Mark Bell's Power Project - The Truth About Dietary Cholesterol On The Carnivore Diet - Shawn Baker || MBPP Ep. 1032

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

In episode 1032, Shawn Baker, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about cholesterol, how to easily lower it and things to think about when it comes to cholesterol on the carnivore diet. Follow Shawn on IG here: https://www.instagram.com/shawnbaker1967/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

They had, on average, been on a very low-carb, high-fat, like a ketogenic or carnivore diet for at least five years. Super high LDL cholesterol. And they compared these people to another healthy group that has low cholesterol. There was no difference. What's with this Oreo cookie study? He took his LDL cholesterol down from 384 milligrams per deciliter in three weeks of eating Oreo cookies down to 111. I think if you've got high cholesterol and you're metabolically healthy, does it make sense to lower your cholesterol?

Do you think it's necessary to also include like the beef organs and all that stuff? You know, my stance on that is they're not necessary. The argument that when an animal does get its prey, it will go for like the liver and the heart and all that stuff first. These animals are very lean. The only place they're going to find fat on those animals is going to be in their viscera.

Power Project family, we've had some amazing guests on this podcast like Kurt Engel, Tom Segura, Andrew Hooperman, and we want to be able to have more amazing guests on this podcast and you can help it grow by leaving us a quick rating and review on Spotify and iTunes. If you're listening to the podcast, just go ahead and give us a review. Let us know how you dig it and help the podcast grow so we can keep growing with y'all and bring you amazing information enjoy the show yeah last time we were here we had stan here so i kind of feel sad he's not well you already uh you already kicked his ass here to kick this deadlift record well i mean i will tell you that you know i i have to because i did a little bit of touch and go there, so it was kind of not. Oh, was he pausing each one on the ground or something?

Yeah, he paused, and I did that. He was taking breaks then. Well, he took a two-rep break on his, too. He did 23, and then he walked away for a second. His wife yelled at him. He did two more. Anyway, I'll call it at least a draw. You've got to set up stipulations because you're in the trap bar.

So at the very least, you can't step outside. You can't step outside step outside yeah he did step outside of the realm of the trap bar too i think you shouldn't be able to take your hands off the bar that's yeah that's good you have to sit there for like 10 minutes until you're next that's a good rule yeah and it's not not an advantage at that point when you're just hanging out down there but you got uh what 27 27 27 yeah last one was ugly definitely it's still impressive, man. Jesus. It's interesting, though, how everything was smooth. You got past 25, and once you got past 25, it was like 26 was like, that's where it started. Right, right.

You know what I mean? Well, that was my mental goal. It was a mental breakdown. Yeah. It is. You guys know who Tim Noakes is? I know the name, yeah. So Tim Noakes, he wrote The Law of Running.

Big exercise scientist guy. Among other things, he's now kind of a low-carb proponent. But one of the things he came up with is the so-called central governor theory of athletic performance. And so that's why you often see guys that are like world-class, like world records. And in that last 5%, they turn it on. They see the world records in their face, so they're able to raise their game. And so it doesn't seem to be that there's some sort of muscular failure

or whatever, lactic acid dose. There's all these different theories on what makes you give up, and it's really the brain. It's really the brain that makes you quit. And so you can see that's where it is. In my mind, I said I want 26, and I got to 26, and I was like, fuck it, I'm done. I'll do one more. But I think if the target was 27, I might where it is. In my mind, I said I want 26. And I got to 26. I was like, fuck it, I'm done. I'll do one more.

But, I mean, I think if the target was 27, I might have got 28. You know, it's just one of those things, right? That's one of those deals where it's always good to get around people that are, like, better than you. You know, it's a good idea to try your best to get around people that are better than you because then what's normal, you know know now is elevated to a different well i mean it's like when the you remember when the when the well you guys don't remember because before all of us but when the four minute mile was broken you know roger manister did that no one thought it was possible the second he did that it was like within a year like three or four other guys had done it so it was just like you know once you see what another human can do you're like okay well

he's got two arms and two legs just like me why Why can't I do that stuff? And that's like when I was first breaking world records on the rower, I saw the guy that had the record, and I'm like, he's not better than me. I'm better than you, objectively. It's like you put his face on the wall, and you're like, yeah, guess what? I got it. You can do that. So anyway, it's interesting. You were telling us some pretty cool stuff just a few minutes ago about cholesterol.

I think it'd be great if you could share it with all the listeners. I know you were on Joe Rogan recently, and I think some of the results of that study that you were talking about, they weren't out quite yet. I had known the results before I was going to the study. They wouldn't let you talk about them because it hadn't been officially published yet but basically uh so there's this theory that um and it's still a theory that you know most people will accept that high ldl cholesterol or apob over time leads to cardiovascular disease and that's what most people think and probably in most of the cases that's true however there's there potentially is this sort of group of people that are very lean and they are metabolically very healthy, no diabetes, no hypertension. They've got low triglycerides, high HDL, low inflammatory markers. They're very

lean typically in what they look like. Maybe they're very athletic, but their LDL cholesterol is very, very high. And the theory behind why that's occurring is because when our livers are relatively depleted of glycogen, so we're lean, we're not over, like most of us have too much energy. We have just too much energy stored in our tissues in the form of body fat or topped off liver glycogen. So in that situation, there's no real reason for your blood to be trafficking a lot of energy. But when you're in this really depleted state, so to speak, relative to glycogen, your liver says, hey, like the cells are out there saying, hey, guys, we're hungry. Feed us.

Feed us. And so what the liver does is it says, zoom, I'm going to send a bunch of fat your way to eat because there's no carbohydrate available. And so that's why this high amounts of cholesterol are seen in the blood. And the thought is, well, that's why it's occurring. And that's been shown in a number of studies. Now, that is why that's occurring. The question is, is that indeed harmful to us? And like I said, most cardiologists, most primary care physicians, most lipidologists

will say, yeah, we believe that it doesn't matter the situation, high LDL cholesterol or high OpoB means more heart disease. Well, this study that Matt Budoff has done at UCLA is starting to question that. And what they found out, they released their initial data. And so what they did is they took a hundred people in this situation who, whose average age was about 55. So they weren't young people. They were like, you know, my age, uh, sad to say that it's not young, but, but they, they, they had, they had on average been on a very low carb, high fat, like a ketogenic or carnivore diet for at least five years. And their average LDL cholesterol was in the top 1% of 1%. It was super high, like 2, 3, 4, 5, 600, super high LDL cholesterol. And they did a really high level

precision heart scan called a coronary CT angiography. So CAT scan with diet contrast in there. And they can tell very detailed, soft plaque, hard plaque, calcified plaque, uncalcified plaque, if they got any heart disease. And they compared these people to another healthy group that has low cholesterol. And guess what the difference was? There was no difference.

There was no difference at all, even though these guys had sky-high cholesterol. In fact, the people with the sky-high cholesterol, even though it wasn't significant, actually had less cholesterol, less plaque in their arteries.

And so that's interesting. So it's like that would be not what you'd predict. Now, the next part of that study, which will be done in February of this year, so in another month, is they're going to run these people for a year, super high cholesterol, and then re-scan them again. And if it shows no progression or even perhaps regression, like some of the plaque that they did have went away, then that will be really groundbreaking. So we'll know more information probably by the time they collect the data, write it up

and release it. It'll probably be this summer. So that's of interest because it may kind of put a little wrinkle in the way we think about cholesterol. It doesn't mean that everybody with high cholesterol can just ignore it. I mean, I never tell people that because people ask me all the time. Because there's people in the low-carb community that'll say, oh, you're low-carb, you're carnivore, don't worry about cholesterol. And I never tell people that.

I tell them, hey, look, that's something you need to get more information. At the very least, get imaging because it's so important to, like, not just look at risk factor, but look what's actually really going on so you have a better idea of what's going on. Because if maybe it doesn't affect you, maybe it does. And that's how I do it because that's what I did. I mean, I checked my heart scan when I was 52 uh it was zero which is good i'm going to do it again this year so when i'm 57 i'll do it you know maybe once every five years and make sure uh hopefully it's still zero we'll see i mean hope so i mean my my my heart seems still works pretty well i mean i can tell i can tell athletically that i've still got a pretty good

high output so that's and again vo2 max is correlated with atherosclerosis. So if you've got high VO2 max, you're less likely to have heart disease, which makes sense. Was there any correlation to ApoB as well in there? Well, ApoB, so LDL is one of the ApoB particles. And so ApoB is on every single lipoprotein, whether it's LDL, VLDL, IDL, lipoprotein little a, it LDL, VLDL, IDL, lipoprotein little a. It's all just a single molecule that's attached to every different type of lipoprotein that we have.

And so generally when LDL cholesterol is very high, then ApoB is going to be very high. They run together. I mean they're not exact and there's maybe slight variation. But if you've got super high LDL, you've got super high ApoB almost guaranteed. There's very, very few exceptions to that. So it's kind of the same thing. And then in some of these people you're just saying that the ApoB and or the cholesterol didn't result in

any extra calcification. Right, no soft plaque, no hard plaque accumulation relative to any of the other. And there was another study done in Denmark last year, Mortensen did that, where they looked at people with a zero coronary artery calcium scan. Some of you guys have heard about the CAC score, where you just, you know, you run a CT of your heart. And if you had a zero coronary artery calcification score,

and they followed them out for something called MACE, which stands for major adverse cardiac event. So that's a heart attack, that's a stroke, dropping dead or needing a bypass. The people that had zero calcium, it didn't matter if their LDL cholesterol was super low or super high. There was no difference in outcome. So we're seeing, like I said, maybe there's some nuance to this and that. Like I said, that's why it's important if you're over 40 to get some imaging on your heart to understand where you fall in that sort of spectrum.

What's with this Oreo cookie study? Yeah, so this goes back to this lipid energy model. And so this guy, his name is Nick Norwitz. He understands this lipid energy model. And this is proposed, like I said, if you're lean, if you're fit, if you've got low carbohydrate diet and your cholesterol goes up, it's because your liver is trying to traffic energy to your cells to nourish them. And he said, well, if that's true, then if I take in extra carbohydrates, I should be able to lower my LDL cholesterol. And so he said, well, I'm going to eat exactly the same,

do the exact same amount of exercise. I'm just going to add a dozen Oreo cookies a day to my thing. And he took his LDL cholesterol down from LDL of 384 milligrams per deciliter, which is ridiculously like super sky high. You know, your doctor's going to have a heart attack if he sees it high, right? He took it from that in three weeks of eating Oreo cookies down to 111, right? And he compared that to statins. And guess which did better? The Oreo cookies, by far, like by almost double the amount, had almost double the amount of effect of the statin.

So it just shows that this lipid energy model is actually true. That's why. Were these double stuffed? I think he ate a variety. Was the guy twisting one off and then stacking them? I mean, I would never do that. I think he did a variety pack. Like one week he did this kind of one,

and the next week he did this. I think. I can't remember the details. It'll come out in the paper. He's actually got a paper that's going to get published through Harvard. And Bill Cromwell, who is one of the leading lipidologists in the world, is actually the senior author on that paper. So it's a real sort of validating this whole lipid energy model.

That's why he did it, just to prove it. Like I said, if you have a theory, you should be able to predict. You should be able to make a prediction. He said, I predict eating Oreo cookies is going to drive my LDL cholesterol down. And sure enough, it did. And some other people have done something similar, but that's the first time I think it will get, I think it might be the first time it's going to get written up and published in a scientific paper. We're hoping to get Oreo cookies to advertise. Maybe on their box, they can say heart healthy Oreos. I'm surprised it doesn't say that already. It might. They will after this. Yeah, sure. I want to quickly go back to the first

study you were talking about. You said that that study was done in individuals that were 55 and above. The average age was 55, yeah. So they had some, so 45, 65, 70-year-olds, yeah. So it's older folks. So this is a heart attack range. You start seeing people having heart attacks and heart disease. Certainly 55 is clearly within that area. I think most people that have heart attacks tend to be in their early to mid-60s. But you're certainly developing atherosclerosis before that. It's a long, generally considered a long, long process. Got it.

And they're all in pretty decent shape too, right? Yeah. I mean, they all metabolically look good. So if you look at their lab, you say, oh, their cholesterol. I mean, you would say everything but their cholesterol looks really good. But their triglycerides were good. Their blood pressure was good. Their glucose was good, their inflammatory markers were good, their hypertension was good, all those things. So they were otherwise metabolically healthy because there's something called metabolic syndrome, which consists of high triglycerides, low HDL, high blood glucose, increased BMI, and increased hypertension.

So that's a classic definition of metabolic syndrome, which doesn't include cholesterol, by the way, which is kind of an interesting thing. So when you're not metabolically sick and your cholesterol is high and you're on a low-carb diet, it may indicate that you may not be as much risk for heart disease as we thought you were. So again, that's still, it's not solid yet, but the data is sort of pointing there. So we may have

some more information, which is exciting. So I'm wondering then, because they're metabolically healthy, a lot of people who are, let's say they're transitioning to trying out a carnivorous diet or eating more meat. They've probably watched all these documentaries and seen how like people say that meat isn't healthy, but these individuals that are coming from a place of being metabolically unhealthy, what do they need to be careful about as they start eating more meat, reducing the amount of carbohydrates they eat, potentially eating no carbs? There's probably more things they need to pay attention to because I imagine if someone's 50 pounds overweight, they have a good amount of body fat. Now they start eating a lot of fat and their habits haven't changed. There could be something that's not that great there.

Yeah. I mean, there's a transition period. So like the classic example, that would be gout, right? So gout, you know, gout, you know, swollen red toe, it's associated with uric acid. Interesting when you operate on people with gout, I operate on a lot of people with gout, particularly if something called gouty tophi where they get these big nodules that occur around their joints gouty tophi gouty tophi t-o-p-h-i so um you cut into it and it literally looks like crest toothpaste it squeezes out there it looks like toothpaste coming out of their skin and so i you know but i'm not gonna search it i am Mark gave me the look. Andrew, it's not that bad. Look it up. Andrew just turned yellow over there. Yeah, gouty toe-fi. But if you cut it,

I don't know if they have one where it's cut open because I used to do that surgically. Poor Andrew. But almost all of those patients always were metabolically healthy, unhealthy. They were like diabetes, prediabetes, things like that. So they always had this. So what happens is there's this transition period where you go from really metabolically healthy, and now you're adding all this meat and potentially uric acid and perhaps the cholesterol. So there's that overlap period where you have to sort of be cautious. And this is one of the reasons, one of the reasons, you know, we talked about our company, Rivera, having physicians to sort of, they can kind of manage that. So some of those people might for a period of time might consider mitigating things. Like if you're on gout, maybe you need

to be on your gout meds for a while, you know, because you're going to have this transition period until you become metabolically healthy. And for some people, maybe it takes a month or two. Some people might take six months or a year, you know, depending on where they're starting. So you have to be mindful of, you know, medications you might have to use, medications you might have to taper off, things of that nature. Oh, that is gnarly looking. Yeah. I don't know if they're going to suck it out.

Let's see. Yeah. Let's see. Let's see. I don't know if they're going to, I don't know if they're going to suck it out. Let's see. Yeah. Let's see. Let's see. I don't know. Are they going to squeeze it? Yep, they are. Sam would love this.

She loves pimple popping videos. Why do women love that? Does Andy like pimple popping videos too? Yeah. I mean, she's not obsessed with them, but she likes it. Yeah. Yeah. So they, yeah, she's got a pretty bunion there too, but I don't know.

Let's see. It usually looks like white toothpaste. Well, they got a lot of blood. There it is. There's the white one. Come on, squeeze that. Squeeze that. This was back when I was still painting my toenails.

This is, you know, when you do these surgeries, it's so like, it's like relieving. You're like, ah. You're squeezing all that stuff out. But this isn't a very good one because it's not coming out all nice and white. It looks like toothpaste. I mean, it's literally like, the first time I did that, I was like, wow, this is like toothpaste. It was really surprising.

So anyway. Yeah, we were talking about like it could be a possible transition period for people when they're trying the diet. And I love what you said earlier. Like you're not saying like, hey, man, don't worry about your cholesterol. You know, you're not saying any of that. But maybe the way that we look at cholesterol a lot of times is maybe we're throwing drugs at it a little early. Maybe we're doing things maybe a little prematurely. But some of the obvious stuff

is, are you exercising? Are you moving? Are you able to control your body weight? So, you know, if someone does have high cholesterol, what do you think like their next step would be for them? Like you're mentioning like that they shouldn't just, you know, I'm going all carnivore and they just, you know, are eating like a crazy person. Well, I mean, you know, at risk of pissing off a lot of people. I think if you've got high cholesterol and you're metabolically healthy, does it make sense to lower your cholesterol one way or the other, either through diet or medication?

Yeah, I think it does for a period of time, right? And it may be for a lifetime, depending. You know, I disagree with, you know, there's a new kind of a new, a growing thought within cardiology that, you know, atherosclerotic disease begins very early in life. And the lower we can get our cholesterol down,

the better. And some people are calling for our cholesterol should be what it is as an infant when we're neonates. So when we're babies, our LDL cholesterol is 20, right? And normally it's 180, 200, right? And there's a reason for that. One is the baby hasn't eaten anything yet, right? So there's, you know, all the nutrition is coming through the placenta. And so once they start eating, you know, there's, in fact, I just posted a study today. So when a baby begins eating within about two, three months, their LDL cholesterol goes from 20 to 200, right?

Or the total cholesterol goes from 20 to 200, which is kind of normal adult cholesterol. And it's higher when they're breastfed. So then if you're saying that, and their brains get bigger, by the way. They compare breastfed babies to non-breastfed babies, and the breastfed babies have a little bit bigger heads. So you could either say, well, breastfeeding is bad because it gives you dangerously high cholesterol and your brain swells. I'm clearly joking about that, right? Their brain is developing. It's growing.

And so we need this. And so for those people that are advocating that our cholesterol needs to be baby level, And so for those people that are advocating that our cholesterol needs to be baby level, and they're advocating this based on something called beta-hypocholesterolemia or something along those lines where it's a genetic disorder. They don't have a lot of cholesterol. They don't die early. But that's a very different situation. When you compare genetic disease to an environmentally induced things, they're not apples to apple, which a lot of people make this argument. And so I just worry about that, that we're going to start seeing that they're going to drive people's cholesterol so low, so early that, like for instance, we know that low cholesterol is associated with violence, suicidality, depression, all these things.

And so what happens when you start a 15-year-old kid and you drive his LDL cholesterol down to 50? What happens? We don't know-year-old kid and you drive his LDL cholesterol down to 50? What happens? We don't know. We don't know yet. So it could be that they become depressed and do something, some violent type of thing. So it's interesting to see that. So I think that it's still a – we've been studying cholesterol since 1915 or something like that.

We still haven't figured it out yet. So it's still evolving. It's still nuanced. And so I think there's – I mean here's the analogy. They say that – I mean it's, it's, you know, it's still evolving. It's still nuanced. And so I think there's a, you know, I mean, here's the analogy. Like they say that, well, I mean, it's true. If you, if you drive your cholesterol down to zero, you're probably not going to get heart disease. Good. Right. But let's just use another, another analogy. If you, if you're worried about sexually transmitted disease, you can always lop your penis off, right? You're not going to get a sexually transmitted disease most likely. Yeah. But I mean, Hey, what's the downside of that?

There's a downside. So I just worry that we're going to be perhaps harming people. We won't find out for 20 years until they've had some dementia or some... Because cholesterol also participates in our immune system. We need it as part of our immune

protection. And so there's reasons for it to be in our body. And if we artificially bring it down to a level that's never seen outside of newborn baby levels, is that a problem? they don't look bad. They look actually really, really good. These are the new boots. These are their Modus trainers for in the gym. These are some of their casual shoes. But when you look at a lot of barefoot shoes, some people get turned off because they don't want to wear those shoes outside. And that's understandable. That's very understandable. But with Vivo, these shoes look so good and they're so good for your feet that they're almost a no-brainer. So, well, they are a no-brainer. Andrew, how can they get some of these kicks? Yes, you guys got to head over to

vivobarefoot.com slash powerprojects and you guys will receive 15% off your order. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerprojects. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I just got a little sidebar to add, just my own personal kind of, I guess you'd say like adventure with carnivore and keto and all these different things. I think it's good to be, it's always good to be mindful of just general

health practices. You know, getting your sleep, walking, having some sort of fitness level. You don't have to be a fitness freak or anything like that, but just the basics, the old school basics, I think always apply. And so if you're going to go all in on a keto diet or a carnivore diet, just be really mindful if you're binging. Like if you're having a hard time, because most of the people that are choosing these diets are people that really had a rough time, a rough go of it with previous diets. And it might take them six months. It might take them a year, three years, five years. Sometimes, like with my cousin, it took him about four or five years to really be able to lock this diet down and to lock it in. And now he's in great health and he's like 190 pounds.

But I think sometimes in that process, in that beginning phase, you'll see somebody, they're eating a lot of saturated fat. And then three days later, they're just eating like a standard American diet. And I think that's where you start to get in a real dangerous territory, especially if you're gaining weight. So just be really mindful. And I would say that people that are trying the carnivore diet for the first time, if you find yourself, you know, you're doing it for three days and you're off it for three days, you're going back and forth, just maybe see if you can bring, I know the black and white really helps people. They like being like, I'm carnivore, but I'm just kind of recommending maybe you could just give yourself a little bit more options that are still within the realm of general

good health practices, like eating some fruit, maybe eating some vegetables, having a couple other things in there so you don't lose your mind. i mean that's a very fair comment and you know as a couple of points you know obviously i'm known for the i'm the carnivore guy right everybody but i mean carnivore yeah i mean or certainly one of the carnivore guys i mean i was the guy that wrote the book the first book on that but and i was the guy that wrote the book on it i'm literally the guy that wrote the book on the carnival diet. But there's, you know, I think, you know, when we talk about like healthy aging, the thing that distinguishes people that age well and those don't are the guys that train. I mean, that to me is the most important distinguishing factor because you can be on any diet. And if you just sit on your ass and don't do anything, you're not going to age as well as those people that are out there doing stuff.

And I know there's people out there saying, oh, you shouldn't train hard when you're older. And I completely reject that premise. I think it's ridiculous. I mean, you should be doing as much as you're capable of for as long as you're possibly able to do it. Because you're going to, you know, I'm not training for what I'm doing. I'm training for when I'm 80.

You know, like I know other people have talked about this. I don't want to be the guy at the airport, you know, driving around in a wheelchair, you know, when I'm 70. You know, like you see those people that can't even carry their bags. So you don't want to be that person. I mean, I mean, you know, not, not that those people are bad or anything, but if you can avoid that, you should.

But as far as, you know, your point, I mean, probably 90 plus percentage of people that end up doing a carnivore diet will eventually end up on some sort of hybrid carnivore plus not junk food, which I think is a great diet, by the way. I think that, you know, the real killer of Western society is all this ultra-processed junk that we're consuming. And, I mean, I know there are people that push back on that, say, well, some ultra-processed food is fine, and we shouldn't demonize any food. I think there's clearly foods that we should not be eating.

I mean, you know, they taste good, sure, but we really don't have much business eating those things. And I think the's clearly foods that we should not be eating. I mean, they taste good, sure, but we really don't have much business eating those things. And I think the dieticians that are saying there's no bad foods, I think that's a problem. I mean, I think there are bad foods. I think there's foods that if you eat with any degree of frequency, you're going to have problems. And they become addictive, and they are clearly designed to be made so. I mean, I've literally had people from the food industry coming up to me and saying, I worked in the food industry my whole life. I was a food chemist. My job was to make food addictive.

I feel so bad about what I've done in my career, and I want to come work for your company and stuff like that. But not Oreos. It brings down your own health. No, not Oreos. Oreos are good because they bring down your health. But everything else is bad. But I mean, it's, you know, so I think that, you know,

again, there is this cult-like behavior within the carnivore community, like the vegan, like any, really, even the cowries in the Cowrie Out tribe, it's a cult in a way. And I think, you know, I mean, because it's only about cowries. Well, wait a minute, man. There's other things that go on besides that. I think there's a lot of nuance behind all this stuff. And I think that, I mean, yes, it's easy when you say it's very, like right now I'm on strict, as strict carnivores you can possibly be. And for me, I like it. I've been doing it for a long time. I feel better that way. But when I tell people, hey, use variety, use spices,

use dairy products, use whatever you need to make it. Yeah, because I mean, again, if you don't like the food or you're bored or you're hungry, you're going to fail. I guarantee it that that's not a recipe for success. You know, so, so at the beginning, if you're going to fail. I guarantee it. That's not a recipe for success. You know, so at the beginning, if you're going to do this, you know, you transition in, you use some variety, maybe you have to taper it down. I mean, I think it's helpful. Like you've done, you know, fairly strict carnivore for a period.

It's helpful to teach you about your body. And then you can kind of figure out, well, yeah, I can handle this or I can't handle this. And either you can handle it from any side effects it may cause you or you can just handle it mentally. You know, like I said, there's some people that they can't handle having to have a scoop of ice cream. That's that, that ain't going to work for them. You know, cause this scoop ends up, you know, I remember the, remember the Ben and Jerry's where the fun size, what's this a fun size bar? I can have one of those. I'm going to eat three or four of those

damn things. You know, it's kind of like, you know, I mean, you know, we all get it cause we're big guys that can eat a lot if we want to. But yeah, so I mean, I agree with your point 100%. I think ultimately, I mean, what I hope to, you know, through after all this is said and done, and you know, whatever, you know, my life is not, I hope that we learn that meat is actually a health food and it's not to be demonized and sort of, you know, eliminated because there's a lot of people out there who want to eliminate and take away our ability to eat that or make it so expensive that no one can afford or put ranchers out of business or whatever the method they're trying to do. And I hope that we learn that meat, and particularly to include red meat,

is actually a health food, and it's something that we should feature heavily in our diets. I mean, I think that is a fair statement. If some people need to go carnivore, and I do think there are people, specifically as a physician, I'm not really worried about jack dudes, you know, getting healthy, you know, doing whatever

and looking good in a bikini. I'm interested in people that are suffering and sick, you know, autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, you know, food addiction, diabetes. Those people, I think carnivore is uniquely powerful.

And either for doing it for three months, six months, a year, whatever, those people, I think carnivore is uniquely powerful. And either, either for doing it for three months, six months, a year, whatever, you fix them and then let them figure out where they want to fall after that. And so that's, I think there's a distinction there because I know there's people that are like, I'm on team carnivore and I'm never going to, like every time someone, they start carnivore, they're three weeks in, they're like, oh, I feel the best I've ever felt in my life. I'm never going back. And I always say, you know, don't ever say never, because you don't know what's going to happen. to happen. I don't know if I'm ever – I'm eight years in. I don't know if I'll do it the rest of my life. Maybe I will.

Maybe I won't. I'm not going to, you know, pigeonhole myself into that. But, I mean, I think it is a very fair statement to say that, you know, there are good healthy diets that are not carnivore. You know, I think meat is a health food for sure, though. I think that's something we need to understand. And hopefully more of that's going to come out. It's more – because more people are seeing i think the the nice thing about this is um people are starting to realize that wait a minute you know they're you can't you've got to be living

under a rock if you if you don't see the continuous media push that everybody needs to go plant-based i mean i see that all day long every time i open up google in the headlines plant-based this plant this, plant-based that, you know, it's just like, oh, come on, guys. You know, it's just this never-ending barrage of this messaging. And, you know, sometimes you've got to, like, question the message because why do they keep telling me this? You know, what's the ulterior motive? You know, it's interesting. There's a study. So I'll show you.

Here's another example of this. So there was a study that came out in 2021. It was done by Kevin Hall through, I think it was funded through the NIH. And it was, it was a metabolic ward study, high quality, randomized control trial. They put people on a low fat plant-based diet for two weeks, and then they put them on a high fat animal-based diet for two weeks. And they compared who ate more food, right? Because, you know, a lot of people say keto makes me full it's it shuts down my appetite and the results of that study showed guess what the low-fat diet had a better outcome they ate less food right and that was published in something like 75 news major news outlets picked it up and

covered it and showed it all over the world it was on every feed for two years well these other researchers came back and they reanalyzed the data and said wait a minute the order that you put them in a diet had an even bigger effect because there's this metabolic carryover. So when you go on a – like one of the criticisms is when you go on – there's this adaptation phase that occurs, right? So when you go on a low-carb diet, it takes your body a while to adapt. There are enzymes that have to be upregulated. There are cell types in your gut that have to change. It takes two, three, four weeks for that to occur.

And then when that occurs, it takes another couple weeks for it to change back, right? You can't just, you know, day one, day – because every time you switch from one diet to another, there's a shock to your system, right? So what they found out is that if you start out on a low-carb diet, no matter what the outcome was, you always did better overall eating less calories. So it was actually the metabolic carryover effect that had a much, much bigger effect. But the original researchers didn't account for that. They didn't publish on that. So it actually showed that their conclusions were wrong. So they reanalyzed it and just published it.

And that study got zero attention from the media, none. And so on social media, we got it up there. We got to be up and talking about it. So it's up there. So there's a sort of an impact score that the journals have we got the impact score up high only because people that are interested actually talked about the media's head didn't want to hear about it because it's like wait a minute what are you saying that you know plant-based isn't better we can't we can't talk about that so there is a clear bias that's going on here and that's that's a shame unfortunately

i know that with rivero you've helped people like reverse diabetes and do a bunch of things as you mentioned um now when you have people go on a carnivore diet and when people are transitioning to a carnivore diet we had stan on recently and some other people and they're talking about you know being careful about your saturated fat intake do you think is this something that someone needs to keep in mind when they're going on a carnivore diet and eating fattier cuts of meat or if they're on strictly carnivore can they kind of, is it okay? Well, I think that, first of all, let me just clarify on Rivera. Rivera is not strictly a carnivore company. We will use that when necessary. But I mean, we're going to tailor

a diet based upon, like if somebody just needs to lose weight, they don't need to go on carnivore. They might. I mean, they might end up going there. But I mean, there's certain conditions where we'll say, okay, this is probably more minimal to a carnivore diet. But when it comes to saturated fat, I think one thing, and our good friend Lane will tell you, caloric excess. Are you in a calorie surplus or not? And so I think— Why do we all kind of laugh a little bit when we see our good friend Lane? I chuckled.

I don't consider him an opponent or anything like that. I disagree with some of this stuff. I don't consider him an opponent or anything like that. I like weight. I disagree with some of this stuff. But I mean, certainly, you know, one of the things about a carnivore diet is, again, there's that satiety effect. So you tend not to overeat saturated fat because you just get full. So I think some of that's there. Now, this is interesting. There's going to be a meta-analysis that's coming out very soon. It hasn't been published yet, but it's going to show that, again,

saturated fat may not be the biggest predictor of raising cholesterol in certain situations. So it may or may not be the saturated fat. Now, if it is the saturated fat, certainly you can do things within a carnivore diet. If my focus is, hey, I'm worried about my LDL cholesterol and I'm still significantly metabolically unhealthy and I might want to keep my LDL cholesterol in check, obviously there's medication out. But within the diet, you could

eat more monounsaturated fat. Most people don't know that, but the number one fat in beef is actually monounsaturated fat. It's about 46 to 44 or something like that. Does it matter if it's grass-fed? It does. It does. In fact, grass-fed has lower monounsaturated fat than grain-fed, which is kind of an interesting, which I know the grass-fed people will be mad about that. But I mean, there's other reasons that grass-fed isn't perhaps nutritionally superior. But I mean, and you know, it depends on where the fat is, you know, like marbled fat, like intramuscular marbling, like Wagyu is actually very high in monounsaturated fat you know if you take a piece of if you take a piece of wagyu and you put like

a really fatty like an a5 wagyu it almost melts when you touch it right yes because it's not it's not saturated because it's more monounsaturated fat so that's why wagyu is a very high monounsaturated fat uh particularly the real you know really marbled stuff and so yes it does make a difference i was looking this up the other other day because there's just these weird things I learned. Actually, the cuts of meat actually vary in their amino acid concentrations, which I thought would be pretty similar, but like short ribs were higher in glycine than some of the other cuts. But in general, you're eating a whole damn cow anyway,

and you'll get it all eventually, hopefully. I want to just stop you for a second and go back to this idea of grass-fed, grass-finished may not be superior nutritionally. Well, I mean, it depends on what your definition is. I mean, you know, obviously, I mean, grass-finished clearly has more, let's say, like CLA conjugate, a little like acid, which is correlated with protection for heart diseases. Higher in omega-3 amounts, and the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is a little bit higher. It's got, like, more vitamin E, and it's got a few other compounds.

They're there. And particularly, you know, this is the other thing that most people don't know, that, you know, we hear about, like, phytonutrients, right? Oh, phytonutrients, phytonutrients in the plant. Beef actually has phytonutrients in it. In fact, it has, in some cases, a more diverse phytonutrient profile

than a lot of the plants we have, and they're more bioavailable. In fact, the work of, there's a guy named Stephan Van Vliet. He's at Utah State right now. He used to be at Duke. They did analysis on beef, and beef has something like 70,000, not 20, but 70,000 unique nutritional compounds, most of which we have no idea what they do, but many of them are phytonutrient. So if a cow's out there grazing in a field, particularly if they have a diverse forage, if they're out in the mountains eating

flowers and weeds and stuff we can't eat, there's stuff that we, you know, you and I can't eat grass. I mean, there's a, you know, the silicate content of grass makes it tear our stomachs up, so we can't eat it, but it has a different nutrient profile. So when you, so those cows actually eat it and it's incorporated into their, into their fat and some of their other tissues. And so we actually get poly,we can get polyphenols. We can get other phytonutrients from beef. That's why it's a pretty complete food. That's why I haven't died of nutrient deficiency, even though—I mean, literally, my diet for the last eight years is, without exaggeration, it's probably been 98% beef.

I mean, occasionally I'll have some eggs. Occasionally I'll have, you know, whatever, some dairy products and things like that. Every once in a while I'll have a piece of birthday cake like I mentioned. But, you know, so I mean it's – but I mean the issue with the grass-fed versus grain-fed finish, and I'm certainly a fan of the message of regenerative agriculture. We need to promote diversity, and I think that's great. And I promoted those guys and talked to those guys that do that. And I think we should do more of that for sure. But here's a but.

The studies we have on humans so far looking at grass finish versus grain finish have not been compelling one way or the other. Because I see people all the time, they say they can't afford it. They go to Walmart and they buy the big old tube of ground beef. That's all they can afford. And they reverse their diabetes and they get healthy. And so I'm like, well, hey, that works. So I don't tell people to stress too much about that. Now, at the same time, I think we need to support our ranchers.

We need to support our local ranchers. We need to, as meat eaters, we need to promote the sustainability of it as well. And so that's why I, you know, I try to be as honest about the message as I can because, I mean, to tell people you're not going to get healthy unless you eat grass-finished beef is dishonest in my view. So I don't want to put that out there. And so I think we need to start with that and say beef is a health food. And then if we can make it environmentally better, then we should do that as well. Is it less harmful having grass-fed, grass-finished regenerative agriculture? Is it less harmful to what, the environment?

The environment, yeah. I think that argument can be made in a way, I mean, for sure. I mean, I think there's enough evidence for that. I think it's certainly, I mean, there's evidence that it restores biodiversity, which I think is a good thing. I mean, you know, you can see these guys like the Will Harrises and the Gay Browns and the Joel Salathans and all these guys that everybody's probably heard of or some of these people have heard of you know you go on their property and

there's birds and bees and you know little little dung beetles and cute little you know deer and everything running around whereas you go to a uh maybe a more industrial place and there's nothing particularly like crops you know like if you if you if you go to a field of strawberries there's nothing growing inside strawberries everything else has been nuked i mean there's nothing that can that can live. And so, so, I mean, this is the whole argument about this sort of, you know, vegan diet. I don't, nothing's dead, nothing's dead on my plate. Well, I'm like, wait a minute, you know, you guys have seen that, have you guys ever seen that Will Smith meme where it's like the vegans go, no, there's no, no, my, my, my meal has nothing dead and you got Will Smith doing this and there's like butterflies and it's hilarious meme it's just fun maybe you can maybe i can find it and you can find that but i

mean it's a it's a it's a it's a funny thing but but yeah i mean it's i do think we should probably as much as the landscape will allow like some places it's not practical like we're like will harris is in in bluffton georgia which is on his bridge where it's just perfect location joel salafin's in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. You know, there's places where it's amenable and there's places, there's somebody who lives in a desert in, you know, West Texas. And it's like harder to do that and make it work.

Or there's somebody up in Northern Montana where it's, you know, six feet of snow. And it's like, well, you can't, I can't graze my cattle in this. I got to feed them, I got to feed them hay or something else. So, I mean, yeah, but I mean, I think, I can't graze my cattle in this. I've got to feed them hay or something else. So, I mean, yeah. But, I mean, I think I am a fan of that stuff,

and I think we should do more of it where we can. There's a guy named Alan Williams at Joyce Farms out in Alabama, and he's done calculations that if we could convert something like 40% of our pasture land into, you know, regeneratively grazed land, then we could offset all of our carbon, all of it, not just cattle emissions, but transportation, energy emissions. So the cow, the way we raise food has potentially a big impact if we're worried about this sort of climate stuff, which, again, I'm not there saying it's not a thing, but we may

be overreacting a little bit to some of the things they want us to do, and it may not make sense. Yeah, the cows always get blamed, but there's carbon emissions from all kinds of stuff we're not thinking about even our pets right right well yeah i mean there's 70 what is it i think there's 70 million cats and dogs in the u.s and they consume like enough food for 70 million people or something like that and i think um the interesting thing is like for instance um we know like the greenhouse gas emissions for the cattle sector you know cattle specifically is about two two and a half percent every year in the u.s the health care sector is anywhere between four and ten percent depending on what study it means you

read so like i said if you want to decrease your impact on the environment don't be sick stay healthy right so i'd rather have you know rather rather than killing a bunch of cows let's just have healthier people that would be a better solution in my view. So it's obviously a very nuanced discussion. I was just looking at these stats on – they talk about this – you know that new – not game changers, twin changers. Yeah, you are what you eat. Yeah, you are what you eat documentary. You got Pat Brown who is the CEO or former CEO.

He got fired as CEO because his message was killing him. Impossible. He came out in 2019 and said, we are going to put the agricultural industry out of business by 2035, right? There's going to be no more cows left on the planet. That's his mission. And people push back against that. And no one's buying that sort of fake, nasty stuff. It sits on the shelves and expires and then goes in the bargain basement bin.

But he was on there saying that every time you eat a steak, a puff of clouds goes up, a puff of smoke goes up in the Amazon, which is total garbage. I mean, the steak I ate last night came from Kansas. I know it wasn't from the Amazon, you know? But I mean, the interesting thing is this is something they don't talk about a lot.

Like the cows, traditionally cattle were grazing in southern Brazil, in different, like Sa paulo and some of these areas where they had a lot of grazing and guess what happened they started planting all this sugar to produce mostly mostly biodiesel uh for europe and so they took all these sugar cane places and they knocked out like 75 of the land that was planted for sugar used to be cattle grazing here and the cows had to go somewhere so like where are we going to put our cattle? So now they're cutting out some Amazon to do that. Even though the deforestation rates are dramatically lower

than they were in the 80s. They used to be like that, and now they're down here. So again, it's all this, you know, kind of appeal to emotion, not really, they don't tell you the whole story, which is typical. I mean, they leave a lot of the information out there, which kind of can be very misleading. And obviously, it's a good documentary as far as it's going to cause some people to go vegan.

I'm sure of it. And then six months later or six weeks later, they're going to like, yeah, that didn't work. I'm sick or something. I'm going to get them. And they're going to be in my carnivore community going, ah, vegan diet messed me up. So anyway, it's interesting stuff. Has the carnivore diet been more or less accepted since, let's say, your first time being on Rogan? Oh, way more accepted.

Yeah. And you know, the first time I went on Rogan, I'm sitting there telling him about how I eat all meat. He's looking at me like Mark did the first time. What the fuck's wrong with you, dude? It's like I had a third eyeball, right? He was looking at me like, what the fuck's wrong with you, dude? It's like, like I had a third eyeball, right? It was like, look at me like, what a weird freaking dude this dude is. This time when I went on there,

I mean, he was like, pragging on before I even had a chance to talk about it. He was like, man, everybody I talked to has been on it, does great. So I mean,

obviously the level of acceptance, and he's obviously bought into it to a degree that he does it to himself and he recommends it to his friends and things. I think he's doing a little carnival month this month. So I mean, yeah, I mean,

the overall level of acceptance has gone up tremendously. It's still fringe, and we're still nutty, right? I mean, we're still in the 1%, but that 1% is better than it used to be, the.0001%. So it's changing. And I think, you know, the nice thing about that Rogan appearance is it kind of, when he out there, when he was, you know, he kind of gave it a pretty full-throated endorsement if you listen to it. He was like, this really works well.

That has had a tremendous impact on a lot of other people that were kind of wondering about it. Because, you know, I basically called out the beef industry. You know, there's this thing called the beef checkoff, right? And everything has a checkoff. There's the hog checkoff, the corn checkoff, the soy checkoff, the beef checkoff. And they get money every year. So all all the producers kicking a dollar every time a cow moves so they get like 50 million dollars a year to promote beef and the last thing they did that you can remember was beef it's what's for dinner i don't know if you guys remember that that

commercial it was 1992 robert mitchum you remember they played uh that aaron copeland it's what's for dinner right that was on there on there. And since then, you haven't heard much. You don't really see much national advertising. And so I'm like, and since that time, since 1985 when the checkoff came in, beef consumption in the United States has gone down like 30%. I mean, we used to eat, back in 77, we used to eat 92 pounds a year on average. Now we eat like 55 pounds a year. So the average American eats like two ounces of beef a day, which is a tiny amount. They're trying to blame all your ills on a two ounce piece of beef.

I mean, come on, man. We're eating 70% ultra processed food. That's the real problem that, you know, they're kind of reluctantly starting to admit. But you guys saw the USDA. Again, I talked about this on Rogan. They came out with a study that said we can do a 91% ultra processed food diet and it can be healthy. Like bullshit. But that's what they're positioning it to. Oh, and by the way, take our Zempix shots and all of our drugs so you don't die type of stuff. Yes, that's why I asked because it seems like before people didn't have a thing to point at and be like, that's unhealthy, right?

The carnivore diet wasn't too popularized until you came around and started, you know, well, you have the book on it and stuff. So it seems like now it's kind of like the easy thing for people to attack when it comes to like, oh, the environment or, oh, people are getting sick. It's the meat. And it just, to me, it seems like I don't remember really ever, I guess I do a little bit in like elementary school being recommended to eat six ounces of meat per day or something like that. But I don't remember anybody like really trying to like kill like the meat industry, like the way, like what's going on today. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's the veneer is save the environment, help your

health. The reality is they want to expand their market share. I mean, the beef industry is a big market. I mean, it's like a $1.3 trillion market annually worldwide. And if they can get you to do meatless Mondays, that's 14% of that market, right? That's a lot of money. You're looking at a $100 billion a year industry. So yeah, people want a piece of that.

And all these investors in Silicon Valley invested in plant meat. They're investing in this, you know, Frankenstein lab meat. Some of them are losing their shirts on that because they're like, it's not panning out. But I mean, they're, they're pumping all this money because they've got all this, they've got all this capital that they've invested in there and they're wanting that. So there's the marketing campaign. It's not about saving the environment. It's not about making you healthy. It's about making those guys and their shareholders, you know, some, some, some dollars, some, some, some money. So, so we're going to continue to see that. And hopefully, you know, call, you know, people with common sense will, will sort of prevail. And that's, you know, hopefully what

we're, we're, we're getting that done and accomplished. What about some of the stuff you hear with like blue zones and stuff like that uh yeah well i mean so again uh this is sort of you know again this is sort of selective you know for one uh we know that you'll never hear me saying the carnivore diet is going to make it a little longer because i don't know no one really knows i mean all the longevity stuff i'm like who knows i mean it's it's all you can pay all this extra money for these fancy supplements and programs and you you're still going to die when you're going to die, most likely. I mean, yeah, obviously, stay in shape. Don't get fat.

Don't be weak. You know, don't be weak. Don't be fat. You know, that type of stuff. Don't drink and smoke a bunch, and I think you're going to be fine. But, I mean, as far as these blue zones go, you know, so it's multifactorial for one. We know that. You know, some of these blue zones are very, very genetically isolated.

Like, they're all the same people, they all have the same genetics uh you know like if i were to move to okinawa it probably would make no impact on my life expectancy because i've got whatever i mean part of it's genetic obviously um but they saw they selected out certain blue zones and they will say that they're plant-based when in reality they're certainly not vegan they're definitely not vegan i mean in fact the one the funny one is like okinawa so they they said okinawans live on They will say that they're plant-based when in reality, they're certainly not vegan. They're definitely not vegan. I mean, in fact, the funny one is like Okinawa. So they said Okinawans live on these purple sweet potatoes, right? And so it was interesting because that was based on a survey that was done in 1949.

Well, there was something that happened right before 1949 that some people may remember called World War II where we destroyed Okinawa. And literally 30 percent of the island was wiped out. Before World War II, there were something like 150,000 pigs on Okinawa. That got wiped down to a few hundred. So they were basically starving. And actually, there's an interesting sort of, I don't know, a video or a book about in Hawaii, because a lot of the japanese immigrants from from okinawa were in hawaii they're sending pigs back to okinawa after world war ii to beef up their pig supply by the 1960s they had restored that so that data was kind of based on a weird time it's like right after world war ii that's not what we normally eat uh but just as importantly i mean there's other places

around the world like we hear about loma l Linda all the time. It's this vegetarian Seventh-day Adventist society near San Francisco. And they're very wealthy and they're religious and they don't smoke and they don't drink and they eat a, quote-unquote, plant-based-ish diet. Only about 15 percent of them are actually vegetarian. And they live a long time. And, you know, it goes to what we were saying. They exercise. They don't drink. They don't smoke.

They have good social connections, on and on and on. And, well, you can look at the Latter-day Saints, popularly the Mormons. Same sort of situation, but they're not vegetarian. They live just as long. So it's not really so much the diet. I can point to places like Hong Kong, where they eat more meat than— in Hong Kong, they average something like a pound and a half of meat a day, which is a lot.

That's a lot of meat. That's one of the highest places in the world. And they live the longest and they have the highest IQ in the world. So it's like, you know, you know, you can go to Iceland. Iceland has one of the highest rates of male centenarians,

guys that live over a hundred. And guess what doesn't grow in Iceland? You know, broccoli and bananas and mangoes i mean they're on a frozen rock in the north atlantic basically and i mean when i went to iceland i visited iceland you know iceland's a home of thor bjornson and all the big viking guys right and you know crossfit champions all this they got good athletes for a tiny little country they put out a lot of athletes but they live a long time too when i went over there i was talking about

carnivore diet and i goes yeah, there's nothing else to eat here. I mean, there's like fish, and there's a few animals they brought over, but they don't grow anything. The only thing they used to import was grain from Denmark, and they basically fed that to their animals. And that's how they live from, you know, I think the Iceland was started back around 900 A.D. They had some Irish slaves, by the way. They brought their Irish slaves over there to do that. But, I mean, that's, you know, how they started. So they get it.

And so there's a lot of people over there that are like, yeah, carnival makes sense for us. You know, so it's, so the blue zones are depending on who you're, it's kind of like the Ansel Keys data where you pick seven countries and you ignore the other 20. It's like, well, there's a lot of blue zones that are, like Hong Kong's got 7 million people. That's more than all the blue zones added up.

There's, you know, that's way more. And so you've got 7 million people that are living longest in the world. They eat the most meat in the world. Of course they say, well, it's not the meat. It's gotta be some other factor. But when you talk about the other blue zones, it's all about the purple sweet potatoes.

It's like, no, it's probably something else. Pat Proctor and I, we talk about beef and meat all the time on the podcast. That's why we partnered with certified piedmontese beef but did you know this that 85 percent of all grass-fed grass-finished beef in the united states is imported from other countries 85 but certified piedmontese is made in the u.s of a america america fuck yeah so go ahead and get some of the best tasting some of the leanest some of the best beef from piedmontmontese. Andrew, how can they get it?

Absolutely. So you guys can head over to cpbeef.com and check out enter promo code power to save 25% off your entire order. And if your order is $150 or more, you get free two day shipping. Again, cpbeef.com links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Fuck yeah. shipping again cpbeef.com links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes you know the funny thing about the blues i'll just think there's the netflix documentary too there are all those factors you talked about like the social stuff um people walking a lot i think in like italy there was a lot of hills so these people are walking up hills they're still kneading dough with their hands in terms of the woman there's there's all this physical activity but i have this kind of like bro theory where like if you're someone who isn't active at all and you're going to be sedentary, it might not be a bad idea to do a plant-based diet. And you'll slowly degrade probably.

But at the same time, it'd be potentially better than having a meat-based diet because you're doing nothing. But if you're someone who's going to be walking and you want to be active and you want to build muscle because on the Twin Studies documentary, You Are What You Eat, every single twin that was on an omnivorous diet had gained way more muscle than the twin on the vegan diet. Like the two black guys, the one black dude gained seven pounds of muscle in two weeks or in eight weeks and the other one was two pounds of muscle in two weeks or in eight weeks. And the other one was 2 pounds muscle.

Every single one fared better. So if you're going to be an active person living a vital type, a virile lifestyle, you probably want to eat some meat. Yeah, that reminds me. There's a researcher, Jose Antonio. I don't know if you know who Jose is. Absolutely. Yeah, so Jose has talked about it. I've interviewed him before, and it was kind of funny because he was like, you know, we've done these studies with protein.

We feed these guys 500 grams a day. Yeah, he's been big on the protein stuff for years. Right, and I asked him about what does he have to do about sedentary because I could care less about sedentary people. He's like, and I kind of agree. If you don't lift, you don't count.

Yeah, exactly. I think, again, I spend every day talking to people and some of them are really sick and obese and they can't do much. I tell them, hey, straighten out your diet first, get you not so inflamed, and then get moving. Yeah. Because I think more than even, you know, we all like to work out and lift and get strong and run and sprint and, you know, whatever. I think the biggest thing you can do is not be sedentary.

That's step one. That has a bigger impact than training hard. Now, again, there should be a progression. I mean, you know, I think Peter Atiyah talks about this. I'm sure you've interviewed him, I'm sure. You know, you don't have to be the world champion, but you need to be in the top third. And that bar is not that high these days because you look around, what's in the top third? I mean, when I look around at other guys that are my age, I'm like, it ain't hard to be in the top third.

I saw somebody put an elite deadlift for age, And it was like, it was like, cause I'll be 60 soon. They said to be elite as a deadlifter at 60, you have to deadlift three 55. I'm like, come on, man, that's not elite. But I mean, but, but I mean, you know, realistically, when you look at the population, there's probably most guys that are over 60, can't pull over 300 pounds. Probably a lot of them can't even pull over 200 pounds. So it's like, you know, the bar has gotten so low. You know, I honestly believe, you know, particularly with the resources we have in this country, there's no reason we shouldn't be a nation of just jacked and tanned savages. I mean, really.

I mean, we could be if we wanted to. And that's kind of a shame. You know, maybe, you know, if like the next president gets crazy and makes me the Surgeon General, we're going to have a jacked and tanned society. So anyway. Yeah, I think our idea of fitness, the idea of just going to the gym I think is a decent idea, but it's a turnoff to a lot of people you know so i think hopefully over time people can start to learn to you know either pick up a sport or some sort of activity or just figure out ways to just implement a little bit of something like it doesn't have to be you don't think you have to train all the time but you know go on a walk with a weight vest or just you know there's like low-hanging fruit yeah i

mean i talk to people like you know particularly if somebody has a sedentary job, I'm always thinking, if I'm sitting, could I be standing? If I'm standing, could I be walking? And just that simple dichotomy. It's just like, because, you know, we're doing this podcast standing. A lot of people do them sitting. I stand all day long. And as you notice, like, I'm doing this.

My arms are moving around. I'm shifting side to side. I'm expanding, you know, energy. Whereas I'm sitting in a chair, it's like Andrew's just sitting on his ass like a lump right he can't do anything this is true that's why it's so hard it's hard to sit and not like look fat so you know you gotta always like move your clothes around move your body around yeah you get you get bent over all your things don't look so good yeah you. You straighten out a little bit better. Yeah. But I know, I don't disagree that, you know, depending where you're starting, I mean, um, just getting active is such a big win. I mean, it is probably, I mean, you're going to, if you're sedentary,

going from sedentary to non-sedentary is going to give you more life expectancy and more life quality than going from, you know, moderately active to super active. I mean, I think that that's clear. Now, again, is there, I do this because I enjoy it. I mean, we all do. You train because it's mentally satisfying to you. I mean, I'm sure that's why you do jujitsu and we train and that's why we're in here and we're, you know, if you were to take it away from us, we would be miserable people. I mean, I guarantee it. I mean, I feel, you know, there's people that get hurt and you can't train. Like every time you get hurt and you're like, you feel vulnerable and you're kind of stressed out. It's like, oh, I don't like being injured.

I don't like feeling like I can't just take off sprinting or defend myself or whatever. It's just, it's mentally draining on people. And I think, you know, because, but you think about it. You walk around, if you go to the grocery store and you think how many people here could actually, if the zombie apocalypse comes, who am I going to hide behind? Not many of these people are going to be good. They're going to be cat and fodder here. You guys, the zombies eat you. But, I mean, you think about it.

But if you're, because I can't put myself in the mind of the mentality of somebody who's frail and weak and, you know, significantly obese. I don't know what it feels like mentally, but I would imagine it's frustrating. And you've got a bunch of frustrated people out here that probably have some sort of like 25 of the population is on some some psychiatric med right now it's crazy so we've got a society where everybody's just angry and frustrated and divided and i think we could fix the nutrition that we would have a better society i mean you know and then you get in there you know because you we've seen these videos of 1963 where president kennedy's telling everybody we need to and we see those you know whatever the little little you know pe class while the guys are doing the push-ups and the monkey bar things and

um yeah i mean i i don't know if we can we go back to that i wonder i wonder if we could we could sort of turn it around and get back to that it would be it would be it would be an interesting experience to see just to see how the mental health of people would be. Well, it's about people feeling good, right? And feeling good about themselves and feeling confident. And it's hard to feel confident if you're not competent. Well, who was it that said that? I think it was Dion Sanders,

look good, feel good, play good, something like that. Was it Dion that said that? Yeah, I mean, it's true. I mean, when you look good and feel good, you're going to perform better. How did you find this diet? How did I find this diet? The carnivore diet?

Yeah, I mean, I was low-carb at the time. And I was, as an athlete, I was always interested in performing better. And I went online, and I was just kind of lurking. I was lurking on this Facebook forum called Zeroing In on Health, a guy named Charles Washington, you know, uh, and some other people, and they were eating all meat. And I thought they were nuts. I was like, these people are freaking nuts. So I kind of like morbid curiosity drove me to read about these people. And I just kind of like, I asked a couple of questions and why do you think that? And they sent me some source material. I started reading. I said, you know, this kind of makes sense. I'm going to try it. So this is back in 2016. So I was like, well, I'll try it for a month. And I was

like, damn, I feel good. I feel really good. in fact. And so that was kind of how I started. So there are other people doing it. But I mean, this goes back. I mean, you know, James Rollo was a surgeon in Scotland back in the late 1700s. He was putting diabetics on all the diets back then. So this is not new by any stretch. I mean, there's Salisbury in the 1800s, Blake Donaldson in the 1950s, you know, A.B. Newbold in the 1970s, kind of Atkins to some degree. I didn't invent eating all meat. In fact, eating all meat was some Neanderthal back, you know, or whatever, you know, Australopithecine three million years ago invented that. But I mean, this is something that has, you know, it's come and gone over the years.

The ancient Greeks used to do, there was an all-meat craze in ancient Greece with the ancient Olympians way back when they were all doing that and thought it was an athletic enhancement to them. And so, you know, but I mean, honestly, in the modern times, it goes back to probably Stephanson,

who was that Arctic explorer, explorer who lived with the Inuit for a decade. And they said he came back. All those old videos, I've seen that before. Yeah, yeah. He came back in the 1920s and said, hey, look, I ate all meat for 12 years. And they said, no, you can't. It's impossible.

I said, BS, I'll do it. So he was basically in a metabolic ward in Bellevue Hospital for a long period of time. And they studied him, did it for a year. And he was like, totally fine. So, I mean, it's been known for a long time. Can you give us the function? Because you've mentioned that you've helped people reverse their diabetes. You mentioned other doctors have done this in the past.

Because on some of these documentaries, they will say, oh, meat causes diabetes. And people hear that and they're like, what? So how have you actually used this meat-based or carnivorous diet to reverse diabetes? How does it work? Well, I mean, so the, obviously, you know, our blood glucose is responsive to what we eat. So, I mean, particularly carbohydrates, you know, when you eat carbs, and that's one of the reasons it might be beneficial athletic-wise, you know, you take a pre-workout, you can slam some carbs before you work out, your blood glucose goes higher and potentially you end up with better performance with that.

So we know that, you know, certainly blood glucose is responsive to what we consume. And we know that when we consume protein and fat, particularly in combination, we have a very slow, you know, glucose response. Now, the critics of that will say, well, you're just masking the symptoms. You're not actually treating the disease. glucose response. Now, the critics of that will say, well, you're just masking the symptoms. You're not actually treating the disease. But what we're seeing is, because with diabetes, you're not so much concerned about blood glucose directly. I mean, who cares what your blood glucose? What you care about is the damage it's causing, right? So what kind of damage might you see? Retinopathy, some blood vessels in the eyes. You might get kidney disease. You might get

neuropathy where you can't feel your feet or eventually you get your feet cut off and stuff like that. Well, what we're seeing with carnivore, and not only carnivore but other low-carb diets, is that not only are we seeing normalized blood glucose, but we're also seeing the reversal of retinopathy in the eyes, reversal of kidney disease, reversal of neuropathy. So we're actually seeing actually reversal of the disease process itself, not just masking the symptoms, as they say. Because what we hear, you know, particularly with the plant-based advocates will say, well, if you consume too much fat, fat will accumulate in

your cells and that will lead to insulin resistance. And so there's, again, there's a half truth to that, you know, because what we see is, you know, particularly saturated fat. So there's a saturated fat in the blood called palmitic acid. It's produced in the liver, and it will, in excessive amounts, lead to something called ceramide accumulation in the cells, and that will block the insulin receptor, so to speak. It'll kind of gum up the insulin receptor. There's more to it than that, but essentially that's what happens, and that's true.

However, that palmitic acid in the blood is not coming from the palmitic acid or the saturated fat you're eating. Your liver is making it de novo by itself. And so that can come from overconsumption of fructose, overconsumption of carbohydrates, or overconsumption of fat. Again, it's overconsumption. This is where Lane would be happy. So he's all about calories. But I mean it's – but if you're not doing that, then it doesn't matter. In fact, Jeff Volek, 2013, in a subsequent paper, showed that people that eat a lot of saturated fat

actually have less saturated fat in their blood than some people that don't. Because again, remember, it's dependent upon what the liver makes. And the liver gets the first crack at it. This is why the baby has a low cholesterol, but when they start eating, they get a higher cholesterol. One of the reasons behind that is a different type of circulation. When a baby's, before a baby's born, it's getting its food from its mother's placenta. And then after it starts eating, you know, it's kind of interesting because a baby's

cholesterol will go from 20 to 200 in about three months because it started eating breast milk. And so unless we want to say breast milk is dangerous for babies, you know, you'd have to change that argument. But yeah, I think that's part of what we see. I mean, there's a lot, you know, like I said, there's a lot of things that are going on there. But I mean, the end result is

we are actually seeing people reverse disease with this. And it's diabetes, but it's a lot of other things. It's autoimmune disease. It's mental health disease. One of the things that I'm most excited about is the mental health aspect of it. Because I see people that are depressed, bipolar, PTSD, ADHD, addiction, which is another one.

A lot of people suffer from addiction. And they see that they go carnivore and they kind of, you know, because it's a very abstinence type of situation. But the funny thing that happens is a lot of people that go carnivore find that, hey, they don't want the beer anymore. They don't want the cigarettes anymore. And it's really kind of an interesting thing because, you know, if you go, like I've talked to your brother and he said, you know, you go, you go into these rehab places and they're feeding you garbage. They just keep feeding you garbage. And it's just like, you're, you're still feeding into the physiology. You know, you may, you may change one addiction for another. You went in a cocaine addict and you came out a frigging

Krispy Kreme addict. You know what I mean? It's like, is that better or worse? To, um, to do a good version of the carnivore diet, do you think it's necessary to also include like the beef organs and all that stuff? Yeah, so that's an interesting question. I mean my stance on that is they're not necessary. I think on a population level, I can't say that everybody needs to do that. And that's been supported by not only the observation, I collected 12,000, I did survey data on 12,000 people asking that specific question. Do you eat organs? Do you not? Do you eat grass-finished? Do you not? And the results basically showed no difference whatsoever. Harvard, when they did their study

that Dave Ludwig did two years ago, showed the exact same thing. Organ meats had no bearing on outcomes. Now, anecdotally, I do see people that say, I feel better when I eat liver, for instance. I see some people say, I actually feel worse when I do that. So I think it's up to the individual, but I can't make a blanket recommendation that it's required. I don't consume them. I don't really like them. I mean, I find it hard to believe that something that is not pleasing to the taste would be required. I mean, how would you sort of convince a caveman,

hey, you've got to eat this stuff. Well, it tastes bad. I mean, I think, like I said, if you and I were cavemen walking around and there was a tree that had Twinkies on it, we'd be like, oh, yeah, man. Give me those Twinkies, right? But I mean, they didn't exist back then.

So, I mean, we would eat things that were chemically pleasing to us. And I think for many people, you know, you hear about people eating organs. You're like, how do I gag this shit down it's like soak it in milk and free you know do you think some of our taste buds are fucked up though because like i like the taste of liver my mom is like the taste of liver because like like we we kind of have some of that food within the culture so like there are a lot of things that we eat where if i gave you some of this

shit man you'd be like oh that's so fucking bitter right so what do you what do you think well i mean there's obviously i, because we eat vegetables, right? And vegetables are trying to kill us, right? I'm kidding. But I mean, you know, I do think there is obviously acquired, acquired taste. And, you know, you, and you associate certain tastes with, you know, pleasant memories and mom and that type of stuff. So there's, there's certainly, you know, I mean, I think, I don't know if you would take some people that were completely novel and never experienced – if you had that population and said, here's this, here's this, here's this, and said go to town and see what you'd select, I don't know how many people would self-select perhaps liver. And depending – again, you probably didn't have it like – maybe you had it just straight up liver with no seasoning and no spices.

I don't know. No, my mom cooked it with like soup and stuff. Right. So I'm saying you sort of altered the flavor and stuff like that. So I mean, like who eats like spinach by itself? When I was doing keto, I would eat all these giant spinach salads. And the only reason I could gag this stuff down is because I put cranberries and nuts and eggs and bacon. That was the only reason I could eat that.

But if I was just like, go down and eat a plain bowl of spinach with no dressing, man, I ain't eating that stuff. It doesn't taste good. So, I mean, I just wonder about that. But, I mean, yeah, there are people that say they really enjoy the taste of that. So, again, my answer to that is if you like it, eat it. If it seems to give you a benefit, eat it. But is it absolutely necessary to be successful?

I can't make that claim because I see too many people where it just doesn't seem to be necessary. And of course, I'm biased because I don't like the way it tastes. I mean, I've had it. I mean, I've had it from time to time. I've had it in very fancy restaurants where they've made it really good. And the best I can say is, well, it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't something like I could seek out, you know? And I think there's some, I mean, they are obviously liver is very high in certain nutrients. I mean, they're very concentrated in a way. And there may be people that, like, because I hear people will say they craved it initially and then they didn't want it anymore.

And it may be that their body sort of naturally knows I'm low in vitamin A or I'm low in something like that. And I just have this sort of craving. Like a woman who's pregnant, they have these cravings. They're eating pickles and ice cream or whatever because it has something that they need, I guess. So I think that's the fairest way to say it. If you like them, eat them. They're not necessary. And I know, obviously, we're not animals, but there is the argument that when an animal does get its prey, it will go for the liver and the heart and all that stuff first before it eats the rest of the animal. Well, I mean, you know, in a way, I mean, I think

here's, here's one thing that's interesting because like we often hear like a wolf or a lion, they kill a zebra on the plane or, you know, a lion might kill or a wolf might kill a deer, right? And these animals are very lean animals, right? I mean, a deer is lean, right? And they, they have a requirement for fat and the only place they're going to find fat on those animals is going to be in their viscera. I mean, their perinephric fat, the pericardiac fat, the omental fat. So they're probably trying to get some fat, I think, because they can't access the brain. I mean, it's kind of interesting. There's only a few animals that can access the brain, like hyenas that do their bite strength. You know, they were able to access the brain like humans could access bone marrow.

And that's one of the things because we had tool users and we would crack the bones. But most of these predator animals cannot access the high fat areas of an animal, which would be brain and bone marrow. And so the only place they can get fat is in the internal organs. Because actually liver is very lean, unless it's a fatty liver. But I mean, naturally liver is pretty lean. unless it's a fatty liver. But I mean, naturally, liver is pretty lean. Naturally, kidneys are pretty lean. And so I don't know that that's what they're trying to do.

And you can't ask a wolf, why are you eating? Why are you going for the guts first? I mean, maybe. But yeah, I've seen that argument. There's these killer whales that just go after the liver of a killer whale that kills a whale and eats their liver or something like that. But I think that's – I don't know if that's rigorous science. I think it's sort of maybe interpretations of general observations because you think about if you've ever been hunting,

and most hunters, they gut the animal and they leave it on the ground, right? Because it's hard to preserve anyway. I mean, and particularly, you know, if you look at like what is the percentage of edible, you know, internal organs that are easy to preserve, you know, relative to how much meat you can get. Like a cow had. A slaughtered cow, after it's been deboned and everything, it's got about 500, 550 pounds of meat on it. The liver weighs eight pounds. So it's like what is the percentage you need there? It's much smaller if you're going to eat it at all. Yeah, I think our taste buds are pretty desensitized.

You know, all the junk people have been eating, all processed foods. Well, you know, when you get rid of that stuff, it's like all of a sudden a freaking berry tastes sweet to me. Whereas before, like I used to be the guy, when I was eating all the junk, I needed the sweetest dessert possible. I mean, oh, it's not sweet enough. And somebody else would say, oh, my God, that's sweet. Give me the whole pie. But, I mean, it was just like your taste buds do change, and they do adapt over time, and you have this sort of,

I guess you develop a tolerance to taste. And now it's like anything that's even remotely sweet tastes, to me, very sweet. But, yeah, it's something that we can adapt to over time. And it's one of those things like because I don't really want that stuff anymore, which is really weird for me because I always loved – when I was a nine-year-old kid, I told my grandma, grandma, I want to start a cheesecake factory. When I grew up, I want to own a cheesecake because I loved her cheesecake. It was something I used to love. And now I'm like, no, I don't really want that. I still like cheesecake, but I just don't eat it. eat i don't really want it anymore which is kind of an

interesting thing so hopefully grandma's okay with that improving your sleep quality is as easy as shipping your mouth and what i mean by that is putting some tape on breathing through your nose will increase your sleep quality it's no longer just something that only the bros do it's now been researched and people understand that if you can breathe through your nose while you're asleep, you'll have better sleep quality and you will wake up more rested. Hostage tape is also really awesome because I know what I used to do. I used to use a little bit of a cheaper tape and every time I'd wake up in the morning, the tape would be somewhere else on the bed or on my face, but it wouldn't be on my mouth anymore. But hostage tape, if you have a beard or if you don't, will stay comfortably on your mouth all through the night. And if you're someone who has a problem breathing through your nose, hostage also has no strips. So you can place those on your nose while you're asleep or if you want to be like one of those hermosy guys you can wear during the day. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at hostage tape dot com slash power project where you guys will receive an entire year supply of mouth tape and the no strips for less than a dollar a night.

Again, that's over at hostage tape dot com slash power project links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. How about the microbiome is something that a lot of people are talking about. Again, in that documentary, they were talking about the diversity in the microbiome. A lot of different podcasts have had people on and they're saying, oh, plant foods will help with microbiome diversity. How, with being on a carnivorous diet, is that something you think people should think about at all in terms of adding in some types of other foods or you good? Well, I think, I think, honestly, I think we kind of put the cart before the horse. I think a healthy person has a healthy microbiome. I mean, I think that, I think that's a reasonable way to say it. And I can't, you know, if I'm like

super healthy and everything feels good and then you say, oh, your microbiome isn't dialed in, I'm like, I don't really care. But I mean, I think, you know, again, with regard to what we know about the microbiome, you know, like they'll talk about something called, you know, alpha diversity or diversity. And we know that indigenous populations that like, you know what, that eat mostly meat, they have plenty of diverse microbiome. I've had patients who have had their microbiome serially tested. I remember one guy who had ulcerative colitis, and his microbiome diversity was in the bottom 5%, and he went carnivore, and it went up to the top 95%.

So it actually helped that significantly. There is, and I mentioned this study that Tommy Wood and Dr. Maylor did a while ago, looking at the metabolic flexibility of the gut and the microbiome. And it appears that, yes, our gut can deal with a high-fiber diet and the fact that it produces these so-called protective short-chain fatty acids, particularly butyrate. But also, if you're on an animal-based low-carb diet, we have the same level of flexibility that we can deal with that.

So I don't think we have to have a lot of fiber in our diet to have a healthy microbiome. In fact, because I see so many, and this is one of the more common things that people talk about on a carnivore diet, is people that have had digestive issues, whether it's bloating, gas, reflux, Crohn's disease, inflammatory bowel disease, IBS, it almost always goes away or very often goes away. So that's consistent with, you know, a healthy microbiome, you know, because, you know, if you're telling me that I got to shove all this fiber in my gut to change my microbiome, but I'm bloating and farting all the time and my gut's always swollen, I don't believe that's a healthier microbiome.

I don't care. I think there's, you know, like I said, there's this, a healthy microbiome is what a healthy person has and what that actually turns out. Because remember, we're still arguing about cholesterol. Cholesterol is one molecule. It's one distinct molecule. We're still deciding what it does. We're still arguing.

We discovered that back in 1910. Microbiome has trillions of different bacteria, thousands of which change every 15 minutes by the way right and it changes in response to everything the weather the temperature the stress the food you're eating the exercise you do how much you sleep how much you don't sleep you know environmental things so we're going to figure that out and we're going to tell it we're going to be able to tell people yeah you need this and it's like wait a minute you don't know that stuff i mean it's it's still i don't know that we'll ever figure it out maybe with ai we might be able to tell people, yeah, you need this. And it's like, wait a minute, you don't know that stuff. I mean, it's still, I don't know that we'll ever figure it out. Maybe with AI, we might be able to figure some level it out. But I mean, to sit there and say, this is the perfect microbiome, this is what you should shoot for. Because I think what they do is they do it backwards. They say,

well, we think this is a healthy diet. Lots of fibers, whole grains, fruits and vegetables. This is a microbiome that results from that, so therefore this is a healthy microbiome. That may not be true. It may be that a healthy person has a healthy microbiome. Let's take people that are free of disease and then analyze their microbiome and see what it comes up with because, yeah, there will be a difference between somebody on an animal-based diet and a plant-based diet,

but is one better than the other? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think anybody really knows. How much meat do you eat in a day? Well, I mean, on average, I eat between three and four pounds. That's an average sort of meat at baseline, you know, weighing at 250, 260-ish. But that's pretty standard. I mean, I'll go up a little bit.

But if I'm training really, really hard, my appetite will go up like it should. That's how it's supposed to work. You you train hard you eat more so i might go as high as six pounds a day if i'm trying to lean out and like if i'm leaning out i might go down to i might well i mean it's like you remember i know you do bodybuilding for a time there's a guy named serge new braid oh yeah serge used to eat 67 pounds of horse meat a day horse meat horse meat yeah lean lean meat from from france because he was french and france and france they still have horse on the menu uh but yeah i mean it's not unusual i mean i mean i saw what was his name cutler talking about his oh yeah how much food he was eating how many eggs and everything yeah eggs and and you know meat and stuff like that so

i mean you know i mean but you know four pounds of meat is four thousand calories it's not that much i mean you know think about it i mean i mean mean, if you plug my numbers into a dietary calculator, it says I need about 4,000 calories. So it's pretty in line with what I probably need, and I'm pretty active. I mean, I'm not a marathon runner. I mean, I exercise pretty hard, but I don't spend all day exercising.

I mean, what we did today is, you know, not atypical for what I would typically do. Maybe I might have done some bike sprints at the end or something like that. And I'm not doing jiu-jitsu right now. But, yeah, I'd say three to four pounds has been pretty consistent. So I think I calculate it because I usually eat a lot of steaks. I usually eat three, four steaks a day, something like that.

In the last eight years, I've probably been getting close to 10,000 steaks in the last eight years. Any chicken or eggs or cheese or anything different? Yeah, I mean – Hamburger? Yeah, like I said, I told you that probably 98% of my diet is red meat. I will – probably in eight years, I've probably had chicken less than five times. I mean, honestly. I just don't really – I just don't prefer it.

I don't want chicken. When they run out of – like I've been to events where they run out of meat. I'm like, oh, fuck. This is know, I don't want chicken. When they run out of, like, I've been to, like, events where they run out of meat. I'm like, oh, fuck, this is chicken. I'll eat the chicken. But, I mean, I will eat eggs. From time to time, I'll go, like, crazy on eggs for a while. Like, sometimes I'll throw down, like, you know, two dozen eggs a day or something like that from time to time. And then I'll go for, like, six months without eating an egg.

And then I go, like, I was doing a bit of dairy recently. And I was eating, like, Greek yogurt, and I was eating cheese. And that's a new addition? I mean, it comes in and out. It comes in and out. Greek yogurt sounds like woke carnivore. Woke carnivore, yeah, exactly. Yeah, occasionally I'll do that.

But, I mean, it's by far and away, like I said, 98% of my diet is basically beef. What do you think about the people that mention, terms of dairy that adults shouldn't be eating dairy? They don't have no need for dairy? Because that is a thing that a lot of people talk about. Yeah, I mean, dairy is a wonderful source of protein. If you look at PDCAS and DIAS, the protein scoring systems that they have out there, whey protein is always way up there. I mean, all all you guys have consumed

whey protein over the years. It is a wonderful source of protein. Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. It's very bioavailable. In fact, you saw a recent study that they did in the Netherlands about the 100 grams.

Do you guys see that study? We should talk about that. I'm surprised you didn't see it. We've classically seen that protein distribution. You should eat 30 gram boluses throughout the day, three, four, five times throughout the day. And that's all you can turn into muscle protein synthesis. Well, they did a new study, and they used quadruply labeled isotopes. And they fed people, it was like a 20-gram or 25-gram dose of protein and 100-gram dose of protein.

And they did muscle biopsies at muscle biopsies every four hours for 12 hours and what they found was yeah i know that ouch is what i would say what they found was is that the 100 gram dose not only did they not drop off but they kept going up up up they kept they kept producing more muscle so it's so this upper limit they said there's no theoretical upper limit because i i routinely throw down 200 grams 250 sometimes 300 grams of protein at one time and you know if i eat enough steak and so because the question would be like if i could only absorb 30 grams of that you know what i mean or you know turn it in a protein i would literally starve to death i mean i literally would be falling apart

and being skinny and and that's not happening and you know obviously from an evolutionary standpoint um you think about if we had to eat every you know six times a day like a bodybuilder you know and you're out hunting and you got a bit of fire maybe it's like and you're out like in the back of the line said hey hey hey hey grok hey can we stop and eat and be like no man i'd eat never you know walk around a little tough work and so we probably you know we probably killed billion animals we feasted till we were full and then you know repeated then repeated whatever the next day. We kind of did that. So it wasn't – our ability to eat right now is very convenient.

Right now, I mean this is the other thing. Our brain sizes have shrunk since about 100,000 years ago. Our brains have gotten smaller and smaller. The human species brain maxed out at about 1,500 cc, Homo sapiens. It's now dropped down to about 1,300 cc on average since we introduced agriculture and we started hunting skinnier, less fatty animals. Back when we were killing mostly mammoths and things like that. We had a little bit bigger brains. But it was, life

was, you needed more intelligence to survive back then. Now, how much intelligence do you need to survive today? You need to know how to swipe right. I mean, that's it. Swipe right and get food delivered to me. I mean, it's not hard to survive as a human these days because everything's done for. Don't even need to use your nose. You don't have to. Yeah, you don't even have to use your nose. You don't have to think. I mean,

it's just like, oh, I can get somebody to deliver food for me, you know, and maybe with the universal basic income, I can just play video games all day and order my food in. I mean, that is what we're allowed to do. And so, but your question about dairy, there clearly are people that struggle with dairy. I mean, you know, a large percentage of the population are lactose intolerant. Now, some people will say, well, it's because it's pasteurized. I'm not totally convinced on that. But I mean, there's certainly people that struggle with that. I have seen people that have gone carnivore that have reversed their lactose intolerance, which I think is quite interesting.

I'm not sure, you know, what's going on mechanically. Maybe they have the lactase enzyme somehow showing up again. But there are, yeah, I mean, obviously I'm not a cow, and I'm not a baby calf, and I'm not, you know, I mean, there are occasional instances where you'll see like a pig nursing on a dog or a dog nursing on a pig. That's happened. So other species do do it occasionally.

We probably started as humans, started consuming dairy. Some people say as far back as 30,000 years ago. Obviously, the domestication of the cow was about 10,000 years ago, but we might have accessed dairy before that. Slaughtering pregnant animals, maybe we had access to some of their milk. So I think in general, it's a very good source of nutrition. It still is. I mean, depending on how you tolerate it though. I mean, there are people, like I see people that are on carnivore and they're still including cheese and dairy and things like that. And they

have to give it up to finally get the relief, like whether it's psoriasis or some other condition. So I think there's definitely issues with dairy for a lot of people, but in general, it's a very, very nutrient rich food. And so it's kind of one of for a lot of people. But in general, it's a very nutrient-rich food. So it's kind of one of those things. It's like there's people complaining about dairy, but they'll eat whatever, some blue Captain Crunch-flavored fake maple syrup. It's like, well, wait a minute. Do you really believe that's better for you?

Do you take any vitamins or minerals or supplements? Or is there anything for carnivore people to pay attention to? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, you know, as I mentioned, right now, I mean, I will sometimes take an electrolyte supplement. You know, you're familiar with Rob Wolf and KetoGames guys, Luis Villanueva's guys. I use that quite frequently when I'm training because I'm sweating a lot and I'm losing a lot of electrolytes. But during this particular carnivore month, I'm nothing, man. I'm beef and salt and water and that's it. I've got nothing else on board,

which is interesting for me because I actually feel really good right now. It's just like, I'm just like, everything feels, you know, for an old guy, it feels pretty good. But I mean, yeah, I mean, I will do electrolytes from time to time. I'm not a, you know, I mean, I think there's some people that may be advocates for vitamin D. There's some other, there's a few other things that creep in there. And again, with the electrolytes, you get magnesium and potassium, things like that. So I think those are the major things that people probably have an interest in using. Again, my sort of – I guess this is more of a philosophy. I think humans should be able to eat a diet that doesn't have supplements in it.

I think – I mean when did the supplement industry start? I mean, realistically, you know, 100 years ago or something like that. I mean, we've had probably, I mean, people have talked about, you know, like particularly plants in the context of medicinally used. You know, there's ancient herbs and stuff like Chinese medicine and, you know, rainforest stuff. And so I think those things have been used periodically for times. But, I mean, I think they're probably used more in a a limited sense in like a medicinal sense that like you know you've got this illness we're going to put this poultice on there you know put some salve on your skin and maybe it works

maybe it doesn't you know uh but i i i don't i'm not a big supplement guy and you know that's just the way it is i just i i i have not been particularly impressed by i mean creatine worked pretty well i thought creatine was a pretty solid supplement. Of course. I used it back in the day, but I'm consuming so much creatine right now, it probably would have minimal to no impact. Now, if you're a vegan, yeah, take creatine. My gosh, you know, you better be using it. Because creatine has impacts not only on muscle, but it has an impact on the brain, heart health.

There's so many things that it does for us. And so I just don't have a lot of supplements that I use. And, you know, because it's funny because people always want to send them to me, you know, because, you know, on social media, I try this dress and I'm like, I mean, I will tell people sometimes I'll say, okay, if you're, maybe you're not on a car, if you're on another diet. And I do think this is the interesting thing because I think our modern diet is so deficient in quality nutrition that a lot of people are nutrient deprived. And I think even obesity, I think obesity is really a malnutrition

problem. And mal means bad, not low. So malnutrition, people are, they're nourished, but they're nourished with the wrong things. They're not getting the nutrients they need. So I don't personally take anything. I know some people say, well, what about vitamin C? What about, you know, potassium and manganese and some of these other ones? Folate is one particular. I mean, I, you know, I don't, you know, I took my blood from sometimes. My folate runs a little on the low side. It's not like deficient, but it's lower. But I don't have any symptoms consistent with like low folate. I mean, you mean, what a low folic can give you? Megaloblastic anemia, sores on your mouth, fatigue.

I don't have any of that stuff. So I'm like, why would I? I don't like to treat lab values, basically. I mean, this is one of the things that a lot of people, they'll get their labs. If you go and get 100 labs, something's going to be wrong. I mean, I guarantee it. Every time you get a lab, one of them is going to be out of range.

And so do you stress out about it? Do you worry about what does it mean clinically? You know, like some people say, I get so many people sending their lab values. They say, hey, doc, look at my lab. I'm like, I don't know anything about you. I have no idea what's going on with you. How can I even make any remote suggestion on what you might need or whatnot? You know, it's more involved than that.

So I'm pretty minimalistic. I know it's disappointing to a lot of people because, you know, it's more involved than that. So I'm pretty minimalistic. I know it's disappointing to a lot of people because, you know, a lot of people want the complex solution or the magic pill. I'm just like, just eat enough, eat a good diet, train hard, get some sleep. And that's basically what I do. Yeah, and if someone was to look at their blood work and they were to take something, it's like, does that have the same impact? Like, I don't believe that vitamin D supplementationation i don't think it makes a lot of sense you know because people will do that and then they might get their blood work done and it might show their vitamin d levels high but i seriously doubt that that's having any better health outcomes it's

interesting yeah i mean that's that's a really good that's a really good one because for a while you know they were showing that um vitamin d supplementation had really no effect even on raising the serum levels and they went with higher and higher doses used to be like a thousand i use another like five thousand ten thousand they were to finally get it up there but so here's a really good point so back in the 1920s they looked at these inuit populations in greenland there were two different populations and you know what live up near the North Pole where there's no sunshine. It's like dark for six months out of the year. You go up there in January, you don't see the sun at all. It just doesn't come up, right? So they have chronically low vitamin D in their serum. You test them, their vitamin D levels

are very low. And so there are things associated with that particularly. One thing's called rickets. It's a skeletal deformity that kids get. And there were two groups. One group, they both had low vitamin D. One group was eating the traditional Inuit diet, seal meat and whale blubber and caribou meat and whatever. And one group was eating that plus they were eating canned goods, flours, and sugar. And guess which group had the symptoms? Even though they had the same exact serum vitamin D levels, but the group eating the canned goods all started having these deficiencies. So even the blood levels may not necessarily exactly represent what's going on. Because remember, why do we test blood? Because it's easy to get.

I mean, you shuddered about the muscle biopsy, right? Yeah. Because, I mean, if you really want to know what's going on in the muscle, you don't test the blood. You stick a needle in the muscle. You want to know what's going on in the kidney, you stick a needle in the kidney. But no one's signing up for that it's painful it's potentially you know there's complications that occur for that so again even a lot of these blood tests they

they're like okay like we know like you know this study we we talked about you know if you're if your ldl cholesterol can drop 100 points in three days which which value am i using am i using the one from three days ago the The one I like, right? You're always going to pick the one you like, right? You show off the labs that look good for you. Because we don't, you know, it's like, it's always funny when people are like, it's like a dick measuring contest, but we're showing each other's LDLs. Like, who fucking cares, man?

It's just like, you know, it just drives me crazy. Do the stuff that actually matters to you. Because when I, if we had no labs, if we had no access to labs and we couldn't image anything, how would you know if you were healthy, right? I mean, you could look at people and say, well, you look at an animal. Look at that animal walking around with a limp and he's all skinny and mangy looking. That's a sick animal. And I mean, we're really, from a population health level, even though we have tremendous access to all kinds of data and information, are we any better for it?

You look around like, why is everybody still sick? Why is everybody so fat? We have all this information. So, I mean, information is power, but is it, you know, what is it actually matters to you? Because, you know, if you could never take another lab test again, how would you know you're healthy, Mark? I mean, you know, really. I mean, I think I could. I think I know how I'd be.

I mean, how fast can I run a can I run a 50-hour dash? How much can I lift? How well am I sleeping? What's my libido like? What's my mood like? And I think that's really, honestly, I think that's what we should focus on. And we've gotten away from that because we've got all this technology. And I know there's people that obsess about this stuff.

They're like, oh, the technology is going to save us. And I'm skeptical. Maybe we're going to be us. And I'm skeptical. Not really. Maybe we're going to be all slaves to the Terminator robots. Right. Oh, God. Oh, God.

Skynet will be fully realized. Skynet is coming. What are your tips for keeping a minimum amount of cardiovascular health as you get older? Because you're sprinting, you're doing jujitsu, you're doing rowing. But a lot of people, maybe they're doing resistance training, but they're not doing many things to get their heart rate up. Right. So what would you suggest people try to do at minimum? Well, I mean, at minimum.

I mean, obviously we talked about don't be sedentary. Just get out and move. I mean, I think that's huge. And beyond that, I think, I mean, it depends on how much time you have. I know you like running. I mean, there's a lot of people. I mean, you got to do what you enjoy, obviously. I mean, if you don't enjoy it, it's not fun.

I, because I'm, I'm sometimes, you know, cognizant of how much time I have. I really like doing, you know, sprint interval training. I mean, I think that works really well for me. I think one of the things, one of the, one of the, you know, one of the mistakes a lot of people have is they, they fail to have enough recovery time on intervals. I mean, I think that's, you know, when you're doing it, when you, you know, when you, like, you know, a lot of people talk about the Tabata protocol, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, I think that's, you know, when you're doing it, when you're doing it, like, you know, a lot of people talk about the Tabata protocol, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, eight rounds. And by the time you're at your third rep, you've got nothing left. You're not, it's no longer high intensity.

It's like low intensity, right, at that point. So, and that was designed specifically for speed skating. That was the, the protocol was designed for speed. I talked to Mark Smith about this, another exercise physiologist. He says, yeah, that's not applicable for the rest of the people. So, like, when I do sprints, the other night i was doing 10 second sprints on the little airdyne x bike you know holland like we've done we've tried as hard as you can i recovered for a minute 50. i mean that's plenty it's like 11 to 1 recovery time but the next rep was just as

intense and all 10 of them were really really intense it still only took me you know took me 20 minutes it's a great workout um and so i think that's something to be mindful took me, you know, it took me 20 minutes. It's a great workout. And so I think that's something to be mindful of. I, you know, I mean, again, there's a progression here. I like people, you know, I think if we talk about high intensity interval training, which is very good for VO2 max, you got to hit high intensity. It's not medium intensity, it's high intensity. So you have to do that and you have to do it in a safe way. Running sprints is great, but a lot of people tear their hamstrings and they tear that you know i've done that and it's just there's a guy he called his name is mark baker he's from the uk he's a master's track and field he runs that he's 63 and he runs like a 12 5 you know 12 second 100 or something like it was pretty decent you know

i mean willie galt you know do you remember willie galt yeah the raiders and no he was in the bears he was a receiver for the bears when i grew up I remember him because when I was a kid living in Chicago, I went to play basketball at this big fitness center and some of the Chicago bears were there and I had to play against them. I remember Willie got was one of the guys, but I had been following him and he's like a master's track. I had 55. I think he's still running a sub 11 hundred meters. So he's fast dude. Right. But I mean, that's, you know, but to think about what does it take and seem to be interesting to say, but what does it take to be able to do that as an older athlete? Well, obviously, you've got to have the cardiorespiratory fitness, the flexibility. But, you know, we talk about the, we're so concerned about the heart and the lungs, right?

This is our cardiovascular system. That's the engine. But you've got to be worried about the chassis, too, right? The body work and the frame. And so if you can't get up and just start sprinting without tearing something, that's a problem. Like, because you look at kids playing. I mean, they just take off.

They're not there stretching and dynamic warm-up. They just go out there and run. So I think we should be able to do that theoretically. And if you can do that, I mean, it's not that everybody can do that, but you can get there, I believe, where you can get up there and just start running without tearing something. And I think that's an important thing. But that takes some work to get there. Mobility, stretching, you know, making sure the tissue integrity is good, make sure the strength or weight ratios are correct, you know, all those things.

Make sure the diet's good because diet does impact our tissue integrity. I mean, I'm absolutely convinced of that. Paparazzi Family on the podcast, we talk all the time about feeling good, good habits to make sure that your health is in check. And one of the things that's super important is getting your blood work done because you could be getting great sleep. You could be having great nutrition. But under the hood, there could be things going on that you don't realize. So it's always good to get your blood work checked so you can totally understand what's going on.

Now, the thing is also when you get your blood work checked, there's so many different things and so many different numbers that it's hard to tell what's good, what's bad, and how do I optimize things. And that's where Merrick Health comes in because they have patient care coordinators on staff that can help you interpret your blood work and then give you the necessary recommendations as far as supplementation, nutrition, and if you need it, hormone optimization that will start moving you in the right direction. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. That's M-A-R-R-E-K Health.com slash PowerProject. At checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save 10% off the PowerProject panel, the PowerProject checkup panel, or any individual lab you select. Again, that's at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject.

Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. One of the coolest things that I got to see up close and personal was how you and your family eats. And it definitely influenced the way that my wife and I run our household. You know, we already kind of were on the same path. But then after I came back from that visit, it was like, babe, like, you know, our son's not going to eat any of the garbage. You know, like we really clean things up. And one of the things that we hear a lot of people say is like, oh, I would clean out the pantry, but my kids eat this way or my kids eat this and that. So can you share exactly like how your family eats?

Because it was awesome. Like I got to it was like one of the better two days in a row where I got to eat like the most amazing dinner that was super healthy for me. Well, I mean, you know, you think about it, you're not going to eat this garbage cause you know, it's bad for you. Why would you feed it to your kids? I mean, don't you love your kids? I mean, it's just like, why, you know, you know, I mean, but they want it. Yeah. Well they want it. But yeah. I mean, you know, your kid is not going to love you anymore when they get diabetes. I mean, they're not, it's not love. I mean, it's, you know, you know, if you, if your kid is not going to love you anymore when they get diabetes. I mean, it's not love. I mean, it's, you know, if your kid is healthy and fit, I mean, as a parent, your job should be to give your kids every advantage that's possible.

Feeding them garbage is not an advantage. It's clearly a disadvantage. Yes, you have to have some tough conversations with them. Yes, you're not going to get everything you want. But, I mean, hey, that's part of being a parent. You know, so what do we do at dinner? You know, like I said, everybody's eating on cutting boards. I mean, it's just like cutting big steaks up.

And my wife's from France, so we have some cheese there. And we have like apple. I think she cuts up an apple and a bunch of cheese and a bunch of steak, and we just go at it. We just eat whatever we want. And we eat until we're full. And I sort of encourage, bully my kid to eat all of his steak. Encourage, slice, bully him to eat all your steak if you're not getting anything else.

And he does that. And then he's realizing, you know, of course, I'm always talking about see how you feel, see how full you are, see how you don't want the junk. And just kind of educating. When my kids were four or five years old and they were starting to learn how to read, they'd go to the grocery store. And, you know, the grocery store is a program for the kids. Oh, look at that little cute, you know, all the colors and the little cartoon characters. And they'd say, I want, I want. I said, well, let's look at the label and see what's in there.

How much sugar is in that? Not that sugar is the only thing to worry about, but that was just a lesson. You need to understand that food has an impact on how you feel. And once they start to realize that, I mean, obviously, when they leave the home, they're going to do what they're going to do, but, I mean, you have to give them at least, you know, an education on how it matters. Teach them how to cook. You know, like my kid knows how to cook a steak now, you know,

and it's kind of like that's a skill I didn't have because my mom, sorry, Mom, my mom was a horrible cook, and she's tiny. She's like five foot tall. She's like 100 pounds, and she told me when I was like a 15-year-old kid, she thought food was a waste of money. I'm like, what? You know, as a 15-year-old boy, you're like hungry all the time. Food's a waste of money. What?

What are you talking about? And, you know, I don't think I had a good steak until later on in life when I figured out how to cook it myself. But, yeah, I mean, it's – if a three-year-old is dictating household food policy, there's a problem here. You know, I don't want the kid to scream, well, figure it out. The answer is not giving him the goldfish or the crap that he wants. It's, you know, your kids will adapt. There may be a little bit of pain. A little bit of pain now is going to save you a lot of pain later on in life because what are you going to do when your kid is depressed and suicidal?

Because nutrition has a role in that, and I think you have to think about it. So teach them good habits. Again, if you wouldn't eat it, why would you feed it to your kids? It just doesn't make sense to me. We did a reaction on this Jubilee video where it was like skinny people versus fat people. And the thing is there were so many individuals there who like they were overweight as adults, but they were talking about as kids, they weren't fed good food. You know, it's like you, you're already behind because now you have to learn good nutrition as an adult. And if you could start your kid off

with that lesson, you know, they'll make choices as an adult, but at least their biology is set up in their favor. Well, they're not addicted to it too. And it's interesting. We talked about how the ultra processed foods rewire your brain, actually. So if your kids grow up on it, you think about some kids, they start off on formula. Number one ingredient, corn syrup. Number two ingredient, soybean oil. I mean, literally, you look at maltodextrin. If you look at, go to the grocery store and pick up some infant formula for one time.

You'll be shocked to see what's in that stuff, right? They start off on that, and then they immediately go to rice cereal and the little candy fruit things. And that's all. And they start out basically, you start out giving them insulin resistance as three or four year olds. And then it just builds and builds and builds. And so now we have 20% of American children that are obese. I mean, obese, not just overweight, but obese. BMI 30, 20% of our kids. And so, I mean, just by having your kids being on a healthy diet, you've put them in the top 1%. It's just like giving them a scholarship. It's like, hey, you've got the scholarship to life, you know?

And it's just like the fact that we have so diminished. I mean, you remember there used to be the – in school, they had the presidential fitness award. You had to run and do push-ups and whatever. They did away with that because it was like some kids were feeling left out and marginalized because they couldn't run the whatever. And so we've done away with that. And it's just – I don't know. My gosh, do we not care about our kids? It seems like you should care enough about your kids to ensure they're healthy.

And it's really sad. And hopefully we can change this. kids. It seems like you should care enough about your kids to ensure they're healthy. It's really sad. Hopefully we can change this. I've got your kids working out with you a little bit and stuff too. Yeah, I was going to ask about the old Nordics that you guys were doing on Christmas, right? Yeah, yeah. So I got this little Nordic machine and I'm trying to learn how to do a Nordic crawl. I'm close. I'm very close to that. I'll get that probably in the next couple of weeks. So my kids were over and we said, hey kids, let's do a Nordic contest. And they were all down for it. I thought they weren't going to be able to do

a full Nordic and every one of my kids could do it. So I was totally embarrassed. God damn it. These little kids, they're doing it. And so I said, okay, well we can't win the contest if everybody can do one. And so I regressed it to 20 degrees and said, let's go for reps.

And my 11-year-old son went first, and he did something like 60 reps. And I was like, holy cow, because I thought they were going to do like 12 or something like that. He did 60. And then my daughter, who's a track and field athlete, she went on there and did like 170 Nordic curls in a row. And then my youngest son was mad. He said, I want to go again. And he did 200 of them. I said, we're sitting here for like five minutes

watching this kid do Nordics. I was like, oh my gosh. So anyway, they had a lot of fun with that. So that was a fun time. So you can bring up the clip. I think it's on his IG. Yeah, I think it's somewhere in there. Yeah, it's the three of them.

My one daughter did not want to be filmed. I had four kids and one daughter said, no, don't put me on film. But yeah, they were having fun with that. So it's, I mean, you know, like I said, it's, and again, it's being the example for your kids. I mean, you can tell them all day, but if they see you stuffing your face with garbage or just being sedentary and watching TV all day, that's what they're going to do. I mean, it's probably more about what you do and what the example you are than, you know, than what you say. because it's, you know, like I said, walk the walk, you know, they'll just talk to talk, walk the walk. And, you know, I try to do that for my kids. And I try to, you know, like I said,

for the people that sort of follow me on social media, I try to, I walk the walk. I mean, I literally do what I do, what I talk about. So hopefully it's, uh, hopefully it sends the right message. At 50, you said you're 57 now right well two days two days from now i'll be 57 two days so you started jujitsu a little bit ago at 56 well no i started it i was i was i was just before i turned 55 yeah so i've been i've been about two years a little two years but i've taken god i've probably taken half of that time off i just unfortunately can't can't roll as often as i'd like to yeah but you know like you you've gotten multiple world records with the rowing stuff you do,

and now you start a totally new type of sport, right? Most people don't start. Oh, real quick. There's Lucas doing his. Look at that. Just bam. That's his single. That's his single Nordic.

He's a young kid, too? Yeah, he's 11. She's 15, so she's the fastest 400-meter runner in New Mexico right now. That was a good Nordic. That was a solid run. That was the first time she'd ever tried it she's like i like this i don't like that like is this hard so saxon he's funny so saxon's my height he's like an inch short of me he's 17 he's autistic and he does the inchworm

technique it looks like an inchworm okay okay hey still did it and my other daughter did it but she didn't get filmed so that was the kids playing uh playing uh playing nordic you know anyway so yeah shit he's like six three or six four then he's six four yeah that's some fucking hype yeah but yeah you started uh jujitsu which is a full-on grappling martial art later like what made you want to start that um well i mean you know i've been i've been you know i i watched the ufc back in the original one back in 92 or 93. And I thought it was, you know, I saw Hoist Gracie win that thing. And always kind of in the back of my mind, interesting. And I, you know, when I was on Rogan's podcast talking about it, I've just seen people talking about it for years.

And so there was this professional MMA fighter. His name is Georgie Carhan. He was fighting for Bellator. And he was following me on Instagram. He was doing a carnival diet. And I was back when I was in Orange County and he was down in Riverside. he said, Hey man, could I come train with you? I said, sure, man, come over, we'll eat some steaks. So, you know, we trained, had a good session. He brought him some of his other, uh, you know, uh, MMA guys, good reels. And the thing that struck me is they

were so nice, you know, cause I've never met any like professional fighters in that capacity before. And what struck me is how nice they were. It was like, these guys are, their job is to beat people up and they're super nice. And so we did a couple of trainings since he goes, Hey man, you know, I run a jujitsu. I'm a black belt in jujitsu. If you want to come try sometime, come on up there. So I drove to Riverside and jumped in there and, you know, didn't know what I was doing, but I had fun. It was like, well, this is really fun. And, um, so that's how I started. And then I just, uh, um, have been, you know, sort of just kind of gradually just kind of – it varies. Unfortunately, like I said, traveling and, you know, I've had a few little just minor little setbacks with injuries and things like that, you know, which obviously happened. I mean, you've had them.

I've had them. So it's been – but I enjoy it. I'm looking forward to – I would like to compete. I would like to compete at a high level at some point, do some of the Masters World stuff. But I just got to put together enough consistent time to where I can do that. But, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's mentally very fun.

It obviously requires some different physical skills. I've been very linear over the years. I mean, I did do some rotations. When I used to do Highland games, it was a lot of spinning rotational, like shot put motion. So I did have that. So I'm not just completely one dimensional, but I do like the way I do like the fact that there's just different, different things to go there. And it's, I guess a lot of camaraderie, uh, you know, like I mentioned that the relative stress that when you're in there and someone's actually trying to kill you and, uh, the rest of the day is less

stressful. You know, some people be stressed out about doing pike. I'm like, no one's trying to kill me right now. So it's like I think it has that sort of effect on you that you're no longer – you can put things into perspective. Hey, it's bad, but no one's trying to kill me, so it's cool. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think we have a little bit of other content that we'll get to on a different podcast that we're going to do with him as well. Always amazing having you here. Hopefully people are inspired and fired up. Hopefully people will do World Carnivore Month and hopefully they'll eat some damn meat. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, like I said, there's more and more people doing it every year. I mean, let's try it and see what happens. Like I said, there's nothing wrong with trying. The worst thing that happens, you ate a bunch of steaks.

And, hey, that's not bad. And you have, like, I think you said something like 6,000 people waiting to. Yeah, we are. Yeah, Rivero is our company. We are licensed in all 50 states. We provide health care. Basically, you know, we treat root cause. We don't just medicate and put mandates on people.

We actually work to try to get people off medications and to actually reverse their diseases when possible. Well, you can prescribe if you need to. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, we're licensed physicians. So that is, you know, sometimes we'll use carnivore, sometimes we won't. Sometimes we'll use some sort of low-carb elimination-type style diet. And that is, so yeah, we have, we had a waiting list. We have something like 6,000 people that signed up for it.

So it's a very promising thing. We just, I think just this week, we are bringing our first patients into the clinic, into the virtual clinic. So it's going to be a busy year for me. I've got a lot of stuff coming up. And then hopefully, you know, once we go, we'll scale that up.

And, you know, hopefully we get to the point where we're seeing not just a few thousand, but maybe hundreds of thousands of people, which be really exciting congratulations on i know you've been working on it for a long time yeah thanks mark appreciate it yeah strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye