be some form of restraint no matter what.

It has to be uncomfortable at some point. Right. Now, you can pick your form of restraint. If you want to eat whatever foods you like, you got to track calories. If you don't want to track, maybe keto, maybe elimination diet, maybe vegan, depending on whatever works for you. But a lot of times, in your opinion, those work still because they're accounting for calories. They only work because of calorie deficit, right? Now, I don't want to go into a whole other rabbit hole, but people will – like I see a lot of criticisms about the energy balance model of overweight and obesity, and people just don't understand it.

Energy balance always applies. And what I hear a lot of is, well, you're just assuming the human body is a closed system. Energy balance doesn't assume the body is a closed system. It accounts for the fact that the body is an open system and that you waste energy. It's called NEAT, non-exercise adaptive thermogenesis. And so, yes, but even let's say, for example, one diet causes you to waste more energy than another one. Let's say a high protein diet or even a carnivore diet, right?

You can still explain that by the fact that you're increasing your body's energy expenditure and creating a calorie deficit. Now, the reason people will think energy balance doesn't apply is they'll say something like, well, I ate the calorie deficit and I didn't lose weight. Well, by definition, you weren't a calorie deficit. Now, you may have calculated that to't a calorie deficit. Now you may have calculated that to be a calorie deficit based on some online calculators or what should be a calorie deficit, ate it and didn't lose. But that just means that it wasn't a calorie deficit for

you. Maybe your metabolism is slower than normal, or maybe you're not tracking correctly. There was, this is a big problem out there. There was a study looking, they had people come in who reported saying that they couldn't lose weight, so they were diet resistant. And they tracked those people and found that they consumed 47% more calories than when they reported.

47% and they over-reported their physical activity by almost 30% as well. So you start to look at that and people say, well, I'm eating 1,200 calories a day and I can't lose. Yeah, you didn't count that handful of nuts you grabbed. You didn't count those Skittles you snagged. You know, that half-eaten Snickers bar in the cabinet. You know, that's a big problem. And food labels can be off. Of course. And that goes down to the argument again of, well, we can't track it exactly. So what's the point of tracking?

I mean, I think that's a poor argument. I would actually make the case for it's actually more important to make sure you're tracking because there's error inherent. But yes, there's error inherent in food labels. I think it's like something like 10%. So there's error inherent in food labels. I think it's something like 10%. So there's that. There's tracking errors where if you're not weighing. I think weighing food, tracking it, I think everybody should do it for six months at some point, even if you don't do it for life. Dr. Baker, have you ever messed with that before? Have you ever weighed your food and measured it out? it for life. Dr. Baker, have you ever messed with that before you ever weighed your food and measured it out? No, I, I, I try, I track stuff like that. And it's, you know, it's,

when we talk about restriction, I mean, that's, that's a form of restriction because it's just extra work you got to do. And a lot of people don't want to do it. In fact, most people don't want to do that. It's, you know, I mean, when you were doing your bodybuilding contest, you did that. Yeah. You may not be doing it now because it's just not sustainable long-term for many people. There's not, not a lot of people want to walk around with an app the rest of their life calculating every, every, every damn calorie they take. Go back to one thing Elaine said about preservation of food. Felicia Smith out of the UNM put out a study on looking at animal populations from back in the day, 100,000 years ago compared to now.

We look at the overall average size. The average size of a mammal, a terrestrial mammal, back then was about 500 kilograms. Big, big, big animals. Lots of them around. The average size today is about 10 kilograms. So we've lost a lot of animal mass that we used to eat. And Homo erectus in particular was very efficient at killing these animals. We know that African tribes can very easily kill an elephant with two guys and a spear. So it wasn't hard necessarily to get that nutrition from the animals. And we know that they dried the meat. They can stick it in the snow and they can stick it under water. Those are all ancient preservation techniques that are out there. So it's not necessarily that we weren't able to keep meat around. And we did see, we did eat some contaminated

meat. That's one of the reasons we have such a low gastric pH or gastric pH ranges from 1.1 to 1.5, probably because we started out eating meat that had been sitting out for a while. And I think that's pretty consistent with the anatomic evolutionary adaptations that occurred. When Lane talks about, you know, maintaining a caloric deficit to lose weight, I don't disagree with that. But I do think there's psychological behaviors that go into that. And so whatever allows you to do that. And the nice thing about a carnivore diet, it's freaking dead simple. Doesn't take a lot of planning. It doesn't take a lot of calculating. Just eat a bunch. You know, Ben Greenfield said it's a lazy person's diet. Like,

great, I'm lazy. You know, there's a lot of people that are lazy and they just want a simple answer. This works pretty well for them. And for the shortcomings that it may be lacking in fiber or phytochemicals, phytonutrients, none of which are clearly essential. Maybe they're beneficial, maybe they're not. I would argue that the data that supports that is speculative at best. There's no RCTs out there that clearly demonstrate that you're going to live longer if you eat sulfuraphane or you're clearly going to avoid this. There's some, you know, preliminary evidence that suggests that. And I, and likely, and I do have an autistic son as well, and I'm very cognizant of this stuff. You know, I want to do the best things for people, but again, at the end of the day, I think there's a lot of value in estimating, you know, how you feel, how you function, you know, Rob, what's a big fan of this, you know, how's, how does my gut

working? How are my joints working? How's my, my erections working? You know, these things are all very important when it predicts overall health span. Pop tarts for everybody, baby. Keep your erection away from me, Lane. But I mean, you know, and let's talk. That's how I get Mark's attention when I want to talk. I just turn this way. I don't think any of us will argue that the fact that preserving lean muscle mass is a good thing. I mean, maybe the vegans will, because they don't think you need any protein and you can be skinny and weak. And that's a meathead conversation. But honestly, you know, we know people that have preserved lean muscle mass have lower rates of cancer. They have lower rates of cardiac disease. They have lower rates of dementia. I mean, you know, we know people that have preserved lean muscle mass,

have lower rates of cancer. They have lower rates of cardiac disease. They have lower rates of dementia. I mean, those things are pretty clear. And I think, you know, a diet like a carnivore diet, and it doesn't have to be strict. I know your brother does a carnivore diet and he's had, he's had tremendous success from what he went from a year ago to now. And again, that's anecdotal, but it still, it counts a lot for Chris and other people that do that. I think it's very important. I would say, uh, something that, uh, has worked well for my brother and for myself with, with any diet that I've ever followed, whether it be a bodybuilding style diet or a keto diet or a carnivore diet was just kind of like this line drawn in the sand of like,

if I do this, then I'm off the diet. That has always helped me to get back to it. Now, that could be different for each person, but for me, like a carnivore style diet, it's like, if I go and, you know, eat a pizza, like that's not on the plan. That's not part of the diet where I think I've never actually tried flexible dieting for a period of time. I haven't like meticulous, meticulously written down everything. I haven't been like, okay, I got some extra calories and I can eat a little bit more here or eat a little bit less there where I just, I just think in my own head where I would have a hard time is

there wouldn't be that maybe same distinct line, but I guess the line would be drawn on calories, right? But that's, that's different for everybody, right? So for example, some people, so, but that's, that everybody, right? So for example, some people, but that can be a dangerous mentality too. Okay, well if I'm- Oh, it is a very dangerous mentality. I gotta live with this every day. Right, right, right. So you probably are, and I'm gonna assume,

and sometimes when you assume- I'm on or off, yeah. Ass out of you and me, but you wouldn't just go have one slice of pizza. If you have a slice of pizza,. If you have the whole thing, right. For a lot of people. Now,

again, now there's lane using anecdotes. So take a shot, but I also can back this up with some research data for some people. If you take away that, because for me, for example, okay,

this is, this is me and a lot of clients I've worked with. They would have that and they would just say okay I'm eating pizza it's bad for me, fuck it right, that fuck it mode a lot of people know what that is but if you take away that and say listen you can have

a slice or two of pizza, it's not going to blow your whole diet as long as you account for it and make it fit in your budget, right they go oh, and then they're able to do that, enjoy it. And they don't feel the need to go do that. I've had several people who that, that in of itself, just that knowledge, they stopped binge eating, right? Not everybody's like that. In fact, I've met some people who had to get them away from flexible dieting because they got so caught up in trying

to hit everything down to the gram protein, carbon, fat. It was like an OCD thing that if they went over by at all, they just flipped out. Right. And I had, so what I had them do was, okay, just track your protein and calories. Don't worry about carbohydrates versus fats. And that, that tended to help them relax a little bit more, but again, very individual. There is some research data that there was a, again, this is association data. So, but they looked at dieters who either used a flexible model or, or restrictive, meaning they omitted certain foods versus having an inclusive diet. They found that the people who were doing a more flexible approach tended to have lower

waistline and BMI. So they tended to be leaner. They also did a study, and I can't remember the food they used. I need to go back and look this up, where they had people sit down and they said, and they looked at flexible versus non-flexible. I'm going to say cookies. I think it was cookies. They said, you have to eat at least one cookie. You can eat as many cookies as you like, but you have to eat at least one. You don't have to eat more than one. You can have as many as you want. And what they found was what they referred to as the disinhibition reflex, which is binging, basically. They found that people who were very restrictive had a much greater incidence of disinhibition reflex. Again, some people,

if carnivore is sustainable or if keto is sustainable or whatever it is, that's fine. But I know some people, they say, I started trying to do keto and I just found myself binging every weekend because I felt so restricted, right. Well, then that's probably not the diet for them because it doesn't feel easy. It doesn't feel hard. That's why when we talk about people misinterpret this like biohacking, which is like my least favorite word in the entire, I don't even think it's in the English language, but like the least favorite popular word out right now. It's not a hack.

You didn't like just hack into your DNA and change a bunch of stuff. It's not a hack. You didn't like just hack into your DNA and change a bunch of stuff. What happened was for whatever reason, your upbringing, your environment, you're just the way you're wired, that particular form of restriction did not feel like restriction to the individual. So that's why I say again, whatever allows you to create that calorie deficit, or if you're already lean in the case of, because, you know, we overeat at certain periods of time. Absolutely. Right?

If you're trying to gain muscle mass, very important to do, you know. But if you're talking about weight loss and you're talking about the obese and talking about the average person, whatever gets them into a caloric deficit and allows them to maintain that caloric deficit. And then once they've lost the weight, maintain that maintenance, that's probably the best diet for them. And I said this probably in 2006, after I'd had a couple of years in grad school and had my PhD advisor shut down everything I thought I knew about nutrition and challenged me really bad, really, really like, I felt like crying a couple of times walking out of his office. Cause I would just get shut down so bad. Um, best diet's probably the one you can stick to. Right. Yeah. I make, I makes, I mean, that makes the most sense. And I,

and it sounds like for you, uh, there's not a time where you're not pumped about eating meat, right? Well, I mean, you know, I've, I've never had a bad ribeye steak. I mean, it's a very satisfying diet from that standpoint. It's not like I get up in the day and go, oh, damn, I've got to eat a ribeye. I mean, it's not a problem. I mean, I don't dislike the food at all. If I were going to cheat, it would be ice cream or it would be a piece of cake. It wouldn't be to go eat some kale or broccoli.

I mean, I can tell you that for sure. I hate kale too broccoli. I mean, I can tell you that for sure. But I mean, you know. I hate kale too, so I'll. Well, I mean, I don't know who decided that was good for us to eat. But I mean, yeah, but it has some phytonutrients in it. But, you know, and so. But I do agree with Lane that, you know, people that do a carnivore diet. And there's people out there.

And I know you like to use the word calling people zealous. And I think there are people out there that are diehard. And that's the way they think it's got to be. And I don't agree with that. I think, you know, if you can do a carnivore diet and you do fine with that and you like just eating meat, that's fine for you. If you want to add this or that in there and it doesn't mess you up and you're fine, then that's fine too. I mean, I think that's the point. I do think there's a lot of people that are solving health issues. I think if we accept the fact that our nutrition contributes to some of our disease process, and I strongly believe it does, then a diet like a carnivore diet can help you solve those issues.

Do you think the carnivore diet is doing more for people than just helping them lose weight? Because I know that the things are happening in combination, and I've heard some of the stuff you've said and other guests we've had on the show that the simple act of losing weight a lot of times can, can help solve a lot of, uh, medical problems that you might have, but it seems like maybe it's the elimination of some of these other foods that's helping a lot too, but people are, their skin's getting better. And I mean, you know, there's, there's a lot of that going on from what I've seen, uh, on your Instagram. Right. Your shot's ready. Right. I mean, there's, uh, I mean, there is, uh, you know, I mean, there's, there's, there's decent evidence showing things like gut permeability, which Elaine has talked about with gap junctions. And we've got some research coming out of Hungary where they're doing ongoing studies on people on what they call paleolithic ketogenic diet, which is basically a carnivore diet. It's basically a meat, fat, organ meat diet. And they're seeing when they test

these people using something called PEG-400 or polyethylene glycol, that then when they go on an all-meat diet, their gut permeability improves back to normal. And when they eat certain other foods, the opposite happens. And so some of those common foods, dairy can be a problem for some people, not all people. Some people have problems with certain vegetables like nightshades and lectin-heavy foods can have a problem with that. Some people have problems with certain vegetables like nightshades and lectin heavy foods can have a problem with that. Some people have problems with sweeteners can be a problem for some people. Some people will have problems with things like grains. And so, I mean, there's, there's foods out there that may potentially do this. Now I have seen, and again, this is going to be anecdotally. And I think there is

a lot of people that note improvements in things like joint pain independent of weight loss. So they'll say my knee stopped hurting before they lost any significant weight. Also, I think we can't, while I think losing weight is important, I don't think we can continually or just say it's all weight loss. I think there's other things that are going on there. And I think maybe it originates in the gut. You know, I think that's still to be determined. You know, there are clearly, you know, look at kidney stones, right? Most kidney stones are oxalates.

You don't get oxalates from meat. You get them from things like spinach and almonds and things like that. That's the first thing they tell you not to eat, right, is when you get a kidney stone, they tell you not to eat meat, right? So, I mean, there's foods out there that's independent of weight loss, right? I mean, that's, you know, if you're eating a high oxalate diet and you have kidney stones, eliminate the oxalates. You may or may not lose weight, but you may improve those symptoms. So I

think there's things that happen independent of weight loss that are important to consider as well. And how much meat do you eat on a daily basis? And are you maintaining your body weight now? Yeah, I mean, I may, you know, for me, you know, my maintenance is about three to four pounds a day and I sit at about 245 you know it's pretty comfortably i don't have to think about it i don't plan i just eat when i'm hungry and i stop when i'm full and i eat again when i'm hungry you weigh yourself here and there to kind of make sure you're not heading in the wrong direction up or down yeah i mean i i mean i you i i don't really worry yeah i mean i i you know hop on a scale and once a while to see where i'm at you know more i'm more

concerned about performance, quite honestly. How fast can I row? How much weight can I lift? I think that, to me, that's, you know, given I'm not clinically obese, I don't think that's a big issue for me. And I think it's very liberating. You know, a lot of people say it's restrictive, but it's very liberating not to have to do that stuff all the time.

And a lot of people that do this diet note the same thing. It's just like, well, I don't have to think about it. You know, we think about it. Wild animals don't have to self-monitor. I mean, they're not out there, they're not out there calculating. And so I think humans potentially, we can consider ourselves animals. I think we're still animals. And I think there probably should be a diet that we can do that we don't have to sit there and calculate all the time. And, you know, we can argue whether it's a carnivore diet or something else. But I think if you can eat a diet and you don't have to calculate stuff, that's very, that's very easy. And it's very, very, uh, maintainable for a lot of people. How many times a day do you eat usually?

Typically two. And does that, uh, seem to be true with a lot of the other people that are following the diet? Oh, that's a pretty common pattern, you know, and I, you know, and I know Lane has data on whether or not intermittent fasting or, or timeed eating is going to change the caloric, you know, how much you eat or not. I don't think it makes that much of a difference. But for some people, it works pretty well. And, you know, there's – and I think, you know, the snack food mentality where we eat constantly, I think there's arguments that that's not necessarily a good thing. And maybe the quality of the food, the types of food that we snack on.

think there's arguments that that's not necessarily a good thing and maybe the quality of the food the types of food that we snack on but certainly eating every you know from 7 a.m to 10 p.m like most americans do is probably not a good thing and i think if you if you you know if if you know the diet satiates you really eat twice a day and you're eating less calories you're eating less garbage and i think there is some garbage food out there but i think that's also a good thing what you got buddy it's like lane looks like he's like welling up yeah yeah i see you kind of pacing back and forth no i think that like um with regards to intermittent fasting uh there's a lot of people who that works very well for um but it's not a magic thing it's they eat less when they intermittent fast but for some people they they don't care like

they would rather go longer in fact i'll just i don't do intermittent fasting but one of the coolest things about my take a shot phd uh about my phd research was i changed the way i ate afterwards because uh one of the first study we did um i was like most meatheads i ate uh protein every two hours you know eight meals a day that that sort of thing. Got some data back. And I actually, I remember I kept rerunning it and rerunning it, rerunning it. I went into my advisor's office and he's like, why haven't, why aren't we done with this? I was like, well, I've just got to run a few more things because it's wrong. And he's like, well, why is it wrong? And we sat down and talked about my analysis, talked about the study. And he's like, well,

it sounds like you're trying to get the data to fit your hypothesis and maybe you need to change your hypothesis to fit the data. And that was like a mind blowing moment for me, but I think everybody's, but everybody's had that. Uh, let me give you an example of a, of a, of a contrast to this. When you have that, that's a cognitive dissonance moment. This is what I believe. This is what my data says. Can I really justify eating the way I am if I know that it might not be optimal? So I cut down, like when I left, I ate four meals a day. I think probably three to five protein containing meals a day is probably optimal based on our protein synthesis

data and some meta-analysis data. Just because just cause your body doesn't have a, a way to store protein. Like I got in a debate on Twitter the other day with some kid who, uh, he's an intermittent faster and he said, well, yeah, you can store it. You store it in muscle. It's like, no, the body doesn't build muscle so it can break it down for energy later. Like that's, that's not the primary purpose of muscle. The primary purpose of like glycogen and adipose is that so that you could, it's not structural. You can break it down later. So you don't have storage form for protein. So you can't really make up for low protein at one part of the day by overeating another part of the day. But obviously like people will say, well, I eat one meal a day and I, I gain muscle.

Sure. You could still do that. You can still gain muscle. Absolutely. Now, the question is, is it optimal? My research showed that, you know, if you don't hit those thresholds multiple times a day, you might have like a, it might be 10 or 15% less optimal, right? In terms of absolute muscle mass. So now, but if, again, if that's something that's more sustainable to you, again, you've got to pick your trade off, right? So what happens if you just eat all the protein in one

shot, you have the 300, 500 grams, you know, at one sitting. Uh, well you, you, you could still grow muscle. Are you going to get to an, the most muscle you could ever possibly get to? I would argue that you probably aren't. Right. Um, because your, your threshold for triggering muscle protein synthesis, the, the max,

I mean, obviously individual differences come in for most sources of food. We think it's probably around 30 to 40 grams that, that after that, you really don't get much additional benefit from it. Maybe small amounts, but so if you only do that once a day versus doing it multiple times a day now you can do it too frequently that was my study showed that too

frequently was was not optimal either so again that bell curve right where you're usually suboptimal optimal and then suboptimal again well i'll give you the the so i changed my the way i ate because i had data that i had to confront yeah myself right i was in uh epic fitness summit in 2015 where gary taubes was uh debating alan argon and alan said g, well, we're going to fund research that's going to prove that the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity is correct. Which, first of all, just that statement of itself is like so unscientific. You can't prove anything and you don't want to walk in saying we're going to prove X because, you know. But anyway, but Alan said to him, okay him okay well what if the studies don't show what you think they'll show would you change your mind he said no so for a lot of people

diet is replacing religion like and i think it's i don't i don't know the psychology behind it but i think the humans like to belong and people like to create tribes and tribes are very beneficial for business, right? So creating an us versus them mentality is extremely beneficial for business. You want that kind of, for actually selling stuff, you want that kind of zealot following, right? But it's very bad in terms of like actually having good cognitive discussion and i've been guilty of this and i'll give you an example or i started to be guilty of this uh i am a i'm a second amendment guy so i just lost half of our audience right there uh i i but i enjoy shooting uh i own several firearms i have a concealed carry permit all

that kind of stuff. And I love doing competitive shooting matches. Like that's really fun for me. So I joined the NRA. And I found myself like, just because I agreed with that one aspect of what they do, there are several other platforms that are associated with gun guys that we think about, right? They're typically conservative. There's other things that they're typically for or against. I found myself wanting to fall into that trap of becoming that way. Kind of like the person who gets one tattoo ends up getting covered in tattoos, or you kind of get into riding motorcycles and now all of a

sudden you're wearing leather jackets and you got your hair all done up and you're wearing a do-rag, you know. I think people want to belong. And so I would just encourage anybody out there, like try to, you can never be completely objective. Everybody has bias. Everyone. Anyone who says they don't have bias is full of shit. I have bias. Absolutely.

who says they don't have bias is full of shit. I have bias. Absolutely. I try to step outside my echo chamber and look in perspectively and say, does this make sense? I try to disprove my own shit, right? Because I don't want somebody else to disprove it because now I look really dumb, right? I would rather disprove it myself and change my mind rather than have somebody else disprove it for me. So I'm always like trying to disprove what I'm saying. Like when people talk about magic foods or while flexible dieting won't work, I'll say, don't you think when I went to grad school, I wanted to find magic foods. Cause if I found magic foods, we're not in here. I'm out on a 400 foot yacht in the middle of Pacific getting fanned by 15 bikini models. You know what I mean? That's my life. Cause I'd be worth a hundred billion dollars if I found magic foods, but everything's a trade-off. Everything has benefits and drawbacks

and you got to decide what's best for your individual situation. So it seemed like both you guys agree on the fact that look, you got to be able to follow the plan, whatever that, whatever that plan might be, whether it be flexible dieting, carnivore diet, keto diet, South beach diet, whatever diets that's out there. Um, have either of you found anything that you would kind of consider almost magical in being able to help people? Like, uh, has there been like a particular tip or has there been something where you're like, you know, that has really had a profound effect, not necessarily like just the foods or whatever, but like maybe a lifestyle tip or something that people

can implement into their day to day? Well, I mean, I think nutrition is important. I think activity is extremely important too. I mean, I don't think everybody can, you know, start out deadlifting or rowing or squatting. I mean, there's people that have to work into that stuff. But I think that is, you know, recovery, getting an adequate sleep. I mean, there's just a lot of dumb stuff we do. And I think to stop doing the dumb stuff. And I think that more than anything, I don't think there is, and I agree, Lane, there's no magic formula. It's about consistency.

It's about putting in the work. It's about doing the things repeatedly over time that are going to get an impact. And so it's the same with diet. It's the same with exercise. It's the same with being dedicated to getting recovery. And I'll echo Lane's sentiments regarding, you know, zealotry and tribes and stuff like that. There is a lot of religion in diet.

And when I stepped into the ring and said, hey, I'm going to try a carnivore diet. I think it works well. Try it yourself. You cannot believe how much hatred I brought upon myself, you know, coming from vegans. And there's people in the carnivore community who do the same thing. And I'm not encouraging that. I'm saying try what works for you. This is an option for you. Use it as a tool, use it as an elimination diet. If you like it and you want to stick with it,

keep doing it. But I mean, it's not the one solution for everybody. It may work for a lot of people. I think all humans, we're all human beings. We all have the capacity to digest meat pretty damn well. For the most part, there's people that have problems later on in life. They lose some of that capacity. But I think most humans have that conserved trait. And so, you know, it's just about finding what works for you, what you can stick with. And this works for a lot of people. I mean, at least that's been my experience so far.

And it's very rewarding to see, you know, people come back, come to me. Whether it's an echo chamber or not, it's enough to continue to meet for me to sort of promote this as saying this is an option for people, particularly if it takes someone who has rheumatoid arthritis and it goes away. Maybe it only impacts 2% of the people with rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe it doesn't work for 98% of the people. But for those 2% of the people, it's life-changing. And I think that itself is something we need to, to at least appreciate. For somebody who's listening, who's like, man, how in the world would I ever get myself to just be able to only eat meat? Uh, where should someone start? With a ribeye steak? No, I mean, it's,

you know, I think it's, it's just something that, you know, I think, I mean, I talk about how to, you know, I've got a book coming out too. I talk about how to transition into this and how to transition out of it, to be fair. And some of the pitfalls people are going to have, and it's not all wine and roses. I mean, I do see people that fail on this diet and I do see people it's not right for them. And I tell people, if the diet's not working for you, why the hell are you doing it? Do something else. And people get mad at me because I don't continue to force them to do the diet. I'm like, no, I mean, why would you, why I wouldn't do it if I, if I, my health were failing or I saw something that was a red flag for me personally, and I understood what

was going on, I wouldn't, I wouldn't continue doing what I'm doing, but for now I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. Somebody should just start adding some meat to their diet that they have already, or because, you know, it's gotta be a, it's a big jump for some people. Well, I think meat is a superfood. I mean, I think, you know, we, we, we can talk about what's good in meat. And I think there's a lot of things. I mean, obviously the amino acid pro top, we look at, you know, the amino acid equality, and I know they're, they're switching over from something called the, I think Elaine, you may have to help me out on this, but it's a protein digestibility corrected amino acid scores going to the DIAAS. Now I think the FAO has recommended that. And even that shows that animal source proteins are even better, you know, when we look at that, because they're, you know, they've used as

something, the PDCAA since the 1980s, and they're switching to something else, which, and milk protein particularly was very, very strong in that. But I mean, animal source protein is a wonderful source of nutrition. In my view, it's a better way to build muscle, you know, and I think that some people argue about that, you know, but I think it's, I think Don Lehman won't. I think Don Lehman will agree probably. But, you know, the other thing is, you know, carnosine, carnitine, there's all kinds of, you know, B vitamins, zinc, iron, heme iron. There's all kinds of good things in meat. I think, I think it should be a vital part of the diet, whether you're a hundred percent or 80% or 70% or some amount there. You know, I know Stan Efferding, you know, he's got his vertical diet.

And Lane can talk about whether it's good or bad or not. But, I mean, he focuses on that as a very, you know, essential part of the human diet. And I think that's what it is, quite honestly. Do you supplement at all? I don't. I don't. I mean, salt. I mean, if you want to consider salt would be a supplement.

I don't take vitamin C. That's the other thing. If I were to listen to, and I think it's important to realize that we don't know it all, because if I were to talk to, and I did talk to people years ago, they would say, well, you're going to get scurvy because there's not enough vitamin C. Clearly, it's not in the RDA. I know I'm not. I don't have scurvy.

I mean, I don't have any even close to subclinical or clinical symptoms of scurvy. I mean, and so that just shows us we don't know as much as we thought we knew. And I think if we're humble about it and we say we've got a lot to learn and maybe the carnivore diet's not right for everybody, I think we can learn something from it. We may learn some things about nutrition. We may learn some things about disease, autoimmune disease in particular, which are largely idiopathic, which means we're too idiotic to figure out what it is.

So we may learn some things. We may learn some, you know, certain things in the diet are causing this. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. I don't know yet. So can we talk about your blood work for a little bit? Because I knew that that was a big thing. And I think you're, I'm not going to attack you over this. I don't care. It's fine. I mean, I think I'm very open about it. I mean, yeah. So no, I commend you for sharing that because a lot of people would look at the numbers and go, I'm not going to share that because it doesn't, some of the stuff doesn't look good. But so for those that don't know, uh, your blood glucose, your fasting blood glucose was high. Sure. Your blood insulin was actually low. Right. Your HbA1c was high. Right. I think you were a little bit low

in vitamin D or something like that, but so am I. Like a lot of people. Well, I was like 31 or something like that. Yeah, I was like 40. I mean, the vitamin D levels, there's only one organization that considers above 40 normal. Everything else is 20 or above. And so, I mean, if you look at the vitamin D, I think the only one that's the vitamin D society is the only one. The Endocrine Society doesn't think that. All the other major societies don't consider that low. There is some evidence that vitamin D has some protective effects. Sure, sure.

But what I found was your testosterone was really low. Right, sure. Now, again, this is the problem with anecdote is we don't have previous blood work to compare to. Right. We have data a week later. I can share with you it was higher. But I mean... It was higher?

Yeah. And it makes a difference how much sleep you had, all that kind of... What was the measurement a week later? It was like 100 points higher. So I mean, as you know, testosterone varies throughout the day. Sure. I mean, it varies with training. There's whole things that can cause you up and down.

I don't know if you're aware of a paper that Stuart Phillips and others put out at McMaster a couple, I think back in October, might have been earlier than that. Maybe it was July or something like that, talking about hormone levels and muscle building. Did you see that study? Stu Phillips is one of my man crushes. Right. So anyway, I mean, obviously he's a guy who knows what he's talking about. that study when i saw stew phillips is one of my man crushes so right so so anyway i mean you know obviously he's he's a guy who knows what he's talking about so he did a study on uh androgen receptor uh either density or sense i think it was density and they looked at guys that were all that

you know these are guys are unsupplement so these are natural guys and they looked at uh resistance train guys and they looked at what predicted muscle building and it wasn't the androgen level no it was it was a receptor yeah a few years ago it was uh the paper is what predicted muscle building. And it wasn't the androgen level. No. It was a receptor. Yeah, it was a few years ago. The paper's called Muscle Building is an Intrinsic Process. No, it was a different paper. Oh, there's a new one. There's a new paper on that.

But it clearly showed that the hormone levels really didn't have that much to do. Now, it's not to talk about exogenous stuff. I was sure it had an effect on that. Sure, that's super physiological is much different. Right, right, right. But, I mean, for a normal guy, I mean, probably most people wouldn't look at me and say, this guy is lacking testosterone. Right. I mean, that a normal guy, I mean, I mean, probably most people wouldn't look at me and say, this guy is lacking testosterone. Right.

I mean, that's that's just not the way it works. But irrespective of that, you know, it changes, you know, it changes from from day to day, week to week, from hour to hour. I could test it tomorrow and it'd be different than it is today. And so I don't take much stock in that. I take stock in clinical function. I think that's far more important. You know, we've got biomarkers like cholesterol. We know that they can change 100 points in clinical function. I think that's far more important. We've got biomarkers like cholesterol. We know that they can change 100 points in a week. And so if we're measuring that stuff, knowing it's so labile, it's kind of like, well, what are you really measuring?

It's like sticking your finger out the window in January and saying it was 1 degrees. Well, that's a temperature all year long. That's not the case. So we have to look at the cumulative effects of what you're seeing day to day. And the cumulative effects for me from a testosterone standpoint is I'm 52 years old and I'm pretty darn strong for most people. And I would say that I don't have any issues with regard to testosterone and clinical function. I can tell you, well, I can bring my girlfriend here and testify to that stuff, but I'm not going to do that stuff. So I'm not worried about that. I don't worry about

a number. I worry about the things that actually count. You know, I don't care if my test threshold is a thousand, if I can't get it up. I mean, who cares? Right. Well, I think that, you know, again, one of the problems, and you mentioned it, is you're just taking a snapshot in time is all that is. Right. That's why repeated measures are good and obviously like the problem is we can't let me use an example of myself so a lot of people years ago i set a world squat record at the time 668 pounds did it at 201 and a half pound body weight in the 205 pound class it was later broken of course because all powerlifting records get broken eventually but a lot of people at the time were like your

training is wrong like you're you're doing too much of the main lifts because i was squatting three and four times a week you know like and i would my kind of defense was well how can you say it was wrong right proof is in the pudding but i can't i don't know right i will never know because maybe i could have the argument against it would be, maybe I could have gotten that record and not had to beat the crap out of my body so much. Maybe I could have done a little bit lower volume, a little bit more accessory and did the same thing,

but we won't know because I can't go back in time and compare it to myself at the same age under the same circumstances, right? So all we can do is speculate, really. And there's a lot of merit to yourself feeling a lot of self-worth going through the process of working hard. Yeah.

You know, so that's like... I've had to change the way I do things now. I can't do it the same way. But equally, it's a world record. And so when you look at overall performance, you had to have been doing a lot of things, right? Right, yeah. You know, you could say it wasn't perfect.

I don't think anybody that sets a world record doesn't think they could have maybe got out another half a percent more. I mean, when you bench, whatever, would you hit 850 or something like that? 854, yeah. You probably said, I could have got 855, but it's done something else. I mean, we're never going to, you're never going to know that stuff. And that's the problem with comparing. But we can also find people who train completely different than me who go set world records, right? You find a guy who deadlifts once a month and he's one of the best deadlifters in the world. I'm sure there's somebody out there. I don't know in particular, but I'm sure there's somebody out there like that. So it's so hard to tell. So what it always is, is you're kind of guessing, well, okay, was what I did good enough to set the record? Yes, it was. But maybe I had some genetic

advantages. A lot of people like I had my blood work done. My testosterone has always been high. Always. Even when I was 16 years old, it was over 800 points. So some people might say, well, he's got unfair advantages. Like how high his testosterone is, right? Well, I've also got a disadvantage. And then I got really long freaking dancer's legs. So we talk about this a lot.

But, you know, I fluctuate between 800 to 1100 on testosterone. And that's, you know, I'm sure here come the not natty comments. But, you know, that's sure here come the not natty comments. Um, but you know, that's just, so that's only one aspect. The question is, was what I did the very best thing I could have been doing? We don't know. Right. So looking at your blood work, um, like, uh, I think one of the things you mentioned was the androgen receptor density was you're eating a lot of carnitine. Carnitine has been shown to improve androgen receptor density. So maybe you don't need as much testosterone to quote unquote, get the job done. Right. And obviously if you feel good and whatnot, and sex drive is fine, like regardless of

what the clinical marker says, you feel okay. But like I supplement with carnitine actually, and I didn't notice a drop in testosterone. So I don't know if that explains it, but we don't know because we don't have that data before and after. And this is why I want people to be careful with anecdote, just because, you know, unless we did a study where we took people and crossed them over and had them not consuming carnitine and then start doing it and then see if their testosterone changed and then switch them back with a washout period, we don't really know, right? As far as the blood glucose goes, I found that really interesting, that it was high fasting. But it doesn't surprise me necessarily, because what's happening is you require a lot of glycogen for what you do.

And since you're eating a lot of meat, your rate of gluconeogenesis is going to be extremely high. So your liver is producing a lot of glucose because of the demand your muscle has for it. Thus, the flux of glucose going through your system is probably going to actually be pretty high. And your insulin is low, indicating that you don't need a whole lot of insulin to clear it. So I think it would be hard for somebody to claim, and I saw all the vegans saying you're insulin resistant.

I don't think you really claim that. I think you'd have to do, if you did an oral glucoseans saying you're insulin resistant, I don't think you really claim that. I think you'd have to do, if you did an oral glucose tolerance test, that would actually be a pretty interesting, because my guess is you probably wouldn't clear it well, but then again, maybe you would because you have high fasting blood glucose. It's hard to tell. Yeah. So, I mean, and believe me, when I saw that, I was like, well, that's kind of interesting. I better investigate this.

And, you know, if we look at diabetic pathophysiology, it's really insulin plays a much bigger role. And glucose is just a marker. It's not the actual true driver of the disease. And so there are some studies out there. There's a 2016 study out there using continuous glucose monitors on athletes. These are, these are sub elite athletes, cyclists. And they saw that about 40% of those guys had high, high fasting glucose is, you know, in the range of what I had and sometimes even higher. They found the ones that trained the hardest and ate the least carbohydrates had the highest, and this is a small cohort, there's only about 10 athletes, but the ones that had the lowest carbohydrate intake and the highest training intensity had the highest glucose.

We had a guy on our podcast, Alessandro Ferretti, who works with Olympic athletes, and he says the same thing. He says these guys, particularly doing the sprint athletes, they see when they're in their hard sprint training, they see glucose numbers that are up pretty high. So it'd be interesting to see, as you know, Lane, that gluconeogenesis is a demand-driven process, right? We know it's demand-driven. Now, there's some debate about that, but you just don't randomly make glucose from the

hell. You don't turn amino acids into glucose because it's not energetically a good thing to do unless you need it. And so that's what happens. So if you have too much protein, you just piss it off as urea. But, so. Well, you still got to dispose of the carbon skeleton. Sure, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's, there's, I think there's a physiologic reason outside of pathophysiology why my glucose was higher.

I mean, if you look at any other marker that would be associated with diabetes, I don't have any of those. Low inflammation, low triglycerides. Triglyceride-HTL ratio is very good. Obviously, body composition, waist-to-height ratio, none of those comport with that. I had my coronary artery calcium scan done. I had a heart scan done a few months ago. Perfect score. No calcification whatsoever.

You know, despite eating massive amounts of saturated fat, I eat 25 times the average daily American's intake of red meat. And, I mean, that's significant. And, you know, you would say, well, if the dose, if it's a poison, it's going to be dose-related. And I'm overdosing on red meat, arguably. I'm not getting any deleterious effects right now. Now, again, I'm a couple of years into this, you know, maybe it'll change in five years. Maybe I'll start seeing decline in performance and then I'll reevaluate things. I'm not stupid. I don't want to die. I mean, I don't want to have a heart attack, but I'm right now I'm doing what, you know, low inflammation, excellent blood

pressure, you know, good cardiac function, you know, good exercise function, good exercise capacity, all those things right now are working for me. So like I said, I'm going to continue to do this in modern. I think anybody who's doing any diet should do the same thing, whether it's some crazy carnivore diet or a vegan diet or flexible dieting. I think you should objectively assess what's going on and be willing to change if you need to. I think that a lot of that speaks to the protective effect of exercise as well, because exercise enables you to get away with a lot, especially with how intense you exercise. I mean, your training regime is very difficult. And the...

I just lost my train of thought there for a second. That's the first time. But I think that exercise is very protective. And I think that if you look at the increase in blood glucose, the fasting level, my only concern is that some, I think I saw, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you said this, that you don't have big spikes in blood glucose because you're eating meat, which makes sense. So even if you eat a piece of meat, your blood glucose probably isn't going to jump very much, if at all. It probably goes up some just because. Sometimes it goes down, actually.

It's kind of interesting. Interesting. I'll sit there before me, it'll be 90 and i'll eat it that might be due to you're actually releasing insulin right right yes i don't have much insulin floating around normally so the only thing is like with hba1c with that being a little bit high that so for those that don't know uh hba1c is a site on hemoglobin that can become glycosylated, meaning glucose molecules can attach to it. So depending on how much that's glycosylated shows your HbA1c score. And I think red blood cells have a lifespan of, I think, three months.

I think it's 90 days, something like that. Yeah, roughly. It can vary. It can be as short as 45 and it can be a little bit longer. So that's actually one of the better markers for how high your kind of 24-hour blood glucose is because that's not going to reflect short, short-term changes in glucose. That's going to reflect your kind of long-term levels. And you're kind of in that range where there is a small uptick in risk for CVD, like people who are above 6.3, uh, especially white males. I think it was, there was about a 10% increase in cardiovascular risk, but you're also exercising a ton. So it's like risk, right? You're, you're weighing two things. Now, again,

it's hard to say, maybe you would have even lower risk if you were having more white meat, fish, that sort of thing, but we don't know, right? Because this is N of 1. So it's hard to say. Right. Well, I mean, just, and again, well, I'll step outside the N of 1 and talk about, you know, the vast majority of people that do this diet don't exercise like me. And the vast majority of them see their blood glucose actually fall and is very stable. And my blood glucose never goes about above 135 when I've checked it, when I bothered to check it. The other thing that's important to realize, and we talk about hemoglobin A1c, you know, there is something called glycosylation where you've got hemoglobin A1c and there's advanced

glycation end products, ages, right? Those are sort of a non-enzymatically driven process that occurs, that's where the damage is coming from. Hemoglobin A1c is not the same thing as an advanced glycation end product. And so that represents kind of a, the hemoglobin A1c represents a kind of a diffusion gradient that there's more blood glucose glowing around, so it'll attach to the red blood cells. But the actual damaging part that glucose is involved in, and quite honestly, fructose is about 20 times more potent of an anti-glycate, as a glycating agent when we look at tissue.

So if we're looking at our kidneys, our eyeballs, our cardiovascular stuff, our vascular tree, that's where the real problem is going. And it's unclear that if I'm only getting glucose via gluconeogenesis, because that's the only source of my glucose is I'm making my own, if that is inherently as damaging as if you're taking in a lot of exogenous and particularly maybe fructose. And I think, you know, I know, I don't know what your thoughts about on fructose is, but there is some data, particularly animal data that shows that fructose has been associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It's more powerful in vivo and in animal studies to show that it is more powerful at advanced

glycation end products, which arguably are related to disease and aging. I am familiar with it. Actually, quite a bit of that fructose research was done right across the hall from me in Dr. Manny Nakamura's lab. And interestingly, when you get fructose high enough, weird stuff starts to happen. But we're typically talking upwards of 50% of your calories per the day from fructose. That's tough to get when you consider like, okay, let's say you just ate carbohydrate. You're drinking Cokes maybe. Yeah. Right. So if you just all got all your calories from like cola, for example, it's still only be 55% fructose. Now,

I bet you would see some really funky stuff happen. You know, like if you get extreme enough on any diet, some weird stuff can happen, which again, we don't know if your blood work is like, I would look at it and say, I'd be mildly concerned, but I wouldn't freak out like a lot of these, um, vegans who were saying you're insulin resistant and whatnot, because if that was the case, your, your fasting insulin would be high. Um, so I would have some concerns, but I think that whenever you get extreme on any diet, it doesn't surprise me when you have weird stuff start happening. Right. Uh, I'll give you an example on that. We had a study, uh, one of the studies where we were comparing wheat, soy, egg and whey proteins. And these were rats. And they only got those sources of protein for three months. Three months study. And I weighed out every single meal, put together all these diets myself. I knew it was exactly down to the gram. So I'm weighing out, uh, 330 diets a day for these, for these rats. So I tracked everything for them. And what was really interesting was the soy group,

the heaviest animal in the soy group was smaller than the smallest animal in the wheat group. So like when you got soy high enough, just some really funky stuff happened, right? Now I'm not one of these people who goes out and say, never eat soy because if you eat it in moderation, it's probably fine. In fact, there seems to be some protective effects with some of the isoflavones. Now there's some evidence in postmenopausal women that the isoflavones may have a negative effect. I think it was postmenopausal women. Um, but again, it's, it's all like, what's your population? What are you trying to achieve? And the individual it's,

we know so precious little about nutrition. I remember when I was going to grad school, somebody said, where are you going to go study nutrition? We already know, uh, as much as we ever know about this stuff. And I was like, are you kidding me? Like, we don't know anything about this stuff, you know? Um, and I think we're going to learn more and more as the, as the years go on. But I think, um, I think exercise offsets a lot of the problems with diet. I, people say, Oh, it's 80% diet, 20% exercise.

This is coming from a guy who did a PhD, take a shot nutrition. I think exercise is way more important than the diet for a couple of reasons. One exercise is one of the only things besides drugs that you can do that you don't have to lose weight and you can see improvements in your blood markers. Like if you just exercise consistently, even if you're obese, there's, there's data to show that you can be fit and fat if you exercise heavily. Now, would you be better

off if you were a little bit leaner? Probably. But like, look at Daniel Cormier, right? The, the, well, like people make fun of him, but it's like, Hey, that's what peak performance looks like for him. You know what I mean? So I think exercise is very powerful. It's also very interesting. And I talked about this in my book exercise, one of the main benefits, cause it's not really a weight loss tool in terms of the terms of the amount of calories you burn, unless you're doing something like Sean's doing where you're like, you're literally oxidizing thousands of calories a day from exercise. For the most part, if you're just doing like modest amounts of exercise, your body adapts and you don't burn as many calories as you would think. But what it does do is it sensitizes you to satiety signals.

So there was a study done in the 1950s on Bengali workers. And they looked at people who were sedentary lightly active moderately active and heavily active in terms of their job requirement and what they found was from lightly active to heavily active they pretty much linearly increased their calorie intake without like they didn't track or anything they just intuitively ate more except the sedentary people which ate more than the lightly active and moderately active. So whenever you're a sedentary, it, it dysregulates your appetite and you tend to over consume

rather than even though you're not doing that much. Right. even though you're not doing that much, right? So it's that overall lifestyle. And that's why I think that you mentioned a lot of people doing the diet aren't exercising heavily. And I think that it would be really important to emphasize to them that, hey, maybe there are some drawbacks to this diet and it is important that you really exercise. Now, again, I know lead a horse to water can't make them drink.

You know what I mean? I get that. And again, if you're having people who are sedentary and you get them to lose weight, it's better than nothing. But if you look at the weight regain statistics of people who lose weight and keep it off, over 70% of them exercise at least multiple hours a week. And I think it's reverse. Of people who don't keep it their, their rate of exercise is less than 30% of them exercise. So it's extremely important. Movement is great. It's great. And I think it's a, it's a, it's an easier sell. You know,

I think for some people, the changes in the diet are like so overwhelming. They freak out and they're like, how am I going to get rid of these foods? How am I going to ever go to a birthday party? Um, it's just, it's, it's hard, hard for people, you know, to make that change. Frankly, we focus too much on aesthetics, to be honest, in terms of health, like all these people that you see in magazines who have shredded six packs, I promise you they're hypogonadal as well. Like, like every case study on natural bodybuilders who's looked, who've looked at, uh, at competition lean, every single case study has shown they're hypogonadal, right? And you've been, did you feel like you were performing your

best and your healthiest when you were at your leanest? Nope. Exactly. You probably feel like, right about now, like you're still pretty lean. You're leaner than you were in your powerlifting days. I feel good. Probably feel like you have good energy, can train hard, you know? Like there's a sweet spot in that zone, but it's usually not super shredded. You know what I mean? Some people can do that and be okay. Some people kind of are just at that set point. People see that and they get fixated on that as an idea of health.

And what they don't realize is if they just, like most of the health benefits of weight loss are actually in the first 10%. If you could just lose 10% and keep it off and do a little bit of exercise, my God, you're doing better than 95% of the people out there. Let me just jump in on a couple of points because one thing, if we go back to the metabolism studies from the early 20th century looking at Inuit, and they were widely noted to be free of diabetic complications or diabetic disease at all. They had fasting insulin or fasting glucose in the 120s. That was pretty typical. And they were eating a diet that was reportedly about 4 to 8 pounds of meat a day. So similar to what I'm doing. So the same physiology occurs, and these people were free of disease.

As far as people that are obese still being healthy, I think most of that has been noted to be conferred to their muscle mass because these bigger people, even if they're heavy, they have a little more muscle mass. muscle mass and that's, and that's what seems to protect them. It's not that they're having extra body fat. So I don't think we can make the argument, you know, have an extra body fat is going to be helpful. It's just having that extra muscle mass. And I agree about the whole, the whole thing about, you know, what do we consider healthful, healthy, as far as aesthetics are concerned. And we get these people that think they got to be 6% body fat. And this is not a, it's not sustainable.

It's not human physiology. You've got to do stuff outside of human physiology. The reason you're not and Lane's not sitting there at competition bodybuilding body fat is because it sucks. It's just not a good place to be. And no one wants to maintain that very long. I don't enjoy being a psychopath. No, but I think there's people out there that think that's the answer. I think if you look at how athletes perform outside of ascetic sports, most of them have a little more body fat.

You feel stronger when you have a little more body fat on you. I know from a rowing standpoint, I'm going to do a little better not being super, super lean. It's just the way it is. And I think most performance athletes, you look at them, you're like, wow, he doesn't look like a, he doesn't look like a bodybuilder. So he's not a very good athlete, but there's, there's a lot, you know, I think there's a lot of the problem we have with the fitness industry, pushing these, these unrealistic expectations on people and it's unhealthy quite honestly. Yeah. My mom started out losing weight by going through diet and my dad started out losing

weight by going through exercise and they both had to you know they both eventually hopefully they'll both uh you know end up doing diet and exercise and having a combination of the two that's where you you're probably going to see the most benefits and kind of get into like a sweet spot but it's interesting kind of watching both of them my mom has lost about 70 pounds she's done a low carbohydrate diet she's not on like a real crazy keto diet she's not on something like that's um you, she's not like checking her blood ketones and doing all these, you know, things like that. She just got rid of a lot of junk that she was eating, things that she wanted to overeat on, you know, things that she wanted to consume too many calories from. And then my dad just started with walking.

He started with walking. The walking turned into, hey, you know, I should start hitting the gym, you know? And I was like, hell yeah. Okay. You know, so we started going to the gym together and started gaining some momentum there. And then as soon as we started gaining momentum there, he's like, I got to eat better. And he just, he wanted the results faster. And so he started doing kind of a combination of the things.

And that's what I love to share with people is, is, uh, you know, look, uh, like you've said, you're not going to start out maybe deadlifted and squatting and going crazy in the gym. Maybe you're going to start out with a different version of exercise and what exercise looks like for you. Maybe you're not going to start out with a crazy bodybuilding diet or maybe you're not going to start out with the carnivore diet. But just start to make steps towards that direction if you've struggled and learn about yourself. And both you guys actually mentioned that, that you're going to go through an education process as you're learning about how you're supposed to eat for you, as you're learning how you're supposed to lift for yourself.

And I think that's a key ingredient is the self-education that happens in your development towards losing weight or towards getting in better shape. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's, you have to, the phrase find what works for you is very overused and inappropriately applied a lot of times, but it doesn't mean that it's not true. But what works for you, people make the mistake of what works for you is physiological in terms of diet, right? So they say,

well, nothing else worked for me. Um, I don't, I'm not even dieting and I'm on keto and I'm losing weight. Well, no, you are dieting in terms of caloric restriction,

but again, maybe it didn't feel like it for, for you. So whatever that, if we're talking about weight loss, whatever that quote unquote hack is that makes you feel like you're not even dieting, then that's probably best for you. But that's going to be individually dependent. That's why if you look at weight loss, every, there is no one

diet that's associated with better weight loss and weight loss maintenance than any other diet that you, you could make a, you can semi-reasonable argument for the people who maintain weight loss tend to eat higher protein. You could say that. But in terms of like low carb versus low fat versus all these other diets, none of them are associated with better weight loss and weight loss maintenance. What is associated is a series of behaviors that we talked about earlier. So those behaviors are what's most important and finding the diet and the nutrition strategy, the form of restriction for you that feels the least restrictive. And why is that important? When I was on Joe Rogan's podcast, he made a point of saying, well,

these, and I don't want to misrepresent what Joe said because it was probably more nuanced than this, but he said, well, then these people just don't have enough discipline. And I think that there is something to be said for, hey, anything you're going to do is we're going to require discipline because you got to be mindful all the time. The days of just eating whatever you want, not having to be mindful because we're not as active as we used to be. of just eating whatever you want and not having to be mindful because we're not as active as we used to be. So that's not a reasonable expectation, but also just saying that, Hey, eat more, move less while true or sorry, eat less, move more while true physiologically is not really that helpful. It's like telling a depressed person, Hey, stop being so depressed.

Snap out of it. Yeah. It's not. So we need to teach behaviors and lifestyle modification that enables people to make this a lifestyle. And why do I think it's important to find the least restrictive form of dieting for you? Because when do we fail on our nutrition strategies? It's not when we're at home, low stress, nutrition strategies. It's not when we're at home, low stress, we're in our zone, we're in our routine. That's not when we fail. We fail when we're traveling and stress is high and we got problems at work and we're going through a divorce or all that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, where you've just kind of all your willpower has been zapped out of you, what are you left with?

So if you're on something that requires a maximal amount of dedication or discipline you're drawing it all from the same place you're going to snap and that's going to be the thing that goes but if you're doing something that requires the least amount of discipline for you in particular then maybe you can still sustain that even when shit hits the fan yeah well i mean you know and i'll just go back to the carnivore diet for me. You know, I drove up here, you know, I was hungry. I stopped at In-N-Out. Got a bunch of burger patties.

I mean, that's not difficult for me to maintain on the road. When I'm at home, I cook steaks. You know, and I generally get 95% of my nutrition at home, you know, because I know what I'm eating. I know what I'm getting. And, you know, the funny thing about fast food places is that they're generally garbage. I think most of the food in there is, is probably not that healthy for us. I do disagree with the fact that I think the meat, the beef in those places is actually pretty good. And most parts are not cooked in

some sort of vegetable oil. Typically they're, they're a hundred percent beef typically. So it's a pretty easy, it's an easy, it's an easy uh you know from an ease of diet strategy to follow it's very very easy and again a lot of people just they want easy they don't want to think it definitely is simple you know whether how hard it might be for someone to follow might be a little bit more of an issue but so but it definitely has simplicity to it eat Eat, eat some damn meat. I'm reading some of the comments here and this is, this is some of the problems with on this message of our show. Yeah. Yeah. Messages that, that, that get relayed. Somebody saying the carnivore diet is not about weight loss lane.

Well, I think what we established was weight loss is one of the most important components of it. It's certainly a component. I don't think it's the only thing, but I think it's a component. So, so people want to, and I had another person say, well, what about all these lean athletes that are pre-diabetic? Who? Who? Like, maybe there's some out there and what metric are using to assess that? Because we could say that Sean was pre-diabetic, but which I don't think you are, by the way,

are using to assess that because we could say that Sean was pre-diabetic, but which I don't think you are by the way, but like when you're exercising intensely, you have some things that change in energy metabolism. And just like, for example, uh, lean athletes have higher levels of intramuscular triglyceride. So do obese people. There are different reasons. Yeah. I think that's a very important nuance to talk about this because I think when we're talking about athletes that are clearly, you know, functioning well, their physiology isn't the same as the average, you know, fat guy sitting on the couch. And so I think that's something that's an important point.

And I think that's, you know, there was an Olympic rower, Steve Redgrave, who won five Olympic gold medals, and he was diagnosed as a diabetic. I think perhaps he truly had that. But, I mean, in general, you know, we're learning more. I think the continuous glucose monitor is something that's, you know, new technology is going to allow us to find a lot more about what's going on with glucose homeostasis. You can get readings all throughout the day, right? Well, if you exercise, your glucose will go up a lot of times.

Your liver is going to dump some glucose to fuel that strategy. You know, use your glycogen. And so that gets dumped in the blood. And so there's a lot of reasons for your blood glucose to go up outside of you've got diabetes. And so I think that's, you know, an important thing to realize that we don't, you know, we're still learning a lot. We've got a lot to learn. What you got over there, Andrew? It's low-hanging fruit, Lane, so I think that's, you know, an important thing to realize that we don't, you know, we're still learning a lot. We got a lot to learn.

What you got over there, Andrew? It's low hanging fruit lane. So I apologize in advance, but. We got a question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's just, you know, the, the comments of like, oh, this guy's spinning all this knowledge, blah, blah, blah, but he's a drinking monster. Like if you could just, just, I'm only asking because it's been asked at least 20 times on the live chat so if you can kind of just run through that one really quick yeah i mean that

there's anti-artificial sweetener zealots to be sure um you know there was a recent study that came out showing that um i think it was i want to say it was saccharin could change, uh, was toxic to E. coli in the gut. And actually I went through and I have, I wish I could remember my critique exactly because I broke it down because I, I read the study. Um, it was one strain of bacteria and what they call the physiological amount was five times more than anybody would ever get in the diet. When you look at these studies on artificial sweeteners, it's always in vitro stuff or animal stuff where they're feeding them extremely high doses. And the humans, you just don't see it. I mean, I've heard the insulin arguments, artificial sweeteners increase insulin.

If that was the case, every time you drank one of of these you'd go hypoglycemic because your insulin would go up but blood glucose wouldn't grow up so we don't see that now am i saying that it's better than water no i'm not saying that uh but i like the way it tastes it's a good way for me to get hydrated people say well it's got caffeine that dehydrates you. Caffeine is an extremely mild diuretic, extremely mild. You are, and they've done studies on coffee showing that you're much more hydrated and it's actually no different than water in terms of hydration status. So sorry, guys. I mean, like maybe data will come out.

I don't know. Like I can't predict the future, but on the list of things, it seems to be pretty low on the stuff that's going to kill you. Considering there's no data to suggest that we've tried to construct different arguments. And again, like Sean said, I don't want to die.

You know what I mean? Like anybody who out there is like, and I I've seen some of the comments too. I ignored them, but it's like, well, Lane doesn't care about health or he's saying you can eat Big Macs and it's just as good for you as whole unprocessed food. That's not what I'm saying. Like people don't actually listen to what I'm saying. It's really frustrating to make these false dichotomies.

What I'm saying is most important, most important thing, calorie deficit for weight loss and actually health. Then if you want to start arguing some of these other things, then we can have that argument, right? But I'm not saying you can go out and just be in a calorie deficit and only eat Big Macs. But what I am saying is you could lose weight only eating junk food and actually be healthier because there's been studies to show that. In fact, you can look up Dr. Mark Haub, who did what was called the Twinkie diet, where he just drank protein shakes, ate Twinkies and junk food, lost 1,800 calories a day. So now he said, I didn't like doing it because I didn't feel very satiated, but he did it to

prove a point. And all of his blood markers improved all of them so don't don't tell me you can't be healthy doing that the problem is is that it would be extremely restrictive in that it's not filling right so don't don't tell me that like you you guys are trying to play both sides of the fence it doesn't work yeah let. Yeah. Let me, I think two concepts. I mean, there are big things, and this is the whole biohacking thing. People, they'll read some study, and they'll see what's the methionine, glycine, and they'll get wrapped around these minor infatessable things that make not even 1%, probably a tenth of a percent difference, and they'll focus on that.

And, you know, people, you know, what do I do about a steak and the glycine, methionine, I'm just going to eat a fucking steak and don't worry about it. You know, I mean, but that answer, but I will just to, to, to the Twinkie diet. I don't think that's a good idea for people, even if you're in a caloric deficit, I mean, maybe relative to other things, I wouldn't recommend somebody eat a diet of corn oil and, and sucrose and a little bit of protein shake. That wouldn't be my prescription for health. Of course not. Even though it causes you to lose weight, because, again, we can go back to, you know, what's being deposited in the tissues over the long haul.

You might lose weight over the short term, but what happens if you've got this, you know, crappy inflammatory fat deposits now that hang around your body for, you know, and they stick around the body for a couple of years. I mean, when you get these omega-6 oxidized fats, they get in the tissue and they stay there for a while. And so I think there's, you know, we have to, I think Lane's reasonably, he's not going to tell everybody to go eat a Twinkie diet and be in a caloric deficit at the same time. He's going to say, you know, a decent source of protein, you know. And then if you can have, you know, if you want to just for your own sanity, eat a cookie every once in a while, that's not a big deal. And I don't think, you know, even if you're on a carnivore diet and you want to eat a

cookie every once in a while, I don't have a problem with that. But if it messes you up and then all of a sudden you're a person that uncontrollably goes out and binges and spends the next six months eating ice cream tubs every day, then that's a problem for you. You just have to know who you are personally. But even putting in perspective like omega-6, oxides omega-6, which are dangerous. If you're exercising and eating the caloric deficit, you're very, it's very less likely that you're going to be doing that because you're not depositing a lot of stuff in fat and fat tissue. So for example, like a lot of people have said to me, like, I probably eat over a

hundred grams of sugar a day just because I honestly, like, it's hard for me to eat all the food I've got to get in, in order to maintain my body weight. And I'm trying to gain weight right now. And I had my CRP done and it was almost out of the detectable range. Like my CRP was very low, which is an inflammatory marker. Um, and people said, well, people have said, oh, you know, lanes, lanes would have such high levels of inflammation. Sorry, I don't. And if you look at research, there was a study done where they compared 110 grams of sugar a day versus 10 grams of sugar a day. Now it's an estimate there was because it was percentages, but for most people at the body weights they measured, it was around those differences, same calories, same proteins, same carbs, same fats, just difference in sugar. Both diet, both groups lost weight. Both groups had about the same change in their blood markers

of health and inflammation and blood lipids. The only difference was the low sugar group actually had a little bit bigger drop in blood cholesterol, but that was probably because they were eating more fiber, which binds cholesterol, caused you to excrete it. So they had about 5% lower cholesterol. Actually interesting about fiber, side note, it actually can bind to carcinogens as well. So in excrete carcinogens. So that's another benefit to fiber, but you know, again, it's, it's one of those things like pick your priorities, right. And in the new book that's coming out, have you ever seen, uh, Eric Helms muscle and strength guide pyramid? You ever seen that? It's great. It's a great, uh, guide guide in anybody pick it up so i'm promoting somebody else's book now but uh we kind of adapted that for a fat loss pyramid and we give him credit but like what's your most important behavior and

lifestyle adherence calorie deficit and then we go down you know so watch if you've gotten your base stuff taken care of then you can start to worry about this other stuff. But if you say, well, I'm going to eat meat only to be healthy or meat and vegetables only to be healthy. Let's let's satisfy my bias. Right. I'm going to eat meat and vegetables only to be healthy. But then you're still managing somehow to eat in a surplus and gain weight. Well, then you're missing the point. Right. Because you're not going to be healthier. Maybe unless you're training really hard. And that's that's a that's something you're purposely the point, right? Because you're not going to be healthier, maybe unless you're training really hard. And that's, that's a, that's something you're purposely trying to do. I think all of us need some slack in our diet, you know, here and there, you mentioned that you're working on gaining weight and people made the comments about the monster energy drinks. I

know that you sometimes hit up some fast food, you go to Wendy's or, or In-N-Out and you're still adhering to, you know, your to your diet demands and everything like that, but it's still not 100% the healthiest thing that you can actually choose or pick, right? Like you could buy meat that you feel is safer or however you want to slice it, but we all need some sort of little variance in your little, you need a little variance in your diet. Otherwise you don't have any, uh, you know, flexibility. You don't have any mobility. It's going to be harder for you to travel. It's going to make things harder. You gotta, you know, you could cook the meals ahead of time, but then it's kind of a pain in the ass. It's just easier to

roll through in and out and it has a different taste, you know? So it's important. I think that we have, you know, at least some variability in the diets that we choose and whatever it is that you select. You know, for myself, if I'm going to eat meat and maybe I'm going to have a cheeseburger, a bacon cheeseburger. I mean, you want some flavor and some pop to some of these things that we're eating and having. And as far as diet sodas and people can get just like way in the weeds with all this other stuff. Look. Look, well, what point does it become a disorder too?

Yeah. Like, are you like mentally unhealthy because you're so worried about all this stuff and a hypochondriac and like, Oh, dude, like, okay. I guess is my point.

Like maybe you could get yourself nine more months on your life, but you missed out on like living your life because you were so worried about all this stuff. So like take care of the big stuff. And then if you can get the little stuff, great. Right. You know,

that's, that's. Dr. Baker, what do you got coming up next? Uh, what do I have coming up? I think we're,

we're, we're working out, right? Yeah. Some lift, getting some lifting done. Yeah. Some lift.

I'm still toiling away, trying to break this one K world record on the row. It's been, I just got to nut up and suck it up and do it. I'm just, I've been training for a while and doing that. Just do it today. Get it over with. I wish I was quite where I wanted to be for that. Obviously, books are coming out. Probably go back to medical practice

part-time. I've got kids in two different states, so I've got to bounce back and forth and make that happen. Probably do some speaking. I've got to do some speaking on some different low-carb type conferences. And so that'll be, you know, probably a lot of next year. We'll see where things go. It'll be kind of interesting to kind of evolve and continue to learn stuff. Hopefully I can be a catalyst to get some more research done

because, you know, honestly, in my... The passion I have in this is, is this something that can help people from a health standpoint? And can we get some of these people that have these weird diseases that we don't have a good answer for? Maybe there's a way to help them fix it. And I think, you know, if the diet helps, then great. If it's some component of the diet, we can figure that out. And maybe doesn't everybody have to be on a carnivore diet, but maybe they need to do some version of that.

And they get the same benefit. I think that's going to be helpful in the long term. And I think it's, you know, important to continue to ask questions and not, you know, disregard stuff. You know, it's like, well, I don't have, I have scurvy. You know, when the dogma said you should have gotten scurvy, well, I'm not. So maybe we don't know everything and just continue pressing buttons and see what happens. And, you know, I guess I'll continue antagonizing veg't know everything. And just continue pressing buttons and see what happens. And, you know, I guess I'll continue antagonizing vegans. I think that's a full-time job.

No, I'm kidding. I don't, you know, just for the record, I don't care what diet you're on. If you're on a vegan diet, that's fine. If you try to push that on everybody else and guilt people and say they're murderers, I just disagree with that. I think there's a lot of, uh, uh, propaganda out there that, that is, is incorrect in my view. And, uh, you, you have a Facebook group that people can kind of reference and a website as well, right? Yeah. I mean, meatheals.com,

we just collect anecdotal stories where people that can get inspired to try the diet. You know, it's like, you know, it's categorized by, you know, arthritis and autoimmune conditions and mental health issues. People that have tried the diet, they've improved those things. I think those are helpful stories. Studies are important. We need to do those. But what inspires people often is just an anecdote. The reason Chris did the diet is because he saw me on Joe Rogan.

It's just an anecdote, and it benefited him. If stories and anecdotes help people to be inspired to do something, whether it's a flexible diet or whether it's just an anecdote and it benefited him. So if stories and anecdotes help people to be inspired to do something, whether it's a flexible diet or whether it's a carnivore diet, good for them. I think we shouldn't dissuade people from telling their stories. Both you guys. Yeah. But I think, you know, and if we can get the research to back it up, I mean, there's very little research out there on a carnivore diet. I mean, in all honesty, the only research on the carnivore diet that's been done has been very positive. I mean, if we

look at the totality of the research and it's, you know, the six peer-reviewed studies that came out in 1928 with Stephanson and Anderson when they did it for a year, and they found no deficiencies whatsoever. They were completely healthy. So we don't have a lot of research on that. So hopefully we can get some more. Maybe Kevin Hall's study will shed some more light on this. You know, see, because does it work for 1% of the population, 5% of the population, 50% of the population, or 80% of the population? I don't know right now. I'm in an echo chamber.

I can fully admit that. I do see people it doesn't work for, and I tell them don't try it. But at least there's a significant cohort of the population where it seems to work for. So that's, you know, that's where we're at right now. Both of you guys name-dropped Joe Rogan, so I'll say when I was on a show just to get it out of the way. There we go. Lane, what's coming up for you? What you got going on, buddy?

Well, I mentioned we're going to be releasing my, as an ebook, my new book, Fat Loss Forever, that's coming out. Peter Baker, myself, my co-author. Basically just going through. When's the book come out? two weeks oh there we go so it should be before christmas so just in time for everybody who feels nice and fat to lose it right we didn't time that time that at all but uh you know i'm really proud of it because i always learn the most about something when i go write about it so when i found out i was going to be on uh i was already starting to write it but when i when I found out I was going to be on, I was already starting to write it,

but when I found out, you know, I was going to be on Joe Rogan for a debate with Dom, I was like, well, this would be something great to write about because I'll actually learn a lot while I go into the debate by doing this stuff. Because you, I mean, we must have cited, I don't know how many papers we cited, but it has to be over 200 in the book that we've cited.

And basically kind of distilling down, first off, what matters? What really matters? What behaviors? Like who are the 5% of people who lose weight and keep it off? What can we learn from them? What can we learn from the people who fail? And then practically, how can you apply that to yourself? And we've been getting really good reviews from the experts we've sent out to.

In fact, get ready, Zealots. You're going to be so happy. We have a chapter on keto that was written by Dom and one of the students in his lab. And a portion of the proceeds from the book sales will actually go towards supporting research in Dom's lab. So all you keto people who think I hate keto, you're wrong. I just hate zealots. So take a shot. So I'm really excited about that.

I think it's going to be a big game changer for a lot of people. Dom just sent me his quote about the book. He looked through it and said that he thinks it's the best resource for anybody who wants to lose weight. Um, and then Jordan Syatt, who, uh, he trains Gary V. Jordan, I think he went a little bit too far, but he said, uh, it's better than doing a 40 year degree in nutrition was his quote. So, uh, I don't agree with that. I think that college is good. Stay in schools, kids. But I think that this is going to be a great adjunct guide for coaches or people who are just frustrated with all the bullshit in the industry. And they want to see, like, what does the research actually say?

So I think I'm hoping this helps a lot of people. Sounds like both you guys are coming from some different perspectives. But in the end, you both want to help people. That's what I'm seeing. Like you're writing a book about it. You're sharing a lot of stuff on IG. You're writing a book about it. You're sharing a lot of stuff on all over the internet, YouTube, on your Instagram.

I usually just yell at people. Yeah, I see you yelling at people here and there. Both of you guys, I see you, you know, throwing some jabs out there here and there at people. And sometimes it's rightfully so, because I see people attacking you guys as well. So you got to like, you know, put your dukes up, right? Yeah. I mean, you got to play the game. I mean, social media.

I mean, no one's going to, no one's going to get your message if they're not interested. And so some of it's just entertainment. I mean, quite honestly. And so I think that's, I mean, you know, honestly, I mean, the reason people follow you and Lane, because he got jacked and was a bodybuilder and a parlor, same thing with you. And arguably for me, people listen to you because you've done stuff. And because you, you say stuff that's a little controversial sometimes. It gets attention and then they can kind of follow the message and then they can say, well, this guy's a total idiot.

Or maybe I agree with some of what he says. Maybe there's some value there. I get a lot of that. Got anything else over there, Andrew? I had some stuff, but I'm a little nervous to spark up another debate of this and that or whatever. So I guess just... Limit us, just give us a timer. No worries. I guess what I will

ask, and you all three can answer at the same time, do vegetables kill you? No, they do not kill you. Thank you. Is more protein and less carbs good in general? I think more protein is good. I think if you're doing more protein, you'll probably do less carbs just by default. I think more protein is, in general. I think more protein is good. I think if you're doing more protein, you'll probably do less carbs just by default.

Yeah. I think more protein is in general, probably good. Cool. So we brought it full circle and we all, we all agree on the exact same thing. There we go. You know, uh, one thing I'll mention before

we sign off here is that, uh, carbs is a really interesting thing. Cause I think. Warren carbs. I think one, one person, when they say carbs, they're envisioning, you know, somebody might envision rice, potatoes, like a bodybuilder might envision that stuff. And then someone who follows more like a keto diet, when someone says carbs, they're thinking of like pizza and ice cream and all these different things. So we've got people talking

about different things. Anyway, this is a great podcast. Thank you guys so much for coming out. Appreciate the time you guys spent with us today. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. PhD anecdote. Take two shots. See you guys.