Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Chris Kresser on the Nutritional Value of Organ Meats

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

If you’ve paid any attention to what’s trending in the fitness space these days, you may have come across organ meats. Eating liver, kidneys, and heart seems to be on the uptrend in general, and is all the rage in certain corners of the internet. Claims about organ meats can vary wildly. Some people say organ meats are reservoirs of toxins and shouldn’t be consumed at all, while others claim you can not only survive by eating only organ meats, but actually enhance your health. Yes, if you hate veggies, you can make up for it by eating enough of the right organ meats, proponents claim. If you’re like me, you probably don’t eat any organ meats, and opt for more appetizing fare like chicken breast or steak. So what’s the real story here? Should we be incorporating organ meats into our diet? What value do they provide, how much of a difference can they make, and can we get those nutrients from more “normal” foods instead? To chat about this subject, I invited Chris Kresser back onto the podcast. In case you aren’t familiar with Chris, he’s one of the most well-known names in the world of Functional Medicine, a New York Times bestselling author, and the host of the popular Revolution Health Radio. I last had him on the show to talk about The Game Changers film, and I knew he would be a good guest this time around to talk about the nutritional value of organ meats. So, if you want to learn about what makes organ meats healthy, how you can incorporate them easily into your diet (and whether you should or need to), give this podcast a spin! Timestamps: 0:00 - Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://buylegion.com/ and use coupon code MUSCLE to save 20% or get double reward points 12:27 - How big of a difference does it make to include organ meats in your diet? 15:54 - Can you reach vitamin A sufficiency through carotenoids? 18:17 - Can you get too much retinol? 19:26 - An easy way to eat liver 25:55 - Are there other ways to get the nutrients from organ meats? 28:48 - Choline 29:12 - Folate 29:44 - Legumes 29:57 - Vitamin B12 30:39 - Vitamin K2 35:36 - What are your thoughts about taking a well-formulated multivitamin versus trying to get all the key nutrients through food? 37:33 - Bone broth 40:03 - What do you think about plant avoidance? 58:45 - Where can people find you and your work? Mentioned on the Show: Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://buylegion.com/ and use coupon code MUSCLE to save 20% or get double reward points Chris Kresser’s website: https://chriskresser.com/

Hello there and welcome to Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. And doubly thank you if you have subscribed to the show. If you have not, please do take a moment to do that in whatever app you're listening to me in so you don't miss any new episodes. And it helps me by boosting the ranking of the show in the various charts. And so what is the order of business for today? Well, it is an interview with Chris Kresser. This is the second interview I've done with Chris Kresser. And this is all about organ meats, eating tip to tail or nose to tail as it is referred to. And this is something I've been getting asked more and more about these days. One, because primal slash ancestral living is becoming more and more of a thing. And two, because there's this guy, Liver King, on social media, who clearly has really high levels of natural, of course, natural trend balloon production going for him.

of course, natural Trenbolone production going for him, and who is a clever marketer because he's jacked, he's shredded, and he has a contrarian message that perks up a lot of ears. And he does weird stuff. He does capers like eating raw cow testicles. I saw that. And squeezing I saw that and squeezing raw fish eggs out of a dead fish into his mouth. I saw that and eating dozens and dozens of raw eggs. If I remember correctly, I think he did that and other things like that. So clever marketing, of course, that type of stuff gets shared around a lot and it has quickly grown him a big following. But many people have reached out to me asking about his message, which revolves around eating organ meats. And so I wanted to get someone on the show who knows

more about this stuff than I do, because this isn't an area that I've looked too much into. I could give you a basic rundown of some of the benefits of including organ meats in your diet. However, I wanted somebody who could come on the show and go into more detail about some of the claims that are made for eating organ meats. Some people say that you shouldn't because they are reservoirs of toxins and they should not be consumed at all. Others say that you can not only survive by only eating organ meats, but it's actually better than eating a balanced, nutritious diet. It is better to drop all of the plants out of your diet, drop everything out of your diet, really, and just eat organ meats. And that is why I invited Chris back onto the show, because not only is

primal slash ancestral living very much in his wheelhouse, it is something that he has studied and written about and spoken about for quite some time. He is also one of the most well-known names in the world of functional medicine, which I understand is controversial, like chiropractic care, for example. But I do not believe that all functional medicine practitioners should be labeled as quacks, just as I do not believe that all chiropractors should be labeled as quacks. There are many smart, evidence-based people in functional medicine and in chiropractic. And I do think Chris is one of the good guys. And he's also a New York Times bestselling author. He has a very popular podcast of his own called Revolution Health Radio. And the last time I had him on the show, it was about the Game Changers documentary, which is full of nonsense and

propaganda. And Chris did a very good job breaking that down. And so if you want to learn about organ meats and what makes them healthy and why you should consider including them in your diet and how you can do it without throwing up, then this podcast is for you. Did you know that you don't need supplements to build muscle, lose fat, and get healthy? That you don't need any pills, powders, and potions whatsoever if you know what to do in the kitchen and in the gym. You can get into fantastic shape without supplements and stay that way for the rest of your life. But if you have the budget and if you have the inclination, life. But if you have the budget and if you have the inclination, the right supplements can help. And that's why over 300,000 discerning fitness folk have chosen my sports nutrition company,

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if you don't absolutely love our stuff, just let us know and we will give you your money back. No questions asked, or we will send you something else if you'd rather try something else. So you really have nothing to lose. Go to buylegion.com now, use the coupon code muscle at checkout to save 20% or get double reward points if it is not your first order. And try my supplements risk-free. Hey, Chris, happy new year and welcome back to my podcast. Hey, Mike. Good to see you again. Happy new year to you. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we are here to talk about something that I've been getting asked more and more about recently because of this liver king guy, and that is organ meats. How important is it to eat organ meats? If you only eat organ meats, if you eat enough of a variety of if you eat tip to tail, as they say, can you just do away with plant foods altogether? I get asked that. I get asked, okay, if maybe you don't need to go that extreme,

are there any real health benefits to incorporating organ meats into, let's say, a well-designed nutritious diet that obviously has a lot of plant derived foods and I think yeah I think those are those are a few of the the big questions that that we can start out with and I would love to hear your thoughts on this I don't know if I would call it a movement a phenomenon maybe and how maybe um and uh how how legitimate are a lot of the the claims being made to sell people on it yeah yeah good questions and i mean it's it's really actually a modern resurgence of a traditional dietary pattern that humans and hominids followed for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. You know, there've been several studies done. There aren't many traditional hunter-gatherer cultures left, unfortunately, in the world. But there were still throughout the 20th century and all the way up into the 60s,

70s, and 80s, there were still some extant hunter-gatherer societies that were largely following the same kind of dietary patterns that they've followed for thousands of generations. And almost all of these cultures that have been studied ate nose to tail. And there are a variety of reasons why they did that. One is just simple economy and efficiency. If they killed an animal, it didn't make sense not to make full use of that kill, not just eating, but of course, using skins for clothing and different parts of the animal for other purposes. But certainly, they would want to extract full nutritional value of that animal that they killed. And of course, they didn't have the benefit of modern science like we do to do

nutritional analysis, but humans are pretty clever. And especially over a long period of time, they figured out that a lot of the different parts of the animal had different benefits nutritionally. So Weston Price, who was a dentist back in the early 20th century, he was starting to notice that people's teeth were in the West were really unhealthy. They were rotting and just there was a lot of tooth decay. There was a lot of facial degeneration. And so he set off around the world to study traditional cultures and traditional diets, most of whom, by the way, had beautiful teeth, wide dental arches, and their faces looked really different than people in the West.

And he tells a story in his book, Nut physical degeneration of a prospector in the 1800s that went blind while crossing a plateau in the rocky mountains who was then discovered by a native american who fed him the the flesh and the head and the tissues of the back of the eyes this is a quote from the book including the eyes of a trout. And within a few hours, the prospector's vision or sight began to return. A few hours after that, his sight was normal. And today, we know that that type of temporary blindness can be caused by vitamin A deficiency or retinol. And we also know that the eyes and heads of fish are among the richest sources of retinol that you can find in the diet. So some Native Americans knew this just through many, many generations of trial and error and experimentation.

And this is one reason that they incorporate a lot of these nose to tail foods in their diet. And now we can look at, you know, use the modern research and scientific tools that we have to analyze all these foods. And we find that liver, for example, is extremely high in vitamin A. It's rich in iron and copper, choline, B6, glycine. You know, heart is a very rich source of CoQ10. You have kidneys that are rich in different nutrients. So it's like our ancestors figured this out. And even probably our grandparents, most of ours, many of our

grandparents were still eating foods like liver, but it's in the past couple of generations that they've really fallen out of favor and they're no longer part of a typical diet. And how big of a difference do you think it makes to include these types of foods? Given that now we know a lot more about basic nutritional requirements we know a lot more about which nutrients can offer additional benefits if you if you eat larger amounts of them in some cases it's maybe really only practical to do that through supplementation and and that we know you can get these nutrients from many different types of foods. For example, a lot of plant-derived foods. But are there some unique benefits, do you think?

Yeah, several actually. And here's where some of the biochemistry becomes important. Let's take vitamin A, which I mentioned, liver. If you look at, so first of all, let's start with the definition. Vitamin A is not the same thing as beta carotene. So when you look at a nutrition label, unfortunately, they're conflated. Like if you, on a carrot, it'll list vitamin A, but that's actually beta carotene. Beta carotene is a precursor to vitamin A. beta-carotene. Beta-carotene is a precursor to vitamin A. In humans, we can convert some beta-carotene into retinol, which is the active form of vitamin A, but that conversion is very

inefficient. So it could be as low as three to 5% in the case of beta carotene that you might eat from a raw carrot that actually gets converted into retinol. Retinol, active vitamin A is what really fulfills a lot of the important functions of that vitamin. So you could be eating plenty of plant sources of beta carotene, you know, red peppers, carrots, et cetera, and you could still be vitamin A deficient even if you're getting more than the recommended dietary allowance of beta carotene if you look at the vitamin a content of typical foods for example you know carrots have no pre-formed retinol or active vitamin a apples have none even a red meat just like you know lean kind of muscle meat that you would get like a steak has about 40 iu of retinol 100 grams of beef liver the same

amount has 53 000 iu of pre-formed retinol so that that is, uh, we're talking about orders of magnitude difference there. Um, you know, cod liver oil, which is a supplement that has gained some recognition over the past 10 years. Uh, and again, something that often our grandparents, uh, uh, you know, unwillingly took, uh, or was forced into their mouth if they were sick. But there was some wisdom to that because just a half teaspoon or a teaspoon of cod liver oil is a very, very rich source of vitamin A and also a good source of vitamin D. So that's a good example of a situation where it's actually not very easy to replace that amount of vitamin A with plant foods or even with other animal foods that are muscle meats or lean parts of the animal simply because there's such a vast difference.

And do you think that you can't reach sufficiency through various carotenoids? I mean, it doesn't have to just be beta carotene, right? Yeah, there are a bunch of different carotenoids, but they all suffer from the same conversion problem. So, the question of whether someone can reach sufficiency is fairly complex. Is it possible? Absolutely. Many people do. Is it likely or is it universal? Those are different questions. So, and they depend on a lot of different factors. So that conversion process that I mentioned where beta carotene gets converted into retinol, active vitamin A depends on other nutrients and cofactors and enzymes.

And so if, and it also depends on genetic factors. So let's take somebody who genetically is predisposed to not making that conversion very well. And then let's say that they're also not getting enough of the other cofactors and enzyme cofactor nutrients that are response, you know, required for that convert enzymatic conversion, then that person could very well develop a vitamin A or retinol deficiency. And they likely won't know it, at least not for some period of time. They might develop some bumps on the under part of their arm. That's one sign of suboptimal retinol intake. But they're generally, unless it's severe, they're probably not even going to be aware of that.

On the other hand, you can take someone, some of the not even going to be aware of that. On the other hand, you can take someone, you know, some of those, the people who are tend to be successful on vegetarian or even vegan diets, genetically, I suspect that genetically, they're very efficient at making that conversion. And they're doing a good job of getting enough of all of the other cofactor nutrients as well. So there's always those people out there who are able to do it, but I would say they're probably not the norm. Most people I think do benefit from eating some preformed retinol and organ meats are not the only way to do that, but they are one of the easiest and sort of most bang for your buck ways of doing that. So, uh, for example, I, you really only have to eat one to two, three ounce servings of liver a week to reap the benefits because that's how nutrient dense it

is. It's generally about be a follow-up question because people also ask me about that. Like, uh, how much of this stuff should I eat? Because I've heard if I get too much retinol, that's bad. That's true. You can, you can get overdo it with retinol. Also, liver is such an incredibly high source of iron. Again, to put it in perspective with apples and carrots, you get 100 grams of apples, 0.1 milligrams of iron, carrots, 0.6, even red meat, muscle meat, 3.3, even red meat, muscle meat, 3.3, liver is 8.8. Only clams and oysters are as high or higher per 100 gram serving. So if somebody has iron overload, which is not uncommon, actually, the genetic polymorphisms that lead to excess iron are among the most common in North America. You wouldn't want to be eating liver every day because that could push your iron levels too high. It could also potentially

push your vitamin A levels too high. So I think of it as almost like a medicinal food in the sense that- It's almost like a supplemental food. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like here's a couple, here's a couple of ways you could do it. And a lot of people do do it is, you know, you take three ounces of beef liver and you chop it up and you mix it with a couple of pounds of ground beef and then you season the ground beef and then you eat that beef throughout the week. Or, you know, if you're single or maybe you cook it for your family, if you have a family. That's a pretty simple, low-lift way to get some organ meat in your diet.

And that's about the amount that we're talking about. We're not talking about sitting down eating liver and onions for breakfast every day. I get the picture of the liver king guy holding the huge animal liver and then probably eating it raw. I don't know taste and texture of liver are distinct. Let's not kid ourselves. Some people are fine with it and they like it. But I would say the majority of people, and I've been talking about the benefits of organ meats for 10 years. It was in my first book. I tell my patients about it. And I would say I'm lucky if I can get 20% of my patients and people that I work with to eat liver on a regular basis. I'll share some ideas in addition to what I just shared for making that easier and more palatable. But nowadays, there are also supplements which are almost as good as eating the real thing. They're freeze-dried. What they do is they take liver from a pasture-raised animal in New Zealand,

a cow usually in New Zealand, which is a pretty good source of beef, no hormones or antibiotics or anything like that. And then they freeze it freeze it and then they desiccate it in, you know, which basically means turn it into a powder. And then they put that liver powder into capsules and then you can take the capsules every day. So it's about as close to eating layers you're going to get. Uh, it's a, it's a whole food supplement, so to speak. And you get a lot of the same benefits of doing it that way without the preparation and eating of liver. So yeah,

liver is typically talked about as one of the most important. I think another point I want to make about why it's important is nutrient balance. So all of the different foods we eat have different nutrients, of course, and lean meats are pretty rich in methionine, which is a certain amino acid that makes up protein and can be rich in certain B vitamins, you know, decent source of iron, you know, phosphorus and things like that. But muscle meat is generally not a good source of choline, glycine, some B vitamins or vitamin A or vitamin D or K2. And those are all really important nutrients. And let's just take the relationship between methionine, which is in lean muscle meats and egg whites and things like that. And then glycine and choline, which are in B12 and folate, which are in liver. There's some research that suggests that if you get too much methionine over a long period of time

without enough glycine and choline, that can actually increase the risk of cancer. that can actually increase the risk of cancer. So if you have a really high intake of methionine and that's not balanced out by B12, B6, folate, choline, and glycine, then there is some concern about increased cancer risk. And I think that actually explains some of the observational studies that do show some correlation of cancer risk with meat. It's not about the meat itself. It's about nutrient balance. So I think this is just a good way of helping to avoid unintended outcomes, you know, over our lifetime, just making sure that we're getting this full balance of nutrients and

eating in a way that humans and our ancestors have eaten for thousands of generations, because there's some wisdom there. You know, it's only one consideration. We should never look at ancestral diets and just try to replicate them just because our ancestors ate them. But when we see a dietary pattern that's consistent across multiple cultures, multiple times, all around the world in different geographies, it should at least generate questions for us about why that is. What is it about this diet pattern that made sense for humans for thousands and thousands of generations?

Yeah. And I think that that makes a lot of sense. And it would be naive to think that because our ancestors ate a certain way, which I'm sure that this is, well, I know you know this because you are not a plant avoider, but it also included grains and other plant foods. It wasn't just meats. There's a bit of a mythology there that helps sell something like the carnivore diet. And if you want to sell people on something, if you can appeal to history or science, those are probably two of the most effective tools you can use to persuade

people. And if you can persuade people that something has history and science on its side, you're going to get a lot of buy-in if you are a good persuader, right? But those appeals work quite well. And so what are your thoughts on, well, two questions. First, I just wanted to follow up on what you were talking about regarding some of these other nutrients that are important to get. What are some other or are there other viable ways to get those nutrients that are also practical that don't involve eating organ meat. So again, a lot of people listening probably don't eat any organs whatsoever, but they probably do eat fairly well by anybody's standards, meaning they're eating a higher protein diet. And that's probably mostly from different types of animal products, but there's going to be some protein from plant foods as well. But they're probably eating several servings of fruits and vegetables per day and a variety of things and colorful things to get pigments.

And they're probably getting in some whole grains and maybe some legumes and maybe some seeds and so forth, polyunsaturated fat. some seeds and so forth uh polyunsaturated fat and so for those people should they be thinking about incorporating some we'll call it liver or or you can speak to other other organs if if if you think that they're particularly worth including in the diet not just for um retinol or preformed retinol, but some of these other things as well. Like take, you know, vitamin K, for example, I guess, seaweed. I don't know. I don't eat much seaweed or kale, I believe. Right. I don't really like kale. So. Yeah. So, all right. Well, let's go through some of the nutrients. So vitamin A is one of the trickiest ones because again, like for some people just eating a lot of, you know, eating the rainbow, so to speak, lots and lots of beta carotene, if they're decent converting converters of that to

retinol, then they might be okay. Along with some, you know, smaller amounts of retinol that they're going to get from just eating muscle meats and other sources of protein, animal foods like pasture-raised dairy products or something like that. But for some, that won't be enough. And either eating some liver, taking liver supplements or cod liver oil, which is probably one of the most popular liver supplements and easiest to take. And it has added benefit of having vitamin D and also EPA and DHA, which are the long chain omega-3 fats. You know, I don't like to take a lot of supplements myself. I like to get as much nutrient as I can get from food. So if I find a supplement that has its whole food base and has multiple benefits, I'll tend to lean on that. And so cod liver oil is one of those because you get all three of those nutrients in a whole food. It's arguably not even a supplement in a

way. It's a food. It's oil pressed from a cod's liver, but it's a supplemental thing. Most people just don't include cod liver oil in their diet on a regular basis. So I still call it a supplement. Choline is another interesting one. You can get choline from egg yolks. They're a great source of choline actually. So if people are eating egg yolks on a regular basis, not the whites, but the yolks, I mean, you can eat the whole egg, on a regular basis. Not the whites, but the yolks. I mean, you can eat the whole egg, but the choline is in the yolk, especially if they're pasture-raised egg yolks, that could be a good source. Folate is found in pretty significant amounts in some dark leafy green vegetables like kale. You mentioned, Mike, that you don't like very much. Good source of folate.

Spinach, I do that. I do a couple handfuls every day. Yeah. So spinach has some folate. I mean, I would eat kale, but I prefer spinach. Kale is a little bit too bitter for, you know, it has to be, it has to be the right recipe that, that, uh, works with the bitterness, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It can be really bitter, especially when it's eaten out of season. Umumes like lentils are a pretty decent source of folate as well. You know, I know they don't work for everybody. Some people have kind of a digestive sensitivity, but if you can tolerate lentils, those are good.

B12, again, you know, you're going to get some amount of B12. Red meat, 100 grams has 1.4 micrograms of B12, but beef liver has 111 micrograms. So again, we're talking about almost a hundredfold difference in the content there. So I think to answer your question, there is a way to get almost all of these nutrients if you pay very close attention with the foods that you're eating. Micromanaging everything, yeah. Yeah. And also if you're really good at converting, like I said before with the beta carotenes, vitamin K2 is another example. So it's different than K1. K1 is found in plants, leafy greens, stuff like that. Mostly the green stuff. Some people can convert K1 into K2 fairly well,

but like the beta carotene to retinol conversion, it requires different nutrients and their genetic factors. So eating some preformed K2 is a good idea. And that's primarily found in fermented foods. So hard cheeses, for example, are good sources of K2. Kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi. Unfortunately, beer does not qualify. Wine does not qualify. qualify. Wine does not qualify. And then fermented soy products. There's a Japanese food called natto, which is a fermented soy paste, which has really intense taste. And a lot of people like it, including me, but it's off the charts in terms of the K2 content. And K2 is important because it helps regulate calcium metabolism and it makes sure

that calcium gets into the bones and the teeth where it belongs, the hard tissues, and keeps it out of the soft tissues like our arteries and the kidneys. And there have been studies that have shown that cultures like the Netherlands, where they eat a lot of hard cheeses, for example, and they have high K2 intakes, they have a relatively low incidence of heart disease. Japanese have done some really interesting studies on using K2 in high doses to treat osteoporosis. So yeah, I think with a little bit of intention and education and understanding, there are ways to meet these nutrient needs that don't include eating organ meats. Eating organ meats or incorporating them in some way into your diet is kind of, I look at it as kind of an insurance

policy. You know, it's because they're so off the charts with a lot of these nutrients. If you just eat, you know, a couple of times a week, you eat liver, you take a liver supplement, it's just making it less likely that you're going to run into problems for nutrient deficiency over time. Is it absolutely essential? Of course not. There are lots of people who live a full, healthy life, never having touched liver or gotten anywhere near it, but it just makes it a little easier to meet your nutrient needs. It's funny because that whole breakdown is very similar to my pitch for a good multivitamin. It's simply that if a multivitamin is formulated well, it's going to have appropriate amounts of each one of these things that you just mentioned. And you could think of it as an insurance policy that can help plug any little holes that might exist that you might not be aware of, like you mentioned, because it's not so bad to really produce noticeable effects. But so my multivitamin has all those things, for example, and it actually doesn't have choline but um it

has it has the rest and and a lot of other stuff in it as well and something that uh if if anybody goes and looks at the reviews on the website something that is is it's just a theme is that you have a fair amount of people who are eating well and then they start taking the multivitamin and they notice that now they just feel better. They just didn't realize that by increasing their intake of, and it's hard to say what did it, but, uh, maybe, maybe it was a vitamin a related thing or a K1, K2 thing or B12, right. Cause that can, that can be an issue, uh, for issue for conversion to the bioactive. So we use the more expensive 5 form. 5-MTHF. Yeah, exactly.

I'm thinking of folate. Yeah, 5-methylfolate. Oh, sorry, sorry. Exactly. Yeah, I said B12. Very similar. Yes, yes. And so anyway, so my point is just that, um, it doesn't not

that people need to take a ticket, take a multivitamin. Uh, but that's why I do. And that's why I think it's smart to do that because I am actually pretty fastidious about my diet. I have given some thought to the different vegetables that I eat, for example, and the fruits that I eat and everything that I eat, but there are things that I just don't really like to eat. And so I'm willing to go to a certain point with that. And so I add a supplement to get enough of some of these nutrients that i know i'm not getting much of now what are your thoughts on that versus uh let's say not supplementing with liver or or another organ but eating it what do you think about let's say taking it doesn't have to be my

multivitamin obviously but say a multivitamin that is formulated well, that has proper amounts of these key nutrients versus trying to get them exclusively from food and taking no supplements. Yeah, I think it just depends on the person. Some people just know that they're going to be far more likely to take a multivitamin than to pay the level of attention that we're talking about to, you know, getting enough of each of these different kinds of foods. Like, first of all, just knowing what nutrients are in which foods and, you know, that they, that you need to eat a certain amount of those foods on a regular basis. Some people are really into that. You know, I'm, I'm a kind of a food person. I like food. I like

preparing food. I think about food. I I'm, you know, in my profession, I'm, I'm a kind of a food person. I like food. I like preparing food. I think about food. I I'm, you know, in my profession, of course, I pay a lot of attention to the nutrient contents of foods and, but I realize not everybody's like that. You know, in fact, most people I would say are probably not like that. And, and, and even some people who are like that, just life intervenes, you know, they get busy kids, family, work, whatever, you know, they're not necessarily able, they know how, what they should be doing or what they would like to be doing. And they are not able to do that.

So, you know, I guess I would say I have a general preference for getting nutrients from food whenever possible, because I think that's just what humans are best adapted for. And, you know, often the safest way and way to do it and the most nutritious way to do it but we don't live in an ideal world and um there are a lot of we don't all have personal chefs to uh exactly to make the liver and the we don't yeah and like i said even when you know what to do and what you should be doing it's often a challenge to do it so um i think you know making an effort to do the kinds of things that we're talking about like you know eating some organ meats we haven't talked much about bone broth and other nose to tail additions but like bone broth is great it's a it's it's a

great source of glycine, which I mentioned before. That's another amino acid that balances out the effects of methionine, you know, for, from a strength training perspective, methionine is really what puts on muscle, uh, one of the proteins that does that, but glycine helps a lot with recovery and repair. So you want to have both, right? You don't want to just have glycine and then you're not going to build muscle and strength as much. You don't want to just have methionine because if you get injured, for example, it's going to be harder for you to recover.

And this is why like the LA Lakers, the basketball team, they're all drinking bone broth now and finding that it helps with their athletic recovery. And you could consume some fermented dairy products if you like them and tolerate them and you get some K2 that way. In addition to calcium, you could, you could take some cod liver oil, which is a pretty low lift thing. Um, you could eat some, uh, fattier cuts of meat like brisket or oxtail or shanks or things like that to get some additional glycine. As it's convenient and easy for you to work into your life, some egg yolks, you could eat some shellfish, which are amazing sources of zinc and copper and iron.

And then if you feel great and that's enough for you, then awesome. You stop there. But if you're still then maybe tired or not sleeping well, or experiencing some kind of what I call, you know, Mark Hyman, who's a friend and colleague calls FLC, feel like crap, not a sickness or disease, just not quite where you want to be, then try adding a multivitamin, you know, well-formulated one that has all the right forms and the nutrients like you mentioned, Mike. And if you feel better with that, great. Then you get that much better of a result. So I'm not super dogmatic about this stuff. I think people need to choose what works for them and what's realistic based on their circumstances. Yeah, that makes sense.

If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. all natural sports supplements in the world. What do you think about plant avoidance? Because that's a big part of this whole topic. There's the carnivore diet and that's something that, oh, it's probably been a couple of years when it was first coming into its own. I put some time into writing a long form piece on it that then I spun into a podcast and I haven't paid too much attention to it since because it was so ridiculous to me at the time. But it's probably even more popular now, certainly. If I were to look in Google Trends, I don't think it's going down uh what what are your thoughts on that and

and the claim that if we are willing to eat enough of i don't know i mean this there might be carnivore people out there saying nah just eat like steaks and hamburgers and you're fine uh but what about the people who are saying okay well you can't just eat steaks and hamburgers, but if you eat nose to tail, if you're willing to eat enough of these things that you've been mentioning, these different types of meat, organs, then you don't have to eat any plants. Yeah. And I guess the pitch is probably that it's better actually, right? Because it's not a sexy pitch. If it's like, well, you'll get the same result result but you have to eat all this weird stuff uh oh yeah well they argue that plants are toxic and so they're definitely not just saying it's you know

you're just saving the trouble of preparing vegetables you're saying you're gonna feel better because you're not eating toxins that's that's really actually the core argument. And as with most of these kinds of arguments, there is a kernel of truth in them. If there wasn't, it would just be dismissed outright. Nobody would take it seriously at all. But it's true that plants have toxins. That's how plants defend themselves. Animals can run away or fight. Plants produce toxins. Any biologist will agree to that and tell you that that's true. The question is, is the level of toxin that's in broccoli or kale or whatever harmful to humans? Because we are constantly exposed to toxins in our environment. Water

can be toxic at high enough doses and kill us. So the question is not whether there's any compounds that have potential toxicity in them. The question is whether the level of that toxicity is problematic for human health. And even more, does the nutrient value of those plants far outweigh whatever potential downside they might have in terms of plant toxins that they contain. And come back to that. I want to start by just- And then also what happens to some of these things when you cook food as well. Exactly. What methods of preparation do to the levels of toxins in these plants? And that's quite significant in most cases. And I'll use an example of that.

But just kind of zooming out a little bit and going back to the ancestral lens, again, it's not the only lens we should be looking at, but I think it's a good one for generating hypotheses, right? And so if we look at every traditional diet of every traditional culture that's been studied, and we see that not a single one of them was all plants, or not a single one of them was all animal foods, then we would have to at least question a strategy that advocated for an exclusive plant composition of the diet or an exclusive animal composition of the diet. we would have to say, okay, on what basis are we advocating for this as a theory if we have no examples of any human

cultures that have ever followed that approach? We're starting from below the line. As if it never occurred to them to even try that. Right, exactly. And on the contrary, you see cultures that have a primary animal focus in their diet go to great lengths to obtain what little plant foods they can. Like the Inuit are often used as an example of culture that primarily consumed animal foods. Well, guess what? As soon as they can get their hands on some blueberries, they eat them. animal foods. Well, guess what? As soon as they can get their hands on some blueberries, they eat them. It's not like they're just eating animal foods because that's their dietary philosophy.

It's because they live in the North Pole, the Arctic, and there's not a lot of plants growing there for the vast majority of the year. And they do whatever they can to trade for and eat those plant foods and vice versa. Cultures that are eating a higher proportion of their calories as plants, they'll trade for high value animal foods like shellfish and things like that because animals and plants have different nutrients that are important to human health. And so animal foods are definitely higher in what we call essential nutrients. So these are nutrients that we've known about for a long time that we can't produce on our own inside our bodies and that we have to obtain from the diet.

So they're, you know, vitamin B12, vitamin A, the preformed vitamin D, zinc, iron, minerals like that. So they're really crucial to our health. We need them. And animal foods are often the best source of those essential nutrients. But there's another class of nutrients that has not been, you know, we've only been aware of their importance really for the past maybe 50 years and even more so in the past two to three decades. And these are things like carotenoids, which we talked about a little bit, beta carotene, lycopene, lutein, zeaxanthin,

and then polyphenols, flavonoids, lignans, plant sterols and stanols, isothiocyanates and indoles, prebiotic fibers, which we know are really important for not feeding us, but feeding the beneficial bacteria in our gut. Well, guess what? Those are all only found in plants. You cannot find those foods or those compounds that I just mentioned in any animal foods. So, a lot of the carnivore folks will argue that those are not essential, like vitamin D or like vitamin A, and that humans don't need them. I don't think that's the case. I think there's a lot of research- That's an interesting jump to say that they're not essential, meaning, okay, fine, you're

not going to die if you don't get enough, but then to say, well, therefore we don't need them. Right. So, so I, I think when you look at both modern research and, uh, traditional diets, anthropological or archeological research, you see that humans, uh, generally best, you know, I've always eaten and do best on some combination of plants and animals. And, you know, the specific combination of like how much animal food versus how much plant food, that's varied from culture to culture. You have some cultures, again, like the Inuit or the Maasai who have a very high proportion of animal,

of calories from animal food and low from plants. You have other cultures like the Tuka Senta in Papua New Guinea or the Kitavas in the South Pacific who had a relatively high percentage of calories from plant foods and a lower percentage from animal foods. And I think you can even argue for a similar kind of individual split, like some people feel better with a larger percentage of their calories from animals and a smaller percent from plants and vice versa. But generally, most people do best with a combination. Now, there is a caveat to this that I have to mention just because I'm a clinician and I treat patients and often patients who are quite sick with very complex chronic disease. I think the origin of the carnivore diet where, where I started seeing it, like long before it became really a mainstream, I mean, it's still not mainstream, but before it became a trend, I was seeing people who are really sick use it. And I was seeing some pretty incredible results, at least in the short term, where you had people with severe autoimmune disease

or other really Lyme disease or conditions like that, where they completely removed plant foods from their diet. And they had a pretty spectacular response and recovery to that. And I have a theory that might be going on there. I don't know if it's accurate. I think in a lot of those cases, their gut flora is so severely dysregulated and disturbed that intake of any fiber, which is what you're going to get in plant foods, causes a really bad reaction. And so when they remove that fiber and maybe some of the plant toxins that like generally healthy people don't have an issue with

or are a bigger issue for them, but that doesn't mean it's a healthy diet for everybody to follow. It doesn't even mean that it's healthy for them to follow for the long term. I mean, you're talking about an elimination diet. Essentially. that it's healthy for them to follow for the long term. I mean, you're talking about an elimination diet. Essentially, yeah. And really starting with something that is well-tolerated by most people, which would be meat, right? If you had to get rid of everything but one food. It's digested very high up in the small intestine.

It doesn't have any residue that gets down into the gut. And the problem with it is I would see, I would often start to see other issues develop if they stayed on it for a while. And then when they started to add plants back in, it wasn't better. So I, it was hard to tell people not to do it because it was so incredible for them. Like their symptoms would, you know, be 80 or 90% better. And these are people who are really, really suffering. So who am I to say, don't do that? And I didn't, but I was curious about what the longer term effects would be. And I don't think we really have a lot of research to guide us on that, nor do we have

historical examples that we can look at to give us any indication of what might happen there. examples that we can look at to give us any indication of what might happen there. And I just worried that it wasn't really addressing the cause of the problem, even if it was providing significant symptom relief. But again, we're talking about a very small segment of the population here, and we're not talking about what's generally healthy for the vast majority of your listeners who are tuning in. Yeah, Most people are not going to derive any benefit from an elimination diet. They're not going to learn anything interesting. I've told people for some time, they've asked me about food sensitivities, for example, and these are people, they don't have any major issues. They're not sick. They're not suffering. And I've always told people, I think we can keep it simple. If you eat something and it doesn't sit well with

you, if you get gassy, bloated, if it upsets your stomach, then just stop eating it. And, you know, some people, for example, with FODMAPs, for anybody listening, if you want to learn about that, you can find, I recorded a podcast on it. can find in articles type of carbohydrate that some people can't process well but it includes nutritious stuff it includes beans onions garlic yeah onions garlic and so i've heard from a number of people over the years who had that issue who were very relieved to learn about it because they couldn't understand obviously how how are they having these regular gi issues when they eat really well and then when they removed the foods that were high in this type of carbohydrate that was it it resolved the issue but but again for most people they don't have issue. And so it's mostly a matter of if something bothers you, your stomach, when you eat it,

you don't even necessarily have to worry about why if you just stop eating it and that resolves the issue. Uh, I think that's workable for most of us. Yeah, definitely. As long, you know, as long as you're not doing that with so many foods that you're decreasing your overall nutrient intake at that point, it would be good to probably see cow but if it's just if you don't tolerate beans or legumes that's a pretty common one right i think you get my wife peas they just bother they upset her stomach so she just doesn't eat peas exactly and you can eat a completely nutritious

diet and be fully healthy without eating peas and any, and in fact, without eating any legumes, like there's, there's nothing that you can't get, you know, that you can get from legumes that you can't get from other foods, um, if you eat a diverse diet. So I agree with that. And I think sometimes there can be a little bit of an obsession with testing and, you know, uh, a lot of the tests are not, um, depending on what we're talking about are not super accurate anyways. So, um, at the end of the day, your body is the final arbiter. You know, if, if a test tells you, for example, that you're not gluten intolerant, but every

time you eat gluten, your body freaks out, then does it really matter what the test says? You know, like at the end of the day, you're, you're the one who has to live with that. So, uh, I think that's an important point to, to remember. And, and for the, the carnivore for the, for the people who, who are, are getting into it because it's, uh, interesting to them or is it uh i guess for some people i've heard is it is just plant avoidance it's i don't like vegetables and this dude is telling me i don't have to eat i don't have to eat my vegetables oh my god yeah that's it like i don't have to this guy he's a doctor he says i don't need to eat vegetables and he says in fact

if i stop eating vegetables and i start eating all this other delicious stuff that i like to eat i'm going to be even healthier it can be hard to change that person's mind because they are being told what they want to hear and you know so it's just it's interesting to have some of these discussions with people where you know a lot of the stuff we've been talking about here is is is kind of boring it's kind of unsexy it's what everybody's been saying for a while or at least the the basic philosophy has not changed all that much and and and it and it won't it'll it'll evolve for for sure but i highly doubt in our lifetimes there's going to be a point where credible experts are going to say you know what we had it all wrong throw away the vegetables throw away all the

plants just eat these specific organ meats and these these other animal products but if you have to you have to prepare them maybe in a certain way, or you have to combine them with these other weird substances, uh, it's just, it's just not going to happen. Yeah. And that's always going to be niche too, because there are people who literally, who are, are that opposed to eating plants, but I would say they're even in the minority. You know, most people like to have a little bit, at least a little bit of plant food in the diet, like a slice, a piece of lettuce and a tomato on their burger, you know, like some, some blueberries or fruits or. I guess for many people too, it's about weight loss.

Right. And if their calories come down enough, because now they can't eat all their delicious carbs anymore and they don't, uh, they don't fill up, uh, their, their, their, their energy expenditure with, with fatty meats and stuff. And then they see, they see that, and then that excites them. And I understand that, uh, it's one way of going about it, I suppose. Yeah. So, I mean, just, I know we're getting close to time here, but just a few simple ideas, I think, to bring this home for people. Again, it does not have to be crazy. We're talking about have some soup a couple times a week with homemade bone broth, or you can get good bone broth in the store now.

Kettle and Fire is a great brand. They simmer it for 24 hours. It's got all the glycine and collagen stuff in there. You can use bone broth to really enhance the flavor of a sauce that you might make or stew. Sometimes if we cook rice, we'll cook it in bone broth. There's just like really easy things you can do and that will help get you some more glycine and collagen. If you want to, you can use, like I said, three ounces of beef liver, mix it with some ground beef. When you cook on beef and have tacos or whatever you're going to do with that ground beef, it can be a pretty simple, easy way to do it. Make sure, you know, eat some egg yolks

throughout the week. That's going to get you choline. It's a really good source of choline, going to get you choline. It's a really good source of choline, second only to liver. If you don't want to eat liver, you could take cod liver oil on a daily basis. It's pretty easy to do. They have comes in capsules now. So if you don't like the taste and then work some fermented foods into your diet, sauerkraut, kefir, kimchi, hard cheese, if you tolerate dairy, that's good for K2 and other nutrients. And then if you're eating meat and animal products, maybe occasionally have some stew or some brisket or chuck roast, or like a fattier cut of meat that has some collagen in it, instead of just the 98% lean ground beef or super lean steak. It's really as simple as that. You know, that's, that's, that's the level that we're talking about here. And, and it's, it should

enrich your diet and make it feel better and more interesting and more delicious. Not, not, it shouldn't feel like a chore. That's a, that's a great summary. And, uh, you've, you've inspired me. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to expand my palate a little bit. I'm going to expand my meat horizons. I tend to go for, I'll eat a bit of chicken and I'll eat a bit of lean ground beef, but I haven't had liver in a while. So I actually don't even remember what it tastes like. So I'll find out. Let me know, Mike, maybe maybe i can maybe i can get away with it in a stir fry but i don't know maybe it's so gross that it's going to ruin the stir fry we'll see it really depends i would try some before you put it all throughout the stir fry oh i'll eat it

regardless as long as i'm not throwing it back up it's going down so the question is do i do it again yeah well let me know how it goes. I'm curious to hear. I will. I will. Well, hey, thanks for doing this. This was very informative. Always great talking with you. And let's wrap up with where people can find you and your work.

And if there's anything in particular that you want them to know about, any particular product or service, maybe that's new or exciting. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Most of my work can be found at my website, chriscresser.com. And I'm also on social Facebook and Instagram under Chris Cresser. If you search me, you'll find me. And no, no particular, nothing particularly new right now. We're doing some workshops this year. We're doing one on how to boost your immunity naturally, which I think is a really important topic given the day and age that we're living in, because we actually do have an immune system that functions really well when you give it the right

inputs, which you would almost not know if you were just following the mainstream media coverage right now. I don't know when this is coming out, Mike, but that's going to be at the end of January. And I'm excited to get that out there because I just think it's so important for us to just stay healthy and boost our immune system as much as we can at this point. Yeah, it's really amazing that the media isn't constantly talking also about the importance, especially now with research coming out, for example, how body composition, particularly body fatness, affects your risk of having real problems with COVID, how sedentary living also directly relates to your ability to fight off this virus and fight off the disease, particularly your cardiovascular. Maintaining normal vitamin D levels. You'll appreciate this, Mike. There's a study that showed that people who are completely sedentary

are two and a half fold more likely to die from COVID than people who are in the most active group. Why is that not being broadcast and shouted from every corner? Then we have studies, almost a hundred studies now on vitamin D taken and meta-analyses that show that people who are deficient in vitamin D have a 2.35-fold higher risk of death, a 2.6-fold higher risk of severe COVID. These are really, really simple things that people can do to reduce their risk of a bad outcome from COVID. And unfortunately, this information is just not getting out there. So that's why I did this workshop. I'm just keen to get it out to as many people as possible because we have to do something about this. Yeah. I have a note too. I wrote an article might've been six to eight months ago regarding COVID. And I got into a lot of, a lot of data

and more of a risk analysis and was explaining to people why I myself could care less about it for my own personal health, or I guess the saying should be couldn't care less for my own personal health, right? And then ironically after then I had gotten it and shocker, I barely even noticed. I think I was congested for a few days. But I have a note that it might be worth writing another piece on it particularly about this angle and and how fitness and body composition uh how big of an effect it can have and it's it gives somebody something that they can do so they can worry less and and just telling people to worry less it doesn't work and even even, even if you show them

the data, if you show them, Hey, let's look at your age, let's look at your health status. Do you have comorbidities? Let's break all this down. Well here, look, the data, it clearly shows that you really don't have much to be worried about. Even that is, is it's not very persuasive. Many people they're still worried. And so getting in better shape is something that they can do that actively, dramatically reduces their risk. And we have to accept at this point, I think that the virus is never going away. At least that's the consensus of like every epidemiologist. Absolutely, 100%. Is that it's here to stay.

It's going to be a seasonal event. Yep. And the Alma cold variant, it's nice to see that it's getting less virulent, but it probably will always be unique and present unique risks to certain people. And so if somebody hasn't gotten it yet, unfortunately, if you're one of those people listening, if you know you haven't gotten it, which is actually hard to know, right? Because maybe you did and you were just asymptomatic. Testing is particularly inaccurate now. Yeah, unless you're going to get a T cell test or something. But let's say you don't think that you've gotten it. Well, you will. You will be exposed to this virus eventually. It's inevitable. And if you listen to the TV, it's that you should just get a new shot every... I think I saw a headline now Pfizer saying every five months. In Germany, I saw a headline. It was one of their

officials, somebody in their government said, hey, actually, you can just get a new shot one month after you've gotten your initial round, right? So, if we're just going to be generous and say, look, there's a lot of money involved here, right? There's literally tens of billions of dollars. Pfizer alone is on track to do what I saw Forbes article a couple of months ago. Last year, they were on track to do about $35 billion from vaccine revenue or revenue from vaccines, up from $9 billion the year before. So there's a lot of money here. And if you listen to the TV, it's, well, just get shots forever. That's it. That's how you are going to sleep at night and not be afraid of dying from COVID. And if people want to do that, they can do that. But I do think that it's worth

talking about other options. And that doesn't necessarily mean don't get vaccinated ever under any circumstances. But again, for the people who are not excited about getting booster shots forever then maybe there are some other things we can do uh to to strengthen our immune system so we can live our lives without um this this shadow kind of absolutely you know yeah we need a more nuanced discussion about it like they're and about it. I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think it's going to come from the TV. No, it's not going to come from the TV. That ship has sailed. And for various reasons we don't need to get into here, the public health, I think it's pretty clear that the public health infrastructure has failed us miserably during this pandemic. So yeah, the good news is we can

take matters into our own hands and there's a lot we can do. And like you said, I think vaccination may very well make sense for some risk profiles and demographics, but it might not, you know, boosters, for example, have not been well studied, particularly in kids. And the kids are at such low risk for hospitalization and any, and death from COVID like 10,000 fold lower risk by some accounts than like a 75 or 85 year old with comorbidities. Um, and there was actually a study out of Germany that I covered in an email recently, uh, where they had a 400,005 to 11 year olds and there wasn't a single death. It was healthy, healthy five to 11 year olds. So, so any of the bad outcomes that are occurring in, in, in young kids are almost always

kids with serious comorbidity. I'm not talking about overweight, you know, or asthma. I'm talking about kids with like leukemia or, you know, very, very severe, uh, conditions that were hospitalized. Um, and, and even in those cases, it's not always clear that COVID was the cause of death. It was, you know, they tested positive for COVID when they went into the hospital. So, in those cases, you know, and in case of young, relatively lean, healthy people, the risk-benefit analysis is very different than it is for someone who's 85 and has diabetes and is obese and has, you know, stage two chronic kidney disease and, you know, a lung problem like that. That's, we should be having the conversation of how the, the approach.

What about, I mean, okay, let's take, let's take a 20 year old kid that he's an athlete, right. Super healthy. And he just just he just got covid and it was like me he was congested for a couple of days and uh he did his little quarantine and now he's fine no lingering symptoms whatsoever and uh i mean i've seen i've seen it i've seen scores of of papers now on natural immunity robust durable, durable, cross-species, et cetera, et cetera. There was a paper in Nature that showed changes at the level of bone marrow that look to be positive changes that indicate that for people who have had it, their bodies will be able

to fight it off more effectively permanently is how it appears, right? And so you take this kid, he's 20, he just had it and he's fine. Should he go get vaccinated right now? What's in it for him? I mean, even if there were no risk of side effects whatsoever, why would he even bother taking the 30 minutes to go do it? Why? bother taking the 30 minutes to go do it. Why? Well, on top of that, some of the Nature Medicine paper, a recent one, showed that the immunity from infection is likely to be more effective against a few different variants as well. I didn't see that. Whereas the vaccines were pretty much all designed for the earlier variants. And there are some new data suggesting that they're less effective for preventing Omicron infections and probably also even from preventing severe

disease with Omicron. And it makes sense because this is a different variant than when the vaccines were originally designed. But these studies are showing that immunity that comes from infection is broader in nature and maybe more likely to cross-react with other variants that exist now and future variants. So there's a lot more to this. And what's ironic is that's actually not a controversial statement before COVID. I privately have spoken with a number of epidemiologists and virologists, people who know what they're talking about, know a lot more about this stuff than I do. And it's just been interesting that they won't say some of these things to their work colleagues or in some cases they have more public platforms. But take what you just said that that would have been yeah uh you can't really say that and that would have been

immunology 101 before before because like okay you have this vaccine that specifically is targeting the spike protein but if you've if your body has actually seen the virus there's there's a lot more going on than just the spike protein yeah and that that. Yeah. And that's, I know we got to get off here, but that is the saddest thing about this for me is just the polarization and tribalism that's happened and the lack of open discourse and consideration of a broad range of opinions from qualified people, people who are legitimately qualified and have all of the same bona fide credentials as people who are on the sort of mainstream side are being shut out of the conversation and debate. And I think that's anti-science, it's anti-progress, and it's

anti-democracy. You can't run a functional democracy when you don't have that. And that's my biggest concern about all of this and where we're at with it. And you're not supposed to ask certain questions. I mean, come on. Yeah. That's a dangerous place to live, actually. So my wish is that I do see some positive changes here. And I also see some stuff that's going on that still shouldn't be going on. So I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that we regain our collective sanity and can find a way through this. I hear you, man, from your lips to God's ears, right? But anyway, chriscresser.com. And thanks again. I look forward to the next chat. Likewise, Mike. Thank you.

And thanks again. I look forward to the next chat. Likewise, Mike. Thank you. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which, of course, then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much

as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.