Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1360: Carnivore Vs. Vegan With Dr. Will Bulsiewicz & Dr. Paul Saladino

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

In this episode, Sal speaks with plant based advocate Dr. Will Bulsiewicz and carnivore advocate Dr. Paul Saladino. An interview with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz.  Is Will pro-plant based or pro-vegan? What are the differences? (4:42) How the food he was eating was holding him back. (6:37) How a plant-based diet allows you to activate satiety hormones to get into a calorie deficit. (11:16) Making the case for protein, the most satisfying macronutrient. (13:10) The educational problems surrounding planet-based diets. (16:22) Having the evolutionary conversation around eating meat. (18:05) Is longevity engineered? (22:57) Has he run into any clients who don’t do well on a plant-based diet? (27:07) His take on creatine. (29:31) Does meat by itself post any health risks? (33:15) Looking at the layers of evidence. What’s the deal with this TMAO? (35:35) Is it possible to build muscle on a plant-based diet? (37:45) His take on veganism being linked to higher rates of mental illness. (41:16) An interview with Dr. Paul Saladino. (43:35) What is the carnivore diet? (44:14) Why does he believe that plants are bad for us? (47:22) Doesn’t processing vegetables get around their toxins? (52:22) Explaining the plant toxicity spectrum. (56:17) What’s up with fiber?! (1:01:21) The effects of no vitamin c in our diet. (1:06:55) The mainstream dogma surrounding saturated fat. (1:09:55) Debunking the blue zones. (1:19:37) The role of carbohydrates when it comes to athletic performance. (1:23:14) Mind Pump Recap and Key Takeaways: Carnivore vs. Vegan. (1:27:28) Featured Guest(s)/People Mentioned Will Bulsiewicz MD MSCI (Dr B) (@theguthealthmd)  Instagram Dr. Will Bulsiewicz | The Gut Health MD Paul Saladino, MD (@carnivoremd)  Instagram Carnivore MD IFBB Pro Jehina🌱 (@ifbbjehinamalik1)  Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned August Promotion: MAPS Performance ½ off!! **Promo code “GREEN50” at checkout** FLASH SALE: 75% off Access to Mind Pump Private Forum – Promo code “75OFF” at checkout New Program Launch: MAPS Suspension $20 off! **Promo code “SUSPENSION20” at checkout** Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome – Book by Will Bulsiewicz MD The Carnivore Code | Carnivore MD Effects of 4 weight-loss diets differing in fat, protein, and carbohydrate on fat mass, lean mass, visceral adipose tissue, and hepatic fat: results from the POUNDS LOST trial A plant-based, low-fat diet decreases ad libitum energy intake compared to an animal-based, ketogenic diet: An inpatient randomized controlled trial Antagonistic Pleiotropy - an overview Effects of Creatine Supplementation on Muscle Performance during the Transition from an Omnivorous Diet to a Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian Diet Brain creatine depletion in vegetarians? A cross-sectional 1H-magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) study TMAO Testing: A New Way To Assess Heart Attack And Stroke Risk Vegetarianism and veganism compared with mental health and cognitive outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis Are Plant Lectins A Problem For Humans? Role of dietary fiber in colon cancer: an overview Effect of dietary fiber on constipation: A meta analysis Stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation and its associated symptoms Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome The ‘carnivore connection’—evolutionary aspects of insulin resistance Dr. Saul Newman: debunking the 'Blue Zone' longevity myth Mind Pump Podcast - YouTube

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Saldas Defano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pumped the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast, we wanted to cover a topic that is quite popular right now in the fitness and health space. This is a dietary topic. Now, we've heard about all the potential benefits of the vegan diet or the plant-based diet, but more recently, we've been hearing a lot about the carnivore diet.

In fact, there's been quite a few people that have messaged us and said that eating in a carnivore style has solved a lot of their health problems. So we wanted to do an episode where we got Who we consider to be two of the best experts on both sides of those arguments to discuss the benefits of why they're on the carnivore side Or why they're on the vegan side we picked two amazing people who are not zealots Who are very intelligent and who present a very, very good case. So we open up the episode by talking to Dr. Will Bulsiewicz. Now he's a gastroenterologist.

He's pro plant-based, very, very smart guy. Really like the guy. He wrote a book called Fiber Fueled, and you can find him online at theplantfedgut.com. So that's the first guy that I talked to in interview. The second guy I talked to is Dr. Paul Saladino. He's an internal medicine specialist. He's the author of the book, The Carnivore Code. In fact, that's gonna be re-released here shortly.

Paul's a very, very smart guy. He's on the meat side and he makes some really, really good arguments. We think you're going to enjoy this episode because none of them are dogmatic. Both of them answer all of my questions very well. And both of them make really good arguments, really, really good arguments. Now at the end of the episode, Adam, Justin and myself have a discussion about the interview. We talk about who we thought did a better job, the points that they both made, and then we threw in our two cents of experience training people for two decades. We have our own experiences with diet, having worked with so many people over a long period

of time. So at the end of the episode, you get to hear our opinion. By the way, Dr. Paul Saladino's book can be found at the carnivorecodebook.com. He also has a great podcast called Fundamental Health with Paul Saladino, and then you can find his website carnivoremd.com. Now, before the episode starts,

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We haven't launched a new Maps program a long time. This one is really popular right now. It's Maps Suspension. This is a full workout that utilizes only suspension trainers. That's it. That's all you need. And you can train your entire body, of course, like all maps programs. This includes exercise demos and videos and blueprints that tell you how many reps and sets and

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Here's how you take advantage of it. Go to mapssuspension.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-U-S-P-N-S-I-O-N.com. And then use the code Suspension2-0. Suspension20 with no space for $20 off. Again, that ends Tuesday, two days. So to open up the conversation, I asked Will, two days. So to open up the conversation, I asked Will, if he was pro plant-based or was he pro-Vegan, what's the difference between the two? I think it is important to understand the difference because although I do consider myself vegan, I really sort of came to this and became interested in nutrition from the perspective of being plant-based. So plant-based is a more broad, and I would say more inclusive on brel term, where basically it just means that you are trying to orient your diet towards being predominantly plant-based. And to me that could be 70, 80, 90, 100%.

It doesn't necessarily mean that there is the complete absence of animal products. Veganism, to me, is really truly an ethic that is motivated by animal welfare concerns and also environmental concerns. And you could make the argument for nutrition in there as well, but truly, to me, veganism comes back to you basically say I'm not going to eat literally any animal products and the reason why is because I don't agree with what they're doing to the animals and I don't agree with you know or I have concerns about the effect on the environment and so therefore no animal products at all. But you know, so the issue with veganism is that you could be a junk food vegan, which many people are,

and I would never characterize that as a healthy diet. You know, if you eat junk food all day long, just because it's devoid of animal products, that doesn't mean that it's healthy. And so, that's where to me, I really come to this from the perspective of being plant-based, because even for people who are vegan, I want them to actually increase the consumption of real food, real fruits, vegetables, whole grain seeds, nuts, and legumes. So right out the gates, you can see that will is also not a dogmatic zealot. This is why I interviewed him for this portion of the podcast. So I wanted to know what brought him to this place, what got him to the point of wanting

to eat plant-based and then what got him to be a vegan. If you go back 10 years, I was 30, like I'm turning 40 next month and so 10 years ago I was 30 and I was just not in a good place from a health perspective. I had gained 50 pounds compared to where I was in high school which for me was hard to swallow because I was a three-support athlete in high school and so it was kind of weird to look in the mirror and see it like basically a beer gut and had super low energy levels low self-esteem, even though I was the chief medical resident at Northwestern, one of the top residency programs

in the country, super low self-esteem, high blood pressure, tons of anxiety. And at that time, my diet was very much like the standard American diet. So by no means did I think that I had a clean diet, but my diet was truly 50, 60% processed food. And 30% animal products.

My favorite food was for lunch and a telling and cold-cut sub. For dinner, a filly cheese steak or like I lived in Chicago at that time, I would get a Chicago style hot dog. I loved ribeye steaks. If it was my birthday, I would go out for a rib eye and a glass of red wine. So that was the diet that I ate and I was raised on that food. And it never really dawned on me that that food could actually be the source of my issues, my health issues that I had. And you know, here I am and I was the chief resident in Internal Medicine at Northwestern. I had this great training and it never really You know, I never really made the connection that it was my food that was holding me back

And I tried to work my way out of it because I'm a very type A type of guy and So I started hitting the gym and just like pounding workouts six days a week thinking if you work out enough You can work your way out of this and eat whatever the heck you want you'll be fine And so I was doing six days of workouts, 45 minutes or so of heavy weights, and then jump on the treadmill for a five to 10 K, or if it was the summertime, I would go do a hundred laps in the pool.

And I could make myself strong, I could run a great 5 K, I could become a very efficient swimmer, I couldn't lose the gut. I couldn't get rid of the medical issues. And so ultimately for me, it was the discovery I made the connection, actually by meeting my wife, of a plant-based diet being a way to eat. I'd really never been around to anyone who ate this way my entire life.

And I made the connection that this is a way that you could eat that you can eat without restriction, you can enjoy your food, and you can have your health back. And I started to make these changes in my life, and the fat melted off, the blood pressure dropped, my confidence surged back, I started feeling young again, and I started looking for research studies because I hadn't heard anything about this. And because at the end of the day, I am people who know me figure out really quickly, I'm a research junkie, like I'm a nerd.

And so I turned to the research studies to see what the heck with the deal was and why I hadn't heard anything about this. And I was shocked when I found that there were thousands of studies backing up this path to health through a plant-based diet. And so I started bringing it into my clinic as a gastronurologist and treating my patients who have, of course, Crohn's disease, all sorts of colitis, irritable bowel, all these different digestive issues.

And I started treating them. And to me, you know, my philosophy is very much, this is not, hey, you have to be a hundred percent or you're not a good person. I wanna meet people where they are. If you are 10% plant-based, then that's cool. That's the way that I used to be. Let me try to get you up to 30.

So I brought into my clinic and had amazing results with my patients, healing digestive issues. And it became so powerful that I felt compelled to share the story beyond just being a doctor and seeing people one-on-one in Charleston, South Carolina. So I started my Instagram account in 2016. And one thing went to another. I had a podcast go viral in 2018. Then I got a book deal and now, you know, here

we are and my Instagram account has 123,000 followers and my book is in New York Times best seller. So, I mean, it's just like this was not the plan. It's crazy. Will was talking a lot about his own personal experience, how he lost weight and felt much better, but I couldn't help but think to myself that maybe they had more to do with the fact that he cut out junk food and calories, unless they do the fact that he cut out animal products.

So that's what I asked him. Is it about the reduction or elimination of animal products? Or is it the fact that you ate just less calories and less junk food? I think there is 100% some validity to that mindset in the sense that if you eliminate processed foods, I mean, that's the one thing that I think every single reasonable scientist can agree on, no matter who you are, no matter which dietary sort of religion you have.

I think we can all agree that processed foods, there's nothing really redeeming there and we should get rid of them. And, you know, I mean, for example, with the carnivore diet, when I hear the people claim that they have improvement of their autoimmune disease, to me, that's because the processed food that you have successfully eliminated

contains 10,000 different chemicals that our food and drug administration has allowed into our food supply. And that's where you find them in the processed foods. So I certainly understand where people will say that, but sell the other thing from my perspective is that we have other studies that I would be happy to elaborate on. That suggests that a plant-based diet where fiber becomes the centerpiece activates satiety hormones, allows you to get into that calorie deficit, and it allows you to eat, like I've never counted calories in my entire

life. I never did during the weight loss process that I had, and we have studies where people are allowed to eat without restriction. If it's a plant-based diet, they still lose weight, because basically the fiber activates the satiety hormones to stop them from overeating. So he talks about satiety. And so I want to bring up the studies that I'm familiar with that show that protein is the macronutrient that produces the most satiety.

It's the most feeling from all the studies that I've read. And of course, plant-based sources of protein are harder to come by. Obviously, animal sources have much more protein. So, what about that? What about protein being the most satisfying macronutrient? No, that's fair. I mean, there's both. Protein does produce satiety, but so does fiber. And fiber actually produces these hormones like weptin and ghrelin that have been connected to activating those satiety hormones. And there was a really interesting study that just came out in the last couple of weeks where,

you know, Sal, doing these studies with real people, like, we're harder to hurt than cats. You know, and it's hard to do good, new high quality nutritional studies with real humans out in the wild, because we just do whatever the heck we want. So there was a study that came out from Kevin Hall, who's one of sort of the leading nutritional researchers in the country is at the National Institute of Health. And he convinced a group of people who were fairly young, there were average 28 years old, to lock themselves in a nutritional ward, like effectively in a hospital, for a month, and he fed them either

a ketogenic diet or a completely plant-based diet. And by plant-based, by the way, in this case, there was still some junk food in there. Like, there wasn't just pure we plants. And so two weeks of ketogenic diet versus two weeks on this plant-based diet, and the beauty of this is that he's controlling everything. Like he's controlling what's on that tray that they give to people. And they gave them unlimited food. you could eat if you were hungry and they were not told what was the point of the study So basically they just knew they were locked up and they were brought these trays of food

They were brought snacks and you could eat when you were hungry and you could stop when you weren't hungry You could do whatever the heck you wanted and Basically what was fascinating and I'm happy by the way to send you the reference so that you can include it in the show notes. What was fascinating is that these people, they flipped between the two. So two weeks of ketogenic, and then over the two weeks of plant-based, or the opposite, two weeks of plant-based, over the two weeks of ketogenic, and the people who were on the plant-based diet during their two weeks, they consumed on average 600 calories less than the people on the ketogenic diet, yet they achieved the same level of satiety in their diet.

So it kind of speaks to the importance of the fiber in the diet and to be fair, to your point cell, the protein wasn't what was being varied there. You know, when they're comparing the ketogenic diet to the plant-based diet, really what they're varying is the high fat low carb versus high carb low fat. And in this case, trying to really sort of minimize the processed food. So he brings up the issue of heavily processed foods. Now, I'm very familiar with this as a trainer, heavily processed foods just promote overeating across the board. And one of the challenges that I would run into

with clients when they would want to go plant-based or vegan is that the only unprocessed foods in their diet were often animal products. They ate eggs or meat or milk. And then everything else was processed. And then they would go vegan or plant-based. They would cut out animal products, and now their entire diet was heavily processed.

So I asked them about this. I wanted to know if he encountered this problem and how he informed his patients when they would remove meat or animal products from their diet. Yeah, no, I think that that's a very valid point. And one of the issues that we've had as a culture, like, you know, on a national basis, is that many people will criticize how things have played out in terms of the recommendations that we've received from, you know, for example, the USDA, where, you know, years ago, they said, cut down on saturated fat. And so what you saw in the United States was that people replaced saturated fat with vegetable

oil. And I wouldn't say that's making people any healthier, right? So and that's part of the issue is there's an educational problem, but this is the reason why I prefer to have the conversation speaking on the grounds of plant-based, because then I'm being very clearbased, because then I'm being very clear and upfront that what I'm talking about is whole plant food. And going 70, 80, 90, 100% whole plant food, stuff that you could grow in your backyard and stuff where when you look at the list of ingredients, there is no list of ingredients

because it's just a real food. So I thought that was a very reasonable response from Will. So next up I wanted to ask him the evolutionary question, the problem that a lot of plant-based advocates run into, which is, you know, we evolved eating lots of meat. We couldn't survive eating just plants. We didn't have the variety of fruits, and vegetables, nuts, and seeds that we do now in modern markets. What about certain vitamins that are almost impossible to find in plant-based sources, like B vitamins or iron, for example? Well, first of all, I enjoy the evolutionary conversations.

I find them very interesting. interesting, you know. And, um, but the, the issue is that I don't know that it's fair to take the way that we ate during sort of pre-modern times where things were radically different. Um, we lived in famine. We, it was a violent world. We had no healthcare system. And way too many people didn't live long enough to actually have children. And it truly was survival of the fittest. And we ate, you know, based upon those circumstances, with the intention of just trying to survive

long enough to be able to have some kids pass on our genetic code and get that to a new generation so that you're part of the evolutionary tree and not removed from it. I mean, that's the world that we lived in for, you know, the majority of human history and I get that. And if I were living in that world where starvation is legitimately a concern, then I would absolutely go for high calorie foods and that's what animal products are. You get more bang for your buck in terms of calories, you know, and if I were living

in those times, in the interest of my own survival, I would be eating those exact same things. But there's this idea that I actually find to be very interesting. So there's two things I would like to present to you, Sal, and in response to that. The first is an idea called antagonistic pleotropy. And antagonistic pleotropy, which I think is complete we at play, is the idea that the way that we evolved to support life during prehistoric times is now actually coming back to bite us in the ass right now. That the genetics that we built to help us during that time is now becoming actually our enemy.

So the idea is that, for example, we evolved ways to efficiently absorb our food because we lived in famine. And now here we are, and 70% of Americans are obese, and type 2 diabetes is taking over. Or we evolved ways to form blood clots to protect us if we had an injury. And now the number one cause of death is heart disease related to blood clots. Or that we evolved inflammatory systems to help to fight infections. And now here we have all these things that are inflammation related, you know, including cancer.

And so the problem is life has changed. Life in 2020 is not the way that it was, you know, 15,000 years ago. And that's part of the challenge. Now the second part of this cell that I want to present to you is that evolution, like every time I hear these evolutionary arguments, and I do find them interesting and I enjoy these conversations. But there's one major point that we always overlook, which I think is really critically important for people to understand, which is that evolution does not care at all what happens to you once you have kids. Evolution doesn't select

for you to live longer and be healthier and make it to 90 and still have a brain and not like develop dementia. Like evolution is designed so that you survive long enough to have children and then you pass on your genetic code to those children. The problem is that now here we are today and everyone lives long enough to potentially have children and in fact many people who lives long enough to potentially have children. And in fact, many people who are the least fit to have children or have in the most children. And so we're passing on the genetic code, not necessarily of the strongest people.

We're just passing on whatever genetic code. If we want to have longevity, if we want to be able to, like for me, what I care about, I want to, I have kids just like you and I want to live time 80 or 90 and still be able to enjoy that time with my family and not be sick in my 70s and 80s. Okay so I had to stop them and actually interrupt them right there because I didn't fully agree with what he was saying. Now, we do know, or anthropologists, I guess, agree that although women can't procreate past menopause, their role is still very important in evolution.

The role of the grandmother, for example, is very important to the building of our tribes and society. And then men, we can procreate until the age or until we die theoretically for still healthy so i wanted to stop them there and ask about that no i see what you're saying i mean basically what you're saying is that for the in the interest of of the tribes survival uh... that it's better for people to live longer and i totally agree with that i

guess my point to you is in just to kind of wrap up my point real quick, is I know we want to move on to other things. My point is that longevity is engineered at this point. That evolution is not selecting for us to live longer. In fact, evolution at this point may be selecting for us to be less healthy. And that my point is that if we want to be healthy and we want to be healthy in our 70s and 80s, we have to use science as we want to be healthy in our 70s and 80s, we have to use science as our compass to guide us there. We can't look to the way people ate 10,000 years ago and say,

well, that's going to help me to live to be 80 and be healthy. We have to allow science to be the compass that guides us there and we have to engineer that. And I would argue that the right approach to getting there is through an anti-inflammatory diet. And the challenge is that, you know, we are living to an unprecedented age now. You go back 120 years, and the life expectancy was about 50. And now the life expectancy is 80. So we need to adapt our approach

so that we can have that health with those extra 30 years that we're tacking on to the back end there. Now, and real quick, sell to address your points about the deficiencies that exist. So, with regard to a completely vegan diet, there are some deficiencies that do exist, and the truth is that if you look at any diet, there are weak points. You know, there are clearly weak points to a 100% animal product diet that excludes plants. And so these weak points, the question is how do we adapt to those weak points? With a completely vegan diet, a completely plant-based diet,

the main point that I would characterize as being weakness, it's not really that big of a deal. It's the B12. B12 is produced by bacteria that includes the animals that have B12. And by the way, many of the cows in animal agriculture are supplemented with B12 because they're not getting in their diet. And so because they're not allowed basically to freely graze. So, you know, B12 is actually incredibly simple for us to supplement from my perspective. I believe that whether you are an omnivore or you are completely plant-based, you still should be taking a B12 supplement because in the studies where they've looked in the United States, 40% of people are either deficient or borderline deficient. I also think that we should be taking an

omega-3 supplement. I think that everyone should be taking an omega-3 supplement. We have big issues with omega-3 and I could break that down. That's a larger conversation that also includes our excessive use of the plant oils, which are high in omega-6, and end up affecting our omega-3. So I think that we should be taking a DHA and EPA supplement. I think that we should be taking a B12 supplement and as for vitamin D, that's not really so much a plant-based thing. That's more that we are living inside and we're not getting outside and getting enough sunlight.

Okay, so he basically is advocating for the use of supplements to supplement a diet. And I can get behind that. We do live in modern times, although people may argue that if you're eating a diet that requires supplements, maybe it's not the best one for you. But again, modern times, I would agree, supplementing in many cases is probably beneficial. Now, next up, I wanted to ask him about his experience with his patients. supplementing in many cases is probably beneficial. Now next up, I wanted to ask him about his experience with his patients.

He works with gut health quite a bit, and I know he's worked with a lot of people, and when you work with a lot of people, like I've experienced as a trainer, you run into this huge individual variance. Some people respond great to one thing and other people not so much. So I wanted to ask him his personal experience as to whether or not he's ever run into anybody

who just did not do well with a plant-based diet. It's an interesting question because I have to separate out the people that I actually see in my practice that are actually my patient versus the people that I see on the internet who are running into issues. And it's, I have to separate that because in my own practice, and I'm going to be completely transparent with you, Sal, that I don't necessarily tell every single patient that they need to go 100% plant-based. And there are some patients, I'll give you an example, this week I had a patient in

my practice who has anorexia, like full on any disorder, and she was in an active flare. Now is not the time for me to be changing her diet and trying to, you know, remove food groups. So for her, I basically told her, and she could use the cork density of the meat. I told her to continue to eat the way that she was eating, and actually that it was important for her to get her calories. But, from my perspective, I've never had a patient

that I can recall off the top of my head where I found that they became nutritionally incomplete under my care following a completely plant-based diet. And the people who do stuff on the internet, many times what I see, and this is just me as an outsider looking in at what they're putting up publicly, and who knows what the truth is, because I think that sometimes there's a difference between what they share publicly and what's really going on. But what I many times see is that they're doing these weird, like, variant forms of veganism, like, raw only or fruit only, or, you know, and it's just like, what are you doing?

That's not, like, just eat plants in diversity. You know, it's not just like, what are you doing? That's not like just eat plants in diversity. You know, it's not be restricting it even further. So next up, I wanted to ask him about the studies that I've seen on creatine. Now, creatine, you can only get from animal sources. And I've seen studies where they give vegans creatine to supplement and they get a notable cognitive boost. So there's some speculations around a creatine in which they say maybe vegans need to eat some animal products to get the

creatine. Otherwise, they wouldn't see such a such a big boost in cognitive function when they supplement it with it. So I asked them his comments on that. I actually believe in creatine and think that it is extremely helpful in terms of exercise performance. So thinking about these studies, you have to first start off with the original studies, which are more than 15 years old, where they basically had no comparison group. It was a bunch of vegetarians and vegans, and they supplemented them with creatine. This is by bunch of vegetarians and vegans and they supplemented them with creatine. This is by the way 2003 and they supplemented with creatine and they

did notice using 5 grams of creatine per day that there was improvement in their mental capacity. But it's important to have that comparison group. Otherwise, you don't really know whether or not other people would have had the same effect. And so there was this follow-up study that they did in 2010 and they compared them to omnivores. And this time the amount of creatine they took was an amount that I personally would never take, which was 20 grams of creatine every single day. I mean to me, that's excessive.

And what they found in this follow-up study looking at vegetarians and comparing them to omnivores is that actually their memory was the same in the beginning, but that the vegetarians seem to have an improvement with the creatine in their memory, more so than the meat eaters did. Now, I can't say that I can fully explain why that would be. Your point is well taken and it is clear

that there is no creatine naturally. If you are completely vegan, there is no creatine in that diet. Your body is capable of producing a gram of creatine per day. And most people who eat meat get an additional gram of creatine from their meat consumption. But there have been other additional studies that they've done since then looking at the actual brain chemistry because creatine is important in two locations.

It's important in the muscle and it's also important in our brain. And when they've actually analyzed the creatine content within our actual brain, there was a 2013 study. When they actually analyzed the creatine content within our brain, they found that they were actually the same between vegetarians and omnivores. There was no difference. And there was another study where they actually gave them

supplements. And they again found that even with the supplements, there was no difference in brain-creating concentrations. So, I mean, I think it's one of these things that I don't think that there is a cognitive deficit. I kind of feel like sometimes these things can get blown out of proportion in the sense that I don't think that people who are on a plant-based diet

are at a cognitive deficit. I mean, if anything, I would actually argue the opposite, which is that we have fairly strong epidemiology evidence to suggest that a point-based diet suggests protects us from dementia risk. And so, so I guess the bottom line with creatine from my perspective is that anyone who wants to use it, I'm really not opposed to people using it. I use it myself

But I don't feel like there's some deficit to creatine that's holding vegans back from optimal brain chemistry or performance All right, so I wanted to find out if you knew of any studies that showed that meat on its own is inherently Bad for us in other words when they control everything, you got healthy, omnivore diet, healthy vegan diet. If they're both healthy, does meat by itself pose any health risks? Yeah, I mean, we have studies. We have studies that suggest that animal protein puts you at increased risk for heart disease, for death from heart disease, for incidents of diabetes. We have randomized controlled studies that show improvements of blood pressure and cholesterol by removing animal protein from the diet. Of course, there's connections between animal protein and like, I don't, this is the nerdy stuff that is my world that I don't know how much you and your listeners know about TMAO, but TMAO is a marker in the blood

that has been very strongly connected to coronary artery disease, stroke, and chronic kidney disease. And the, in order to get TMAO, you have to consume carnitine from red meat. And they have these studies sell where, first of all, they show, and it's kind of interesting because our microbiome plays a role in taking the red meat and the carnitine and transforming it into this TMAO. And what's interesting about it is because it involves the microbiome, they have studies where they showed that if you give a stake to a vegan, they don't produce TMAO. But if you continue to give basically supplements,

carnitine supplements to the vegan for four weeks, then they will actually start to produce TMAO. The point being that we have evidence to connect animal protein or the consumption of animal products to heart disease, death from heart disease, to cancer, including colorectal cancer, but that's not the only one to diabetes, to high blood pressure, to stroke, to chronic kidney disease, very strongly connected to chronic kidney disease, by the way. Okay, so here he was talking about something called TMAO and its role in disease, but it also reminds me of other compounds in the body, other molecules that can be beneficial or bad,

depending on the context of what's going on. For example, MTOR, when that's elevated in a pro-inflammatory pro-cancer state, it fuels cancer. If you're healthy, MTOR helps fuel muscle growth. Inflammation does this as well. Inflammation is a signaler for muscle growth and recovery, but in the wrong context, too much inflammation

can cause some problems. So I wanted to ask him about that. And I also asked him about the studies that show that animal proteins are superior for muscle growth and performance when compared on a gram for gram basis to plant proteins. Yeah, well, I think this is where you have to look at the layers of evidence. This is the reason why one study by itself is not adequate to completely define a condition or a biomarker or anything of that variety that we need to

kind of say, okay, what's the deal with this TMAO? Let's look at some additional studies and find out what those are telling us, too. And they have strong studies coming out of the Cleveland Clinic looking at TMAO as an independent risk factor, meaning that they have controlled for high blood pressure, for cholesterol, for all of these other, you know, smoking, for all of these other traditional risk factors for heart disease. They've controlled for that, and they still identify T-M-A-O as an independent risk factor. And then, what they've done is they've taken T-M-A-O, and they've actually injected it into animal models.

And when they do that, they form blood clots. And so to me, the evidence is that this isn't just a passenger along for the ride, that this is actually the one with the foot on the gas, driving the car. And so with regard to TMAO, I certainly am concerned that this is legitimate. Now, transitioning into the conversation about different forms of protein and the effect on muscle building, you know, I think

and I'm sure you would agree with me on this, that you really need to think about what your goals are and what trade-offs you're willing to take in order to accomplish those goals. You know, in terms of fitness, in terms of muscle building, I mean, I'm sure you would agree with me that it's possible to build muscle on a plant-based diet, right? We have, you know, IFBB professionals, some of whom are not just vegan, but actually were born into families where they grew up, either vegan or vegetarian, Nimae Delgado has never had meat his entire life. Yeah, and there's someone, her name is Jeyna Malik,

and Jeyna Malik is an IFBB pro female bodybuilder who was born vegan, and she's been vegan her entire life. So it's possible. And so we need to break down, you know, where the truth lies and how we can adapt if we choose to have a plant-based lifestyle. And you're 100% correct that on a gram for gram basis, if you give me 100 grams of steak and 100 grams of soy beans,

the steak is going to have more branched chain amino acids. And it's these branched chain amino acids, valine, isolucine, and particularly lucine that have been shown to activate the protein synthesis mechanisms which you brought up, M-Tore. And as you know, it's this balance between protein synthesis and protein breakdown that we're constantly in, and we want to get that ratio positive where protein synthesis is exceeding protein breakdown, and activation of MTOR through branch chain amino acids and through exercise is the way that we accomplish that. Gram for gram, you get more branch chain amino acids

from animal products. That's indisputable. The studies are out there. But the issue is that we're not eating gram for gram. There's no reason. I've never counted grams of food in my life. We're eating to which accomplish our goals. And if the point is, can you eat a plant-based diet

to accomplish your fitness goals and get just as big and get just as many branch chain amino acids as a person eating a steak? The answer is absolutely. You just have to eat a little bit more. And so to me, I don't truly believe that there is some sort of advantage that exists. I do think that there are different body types, you know, different people have different

things that they can accomplish with their body. And if you want to experiment with it to find what works best for you based upon your personal goals when it comes to fitness, I would completely understand that. You know, for me, and I think we all have sort of a mind that we would draw, like I would never do steroids. And I'm sure most people would probably say that. Because there's a trade-off. You can look great on the outside and be rotten to the core on the inside and die when

you're less than 50. For me, I personally am not trying to be a competitive bodybuilder. I eat for fitness. I eat for optimal health, and it also has worked for me in the gym. So, and I think that that's completely possible to accomplish that with a plant-based diet. So, for my final question,

I asked Will about a recent meta-analysis that I had just read that linked veganism with higher rates of mental illness, anxiety in particular. And I wanted to comments on that. I wanted to see what he thought about this big beta analysis study. Yeah. That was a super recent meta analysis. I think it was like June 9th.

All right. So, and let me just ask you a question to frame it. Would you expect Michael Greger to ever from how not to die, who is vegan? Would you expect him to ever come out with a study that says that eating plant based is bad for you? So this study that you're referring to, here's the key, anytime that you review a study, you need to know what the conflicts of interest are. I hate that that is the truth. And I think it's only fair for me to say that it goes both ways. But there's a conflict of interest with this particular study. It made the news, and you have to literally go past 100 references to the very bottom

of the study. It's literally the last thing on the entire page to discover that this was sponsored by the Kettleman's Beef Association. I would never expect the Kettleman's Beef Association to publish a study that says that veganism is equal to eating meat in terms of mental health. I would never expect that. There are systematic reviews and meta-analyses that say the opposite for what that's worth. There was a 2014 study that suggested that higher

intakes of fruits, vegetables, fish, and whole grains reduced depression risk. There also are randomized controlled trials. There was a 2015 randomized controlled trial, which takes away a lot of this bias. And they gave people a plant-based diet. And in this randomized controlled trial, which by the way was among people who were overweight, they had reduced depression and anxiety scores. So to me, I mean, I think it's interesting,

but the problem is that when I see that this is sponsored by the Kettleman's Beef Association, I'm like, okay, well, of course that's what they found. That's what they paid for. It's effectively marketing. Okay, so you heard me talk to Will Bolshewitz. Great guy, very smart dude. Not a zealot, not dogmatic.

Presented very, very good case, answered my questions well. I had a good time talking to him. Next up, you're gonna hear me talk to the other side of the debate or discussion. Paul Saladino, he's an internal medicine specialist, and he is pro, meat-based. He is known as the carnivore MD. I think you're gonna love this discussion as well.

He's also not a Zella, also non-darkmatic, and he explains himself and his points very, very well. Here we go. All right, so I open up by asking Paul to kind of describe the carnivore diet. What is it in simple terms? You can technically define the carnivore diet as a diet that's entirely composed of animal foods, though in my book and in my messaging, I've begun

to expand the definition a little bit. So the more broad definition of a carnivore diet in my opinion is a diet that appreciates two main key premises. And those are number one that animal foods are the most healthy foods that humans can eat. We've been eating them throughout the entirety of human evolution. They form to this key, key, key portion of our evolutionary past by providing us with unique nutrients, fat soluble vitamins, B vitamins, essential fatty acids, which were probably the spark, probably the main factor allowing our genetics and environment to lead to a bigger brain to make us human. So animal foods are this very, very key part of our evolution.

And over the last five decades, they've been incorrectly vilified. So they represent an indispensable part of optimal human nutrition and have been incorrectly vilified. That's premise number one. Premise number two is the opposite side of the coin. That plants and animals have co-evolved for 450 million years, and that plants have defense chemicals.

Plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity, and can be triggering, can be harmful for some people. And if we accept that plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity and that they can cause issues for people, whether it's things like gluten or other lectins, whether it's isothiocyanate, which we can talk about in brassica vegetables, leading to issues with thyroid, whether it's other harmful toxins in plants, potentially damaging the lining. Plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity that can lead to issues in humans. Perhaps not all humans are affected by all plants equally, but if we accept those two pieces of the carnivore diet perspective, we're thinking, all right, animal foods are the

best foods on the planet, incorrectly vilified. Plant foods exist on a spectrum of toxicity. Let's marry those and think about creating an optimal diet for humans, which then looks like a diet, which is mostly animal foods with some plant foods, perhaps, from the least toxic end of the spectrum or with some attention to the way that those plant foods may affect any individual human. Like I said in the beginning, the technical definition of a carnivore diet is all animal products and no plants, but I think that just accepting those two ideas gets us 98% of the way there and will result in 99% of the improvement for most people within the population.

All right, so essentially Paul is saying that we should have a meat-based diet. Plants have defense mechanisms, toxins, and that meat is the most nutrient-dense, nutritious food on the planet, and it's essential, essentially for humans. So I wanted to go a little deeper into these toxins or why plants, why he thinks plants may be bad for us. And you can imagine that those are necessary for plant and animal co-evolution. You ever seen that movie Willy Wonka on the Chocolate Factory where they go, all right, it's like one of the best movies ever, Rawl Doll is an incredible author.

Remember that scene where they go into that large, it's like one of the best movies ever, Rawl Doll is an incredible author. Remember that scene where they go into that large room where everything is made of candy, and there's a chocolate river, and there's lollipop trees, and you can eat everything, and everything is sweet, and I mean, notwithstanding all the effects of all the sugar in there,

but imagine that that was the terrain, that animals and insects and fungi and humans encountered for the last millions or hundreds of millions of years. But you just were in this Willy Wonka landscape of plants and you could eat anything you want, anytime, again, let's not get into the nuance of whatever the sugar is good for you in that analogy. But you know, there would be no plants left on the earth. Animals and plants have been in an arms race for the last 450 million years, and plants have needed to co-evolve with animals, and in order to do that, they have had to develop defense chemicals. This really is not deniable. There are many plant defense chemicals that we're aware of,

and there are many frankly toxic plants that if you just went out into the woods and started eating things, mostly will realize that if you didn't have some appreciation for the plants you were eating, you would quickly get diarrhea or be vomiting. There are many foods in the wilderness that you could eat, and they would potentially kill you, everything from certain mushrooms to green plants to shrubs to roots. There's lots of toxic things in the wilderness. And so, if we accept that plants have toxins and that plants have needed those toxins to kind of do this gentle, this delicate dance with animals for the last hundreds of millions of years,

then we say, okay, which plants are the most toxic? Are there some plants that are less toxic for us? And then we get into the nuance. But it's not really debatable that plants have toxins. And so with a carnivore diet, we're really kind of expanding that lens and looking with a microscope at plants and saying, well, of the plants that we generally eat today as humans, and we can draw a pretty clear delineation between fruit and the nuts, or the or I should say the seeds, leaves, stems, and roots of plants.

So let's draw that delineation at the beginning. But if we're talking about the non-reproductive parts of plants, meaning the non-fruit part of plants, that would include the seeds, the stems, the leaves, the roots, those are the parts of the plant that that organism isn't really excited about an animal eating. Those are the parts that are going to have defense chemicals. And those are the parts where we need to take a really sobering look at to say, are there defense chemicals in these parts of the plants that could be harmful for some humans, for all humans at varying levels, are there some that are more harmful than others. And then we look at our current consumption of plants, and we see that a lot of the plants that we eat, a lot of the plant foods that we eat fall into those categories.

Stems, leaves, roots, and seeds, with seeds being a much broader definition, including nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes, which are all really seeds. So again, fruit is different, we can talk about that too. But those are the types of plants, plant parts that are likely to have defense chemicals. Now, one of the interesting parts of a carnivore way of thinking or along this narrative is a lot of the chemicals that we are told are good for us about plants might actually be harmful for us. And that's the narrative that I'm changing. That's the paradigm shift that I'm thinking about with my book, the carnivore code, with all of the work that I'm doing, that all the chemicals were told are good for us about plants are actually defense chemicals when you get right down to it. That's again not debatable.

The question becomes, do we really use them as a benefit? Or are they really harming us? Do we have evidence to say either way? Do they serve indispensable roles? Do they have unique roles in humans? Or have we really just been wrong in our interpretation of things like polyphenols, isothiosyonates, etc., etc.? I think most people would agree that lectins are either benign or harmful. I don't think anyone believes lectins are good for humans.

And certainly, people are familiar with gluten as a lectin and other lectins from beans that are pretty clearly toxic. But there are all of these different types of plant toxins, and we can get into all of them individually and talk about how they may or may not be harmful for humans. Okay, so Paul's talking a lot about this, the co-evolution of plants and animals and how plants develop to all these toxins is defense mechanisms, and it makes sense. Animals have other defense mechanisms.

They have sharp teeth, claws, they can run, they can escape. Plants just sit there. So the way that they evolved to protect themselves was by developing these indigestible toxins, for example. But when we eat them, typically historically, we process them. We grind them down, or we cook them, or we boil them. We get around their toxins.

The same way we get around the defense mechanisms of animals by hunting them and killing them. Obviously, I'm not going to eat a buffalo while it's alive because it'll kill me. So I have to kill it first. So one of the questions I had for him was, doesn't processing vegetables or cooking vegetables get around a lot of these toxins so we can unlock their nutrients and they can become very edible? I think it does, but the keyword there is some, and I think that most of the time when we study this, it's partial. So we get into these nuance discussions

around how well can anyone tolerate them in those situations. But I do think that our ancestors knew about toxins and plants, and you're absolutely right, that things like fermentation, cooking, they didn't really have pressure cooking, but we have pressure cooking now. These can get rid of some of the toxins in plants, but there are other toxins in plants that are not denatured when we do this. Phytoc acid, for instance, is a keylating molecule that holds on to phosphorus and other divealant cations. These are minerals that have a positive two charge in plants.

And phytoc acid is really hard to get rid of with cooking or baking or pressure cooking. eye-valent cations, these are minerals that have a positive two charge in plants. And phytoc acid is really hard to get rid of with cooking or baking or pressure cooking. It can be denatured by fermenting, but you need the bacteria to make this enzyme fightase to get rid of phytoc acid. So a lot of these things are persistent. Some of the lectins are probably denatured when we cook or when we pressure cook, but I think some still survive. And the intention of our ancestors is pretty clear here, and it goes back to what we were saying. They realized that there were toxins, and you can make the plants into less toxic forms by cooking them.

But the idea remains the same, and this is kind of one of the overarching questions of a carnivore diet is, if you can get, and this is something we may have to unpack as well, what if we could get all of the nutrients that we need from animals? And plants are really just survival food. In that case, yeah, cooking, sprouting, fermenting, that would be the best thing to do with a food to make it more palatable as a survival food, but do we need them? And is it possible that there are some people who are quite sensitive, and no matter what they do

with the plants, we'll see this autoimmune injury or GI injury, and have these symptoms? Certainly, if there are people out there who are eating plants and their diet, and they are just kicking butt and feeling great, and are not having issues, then who am I to tell them to not eat plants? What's interesting for me about this whole question is, what about the people who have persistent

auto-immunity? What about the people who have chronic smoldering inflammation? What about the people who have chronic skin issues or depression or psychiatric issues who have tried everything and are not being told that, hey, maybe some of the plants that are still in your diet are causing you an issue? This is just another tool for people to realize, like, oh, maybe this of the plants that are still in your diet are causing you an issue. This is just another tool for people to realize, oh, maybe this is the last thing that I haven't thought of, because no one in the mainstream

is going to recommend removing spinach from your diet. But for a lot of people, the oxalates in that spinach are pretty harmful, and maybe that's the key deciding factor here. And that's only viable if we realize that the animal foods can serve the majority or the entirety of the role in the human diet and entirely replace plants with that any real negative consequences. Again, every single statement I'm making here requires tons of time to unpack, but I think

you see where I'm going with all this. Paul's obviously coming across as not a zealot, which is why I appreciated talking to him. So I wanted him to kind of explain the plants that are on the less toxic side in his opinion and ones that are on the more toxic side just so we get some context. Yeah, so in my book, The Carnivore Code, I laid out this plant toxicity spectrum.

I'm writing a cookbook, which will be out in the fall. And the cookbook is gonna be mostly carnivore-ish, which is what in my book, if people read it, they'll see a tier one carnivore diet, which is the most basic carnivore diet, and even says, hey, these are what I think of as the least toxic plants. In the cookbook, I'm going to lay that out in much more detail and the majority of the recipes are going to have the least toxic plants. Now, this is going to be individual, but as a general rule, just intuitively, we've kind of already touched on that. One of the parts of the plant that are less likely to have as many toxins and less likely to be immunogenic.

Well, it would be the fruit. And a lot of things that we eat are fruit, but we don't think of them as fruit. So like an avocado. An avocado is a fruit. Olive is a fruit. Squash is a fruit. Cucumber is a fruit. So in the book I talk about non-sweet fruits and even sweet fruits are probably the least likely just as a general rule kind of intuitively to be problematic for people, but some people will still have issues with them. So things like avocado, olive, squash, berries, and fruit in general, I think is less likely to have lots and lots of these toxins and lots and lots of these issues. Now, anytime you say fruit, people are going to say, what about fructose?

And we can certainly unpack that too. I'm not as fearful of fructose in the fruit form as I am as fructose in a processed form. And we can get into why that is. But those are what I think of as the least toxic plant foods. Now anecdotally, I'll mention that for myself, the reason I got interested in the carnivore diet was because of my own eczema. And I found that when I removed plants,

the eczema that I had suffered from for a long time, went away. Again, N of one, just my experiment. I incorporated some carbohydrates back into my diet recently as an experiment. We can certainly talk about that too. And when I put squash back into my diet, my eczema came back. And I thought, isn't that weird? I get like this eczema at the low back. I joke that it's my eczema tram stamp. I get this low back eczema. And it's pretty predictable. And it came back when I put in squash. And so whether that's my own sensitivity to something in squash,

soliculates or something, who knows? But then I remove the squash and it goes away. And I think, OK, I don't want to have my immune system activated in my skin. I'm going to avoid the squash. So that's my own anecdote, even as food like squash triggered me. On the other end of the spectrum is the most toxic plant foods,

which really fall into the categories I described earlier. I think a lot of these are leaves, a lot of them are seeds, and some of them are roots. So we don't often think of seeds as toxic, but many of the foods that we know pretty well to be toxic our seeds. Beans are seeds. Again, I'm kind of mixing the words here, but let's just think a seed is a plant baby. It's something if you plant it, the seed will grow. Seeds, nuts, grains, and legumes are just colloquial names that we've given to seeds of plants from different plant kingdoms or plant families. But the gumes, if you eat a bean, raw off a plant, it's going to cause massive GI distress.

You might be able to cook it, and you're gonna have to cook the heck out of it to detoxify it, but that is a very toxic thing. And beans contain lots of lectins. Grain's have lots of lectins. People are familiar with gluten, et cetera. And there's a lot of talk about grains and how harmful grains are to many people.

But I also think that nuts and seeds in the colloquial parlance cause a lot of GI issues that people may not be aware of. Again, anecdotally for myself, I had a period as a raw vegan. It's crazy, I know, it was about seven or eight months. And personally, when I would eat almonds, which were a large part of my diet, I had massive GI problems.

I had horrible gas, a lot of GI pain and bloating, and a lot of people I work with, when they eliminate nuts and seeds, see significant improvements in sort of their gut function, just the way they feel, they don't get pain and bloating. So I do think that seeds of all types are particularly hard for people to digest, for humans to digest, and it makes sense. This is the plant baby, this is the plant reproductive part, it's putting it out into the world, it has to defend it, but also the leaves, the stems, and the roots, and the leaves of plants are probably where my ideas or these ideas are on the carnivore diet are most controversial. I don't know if there's anybody else out there telling you not to eat broccoli

or not to eat your leafy greens, but I think that's a really key component of what we're looking at here in this line of thinking that, hey, that's the leaf of a plant. It doesn't want it to get eaten. And I think when you really dig into the research as I tried to show in my book, and as we can talk about more, there's a lot of harmful compounds and leaves for humans as well. All right, so now Paul's saying leaves, don't eat leaves and stems and those kinds of things. He said that a few times. So I wanted to ask him about fiber.

I've seen studies, I've read studies that talk about the benefits of fiber, a lot of people in the nutrition space recommend fiber to everybody. In fact, some people say it's another macro nutrient, in fact, that we need it for good health. So I want to know, what's up with fiber because you can't get that in animal products? Yeah, great question. There's a whole chapter in my book about this. So the studies, if you can think of a specific study, we can discuss it with regard to fiber, but I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my suspicion is that you're thinking

of epidemiology studies with regard to fiber, because the interventional studies with regard to fiber are pretty abysmal, and with regard to fiber and cancer, specifically colon cancer, or pre-calonic adenoma, pre-calonic pre-cancerous adenomas in the gut, which are the pre-cancer's lesion for colon cancer, fiber has failed miserably to prevent those. There's three studies I talk about in the book that are interventional studies as opposed to epidemiology. So just as a listener knows, epidemiology is associational survey-based

study. There's no experiment. We're looking at a group of people, we're giving them a questionnaire, and we're looking to see how some aspect of their health has performed in the past or performs moving forward. This is an associational study, which can tell us about correlation, but it can't tell us about causation. It can only generate a hypothesis, which we then have to test with an interventional study. Well, there are epidemiology studies which associate consumption of fiber with better outcomes, but this doesn't mean that the fiber is responsible for that. As we know, there are many things that people who eat fiber because that's been the mainstream health messaging may also do that are beneficial.

This is kind of the same story over and over, and why misleading, why epidemiology can be so misleading for us when we're looking at medical science and why we really need to counter that with interventional studies. In the case of fiber, when we look at studies where they gave people who had colonic adenomas, these precancerous lesions, when they gave them fiber or fiber supplements and followed them for five years with colonoscopy surveillance, there was no change in the recurrence rate of that colonic cancer or that colonic precancerous lesion with increased food and vegetables or a fiber supplement for five years. So fiber has really, really failed to show any benefit

in the recurrence of colon cancer specifically, which is really the only one you could study it for. I believe there have been studies done with other cancers as well, but colon cancer is the main one we think of with fiber. And fiber has failed for that one. Just hands down clearly, nail in the coffin. There's no evidence that including fiber in your diet prevents colon cancer. Now, when we think about the other benefits of fiber, and again, I go through

all this in the book, it's a very detailed chapter, we think about constipation. Well, looking at the medical literature, fiber also doesn't improve constipation. Fiber can increase the size of a bowel movement, or it can increase the frequency with which someone passes a bowel movement. But fiber has failed to improve the other symptoms of constipation, which are pain, bleeding with stool, and use of laxatives. So it's almost like, fiber is doing the reverse of what you wanted to in someone with constipation generally. It's giving them more stool, which is harder to pass and causing more pain and difficulty

passing the stool. So it's not to say that fiber won't bulk up your stool or give you a bigger poop, but for people that have constipation, the reverse is usually true. It makes the stool's bigger, which is poor pain, more bleeding, more use of laxatives. That's not solving the problem. Constipation is not the absence of fiber in the human diet. I'm a testament to that. I pooped this morning, it's beautiful. I've been pooping every day for the last two years

without fiber. There are thousands of people now that prove this anecdotally. And there are actually interventional studies that show that the removal of fiber, the complete removal of fiber, this is a very widely known study in the American, in the world journal of gastroenterology, looking at patients that have idiopathic constipation. They divided them into three groups, one group fiber as usual, one group

reduced fiber, one group zero fiber, and the zero fiber group was the only group in which a hundred percent of people, I believe it was a, each group was about 20 people. So 20 out of 20 people in the 0 fiber group removed gas, completely resolved gas floating in constipation, 100% of people. So the removal of this fiber led to resolution of constipation in that group. It's crazy. I think the title of the study is stopping or reducing fiber leads to resolution of constipation in that group. It's crazy. I think the title of study is stopping or reducing fiber

leads to resolution of constipation in those with idiopathic disease, something like that. People can find that online. So fiber and constipation story is very different than what we are understanding in the mainstream literature. At this point, things started sounding like opposite land. I've never heard that not eating fiber would help with constipation. So I'm not sure how I felt about that, but Paul does bring up some studies. I guess you could look up and read for yourself. The next question I asked him was revolved around vitamin C. You don't find it in animal products.

And we've all heard the stories of people and ships hundreds of years ago going across the Mediterranean, not having any fruits or vegetables of any sort, eating just dry meat and getting scurvy. So they had to get limes or lemons in order to fight this. So that was the question I asked them. What about vitamin C? Don't we all get scurvy or sick if we don't eat some vitamin C from plant sources. The amazing thing is that if you and I are in the wilderness together, not on a ship, and we can always hunt fresh meat, we will never get scurvy. Fresh meat is also an anti-scorbutic, which is just the fancy word meaning it cures scurvy. So

there's vitamin C in animal foods. This has been proven time and time again. It's not even debatable. There were studies done in the 1930s and 1940s on conscientious objectors to the war. And they actually took people and made them scorbutic. They gave them scurvy. And then they looked to see how much vitamin C was necessary to reverse the clinical symptoms of scurvy.

Now, vitamin C has a number of roles in the human body, I'll just back up for a second, but the main one we're talking about here is involved in a hydroxylation step. So it's adding a hydroxyl group, which is an OH group, to one of the strands of a triple helix collagen molecule. Collagen is a long polymer of three amino acids, glycine, proline and hydroxyproline generally, and those all get twisted together, like braided like a rope into a collagen molecule.

The symptoms of scurvy are bleeding at the gums, these petikey eye, little red patches on the skin, and those are all happening because collagen isn't getting made properly when there's inadequate vitamin C because it can't do that hydroxylation step necessary to kind of wrap those three strands of collagen around each other. So what they found in these conscientious objector experiments was doses of vitamin C as low as 10 milligrams, completely cured, cured, scurvy.

They didn't even do a vitamin C dose less than 10 milligrams. And there was no clinical difference in the group that got 70 milligrams, 70 milligrams of vitamin C, or the group that got 10 milligrams of vitamin C to cure scurvy. So when it comes to scurvy, 10 milligrams a day of vitamin C appears to be plenty with no clinical difference between higher doses and lower doses. You could get 10 milligrams of vitamin C by eating maybe half a pound a meat per day, three quarters of a pound per day, and that's not even including organ meats

which are richer sources of vitamin C. So fresh meat has enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy. This is true, you can look it up, I did, after this interview, because I didn't believe it. In fact, they do treat scurvy, or they have treated scurvy with fresh meat in the past. So kind of weird, but also true. So the next question I asked them revolved around,

saturated fat, that evil nutrient that we've all been taught is bad for you, raises your bad cholesterol, clogs your arteries, causes inflammation. Now, I know the science has changed a little bit since we demonize saturated fat, but still, for a lot of people, it's something that they've been told to reduce because of high cholesterol level. So, let's talk about saturated fat. What about that? Again, this is what's so interesting about a carnivore diet. It just raises all of these things. We just challenge the mainstream at every turn.

It's amazing. It's so much fun to think about. I think that most of your listeners will know that mainstream dogma regarding saturated fat has been challenged massively in the last decade. I need a tycold system. A great way has gone a great way toward beginning this. And I think that evolutionarily, let's just think about how much saturated fat our ancestors were eating, animals are not entirely composed of saturated fat. The fat in a well-raised animal, well-raised ruminant, for instance, like a cow or a buffalo

or an elk, is about 50% saturated and 50% mono-insaturated. There's a small amount of polyunsaturated fat, which we can get into there as well, but the majority of the fat in ruminants is mono and saturated. It's about 50-50. So we can imagine, perhaps someone debate this, but if we really look at the anthropologic record, it's hard to make a case that humans have not been eating animals for our entire year of our evolution. It would be a pretty big evolutionary disconnect to have the main source of our food, perhaps one of the most important nutrients we were getting, specifically fat, be harmful for

us. Don't we think that those genes that genetic environmental mismatch would have been selected out of the population long ago? But nevertheless, because of epidemiology, again, coming back to the E word, and not in any small amount, the work of Ansel Keys in the 1960s, the seven countries study, which we now know to be pretty badly cherry-picked. There is epidemiology, again, and most of it is flawed, and a lot of it is quite misleading to suggest that some countries with higher saturated fat consumption have worse outcomes. Now, what Ansel Kees left out of his seven-country study was all

the countries in which saturated fat consumption is quite high that don't have those outcomes, but vilification of saturated fat is based almost entirely on epidemiology rather than interventional trials. Now you bring up an important point here, which is the LDL specter. There's a whole chapter in my book about LDL, and I think that you're hinting at the fact that people are beginning to question the veracity of the notion that LDL in and of itself, this is low density lipoprotein, is able to initiate and progress atherosclerosis in and of itself.

This is the necessary but not sufficient paradox, just because LDL may be involved in atherosclerosis doesn't mean that LDL is enough to initiate atherosclerosis. Again, this is a very, very deep rabbit hole and requires a lot of complex physiology around lipids, lipid dynamics, lipid kinetics. But LDL is also a valuable molecule in the human body, it serves immunologic roles. Right now, the whole coronavirus thing, there's a lot of re-interest or, I should say, reawakening of interest in LDL as an immunologic molecule. We know that in people who are suffering greatly with coronavirus, there does seem to be a lower level of LDL. Lipids are dropping in those people, either they're more susceptible because the lipids are already lower,

or they're dropping in the face of the infection. But we do know that lipoproteins are involved in the immune response. And there's a lot of evidence from, again, it's epidemiology studies, but we use what we can to associate those with higher levels of LDL and greater longevity. And there's, again, associational epidemiology to suggest that those with higher levels of LDL experience less sepsis.

Now before people say, oh, he's going to vilify epidemiology when he wants and then use it when it suits him, I'm always going to say that epidemiology is limited and we have to use it to generate a hypothesis. And so the associational epidemiology does suggest in humans that higher levels of LDL are protective against sepsis, which is severe microbial infectious disease in the human body, and is associated with longevity.

So how could we test that? Well, the interventional studies that have been done, have been done in mice and rats, because we can't really do these interventional studies in humans. But in those rodent models, what we see is that when we inject mice and rats with human LDL, they are more resilient against infectious illness. They've actually done these experiments where they remove LDL. They remove these lipoprotein particles from mice and rats, and then they inject

them with toxins from staphorius or other gram-positive bacteria, or they inject them with gram-negative bacteria, toxins like LPS, lipopolysaccharide, or also known as endotoxin, and the mice die very quickly when they don't have as much LDL. And then they can give the mice super LDL. They inject the mice with LDL from humans, and the survival gets much, much better. There's another correlate to this in humans with a condition called Smith-Lemley-Opid syndrome. And this is a fascinating genetic condition in which there's a mutation in the enzyme that makes cholesterol in the human body. Now LDL and cholesterol are not the same thing, but LDL is a lipoprotein particle that

carries cholesterol and triglycerides. So if you don't make cholesterol because you're taking a statin, or I should say if you're a formation of cholesterol is lower because you're taking a statin, or because you have a genetic predisposition to not making as much cholesterol, your LDL will be lower because you won't have as much cholesterol to be packaged into the low density lipoprotein molecule. Well, these people will smith Lemley-Oppett syndrome, often die in infancy, and if they make it to childhood, they suffer recurrent infections that are very severe.

And the crazy thing is that we can rescue those children from those infections. We can improve their immune system at least transiently by giving them back cholesterol. So it's not amazing that you can give someone back cholesterol. See the LDL go up in a human model, in a mouse or a rat model, and they do better from an infectious standpoint. So the whole paradigm starts to just look very shaky. Why would something that's good for us that's involved in the immune response

be so critically and be the crux of atherosclerosis? There's gotta be something else going on here. When we start to question that and understand that LDL can only be interpreted contextually, a rise in LDL with saturated fats starts to look a little differently. So the reason that LDL is so confusing is that in some people with diabetes, in some people with insulin resistance, you do see LDL go up a little bit, but that's really just a proxy for what we call metabolic dyslipidemia or metabolic dysfunction insulin resistance. So in some cases of insulin resistance,

you can see LDL go up. Does that mean LDL is causing the problem? Probably not. It's probably the underlying insulin resistance that's causing the problem. This is what's so confusing, right? What is actually the crux of the issue? What is the spark that's lighting the fire?

I think it's insulin resistance and I make that case strongly or fervently in my book. And I kind of say, hey, wait, let's not ignore LDL. Let's say that's interpret LDL in context, because what we know about ketogenic diets, low carb diets, which I'm not dogmatic about, again, I talked about the possibility of having carbohydrates on a carnivore diet earlier, and we can get into that. But in the setting of a carnivore diet, what we know is that everything goes in the right direction, quote-unquote, except LDL. Trigalusarides usually go down, HDL goes up, inflammation goes down, fasting insulin goes down, but LDL goes up a little bit. Well, that's a completely different picture than what happens to someone with diabetes or what, or pre-diabetes in insulin

resistance. In pre-diabetes in insulin resistance, everything goes in the wrong direction. But most mainstream physicians are only looking at one marker and that's LDL. They're not interpreting it, interpreting it contextually. They're saying, oh wait, your LDL is going up. Well, yeah, but what about the fasting insulin? What about the triglycerides? What about the HDL? Those are all going down except in the case of the HDL, which goes up. What we understand what I'm saying here, they're all moving in the right direction, but in diabetes, everything goes in the wrong direction. Diabetes is high triglycerides, low HDL, high fasting insulin, high fasting glucose. So, isn't it possible that it's a completely different picture to see LDL rise

in the setting of metabolic health versus metabolic illness or disease or insulin resistance? So, that's the case with saturated fat. Okay, so he broke down the saturated fat argument and I'll be honest, that was one that I've looked into myself. So a lot of what he said is stuff that I've I've also read. Very, very interesting points. Next, I wanted to talk to him about, you know, are there any societies or cultures of people where they eat mostly animal foods? I mean we've heard a lot about places in the world where people live a long time the world's blue zones and most of their diets are pretty much plant-based So I want some examples give me some examples of places in the world where people eat a lot of meat or mostly meat and

Have long healthy lives Absolutely there are. So I sound like a broken record here, Sal, I'm sorry. I've got a whole section of the book where I debunk the blue zones. Dan butiner is in some ways the last generations, Ansel Keys. He did a fantastic job of cherry picking those studies and didn't spend as much time with those cultures as he should have. The first point that I'll debate with you here is that a lot job of cherry picking those studies and didn't spend as much time with those cultures as he should have. The first point that I'll debate with you here is that a lot of the people in those countries, specifically Ecaria, Greece, Sardinia,

Loma Linda, California, the World Leave Loma Linda out. I'll talk about that one specifically in a second, but Okinawa, all of these in the Coa region of Costa Rica, if you really look at these countries, they have a predilection for eating meat, okay? Let's just talk about Sardinia. Sardinia has a dish called Sardapig. One of their national sort of cultural dishes is pork. How anyone can claim that this is a plant-based culture is beyond me. And if you go to look at, like, I don't think that many people who read the Blue Zones have

been to Sardinia, animal foods are treasured there. They're an indispensable part of the diet. They're not eating a plant-based diet. No, they're not eating a carnivore diet. They're probably eating some plants, but they're certainly not eating no animal foods. That's a misconception. The same thing is true in Acaria and Greece, and actually the same thing is true in Okinawa. There have been some fascinating studies in Okinawa showing that among the centenarians,

there were no vegetarians. The Okinawans eat a lot of pork as well, and generally Okinawa has not been Buddhist like the rest of Japan, and they haven't shunned meat in the same way. So again, I present a lot of evidence in the book that really makes the foundations of a blue zone argument look pretty frickin' shaky. In the Nikoya region of Costa Rica, it's only a blue zone for males. It's not a blue zone for females. That's a little bit strange in the first place.

And the males in Nikoya, in fact, everyone in Nikoya, eats significantly more animal foods than the general kosher recan population. And they eat way more animal fats than the general kosher recan population. So you're like, okay, wait a minute. There's something isn't adding up here. This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of places in the world that answer to your question where people eat a lot

of meat like Iceland or Hong Kong where longevity is equally good. Hong Kong has the third largest life expectancy in the world at 85 years, and they have the second or third largest per capita meat consumption anywhere. I think they eat over a pound and a half a meat per day on average in Hong Kong. Iceland is pretty similar. Not a lot of plants grow in an Iceland most of the time.

A lot of fish, a lot of seafood, they eat elk, the same eat or the same way in the Norwegian countries, mostly animal foods. So when you really do the research and you kind of stop, and I'm not saying you're doing this, but when Dan butiner stops cherry picking the data, you don't really see a clear correlation between what people are eating and the length of their life other than perhaps the absence of insulin resistance. I think that the main thing you're going to see with people is overall metabolic health is going to correlate with life expectancy. Okay, so next up, I wanted to ask him about the role of carbohydrates and athletic performance.

I've been training people for over 20 years of the managing gyms, have been in the space for a long time, and the studies and evidence also prove that carbohydrates improve performance. If you have no carbohydrates in your diet, you're probably not gonna be as strong or move as quickly. So I wanted to ask him about that. What about carbs and performance? So this has been an interesting thing

from me to experiment with. I've been doing a carnivore and carnivore-ish diet myself, technically speaking for the last two years or so, and for the first year and a half, I didn't have any carbohydrates in my diet, and then in the last few months, I've incorporated them back. And I'm going to agree with you, Sal, I think that they do have a performance improvement, but what I've realized is that you don't have to be plants per se to get carbohydrates. And what's been so interesting for me is that within the carnivore space, I think this is just how it happens. We're all kind of susceptible to dogma. And I never wanted to be in an echo chamber and I've tried to not be, but I'm sure that I'm

susceptible to it. And we all have our own bias. But I've noticed there's a lot of bias in the ketogenic community and low-carb communities, and I can't deny that ketogenic diets are beneficial for a lot of people. But I also can't deny, I can't state that carbohydrates are uniquely harmful for people, and I think that there's new ones in the type of carbohydrate that we use, and certainly this can go back to high-frouctose corn syrup, processed strains, processed flowers. I think those are pretty damaging for humans along with vegetable oils. But if someone is eating non-processed carbohydrates, I think that can be completely consistent with what I would call a carnivore-ish diet.

And again, what we're trying to do here is not adhere to a dogma or at least I'm not. I'm just trying to help people get well and realize there's different ways to look at the dietary sphere. But for the last couple of months, I've been eating carbohydrates in my diet almost every day and really enjoying it. And again, like I said, I incorporated squash and my exema came back and I thought, okay, maybe that's not the carbohydrate for me. I did white rice. I didn't really like the way I felt. I was using a continuous glucose monitor. I was not using a continuous glucose monitor at that time, but I used a continuous glucose monitor after that. But I wish I'd been using a CGM during rice to see what my post-pranial glucose levels were. But what I found or what I ended up with was honey. And

most people would say, honey, you don't want to eat pure sugar. And what's interesting for me is that number one, honey is not really a plant food. You can make an argument, oh, it's the pollen from flowers, that then bees are fermenting and puking back up, who knows. I mean, is it a bee product? Is it a plant product? But for me, honey has become the easiest and what I believe to be the least toxic way to get carbohydrates into my diet. And because it's such a simple carbohydrate,

I wanted to do the CGM and what I found was really intriguing. I could eat quite a bit of honey. 60, 75 grams of honey, 75 grams of carbohydrates in the morning, and that may sound not sound like a lot to somebody in your space, but to me, 75 grams of carbohydrates in a meal is like, that's a lot. And I could eat that much honey in the morning with my continuous glucose monitor, and I'm happy to publish these results, and I will do a whole podcast about it on my podcast really soon, and only see a small bump in my blood sugar, and I can talk about what that is. But what I learned was that honey didn't really spike my blood sugar that much.

It certainly didn't spike my blood sugar to a pathologic level. And I thought, well, that's really interesting and I felt a little better eating honey. And so I guess my point here is, I don't think we need to be dogmatic about this. And I think that if somebody wants to include carbohydrates and their carnivore diet, they can totally do that.

You can do it with honey, or you can be carnivore-ish. And I love that you started out the podcast with like, what carnivore? Because it's like look, we don't have to be dogmatic. What we want is just to move the idea forward that, hey, plants might not be all benign for all people. I don't think they're magical and that animal foods are probably the central piece of every human diet if we really want to do well. But beyond that, I don't think we have to be dogmatic about which plants or how many carbs or any of those things. Those were great conversations with both with Paul and with Will.

I have to admit, I walked into them with some bias. Now my bias wasn't necessarily in one direction or the other. I wasn't pro, mostly meat diet or pro plant based diet. My bias came from my experience training. So many people over, you know, two decades in that I've never really worked. My experience training people showed me that people are so different in how they respond to diets. I've had clients that did excellent on plant based diets and I've had clients that did excellent on plant-based diets, and I've had clients that did excellent eating more meat.

So, you know, going in there, I'm like, well, I've seen people do well with both things that I think you guys are gonna talk about. Yeah, I've seen, like, individually, bio-diverse. It's all across the spectrum, and, you know, to hear, you know, these ideas from two of from two of polar opposite approaches was really fascinating. I haven't heard a good balanced version of the vegan plant based diet.

I thought that was a really good presentation that we just heard. I think that both Will and Paul are great. I mean, both are extremely intelligent and very well read and neither dogmatic, which also I think speaks to how intelligent they are. You asked a couple of great questions to both of them that challenges their ideology a little bit and both of them were very quick to agree with you. That's a very good point, Sal, and then went on to explain, and then also say that neither of them ever said that they would tell every person,

only eat vegetables, only eat meat. They made that point that there is cases that they have with both of them with clients that they help where they would still recommend them to introduce meat, or vegetables to be able to talk about. So that to me right away left me a lot more open-minded to hear the advice from both of them because you could tell neither one of them

was dogmatic about. No, they weren't zealots and I really appreciate that. Because again, my experience has taught me that there never is like a one answer for everybody. I've never experienced that training people. The opposite has always been proven true for me, which is that there's a huge variance from person to person.

And what goes into that is everything from their psychology, their experiences, their microbiome, their own physiology, all, and more factors, right? Lots and lots of factors go into that. I will say this, I was, after I was done talking to them, I was thinking a lot about just from a reactivity standpoint, like what types of foods in my experience do clients typically have reactions to?

Are there more reactions to plant foods from an intolerance standpoint or to animal foods? And you know what's funny? It's kind of balanced. I've had lots of clients with issues with gluten and nuts and other types of plant products, even vegetables. I've had clients with issues with broccoli

or cruciferous vegetables, peppers, onions, garlic. But I've also had lots of clients who've had issues with dairy and eggs in particular. I will say this, and maybe this is a little bit in favor of Paul, I've owned my entire career of training clients that only ever had one client have an issue, like a reactive issue to meat, to red meat, only one. I haven't had any.

Never? How about you, Justin? Oh, for meat? No. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I haven't had any issues with that. I mean, dairy, of course. I think that's something to consider. But, yeah, I'd, honestly, like, that would be one point that I would probably lean a little

bit more on, you know, on the meat side of the spectrum. You know, I, listening to, after listening to both of them, I really think that ironically, they may not agree with each other, right? But I think they both agree with our philosophies. Yeah. Which we've been saying since day one on this podcast is that it really is about finding out what works best for you and then also not allowing yourself

just because maybe you switch to vegan or switch to carnivore that adopting that, oh, it's the carnivore diet that's made me so great. Or it's, oh, it's veganism that's made me feel so great. And actually looking into, well, what was it that you were doing before? And maybe eliminating those foods is really what the problem was. And you don't have to go,

and that's what I love about what Paul is doing right now, where he's calling it carnivore-ish, where he's allowing honey, and he's starting to eat some carbohydrates before his workouts and fruit. Yeah, and the truth is, I don't know anybody that would really want to live in either one of those forever.

Yeah, you got to consider them. Yeah. What would it be like living in the modern world, eliminating all animal products or eliminating all plant products? Well, and the truth is nobody really does, or at least 80% of the population that identifies with one of these groups,

they live there only a portion of their life. And then they fall off on a weekend. They're vegan for 28 days, but then two days, they're gonna, they miss that burger or whatever the case may be, right? They go that direction or the opposite, the carnivore eating all meat all time. And then it's like, oh man,

miss that ice cream that I finally, so some french fries. And he's a bread. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's a very good point because you can't cut out the psychological aspect of it and that's an important part of quality of life. There is a couple of points that I want to address just with my own comments. You know, Paul makes the argument that animals evolved teeth and they evolved claws and

the ability to run and that's their main way of preventing themselves from being eaten, but plants have evolved developing toxins because they can't run away. And yes, that makes perfect sense. However, we still, as humans, we're intelligent creatures, we're the greatest tool makers of all time, and we cook our meat. We don't eat it raw. Why do we cook our meat?

It'd be very hard to digest a lot of meat. That would meet your nutritional needs on a raw basis. Now, I do know there's some people that do this. Believe it or not, there are some people that only eat red meat. But I'm going to tell you right now, the vast majority of people, if they tried to eat only rare or excuse me, only raw meat, they'd have lots of digestive issues. So we did go through, we do have to process meat to unlock some of its nutrients because cooking meat is a pre-digestive process. It's partially digesting it so you can consume more of it and unlocks its nutrients. The same is true for plants.

We do process plants to a degree to make them consumable for a lot of human history. Even before advanced processing techniques, we would grind the crap out of wheat. We would grind it in stone over and we would boil and we would cook and we would do lots of thing ferment to make them easier to digest. So it's not clear cut, you know what I mean? It's not like, hey, we have to do all the stuff to plants. So that means that it's bad. Hey, we don't have to do that much to meet.

That doesn't mean it's bad. And then my point with will that I want to point out was when I brought up the evolutionary argument, his kind of rebuttal was, well, back in those days life was different and we don't want to go back to that. And I think that kind of skated over the dietary evolutionary argument. Of course, I don't think, you know, it's best for us to go live in caves again and do all that because that's a bad trade off. But I think we can't ignore that our bodies can learn a lot from history Yes, and we did evolve eating a particular way and from a nutrients standpoint

Here's where I here's where I think Paul is right from a essential nutrients standpoint Modern society and shopping markets makes it possible to eat all plants. Otherwise would be impossible Okay, as a human you would be very nutrient-efficient in a natural environment and so this is how we live for most human history You could not get all your nutrients just from plants without having access to like this incredible wide-ride You could literally just kill animals and eat them and be oak maybe not ideal But you be okay. If you did that with plants, you would starve and die. Now, both of them had great points,

and I really enjoyed listening to both of them speak, but only one of them said something that actually kind of sparked something that made me want to do something different in my diet, just to experiment. All right. And that was Paul. And when he, to your point you're talking about right now, when he started talking about, you know, plants, natural defense is for them to have toxins so they didn't get eaten

all the time, and that there's different plants that are higher in toxins. And there are also parts of the plant that are higher in toxins like the stem and the root, for example, in comparison to the flower of it. And I never thought about that. And when I think about, I eat a lot of vegetables and I tend to lean towards things like asparagus and broccoli where I'm eating the entire stem and everything of it. And so, and he talked about his eczema and I have psoriasis and that's a constant battle on things that I'm always trying to work on and trying to evaluate diet And there's definitely offenders that I have found that I try to avoid most of the time things like gluten That really bothered if like lots of sugar even dairy if I have a lot of it tends to flare it up

So I do notice those things in my diet if I am but I've never actually tried to Eliminate like asparagus and broccoli for an extended period of time. And, you know, I'm very interested to see like, I wonder if that could have been an offender. So, you know, of both the conversations and joy listening, I didn't feel like either one of them said anything that I wasn't familiar with or didn't really agree with. But I definitely think that Paul did, did kind of make me go, go, yeah, I wonder if I did this different if I would see something. Yeah, to speak kind of to that too.

I was thinking about that quite a bit in terms of like how plants provide this offering, right? There's this fruit or there's this flower and it's almost like a survival mechanism, right? Here, eat this and then they get totally terrestrial. You don't eat the rest of it. You know, and if you think about it like that and you're eating in the stem,

and that might be where you're getting a lot more of these chemicals that might not be settling in you right. Yeah, so the biggest thing that I like about this episode is that it all boils down to this. Listen to your body. I think sometimes things get pushed so hard on us that, and I know this because I've experienced this with client time and time and again

That something they believe in something so strongly because they're constantly being you know told this by media by diet books by Articles that they ignore their signals because but this is supposed to be healthy You know, I've had people do that with keto diets, I've had people do that with vegan diets, I've had people do that with meat-based diets where they come to me and they're like, hey, Sal, I'm doing this keto diet that everybody says is great, but I'm constipated and it's been like that for about,

45 days, should I wait longer, isn't my body adjusting? I'm like, no, it's not working for you. You're not listening to your body. I've had people go vegan who, they become pale and weak and hormone imbalances, especially in female clients. And they're like, but you know,

but I wanna eat this way cause it's healthy. This is what I keep hearing. And I'm like, you are not listening to your body, which is that is the clearest best coach you could ever listen to. That is the coach that knows you the best is your body. So at the end of the day, listen to your body. And I'm glad that we have smart people on your body. So at the end of the day, listen to your

body. And I'm glad that we have smart people on both sides. I'm actually really glad that we have smart people on the meat side because we've had nobody on that side for a long time to offset the other message to kind of throw a little bit of counter on the meat side. I was talking to Adam about this and I'm a big fan of like the naked and afraid show. And you know, this is the clearest example of You know they're just out there to survive. They need to go find nutrients in any you know facet that they can and so you know There's this guy that killed an analogue and you know They had provided them a lot of meat and he ate the meat and you know, so

Basically got constipated and it impacted him so much that it got stuck. And so he had a real medical problem, medical emergency because of this. But again, dehydration could have been in a factor to that. You know, a lot of factors going in, but you just don't know individually how you're going to respond to just, you know, sticking in one specific modality. Yeah. There's two's two truths here. Humans can eat a lot of foods, obviously. Look at the variety of things that we eat.

And number two, there's a great variety between people and individuals, and listen to your body. Look, my pump is recorded on videos as well as audio, come check us out on YouTube. Also, you can find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug on there. By the way, if you want to learn about podcasting behind the scenes, the equipment used,

the skills required, go follow Doug at Mind Pump Doug. And then you can find Justin, Adam, and I. Also on Instagram, you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. Me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPump Media dot com.

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