The Joe Rogan Experience - #1551 - Paul Saladino

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Dr. Paul Saladino is a physician and board-certified nutrition specialist. He’s a leading expert in the science and practice of the carnivore diet, a food regimen to which Saladino credits numerous health benefits seen in the patients under his care.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Listen, man, I've been telling everybody that I eat mostly meat. And they look at me like I'm going to die. And it's kind of funny. And I've had these conversations with people and they were like, oh, well, if you eat too much meat. Jamie, can we get more water? we'll have one water out here i've been telling these people like

that i eat only meat and they're like well you know if you eat too much meat it causes colon cancer because this causes that and one of the things that i say and as a talking point that i actually stole from you is that most plants are inedible, but almost all animals are edible. And when you say that to them, they look at you like, oh, shit. Like, if you just go out and eat, like, random plants, you'll get sick as fuck. That's real.

So, like, when I tell people I eat mostly meat, they look at me like you're doing something really stupid. Like, Rob Lowe started laughing at me. I said, I have, like, an animal-based diet. You know, some people are plant-based. I'm animal-based. I love that word. Yeah, animal-based.

Just steal what they're saying. And make it better. But what you said, what I've heard you say, that's an accurate way of describing it. Most plants are not edible, but almost every animal is edible. I mean, and I think that if people spend time in the wilderness, regardless of the latitude,

they'll start to appreciate this. Yeah. And I've mostly spent time in latitudes that are further from the equator than not. But even at the equator, if you go walking around the woods or the forest or the jungle there and you try to eat leaves or stems or bark. You're going to die. You're going to die. Really freaking fast.

Well, how about people who collect mushrooms? Like they make mistakes. So easy. I remember there was a story about a guy in a nursing home, and he had went out and picked mushrooms for the people in the nursing home and cooked them up, and they all died because he fucked up. Probably this older guy couldn't see or maybe just forgot what's edible or maybe he was just losing his mind.

But the point is, most of these things you see are not edible. And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes more sense. But we never do that anthropomorphization, and we never think about that. But as I was learning about this and thinking about carnivore diets and animal-based diets, I had to learn a lot of stuff myself. I was trained as a physician. I wasn't trained as an anthropologist myself. I was trained as a physician. I wasn't trained as an anthropologist, and I took ecology in college. But when you look at what we know

about the timeline of life on Earth, 500 plus million years of plant and animal co-evolution. And there's a lot of people who have speculated this, that essentially plants evolve, animals evolve, animals start eating plants, plants evolve defenses, animals evolve defenses against the defenses. And there's a whole series of enzymatic systems in our liver, the phase one and phase two detoxification system, they're called cytochrome P450 and other reactionary systems in our liver that are meant to detoxify things. And a lot of people speculate, and I think this is really reasonable, that the majority of the reason we have those is so that we could eat plants from time to time so we didn't starve

during our evolution. But there's a real interesting interaction here. This is warfare. This is an arms race that's 400 million years old between plants and animals. And so what was so interesting for me as I got deeper and deeper into this idea around, can humans exist? Should humans exist? Will humans thrive on a completely animal-based diet? You start to realize, wait a minute, why are we imagining that plants are benign? They're beautiful. They're fun to look at, but they are rooted in the ground.

They can't run away from us. What's their defense? Well, if you're out in the desert, a cacti has got a thorn or a rose has a thorn, a spine, but most of them just have plant defense chemicals. And that's not even conjecture. That's just known botanical science that plants make chemicals broadly called phytoalexins that are meant to dissuade animals, insects, fungi from over-consuming them. And so my fear is that we've assumed that plants are good for us. And we see everything with these plant compounds through the lens of these are good for us. How can we

prove they're good for us? There's a whole different part of the story. What if we think about it from a plant's perspective? What if these plant chemicals are not good for us? And we're misinterpreting the research and I can talk about why I think we are. And maybe the plants are just making these chemicals to say, hey, if you eat a lot of me, you're not going to feel good. I'm going to affect your thyroid. I'm going to affect your androgens, your sex hormones, or whatever. I'm going to make you have diarrhea or nausea, or I'm going to kill you. And we've just been thinking more plants, more plants, more plants, when it's like, wait a minute, why are we eating plants in the first place? well here's here's a question though is it good

to eat some of them because there's this thing and and i know you've discussed this as well the hormetic response right like where your body responds to these uh effects that these plants are producing and it actually the response by your body is good. The same way the response from a sauna is good. Your body really doesn't belong in 180 degree temperature. But when you put it in 180 degree temperature, it develops these heat shock proteins and it's actually good. It's good for you to do that for short periods of time.

Is that possible with plants? That maybe some, like I know Dr. Rhonda Patrick is really into broccoli sprouts. And I think for that very particular reason. Yeah. So this is really interesting. And if you think about it differently, it starts to make more sense, I believe, or there's a whole different paradigm, a whole different lens through which we can view this. So as I was writing my book, I came up with these terms, environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis. I'll grab your book. It's right here.

up with these terms, environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis. I'll grab your book. It's right here. Molecular hormesis is broadly termed xenohormesis by some people. Xeno is this Latin term that means alien or foreign. So when you think about these, a lot of, in common parlance, people lump together exercise, ketosis, sunlight, sauna with plant compounds. But I think that's, that's not accurate. I don't think we should be doing that. I think we have environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis, and they're different things. So I won't debate that plants can be beneficial as medicine, but to use them as food presupposes that molecular hormesis is good for us. And I'll tell you why I don't think it is. So when you go in the sauna, or when you are in ketosis, or when you're in the sun,

or when you exercise, you do generate reactive oxygen species, superoxide radicals, and they activate a system in your body called the NRF2 system. I can pull up a picture of it in a second. And that turns on genes that are involved in the antioxidant response to manage these free radicals. Life is this elegant dance of electron movement and protons too and other functional groups in chemistry, but the movement of electrons is oxidation and reduction

with the loss of electrons being oxidation, the gain of electrons being reduction. And so when we think about oxidative stress, we're talking about molecules pulling electrons from other molecules creating free radicals, which is broadly means that there are unpaired electrons. Now, these are very reactive molecules that can then create things like lipid peroxides or, you know, free radicals within proteins, which change the confirmation of

the protein. And we know these can be damaging for humans. One of the reasons that cigarette smoking is bad for us is because it creates a ton of free radicals, lots of oxidative stress. But a little bit of oxidative stress or just the right amount, the Goldilocks amount, is necessary for life. We don't want to get rid of all of the oxidative radicals in our body. They're critical signaling molecules at the level of the mitochondria. So this whole movement toward antioxidants and more antioxidant chemicals is eventually, if we snuff out all of the oxidative radicals or all the reactive oxygen species in the human body,

we'll be dead. We need these for signaling. So a little bit of oxidative stress is good. Too much, stressful, creates problems. Not enough, stressful, creates problems. It's definitely a Goldilocks thing. So when you are in the sauna or you are in the sunlight or you exercise, you will create oxidative stress.

That oxidative stress turns on NRF2. This is essentially a transcription factor that translates, locates to the nucleus, turns on genes involved in the antioxidant response, things like glutathione peroxidase, thioredoxin, things like this. They manage those free radicals. And that's just, it's kind of clean, right? You have an input to the system. It turns on a gene.

Molecular hormesis is a little different. It's like going to the pharmacy and taking a medicine. But what we never get with plants is the package insert, quote unquote, that comes with medications in the pharmacy. If you go to the pharmacy and you get a drug, lisinopromatoprolol, a statin drug, even if you get ibuprofen or naproxen and leave at the pharmacy, on the bottle, there's a list of all the side effects. When we use exogenous molecules for humans, we know that they don't really play well with our biochemistry. They're going to do one thing, which may be an intended effect, but then they're going to have other effects elsewhere, which could be damaging. And invariably, we see this with medications we take. We know that beta blockers can affect

glucose tolerance, and they can affect sympathetic signaling in the human body with the nervous system. And we know that lisinopril and drugs like this, which affect the kidneys, can have problems with electrolyte balance or other things. They can affect the lungs because they're affecting the way that angiotensin-converting enzyme works in the lung. They have side effects. And so my concern is that we're conflating the two, and we're forgetting about the side effects that are associated with molecular hormesis. I think that there certainly are studies with molecules like sulforaphane, which is this isothiocyanate compound from broccoli, that show that it also triggers NRF2.

It triggers this antioxidant response system. But what we aren't told about much is the other side effects of sulforaphane, the so-called package insert that sulforaphane has. And when you look at that, there's a large amount of evidence that this whole class of molecules, isothiocyanates, actually have many negative effects in the body. And when you think about it from a plant's perspective, sulforaphane is pretty clearly a toxin. It's a booby trap. So one of the things I like to ask people is how much sulforaphane is in broccoli seeds? And the answer is zero until you chew them. There's no sulforaphane in broccoli or kale or kohlrabi or any of these brassica vegetables till you chew them.

And Ron has talked about this. How does that work? There's a precursor molecule called glucoraphanin, which is a glucosinolate. And it's like a booby trap. It's like super glue. You get two things combining. So you get glucoraphanin is the precursor molecule.

There's an enzyme called myrosinase in a separate compartment of the cell. When you chew the cell and you break the cell wall, they combine and then out comes sulforaphane. So it's a booby trap. It's like, if you're going to eat me, I'm going to make this molecule. It's going to affect you. It's going, if you're going to eat me, I'm going to make this molecule. It's going to affect you.

It's going to be a pro-oxidant, right? Because if you look at the chemistry of sulforaphane, it actually is a pro-oxidant, meaning it's pulling electrons from other molecules. It's not actually coming into our body and acting as an antioxidant. It's turning on our antioxidant defense system, but it's also doing other negative things in the human body. In the case of isothiocyanates, it's actually been other negative things in the human body. In the case of isothiocyanates, it's actually been shown to damage DNA, which is a process called clastogenesis,

and it inhibits iodine absorption at the level of the thyroid. This is also furaphane? Also furaphane, yeah. And there are other molecules like this that are also found in these type of foods, the Brassica family of foods. Things like goitrin or allyl isothiocyanate. They're all isothiocyanates. So they're widely known to affect iodine chemistry at the level of the thyroid. Have you ever seen people with the big necks in Africa, like the goiters?

There's an endemic goiter. Get this huge neck. That's hypothyroidism because they're consuming lots of foods that are goitrogenic foods. Lots of foods that have similarly isothiocyanate compounds that are inhibiting the absorption or at least the utilization of iodine at the level of the thyroid. So it's working against the thyroid. So the intent of plants is very clear here.

It's saying, if you eat too much of me, I'm going to affect your thyroid negatively, and that's going to affect every other hormonal system in your body. So yes, sulforaphane can be beneficial because it turns on our antioxidant response system, but it also has many side effects which are ignored. And we see this pattern over and over and over. And this is what was fascinating. We see this pattern over and over and over with plant molecules. And then if you look at these two, people might say, well, is the risk worth the benefit? And I would argue it's not. Or I would argue the benefit is not worth the risk because you can get your NRF2 system turned on without those molecules because you can do environmental hormesis.

You can go in the sauna. You can exercise. You can fast. You can be in ketosis. There's really good studies in cold water swimmers in Berlin. And they show that cold water exposure. So they go and they swim in cold water for like an hour, and they'll show that their glutathione level goes down, meaning that their oxidized level of glutathione goes up, the reduced level of glutathione goes down. They're using their endogenous antioxidant molecule,

one of them, which is glutathione, to mitigate these newly produced oxidative radicals, these free radicals in the human body produced by cold water swimming. And then the next day, they'll see their glutathione is a little bit above normal. That's hormesis. That's environmental hormesis. So my argument is, can we really say that plant molecules give us a net benefit? I don't think we can. There's lots of interesting studies here that would argue that we don't really get a net benefit from plant molecules It's kind of a redundant effect We can get this nrf2 system this antioxidant response system turned on without them

And then we're getting all of the downstream negative side effects of these plant molecules have there been any independent studies that show people taking like broccoli sprouts and Then doing it for a prolonged period of time measuring their, and then doing it for a prolonged period of time, measuring their system, and then doing environmental hormesis and seeing if they measure up. Well, there's actually studies that show they have two groups of people, and I can pull these up if you want. There's studies that compare people that eat essentially no vegetables or low fruits and vegetables to high fruits and vegetables. And they'll compare them at four, eight, or 12 weeks.

And at the end, they see no differences in the oxidative stress markers, the inflammatory markers, markers of DNA damage. So it's pretty shaky ground to say that invariably, all the studies with fruits and vegetables show that they provide this benefit. In the short term, sulforaphane can create more antioxidant response. You can get more glutathione. But if you take it out a little bit at a time, it doesn't look like there's any difference between people who are eating things like broccoli or Jerusalem artichokes or carrots

or cabbage or any of these other vegetables compared to a group that eats none of them. So there's these fruit and vegetable intervention studies which don't show any differences between these people. That's bananas. intervention studies, which don't show any differences between these people. That's bananas. So all the people that are thinking that they're doing a good thing for their system by taking these vegetables and fruits that have this, your body has this hormetic response for, you can have the exact same response from cold plunge, from sauna, from exercise. You're turning on the exact same system in your body.

But what about the vitamins that you're getting from plants? I mean, there are essential nutrients and phytonutrients that you get from plants. What about those? So this is really interesting when you look into it. There are really, this is going to sound extreme when I say it, but I'll back it up. There are no nutrients in plants that you cannot get from animal foods in essentially equivalent or more bioequivalent forms. How come when like cats eat an animal, they go for the guts first and they'll actually eat the grass that's in the guts of the cow? I don't know. The guts of a ruminant. I don't know why they would do that. I guess it's fermented. I don't know. Because if you look at the nutrients in animal foods, right, there are many nutrients in animal foods that do not occur in plants. And we know this. B12. But the list is much bigger. Vitamin

K2, choline, carnosine, carnitine, anserine, taurine. The list is extremely long, but you can't say the same thing about plants. There are no nutrients that occur in plants that you can't get from animal foods. None. Vitamin C? You can definitely get vitamin C from animal foods. And you get it from, what do you get from liver? Liver, heart, muscle, it all has vitamin C. So in the 1930s, from 1935 to 1942 or 43, they did a series of studies. I think it was in Sheffield, England. I've got the study I can show you. And they had conscientious objectors to the war.

And they had them take different amounts of vitamin C to see how long it would take to get scurvy. And doses as low as 10 milligrams of vitamin C per day could prevent scurvy. They experimented with conscientious objectors? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's kind of creepy.

10 milligrams a day. There it is. Yeah. Medical experience carried out in Sheffield on conscientious objectors to military service. Wow. And if you scroll down to the next page, Jamie. That's kind of creepy that they did experiments on them. Yeah.

There was 10 milligrams of vitamin C will prevent scurvy. Right, but obviously that's not an optimum level for health. Well, we don't know. No? Yeah, because if you look at the amount of vitamin C, they say there that between the 70 milligram group and the 10 milligram group, there was no difference in clinical outcomes. The prevailing thinking is that 10 milligrams is not enough for optimal health, but we don't actually know. There are roles of vitamin C beyond the formation of collagen,

which is the main thing that gets broken when we see scurvy, or at least that's the physical manifestations. You get bleeding gums, your teeth fall out. This is all collagenous tissue. The connective tissue in the human body starts to break down because you can't hydroxylate proline residues on the collagen molecule. But when you look at it beyond that, there's actually some pretty good studies. I'll see if I can find one. I've definitely got one in here that shows that if you look at people eating, they did another experiment with excess fruits and vegetables. And they had one group that had small amounts of fruits and vegetables. And now we one group that had small amounts of fruits and vegetables. And now we're going to skip up to 70 milligrams.

So it's a little bit more than 10. There's no experiments with like long-term 10 milligrams of vitamin C per day. But there's an experiment that compares 70 milligrams of vitamin C per day from low fruits and vegetables to 270 milligrams of vitamin C from fruits and vegetables. And there were no clinical differences in those outcomes in those people. So one group has low fruits and vegetables. One group has high fruits and vegetables, 270 milligrams of vitamin C from fruits and vegetables. And there were no clinical differences in those outcomes in those people. So one group has low fruits and vegetables. One group has high fruits and vegetables. And how long is the study? I think it was eight weeks. I'll pull it up. Is that long enough to see a detrimental effect or a positive net benefit? Well, I think that if you're thinking

about things in terms of oxidative stress, that happens pretty quickly. You would definitely, I think, begin to see increased DNA damage. We measure it with this marker called 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, lipid peroxides, inflammation. I think you would see it, you start to see it pretty quickly when you get lower levels of vitamin C. The higher vitamin C group with more fruits and vegetables certainly had a higher level of vitamin C in their blood, but they didn't have any differences in terms of those markers. their blood, but they didn't have any differences in terms of those markers. So this one is... What about the benefits of vitamin C in fighting off colds and infections? Right. So the interventional studies with that have generally failed.

Really? Yeah, yeah. But the consensus wisdom is that if you have a virus... Right, take vitamin C. Take vitamin C, yeah. I'll show you this one. So if you go to the vitamin C folder, Jamie, and then you go to the vitamin C from an evolutionary perspective study, you'll see a list of all the interventional studies with vitamin C. Scroll down to the table two.

So one more table down. That one. So you'll see these are interventional studies with vitamin C, and there's an RCT there for the common cold. It's a meta-analysis, actually, which 11,306 participants, and there was no effect on the incidence of the common cold. So this gets into the interesting conversation about epidemiology, and I know you know about this, the way that epidemiology is so misleading for us. And if you look at the association

of vitamin C in the blood, there's an association with better outcomes. But when we do interventional studies, we don't see it. And in this table, you can see no effect on mortality, no effect on the incidence of the common cold, no effect on cardiovascular events, and essentially no decrease in systolic blood pressure with intervention. No effect on the incidences of the common cold, but what about once someone has a cold? That is like when emergency and all these different vitamin C supplements, this is what they're always claiming

is that taking it while you have the cold is what's going to reduce the duration of the disease. Concluded that vitamin C supplementation has no effect on the incidence of the common cold. However, a modest reduction of symptoms was consistently found in reviewed studies. Yeah, so maybe. So good while you have it.

Maybe while you have it. So if you have something, then jack up the dose. Yeah. Vitamin C is a complex one because there are many things which can lower vitamin C as well. So metabolic dysfunction decreases levels of vitamin C in our body. So the playing field is not always level, right?

Okay. So if you have a cold, your vitamin C level is going to be lower. Could be lower. Or if you have a baseline of unhealth, something that's been super relevant with the current COVID conversation. If you have a baseline of ill health or baseline of metabolic dysfunction, sometimes synonymous with insulin resistance, per a given vitamin C intake, there's lower levels of vitamin C in the body. So if you look at animal foods, like if you eat nose to tail, if you're eating a couple ounces of liver per day and some meat per day and other organs, you can get pretty close to 70 milligrams of vitamin C a day, which is basically the RDA. I think the RDA might be 70 or 90 milligrams of vitamin C. Now, this expression nose to tail, a lot of people don't know what we're talking about. What you're talking about is organ meats. Yeah.

Yeah. It's eating organ meats because most people, when they think of eating animal products, they think of just eating tissue, muscle tissue. And it's so funny. I recently was hanging out with Steve Rinella, and he was telling me, historically, the trappers, like these fur trappers, maybe in the 1800s, at some point along the way, we lost this ancestral knowledge that eating organs is so important, and that all indigenous cultures do it, and they savor the organs, really above all other things, and they distribute them among the tribe. And these trappers went out and they started to just not, they get hard to get sick from

just eating the muscle meat and they had to start incorporating organs in their diet. It was a historical reference. I'm not sure where he read it, but yeah, if you look at the way that indigenous cultures do this and you look at the way that other animals do this as well, they don't waste anything. Particularly we have talked about it many times in the podcast, wolves, the alpha wolf will eat the liver and the other wolves have to stand by. And there's a crazy documentary about a guy who lived with wolves.

And one of the ways he tricked these wolves into thinking that he was the alpha was he would have an animal and he would put a liver in the animal. So they would bring a carcass and he would be growling at them while he ate the liver. And they were like, wow, I guess this guy's the fucking boss. He's eating the animal. So they would bring a carcass and he would be growling at them while he ate the liver. And they were like, wow, I guess this guy's the fucking boss. He's eating the liver. If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male or an alpha female. Well, it was weird that he knew and that this is just the wolves know in their pack mentality that the alpha is the one that gets the most nutritious piece of the animal. And there are even organs beyond the liver that are uniquely nutritious. The heart is prized. I mean, the spleen, the pancreas, these are things we

don't eat much as westernized humans, but kidneys are prized. I mean, so there was this really interesting Arctic explorer, Willemar Stephenson. Have you heard of his adventures in the early 1900s? I have. Yeah. So he wrote The Fat of the Land, Not by Bread Alone. And he had quotes, I think I have a quote from him here in the, let's see, I think it's in the anthropology. So he would say that the, actually it's in the nose to tail folder, Jamie, if you're looking for that, there's a screenshot there. So he would say that while meat of any kind is in great demand, it is interesting to note the following are the favorite cuts. The brisket of the beef with the fat and the cartilages. So these indigenous cultures in the Arctic, they would favor things with fat and connective tissue.

The skin and subcutaneous fat of the warthog, pigskin, hog's head, and brains, and number four is the liver of any animal. Look at that. Pigskin is never saved for rawhide and leather. It's too valuable as food and is eaten after singeing off the hair and a prolonged boiling. Plump cow skin is similarly eaten.

A lean cow skin will be saved for rawhide and leather. The hog's head, brains, and fat are both delicacies. The liver of any animal, the hands and feet of monkey because of the fat content. Whoa. So they tend to favor the fat and the organs. Brother, eating monkey hands. Should we really listen to them? I've never had monkey hands. You ever had listen to them? I've never had monkey hands.

You ever had brain? No. I've had calf's brain when I was a child. I don't remember. It was a long time ago. But my Uncle Vinny used to, they used to, I guess it was calf's brain or lamb's brain. I don't remember. But I remember they would grill it.

And I found it so strange. They were eating it. I wish I could remember if i liked it or not but i also like i i was probably six you know and i don't know if i had a sensibility towards different you know interesting like i enjoy liver now i actually like it i enjoy heart i eat it i i like some things that other people, I like sea urchin. I like things that people might find weird because of the texture alone. So I don't know if I felt that way when I was little. Liver is amazing. I know you had the guys from Black Rifle on and they were saying

that when they were taking the desiccated organ supplements, they had a rush of energy. But I kind of have this thing that I like to do with people where I have them eat raw liver and it's really cool to see how it turns their brain on. The baseline nutrition depends, will determine how much of a buzz they get. But of course, there's always food contamination issues. Have you ever done it with bile? Like where you slice the liver and squirt the bile on it?

I haven't. I'm hopefully gonna hunt this year, and I wanna do that with the gallbladder. Yeah. But I think that it's so interesting to see that they would savor the things that were salty. There was a little bit of salt in the gallbladder. Yeah. But I think that it's so interesting to see that they would savor the things that were salty. There was a little bit of salt in the gallbladder.

And yeah, I've heard of indigenous cultures using the gallbladder as a condiment. I think Rinella did that on one of his shows where he cut raw liver and ate it with the gallbladder. Yeah. Yeah. That's got to be a strong flavor. I'll report back. Yeah.

I've eaten a lot of the animal, but I've never eaten the gall fluid, so I've never eaten the bile. The Comanche used to love to do that with buffalo liver. They would take the buffalo liver raw and warm right from the fresh kill and squirt gallbladder on it.

Yeah. I mean, it can't be that... I would say it can't be that bad, but then you hear about the people in Iceland. They eat that pickled shark that Anthony Bourdain told me was the single most disgusting thing he's ever eaten in his life. And they love it. It's like a delicacy. Well, I've eaten warm liver out of a deer.

So I hunted in January. Is this Rinella doing it? Oh. Okay, so that's the gallbladder. He's cutting open, or he's tearing open i should say he's taking out look at that all the grass and everything in there not crazy it doesn't look appetizing not at all no is that what that is right there i mean if it's if it's a gallbladder that's the bile but what's all that grass i don't know if it's grass or just bile.

It could be just coagulated bile. Yeah, let's give them some volume. And all their food goes from their crop, which is a little holding tank. Oh, that's a bird. Down to the gizzard. So this must be a turkey. Oh, it's turkey. Edible organs.

Pulverizes it. Okay. Helps digest it. Oh, it's a gizzard. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. I've had gizzards from chickens before. You know, my family, I'm Italian, as you are, right? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we ate a lot of gizzards when I was a kid. I don't know why. See if you find, the edible organs thing, that's wild turkey. See if you can find Rinella Eats raw liver with bile. Have you ever had raw liver? I have not. Joe, we could do it. Yeah?

I brought some. You did? Go get it. Let's eat it. It's right here. I'll eat some raw liver. Jamie's going to throw up. Look at him.

He already started making noises. He already started making noises. I already had milk today. You already had milk? What does that have to do with this? Milk's a bad choice, Joe. Milk's a bad choice? So what, grab a piece?

Anchorman. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Raw liver. Raw liver. What kind of liver is this? It's cow's liver.

This is from grass-fed, grass-finished, regeneratively raised cows from White Oak Pastures in Georgia. This is quite chewy. So what's supposed to be the reaction? It doesn't taste much different than cooked liver. I think that in the tribes, there's an interesting tribe in Africa called the Nuer tribe, and liver is so sacred

that they couldn't even touch it with human hands. I don't know how they got it from the animal to people's mouths, but a lot of cultures eat it raw. They'll just cut it up and eat it raw. I think that the idea is you lose a little bit of nutrients when you cook it not much but you lose a little bit so i've always been fascinated by how many of this is such a nutrient-rich organ how

much of it can i actually preserve in terms of nutrients and do i feel differently when i eat it raw and there's you know there's a lot of interesting nutrients in liver that aren't well represented in the muscle meat which we were about. So muscle meat's a great source of B12 and zinc and iron and other things. So in the nose to tail folder, Jamie, there's a graphic from my book that compares. Oh, not this one. I was guessing. Whoa, look at that. Look at those cool-ass cave paintings.

I find that so fascinating, those cave art, cave paintings. Price also added the notion that liver is truly a prize food for indigenous people regarding an African tribe known as the, how do you say that? New Air. New Air. He stated, I learned that they have a belief, which to them is their religion, namely that every man and woman has a soul which resides in the liver and that a man's character and physical growth depends upon how well he feels feeds that soul by eating the livers of animals the liver is so sacred that it may not be touched by human hands now if that's the case how do you explain Burt Kreischer? Because that motherfucker's liver is overworked.

Pickled, even. Maybe delicious. Maybe. Yeah, he probably has like foie gras, right? Human foie gras. Yeah, I mean his liver is totally overfed, completely fatty. That's not what you want. That's non-alcoholic.

Foie gras is not good? Well, no, foie gras is probably, I don't know that I'd be excited about eating foie gras. They're like overfeeding the ducks, right? It's so good though. It is. It's so good. It's probably – it's a diseased liver. We can admit that.

Yeah. Well, people are like, well, you shouldn't do that because the weird thing about it is the ducks go to the feeding pipe. They go to it. They want it to happen. Like in our eyes, like this forced feeding is a terrible thing. But they actually gravitate towards that pipe. It's a very, look, I'm not in favor of doing weird shit to animals like that.

I'm not in favor of giving them food they're not supposed to eat. I'm not in favor of overfeeding them or force feeding them. But I just find it odd that they go to that pipe. Like there's a, you ever seen how they do it i wonder what's in it i wonder what they feed them pretty sure it's grains um i'm pretty sure that's what it is like see if you can find them uh ducks getting fed grains for fog yeah i wonder if they do anything to the grains to make them overeat it because there are lots of studies in rodents sometimes you can use rodents that are genetically predisposed to become obese.

But if you alter the food, and we know this with humans, you can alter food in some ways to make it more palatable and to kind of short circuit the satiety mechanisms. These ducks are not into it. This guy's grabbing them by the neck. But this is a different setup. This is a handmade one, or a handheld one, and they're just pumping it in there. The video that I saw, like this. These are all being force-fed.

Yeah. Well, I'm sure. The way I saw it, it was like there was a pipe in the center of the room. Force-feeding ducks at Hudson Valley Fog Walk. Go up that, feedingeding Ducks for Fog Walk. I think this is probably one where they... Yeah, see, it's weird because you're grabbing the duck. They're not going to be into that no matter what you do.

And you're making them open their mouth. It just seems gross. Yeah, it is. Here's what's weird about it. Is that any grosser than things that are legal you know because there's a lot of stuff that's legal that we do to animals like when do we decide what's legal and what's not legal because factory farming should be fucking completely illegal and it's legal in california you can get factory fed animals and you could buy them left and right what

you can't get as far anymore and i'm like well listen guys you got you're not making any sense like this is one small moment of this duck's day where they're feeding him and they're they're shoving a tube in his mouth and overfeeding him the life of a pig that you eat for bacon is a terrible tortured life and you're okay with that you're just not okay with this fucking duck getting extra grain pumped down its mouth meanwhile they just live in a normal life other than that and feedlots i mean i think i agree with you completely factory farming is a scourge and it should i don't know why we keep doing it i think there's a lot of corn and soy subsidies that are supported by it and it's really unfortunate but there's a lot of really interesting discussion about the sustainability of grass-fed grass-finished

meat and this regenerative agriculture concept but is it sustainable in at scale though like could you still have jack-in-the-box if you had grass-fed grass-finished meat i think we can both agree that grass-fed grass-finished meat is healthier to consume but the disagreement comes like bourdain, again, rest his soul, would say he prefers grass, grain fed cows because he finds the meat to be more delicious and tender. He liked it better as a chef. And, you know, that's that's a culinary choice. Like he as an artist creating food, he preferred an animal that was, you know, like people like Wagyu, you know, they like that kind of, I think that's, that's a fucking dying animal, man. I agree with you there. I mean, if you look at the way that cattle are factory farmed,

the reason they have all that intramuscular fat is because they are less metabolically healthy than their grass fed grass finished cohort. The sustainability or the scalability argument is so important to consider. So when I think about this, I think about it from a couple of perspectives. There's the land use perspective, but there's also just the actual mathematics of it that 99-ish percentage of cows that we eat that are grain finished had 85% of their life on grass. They're not raised from calves in the factory farm. So then I think, look, wait a minute. We're already raising all of our cattle on grass

for 85% of their lives. We're just sending them to factory farms at the end. And I think it's a consumer-driven thing. It's people who want that type of meat or they're not familiar with the gamey flavor or texture or they want it to be intramuscular fat. They want it to have more marbling. And then the other aspect is the actual land use. And then when you think about how much land is used to grow corn and soy, and then if we get rid of all the corn and soy that goes to

animals and feedlots, we can graze cattle there. And then there's actually, I believe it's called the Conservation Reserve Program. The federal government pays farmers to let their lands lay fallow for decades. There's hundreds of thousands of acres in the United States that are not being farmed because they were monocropped so badly that they had no nutrients, they can't grow plants on it. So what I think what everyone is missing, well, not the people in the regenerative agriculture space, not you, but I think that the mainstream is missing the fact that in order to regenerate land, in order to make land healthy, you put animals on the land. That's why the center of the country where there were millions of bison and elk and antelope

and deer and pronghorn had the richest soil anywhere until we monocropped it. And then we deplete the nutrients. It's a net negative. It's just a sink. We're just pulling nutrients out. But when you talk to the folks at White Oak Pastures in Georgia or other regenerative farms, and you look at the soil, it's incredible that when animals live on the soil in an ecosystem, it puts nutrients back into the soil. The soil is like the color of coffee grounds.

So I was in Georgia recently at Bluffton at White Oak doing photographs for a cookbook I'm writing. And Will Harris, who's a colleague of Joel Salatin, I know you've had Joel on the podcast. Love him. Yeah. And so Will has two jars in one of the churches on his property in Bluffton. And one jar is soil from his farm. And it's the color of coffee grounds. It's like 5% soil carbon. The other jar is from 25 yards away on his neighbor's pasture growing cotton or soy. It's like the color of this wood table. It's light brown. They're completely different.

And if you look at the soil content of carbon, it's 0.5%. So you have 10x the amount of carbon in the soil when it's farmed regeneratively. They've been doing regenerative agriculture there for 20 years. And you can see this steady increase in the amount of soil carbon. I'll pull it up. There's a graphic from this in my book. Well, it just completely makes sense because manure is fertilizer. Animals eat the grass.

They make manure. The manure is fertilizer. Worms and bugs live under the manure. There's an entire ecosystem that evolves around these animals living the way they've lived for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. It makes sense that it all works together synergistically to feed the soil and to provide nutrients for the very animals. And those animals will die on that land. They will rot. They will provide even more fertilizer. And then other animals will live off of land and they will rot and they will provide even more fertilizer and then other animals will live off of them

and live in that area and they too will die and they will shit all over the place and piss all over the place and they will feed the soil. And this is a system. And we fucked that system up by growing corn. We fucked that system up by growing

a million acres of soybeans, like whatever the fuck we do. Why are we eating those things? Well, it seems like we thought it was a great idea during world war one and world war two because they needed food the reason why all this like subsidies of farmers happened it's not that you know the um agriculture business is evil uh and the government is in bed with them. What happened was during the First and Second World War, there was a need for surplus food. There was a need for food because there was, back then, there was a very real concern for supplies, for troops, for supplies for the United States. I mean, we were at war. I mean, a crazy war that I don't think today in our 2020 version of war,

which always happens in some remote, faraway land, and it's always a domination by the United States. I don't think we really understand the desperate and terrifying times when they were asking people to donate metal and rubber. I mean, it was a crazy time. And the government stepped in and said, we are going to pay farmers to grow corn. We need food. And so they subsidized these farmers to grow all this food now it's become a different

animal because now they're subsidizing people to grow corn that is mostly in a lot of like i have a friend who has a farm and they grow it for livestock they have a huge area that they grow corn and it's all by the way monsanto corn right they're spraying that fucking roundup on it which is you know glyphosate is terrible for you and i had a podcast about that recently about environmental chemicals and how bad they are for you and then how that stuff actually can be in the meat and can in turn get into your system and provide you with all sorts of problems and this is why there is there's subsidizing of farmers i mean it's also because we need farmers we need to keep them healthy and this is just not the way to do it though this if we could just get people off the

tit of corn get people off the tit of these monocrop you know monocrop, you know, monocrop agriculture, we would be a healthier country. If we can have these giant areas where people can grow all kinds of things like polyface farms, the way Joel Salatin runs things. He moves all of his animals around. He lets all of his pigs, they live like wild pigs. They just eat acorns and nuts and all these different things. And he supplements them sometimes. And he has incredible soil, like the other farm you're describing, and incredibly healthy animals. That's the way it should be. And I love that you said that. It's just, we have this dependence on soy and corn-based economies now. And I love that the regenerative agriculture movement is starting. And that peeps slowly, slowly, There are more farms that are shifting and shifting and shifting.

Before the podcast, I was telling you about a ranch in Fredericksburg called Rome Ranch. Yes. And they're really cool. They raise bison. And if you look at the ground, so when I was out at Rome, I stood like a couple of feet from a buffalo or a bison. I don't know which one. Was there a fence in between you and the bison?

Why are you doing that, man? Don't you watch videos? Don't you watch YouTube? It was just this universal moment. Bro, this is a great video of a bison charging another bison and launching it into the air. Think about how big, what does a bison weigh? Like 2,000 pounds? It was intense.

It was just kind of like this. We had this bond. Look at that. Those are amazing animals. They're beautiful animals. They're so amazing. And if you look at the ground at Rome Ranch, this is Fredericksburg, Texas. This is land that was monocropped, I believe.

This is land that used to be fertile in southern Texas that was destroyed. Okay. And then actually, you know, they're starting to regenerate it. They've been regenerative, I think, for three or five years. And they start to get more grass growing on a piece of soil. So if you look at a square foot. Hold up, scroll that down there, the hunt. How are you going to hunt something

you can stand right next to? They have axes out there. Oh, okay, that's a different area. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They will not let you stand next to them. They will let you stand next to them. Axis deer? Oh, they won't let you stand next to the axes,

but you can stand next to the bison. No, I'm saying axes deer will not let you stand next to them. Oh, so they have axes deer hunts there. So this is only like an hour plus from here. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they have archery hunts there too. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, holla. Yeah. It's a great spot. But if you look at the ground and you look at a square foot of the ground at Rome ranch, you can see that on the pastures that the bison are in, maybe only 30 or 40% of that earth is growing grass. But you know that in the future,

if you move it out 20 years, like White Oak Pastures has done, when I was in Georgia, every inch, every millimeter of that ground is growing grass. It's like thick grass, right? And that's feeding the cattle in a much more rich way. And so that's what regenerative agriculture is about. We should go there. We should go there and we should in a much more rich way. And so that's what regenerative agriculture is about. We should go there.

We should go there and we should make a video. We should. Of us going there and talking to them about that and throw it up on YouTube. I think that would be really interesting. I'd love to. They're great folks. I'm not going to get near the fucking bison though. I'm going to learn my lesson from other people.

Well, we go out there with Katie and Taylor who own the farm and take care of it. And there's people out there who work with the bisonison they know which animals are more yeah see that's aggressive fuck all that man what if you make a mistake oh i thought it was mike that's bill bill's crazy don't go near bill the head of the buffalo the head of the bison was the size of my torso it was moving man i was like wow yeah i like experiences that make me feel small yeah well that will do it man you know backcountry skiing or being on the pacific crest trail or any of this stuff this whole area used to be overrun with bison which is really crazy I mean this is where the Comanche lived and that was their primary food yeah the Comanche were an animal-based culture which is

really interesting is that book empire of the Summer Moon, right? Yes, yes. Fantastic book. But they really didn't eat much else. They ate a little bit of berries here and there, but most of what their diet was was meat. And there was a benefit to that in terms of the way they could travel, because they could go without food longer than people that were mostly carbohydrate-based. The carbohydrate-based guys, like the soldiers, would crash, and the Comanches could keep going because their body would like the soldiers would crash and the comanches could keep going because their body would just go into ketosis and they would live off fat it was a natural like shift back and forth between eating meat needing fat needing organs to not eating for a while and so few humans in 2020 have gone for more than 18 hours without eating food yeah very few of us us in how many decades we've lived

have utilized the fat burning systems in our body. You can use glucose or fructose or sugars. You can use carbohydrates and you can do glycolysis. But there's a whole other system where you can either use fat that's coming in or use fat from your body and beta oxidation and ketones, move the fat, basically precursor molecules around your body. And when we get adapted to that, we have this extra engine. We have two engines. We're both hybrid and gas.

But if we go long enough without ever using the hybrid, you know, fat burning engine, we kind of lose it, but you can get it back pretty quickly. It's kind of interesting today that there are a lot of people that are interested in intermittent fasting or, you know, having a very specific feeding window. And they are seeing benefits of that. And I was reading some article recently that was saying there's – a study shows that there's no weight loss benefit to intermittent fasting. And I'm like, who made that fucking study? And who are you studying?

And how is that – everybody that I know that's done it has lost weight. Like, what are you studying? And how is that? Everybody that I know that's done it has lost weight. Like, what are you talking about? Like, what is that study about? And why would someone be even interested in promoting that? So much of what gets done in the nutrition community in research is- Fuckery. Yeah. There's a lot of fuckery, right?

It is. And the devil's in the details, right? What were they feeding them? What was the ratio of oils in the food? What were they doing for intermittent fasting? Were they intermittent fasting with junk food? Were they intermittent fasting with standard American diet food? I think it's pretty clear.

There's a lot of compelling data in both, at least in animal models, and I believe in human models too, that having a feeding window and having time when your body shifts from quote, carbohydrate burning or using the glycogen sorted in your liver to making ketones, even on a daily basis, that cycling is beneficial for humans. You're flipping back and forth between anabolic and catabolic pathways. At a broad level, you're looking at systems like mTOR, the mammalian target of rapamycin, and kinase. They're balancing systems. They're kind of this seesaw. And we know that when you have amkinase at a very broad level, when you have more of this ketogenic physiology,

when you exhaust the glycogen in your liver, you turn on these autophagy mechanisms. You do the cellular housecleaning, and that's beneficial for humans. Our ancestors would certainly have done that. Please explain that to people, the cellular housecleaning, that your body actually does get rid of some damaged cells. Damaged cells and damaged proteins within cells and damaged mitochondria.

So within the cell, there are these, quote, powerhouse factories, which are probably ancient bacteria, you know, billions of years ago that combined with a single-celled organism. And we became eukaryotic with a membrane-bound nucleus and a membrane-bound organelle called mitochondria, which produces ATP for the body. And so within the body, there are all these organelles within our cells, and some of them, the job of that organelle is to basically be the trash compactor. Old proteins are ubiquinated, and they're moved to the organelles that recycle them and so you do this cellular housecleaning

and it seems to happen more when you're in this state of ketosis or when you're not using the glucose from or when you're not in sort of an anabolic physiology and so you can see that with our ancestors we would have switched back and forth we wouldn't have been successful in hunts every day we would have had some hunts that were successful and some gathering sessions which were successful and others which weren't. And when they're not successful, you're

fasting. And so that's a beneficial thing. I mean, I think that that intermittent cellular house cleaning is an ancestral pattern that we would do well to espouse, to mirror. Like, so your body doesn't have any food to digest. So it's like, look, let's do some cleaning up. We got a bunch of junk laying around the attic. Let's sweep it up. But if we're doing the standard American thing, which is you eat constantly and snack throughout the day and then can't wait to have dinner

and then can't wait to have breakfast and can't wait to have lunch and your body never really gets a break. It's always digesting. It's always digesting. It's always digesting. I mean, it would be so interesting to look at the Western population or the American population and see how many of them actually exhaust liver glycogen overnight,

how many people actually wake up with ketones in their blood. I think it would be a fraction. I think the majority of people never get rid of their liver glycogen, never actually flip. And to be fair, I actually don't think we should always be in ketosis either. I think that that can present some challenges to the human physiology and that intermittent inclusion of carbohydrates can be beneficial for humans. And this is a cycle, it's a circle, like many things are in our life. And our ancestors,

in spite of the fact that they favored meat and organs, they certainly would have had carbohydrates from time to time when they were available. So there's this balance. I think that personally, when the people I've worked with and in the reading that I've done, everything I've learned, it works better to be cyclic ketosis rather than persistent ketosis all the time. Though ketogenic physiology, I think, is intrinsic to humans. It's beneficial, super healthy, and a lot of people find massive benefits from it. Well, ketosis, particularly for people that have epilepsy, and for seals that work on those rebreathers,

you know, they found that being in ketosis can keep them from having seizures, which is really kind of fascinating. It changes the neural physiology. Yeah. Well, for children, children that have epilepsy, they found a great benefit in being in ketosis. It just makes sense that your body would fare best on the things that it evolved with. The things that it evolved with are mostly animals, fish, and fruits.

I agree with you. Whatever you can, you know, obviously you don't get fruit all year round. You get it in a specific time when the fruit falls from the tree, but animals were available 365 days a year. And that's most likely what a lot of people ate. And if you look at hunter gatherer tribes, that's what we see there. And it's so interesting to me that they have a preference for animal foods. A lot of them will eat tubers occasionally. There's actually a pretty cool study. I think you'll find it in the anthropology folder, Jamie, or that's termed Hadza fallback foods. It's the fourth one there. And this is such a

cool study. I really want to go spend time with the Hadza next year. My friend David Cho did. I heard him on the podcast. Dude, that is one of the most intense things that I've ever heard described on the podcast when he's talking about them hunting baboons because the area where they live has been so depleted of game that they're reduced to baboon hunting. And he was like, it's really crazy and really dark when you see a baboon got hit by an arrow and they grab the arrow with their hands. Like, yikes. That story was poignant for sure. That's too deep for me.

It was intense. But when I heard that conversation with David Cho, a couple of things stood out for me. And one of them was that when he asked them, what was the best day of your life? All the people he asked said, it was the day that of your life? All the people he asked said, it was the day that I killed the biggest animal and fed the tribe.

It wasn't the day that I found this huge patch of berries or I dug the biggest tuber. It was the day that I killed the biggest animal and fed the tribe. And the other thing that they communicated to him was that the animals that they hunt now are different, that they can't hunt the same animals, which has probably changed their food patterns

in modern day. And that he even said this on the podcast that they were sort of describing him, there used to be big animals everywhere. And you can imagine what it was like for the Comanche as they came to the plains and they were herds of thousands of buffalo. Like there is no scarcity of food.

There is a ton of big animals. And these animals are not even big relative to what might've been here when they were megafauna, you know, tens of thousands of years ago. But you just think about the way that currently living hunter gatherers might've changed their, their food stuffs to survive. And if you had woolly mammoth all the time, man, I think you're probably going to eat some honey if you can find it. But honey and woolly mammoth sounds like a good diet to me.

I mean, that's a huge smorgasbord. I want to get into the honey thing, but I also want to talk about what is it called? I always screw up the word. Is it glucogenesis? Like what is it called when your body converts protein into glycogen? Gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis. Okay.

So that is what occurs if you just eat nothing but meat you will develop some glucose you have to you have to in ketosis your body will do gluconeogenesis and your body does this without you don't need any carbohydrates you don't need any carbohydrates to do it it will use there are certain amino acids that are gluconeogenic. The backbone of a fat molecule is glycerol. That's gluconeogenic. Lactate, they're acetate. There are other molecules that can make glucose. We have a backup system to make glucose because there are tissues in the body that require glucose. And this is why if you eat only meat, you will get knocked out of ketosis if you have too much protein. Yeah. Which may not necessarily be a bad thing. It's just, it's human physiology.

It's pretty fascinating though, that your body has, it knows how to do that. It doesn't convert it. Yeah. Yeah. Because you, you would die otherwise. Yeah. If we didn't make glucose from protein and glycerol backbones and other substrate, we would die. We need glucose. One of the things that I found when I did a total animal diet for a month is my energy level was really sustained throughout the day. It was very even. And I found it to be very unusual. There was no difference between me at 11 a.m. versus me at 7 p.m. It was a flat line throughout the day. And I cannot say that about any other diet that I've ever been on. There's been these ups and downs.

And especially when I'm eating just normal, whatever I feel like eating, cheeseburger, have a bowl of spaghetti, whatever I'm thinking about, you know, whatever I feel like eating. When I do that, there's horrible crashes. Like, and the way I feel after meals is so different. The way I feel after meals when I was on the carnivore diet, which, again, admittedly, I only did really strictly for a month. Like, now I'm on the carnivore diet until I go out to dinner. And then I eat whatever the fuck I want.

Like, last night I had sushi. But for the most part, during that month, I had, like, real amazing energy and a lot of clarity. And I felt extra aggressive, which was weird. And I don't know if that was just because I felt better, and that's just my nature, and I'm not tired. But not aggressive in a bad way, but aggressive. I was quicker to mock things.

I was like, fuck that. I had more energy. And it was more fun to make fun of things, too. I had more energy to exercise. I had more ambition to do things. It was very weird and I was thinking like, there's without a doubt some sort of physiological change to my body that's happening while I'm on this

and I lost a lot of weight too. I lost 12 pounds in a month, which I thought was pretty extraordinary. That's a very large amount of weight to lose in a month. And I heard you also say your vitiligo got better. Yes, it did. That is amazing. That's really cool.

Yeah, spots started filling in, which is really strange. Because I first got interested in the carnivore diet because of autoimmunity. And the way that, just the hypothesis, could some of these plant toxins that we were kind of talking about earlier, could these be triggering immunologic reactions in humans? And we know they do. Gluten is a plant lectin, and it certainly triggers an immunologic reaction in the small intestine.

Could that model be at play on a bigger scale for people with vitiligo? I had eczema and asthma, which is an autoimmune condition. What about autoimmune thyroid disease? What about psychiatric illness, which I believe is autoimmune as well? I think there's probably quite a few of them that are. Now, when you said you had eczema and asthma, was that cured with the carnivore diet or is it in remission? I think that's just syntax, right? Of course. So I have not had

any flares of eczema since I've been eating a carnivore or carnivore-ish diet for the last two years, except one time when I reincorporated some plants back in my diet in an experiment with squash. So I'll get eczema on like my wrists, my elbows. So you got it just from taking squash? Yeah, the squash. And it kicked it back in? It kicked it back in a little bit. So you had nothing for two years and then you have squash and then it kicks in? It had a little bit of eczema on my lower back.

And then you stopped eating squash and went away? Yeah. Wow. And there are, I mean, squash is one of the foods that I would think is fairly ancestrally consistent and fairly less offensive to humans, because in the book, I don't, the book is not meant to convince everyone to stop eating all plants. The book is really meant to do a couple things. It's meant to help people understand that animal meat and organs are the foods that we've been eating throughout our evolution they're

wrongly vilified today and we can talk about why with the epidemiology and they should be a part of any they're an integral part of any healthy human diet and then i created kind of a spectrum of plant toxicity thinking about hunter-gatherer tribes and which parts of plants they favor and which parts of plants they discard and then thirdly i think it's important to understand what we talked about processed vegetable oils and processed sugars, hugely bad for humans. But I'm really interested in carnivore and carnivore-ish type diets so that the most number of people can benefit. Now, what about fruit? When you say you eat a carnivore-ish diet, I know you incorporate honey, but do you eat any fruit? I've experimented with it. And so for about a year and three quarters, I had just meat and

organs and fat. And I was in ketosis all the time, depending how much protein I had. And then I had some thoughts about, well, what does my blood sugar look like when I do this? I got a CGM. I got one of these continuous glucose monitors. And I started incorporating carbohydrates first as an experiment. And what I noticed was that with sort of these less toxic carbohydrates or what I think of as more ancestrally consistent sources of carbohydrates, I felt even better. The eczema didn't come back with honey. I had occasional fruit. I found that I couldn't overeat fruit. If I ate too much fruit, I felt bloated and kind of just farty and didn't feel good. Fruit seems to have this built-in mechanism

where we can only eat so much of it. Honey is, you know, I can eat a moderate amount and feel just fine. But the inclusion of those carbohydrates actually made me feel a little better. I slept a little better. With long-term ketosis for myself and what I've observed for some people,

perhaps not all, with long-term ketosis, electrolyte deficiencies a lot of times develop. People get cramps, they get palpitations. And we know that when ketogenic physiology happens, our body partitions electrolytes differently. Sodium, you know, sodium retention in the kidney is different. And then when sodium becomes a little bit funky, our body wastes a little magnesium, a little potassium. And so that started to kind of make sense to me. I thought, oh, maybe it doesn't have to be as dogmatic as full meat and organs. Maybe we can, you know, maybe more people would benefit if we think about this more like our ancestors, right? More like the Hadza eating berries or boabab or baobab and then honey occasionally.

And you can always look at your blood sugar with a CGM or other metrics. What was fascinating, and I actually have all my blood work, if you want to see it, or any of my continuous glucose monitor readings, but you can see this is all in the lab work or the blood work folder, Jamie. And there at the bottom, there's those three images of my blood sugar, and there's a few other ones. But you can see that with honey and mead and organs, don't really have much of a change in the blood sugar at all. It's pretty mild most of the time,

and it stays very consistent. Honey has a lot of really unique properties too, doesn't it? It does, yeah. There's a certain honey, I want to say it's from New Zealand. My wife was just talking to me about it the other day. Manuka?

Yes. That actually helps people heal better. I think a lot of honeys do that, actually. Now, manuka has a very good publicist. I haven't seen any. Is that what it is? I think it might. Ah, it's super expensive. Yeah. I think a lot of honeys can help with that. But if you look at the literature on honey, there's studies. So when I first thought about honey, I thought this is going to cause dental cavities. And I'm good friends with a periodontist. Incidentally, a periodontist who has an advanced leukemia,

who's on a carnivore diet and doing really well. But he was pointing me to a bunch of evidence that honey has been used to treat oral candida, to treat, it actually can have activity against cariogenic bacteria in the mouth. They use it to treat oral mucositis. It's incredible. These compounds in honey look very different. So the associations that we have with sugar and periodontal disease is really just processed sugar. Probably. Yeah, there might be something different about honey. And then if you look in rats,

again, we're moving to an animal model. When you give rats a lot of fructose, they don't do good, right? Rats have- Nor do we, right? Nor do humans, nor do humans. But moderate amounts humans seem to do okay with, like fruit amounts.

But massive amounts in rats or moderate amounts in rats don't do well because rats do their biochemistry a little differently. They convert fructose to fat. And do they give it to them in fructose corn syrup or do they give it to them in- It's in their feed. Actual fruit?

It's in their feed. What do they add to the feed? They add fructose. And it might actually be sucrose as glucose and fructose, yeah, which is essentially the same as high fructose corn syrup, but it just has to do with what the ratios are of the glucose and the fructose. And if you look at rats given honey versus rats given sugar, they have different outcomes.

Really? Yeah, yeah. That's in the honey folder, Jamie, the honey rats protective. So there's something about the consumption of honey that's actually net beneficial? Well, it seems to mitigate the oxidative stress. So if you look at the bottom there, see where it says compared with those fed fructose? Yeah. Interesting.

Well, it tastes good, too. Honey is delicious. It doesn't taste like you're doing anything wrong. Like when I eat a piece of chocolate cake, it tastes great, but it tastes like too honey is delicious it doesn't taste like you're doing anything wrong like when i eat a piece of chocolate cake it tastes great but it tastes like i'm fucking up you know what i'm saying yeah i don't know if that's psychological or what but when i have honey with my tea like it's delicious and it feels like i crave it like i'm enjoying it like it's doing something for me i like it hopefully in the future when i get to go spend time with the hadza i'll be able to eat in the comb like they do. But in the anthropology folder, Jamie,

there's a study, the Hadza fallback foods. The Hadza, both the men and the women in the Hadza tribe rate honey as their favorite food. And the men say meat is their second. The women say meat, baobab, and berries are all... So if you go down to the third or the fourth page, you'll see this graphic of. What is Baobab? Baobab. And what is that? B-A-O-B-O-B. So you see that's the black bar is how many people like honey, right?

And the next bar is meat and then Baobab, berries, and tubers. So both males and females, they don't really like tubers a whole lot. They'll dig them as a fallback food. And actually the title of this paper is Hadza Fallback Foods. But at the end of the paper, they say there's this observed behavior that if there's a lot of meat in the camp,

the women will stop digging tubers for two to three days. Baobab is this tree in Tanzania that has this fruit. I've never had it, but it has this kind of dry, this dry fruit pulp on the outside of the seeds. Maybe you can find a picture of baobab jamie but um yeah that's interesting stuff but they all love honey in the hadza tribe and the that's it wow yeah it's a really cool looking tree freaky tree if i saw that i'd be like that's a

trap that's not a real tree that one in the upper left hand corner like that looks really different i'd be like dude that is not a tree some there's someone in there they're gonna grab you when you walk that almost looks like the tree from remember that tree in the princess bride yes look at this guy he's climbing into a hole in the tree the hadza have this special axe they use and if they if they see wow those are crazy yeah that's the weirdest tree look it's for folks that are just listening they're really fat and wide and then the top they have these tiny little branches jamie go to the left side the left of the other images that you you were looking at go drop down into the lower right hand corner that one the bulbous one looks like an onion look at that thing that is so crazy amazing apparently this tree is common and the

fruit are fairly prevalent. Interesting. Baobab. Baobab. I think that's how you pronounce it. But if you look at, and if you look at tooth decay in the Hadza, there's some interesting findings. The women actually that are in, that eat indigenous ancestrally don't really have significant tooth decay.

The men have higher rates of tooth decay. And we don't know whether that's because they're eating more honey or because they also smoke tobacco and marijuana. And tobacco and marijuana are certainly associated with dental cavities or periodontitis. So there's been some concern about that. But at least in myself, I haven't seen anything. And I've actually talked to a number of dentists who have said, no, honey is protective in the mouth, which goes against everything we think. But there are studies that look at the pH of the mouth. So I'm not a dentist. I'm a medical doctor. But when I've been educated by dentists, tooth decay appears to happen when the pH of the

mouth drops. When we eat sugar or something that's fermentable or in the setting probably of fat-soluble vitamin deficiency, the pH of the mouth drops and the karyogenic bacteria are able to thrive. Well, if you look at the pH of the mouth when you eat honey, it drops and then it rebounds more quickly. So it's interesting. Is there something in the honey that prevents that? It's certainly an ancestrally consistent food. If you look at where honey is available in the world,

it's eaten everywhere it's available. It just makes sense. I mean, you see animals eat it. You see bears eat it, of course. You know, they're famous for just letting bees bite them while they just sting them while they eat their honey. There's things about high fructose corn syrup that makes it particularly damaging to the body. What are those things? So fructose and glucose are different molecules. And fructose and glucose have different biochemistry. In glucose biochemistry, there's a

stopgap. There's a rate-limiting enzyme called phosphofructokinase, meaning that if you try and overeat glucose, your body's going to put the brakes on it and not do glycolysis, which is the process by which you turn glucose that you're eating into energy, right? There's no brake on fructose. So fructose bypasses phosphofructokinase and can essentially move down the shared glycolytic pathway into the formation of the glycerol backbone and triglycerides, which are essentially fats, without any breaks. So the problem is not high fructose corn syrup itself. It's that you can eat it without stopping, right? That you can get massive amounts of it and they're calorically bereft so if you were to eat if you if i were to give you if you

look at isocaloric studies of fructose there's no evidence that they that fructose increases uric acid or blood pressure or waking isocaloric but when anything with high fructose corn syrup is going to be so enticing is going to short- to short circuit your satiety mechanisms so much that you're just going to overeat it in a way that fruit doesn't do, right? Like we said, fruit has this stopgap. It kind of has this break on it. You're like, oh, I can't eat any more fruit. That's another thing that I noticed about doing the carnivore diet for that one month

was that satiety, when you're only eating meat, you don't eat as much. You just don't. I mean, you could call it, it's not just an elimination diet, but it's in many ways, you're reducing calories just because you're just not as hungry. And you eat to satisfaction, but overall, the calorie consumption is much less than if you were eating it along with like macaroni and cheese or, you know, cream corn or bread or all these other things. You would keep eating. Like if you have a steak and you only eat this 18 ounce ribeye, you will, you're only going to eat a certain amount. I mean, maybe you'll eat the whole thing, but maybe you'll get like three quarters of the way and you'll be like, I'm good. But if you've got mashed potatoes

and gravy and bread, you'll just keep fucking eating. And it's weird. It's weird. Your body just wants to stuff more stuff into your mouth. There are different satiety mechanisms, I think, happening at the level of the hypothalamus and the brain when you're just eating protein and fat versus protein and fat

and carbohydrates. And there's nuance there as well. There's some really interesting evidence that polyunsaturated fatty acids probably hijack these satiety mechanisms as well. And that linoleic acid specifically and other omega-6s can have negative consequences at the level of the brain and you don't get that satiety response to turn off.

But yeah, I agree with you. Every once in a while on strict carnivore diets, people can't eat enough because of this. And they do benefit from including some carbohydrates in their diet. And I think our ancestors have done that occasionally. But again, I do think that for humans to thrive, we should not fear meat and organs. And you make that the center of your diet. And like you're saying, I think that there is a benefit to a carnivore-ish diet. Just like you, how many people are going to eat just meat and organs for their whole life? Some devoted few and they're definitely gonna benefit

But I think that the number is 10 to 20 to 100 X who might benefit from understanding that meat and organs are valuable incorrectly vilified and that there's a spectrum of plant toxicity and that Expands it because when i tell people that i eat meat and organs and fat they look at me really funny but if i tell them that occasionally i eat an avocado or some raspberries or some blueberries or some honey their eyes kind of the gears start turning they're like maybe i could do that and it starts to look like i would say a reimagined version of a Paleolithic diet. Because that's what we're essentially asking.

What is the species-appropriate human diet? What is the genetic congruence between our environment and our genetics in 2020? I believe we're really still programmed to eat like our ancestors and that we still thrive doing this. But it can be a little bit more broad for people than just a strict carnivore diet for those that will espouse that. If I say, hey, well, what about avocado? So in the book, in chapter 12, I talk about this spectrum of plant toxicity. And if you think about it from a plant's perspective, there are parts of a plant that it wants you to eat, usually, like the fruit, and a lot of parts of the plant that it doesn't want you to eat. And it doesn want you to eat its leaves why would you plant want you to eat its leaves right it doesn't want you to eat its seeds those are the reproductive parts of a plant right so if you chew the seeds

that's where this you were talking about these negative compounds that only happen when you chew certain seeds like apple seeds apple seeds have amygdalin it's a cyanogenic glycoside and yes you can there there's enough, it actually can release cyanide moieties in the human body. It's frankly toxic. Apples do not want you to eat the seed. But they don't mind if you swallow them and shit them out. Shit them out in a nice pile of fertilizer. Right. Which is how they wind up growing. How they grow. And it's the same with all the stone fruits. So all the stone fruits, peaches, plums, even almonds, they have this cyanogenic glycoside, amygdalin, and they're toxic, like apricot kernels. The FDA, I think,

had to at least step in, or the USDA had to step in and have manufacturers remove apricot kernels from trail mix. There was a big fervor about the Hunza a couple of years ago, maybe a decade ago, and there was this widely promulgated false notion that they were having this longevity benefit from this amygdalin in the apricot kernels. And it was really potentially dangerous for humans. So they ended up with these apricot kernels, the apricot seed in trail mix. And the USDA or the FDA had to step in and say, no, no, no, you can't do that. That has a toxic compound. And almonds were very toxic and we kind of bred it out of them

so a lot of the foods we eat today are sort of we're stripping the toxins away from the plants but the intentions were clear it was one of those goofy vegan doctors who looks like shit was uh on this podcast and he was talking about how he got really really sick because he picked these berries elderberry yes i've seen the video yes elderberry is completely toxic raw how the fuck are you giving nutrition advice where you don't even know that this is a toxic berry and so some berries are toxic but if you think about fruit more fruit is edible than not right but yeah i thought that was hilarious video he's talking about he's talking about drooling that guy look i want to mention his name i'm sure he's a nice person i think he's doing he's trying to do well i think he's just trapped in an ideological paradigm he's like in this

he's locked into this world and and applauded and that's where he gets his love from and if you leave that world by god i've seen people do it and they get attacked in the most vicious and horrific ways it when their body is falling apart and they incorporate salmon and all of a sudden they start getting erections and they start feeling better people will attack them it's like it i understand where these people are coming from in terms of them not wanting to do harm i understand it i i i see their perspective but the vicious ways they attack people that leave that that i'm going to call it a cult because it's kind of like a cult it's it's a dietary choice it's a lifestyle choice but it's very it's it's an

ideology as well there's just there's parts to it it's a meme that poor guy looks like dog shit he looks so bad and for him to be espousing this as a method of achieving health and wellness, you're like, come on, man, do you have a fucking mirror in your house? I want to do like a... He's bloated. It's like crazy. It's crazy. He's got this barrel chest.

He's no muscle at all. He's like sticks for arms. His neck is barely holding his head up. It's so strange. It's like, my God god and there are very healthy vegans by the way i mean the ones that do it right like my friend rick roll he looks fantastic he's great he runs ultra marathons i have friends that are athletes that are vegans they figure out how to do it right i think some people can pull it off but some people that are like in the community

that are giving advice like they're they look like shit looking horribly with the people with the vegans that are thriving i always wonder how good would you be if you ate meat i know well maybe not i wonder i mean i think that there are some people whose ancestors developed in certain parts of the world where maybe meat was scarce i mean it's this is a hypothesis it's just a theory but I think that it's very likely that there are places that are rich in edible plants and not very rich in wildlife. It's possible. So the story that I hear, and I've done a podcast with Rich.

I'm not friends with him, but I did a podcast on The Minimalist where we had kind of a friendly debate. How did that go? I didn't listen to that. It was pretty good because the guys at the minimalists are so cool and it was very civil but um i i it wasn't it wasn't bad it was okay i'd love to talk to him more but rich rich isn't a scientist right he's a very nice guy he's a super nice guy but not a scientist he's the best version of veganism i agree with you he's not trying to convert anybody

he's just talking about his own personal experiences and they've been net positive for him. And the story that I've heard, and I don't want to put any words in Rich's mouth, but the story that I've heard from him and other vegans is valid, but it is often, I was eating a diet of junk food.

Right, that's it. I was drinking a lot. Yep. And I did this intentional choice, which is freaking amazing. I would give anybody a high five. I think anyone deserves congratulations for making any intentional choice in their diet. I just want to provide information to help them make the best choice. And so I think that they've made intentional choices. They've cut out processed seed oils, they've cut out processed food and they feel better and my

question is have you done the other thing right exactly have you eaten meat and organs and you eaten buffalo yeah that's bison that's grazed on like really healthy ground yeah with real good grass raw liver ritual because maybe don't give him that that'll get you high i don't give him that. That'll get you high. I don't think it got me high. It was okay. It was edible. But there was a point in time where if I was queasy, the texture of that, when I was chewing on it, if I was of a weaker constitution, we might have had an issue. But you're stronger now.

So check this out. You'll appreciate this. So in the evolution folder, Jamie, I don't know if the study will be great to pull up, but there's a study in there, the vegetarian ERP brain study. So they've done studies with vegetarians and vegans and omnivores looking at the EEG. So looking at the electroencephalogram and looking at the way the brain responds at a neocortical and a more basic level. And so the bottom thing there is kind of a complex statement, but you see what they say. The findings suggest that vegetarians' aversion toward non-vegetarian food prevails at the subjective level.

And it's consistent with personal beliefs. But at the neural level, the intrinsic motivational salience of animal food remains. So that means that in the deeper brain, they still crave meat. Yeah, well, they eat it when they get drunk. Exactly. There's meat. Yeah. Well, they eat it when they get drunk. Exactly. There's such a high proportion of them that eat it when they get drunk. What is the number? I think it's 30 to 40%, Joe.

Let's find it. I love this statistic. It's a weird statistic, right? Because who's answering these? I always wonder, like, who are you asking? Like, there's so many people that never get asked. Yeah. Like, how many people that are vegetarians that get drunk and eat meat and you never ask them and how many people stay strong and they don't they stick to their diet when they get drunk what does it what does it say let's see proportion of vegetarians percentage of vegetarians that eat meat when drunk it's a big number i think it's i

remember reading it in the high 30s yeah it's a big number yeah and that's the ones that are willing to admit it that's the other thing about that thing it's like you just gotta like there was one girl who got in real trouble because um someone photographed her eating fish right wasn't it like a fish taco or something like that could have been yeah i don't know exactly but i've heard the stories yeah yeah 34 37 37 eaten meat when drunk and 34 of those admitted to slipping every time they're hammered just 22 answer they only drop their standards rarely well that means they all do it then they're all liars yeah yeah it's it's it's in our brain right it's in our brain, right? It's in our brain. And I, like you, I respect people making an intentional choice. It's certainly a better choice than the standard American diet of shitty foods, sugar, and processed food oils. Processed vegetable oils, yeah, yeah.

That's a subject that we should get into, processed vegetable oils. This is a fairly recent thing in terms of the human diet over the past 100 years or so. And there's a direct correlation between incorporating these processed seed oils and terrible health results. It's a fascinating story, Joe, because if you look at how healthy we are in 2020, it's pretty abysmal. So Jamie and the folder Metabolic Health IR, at in 2020, it's pretty abysmal. So Jamie in the folder metabolic health IR,

at the bottom there's a series of graphics that really illustrate this well. I think it'll be really cool for everybody to see. So my friend Jeff Nobbs let me borrow these graphics from his blog. So start with the one on the row below that, Jamie, the red one. It's just the row below that's like the chronic disease.

Oh, you don't see the row. So this is screenshot 1018.58. There we go. So if we look at chronic disease prevalence in America, it's clearly rising. It's a scary thought. So what is causing that, right? That is a massive spike. Look at that

from 1940 to 2020. I mean, it is just like a fucking skateboard ramp. It is a skateboard ramp. What is causing that? And you know, a lot of people, the prevailing narrative today is we eat too much and we're too sedentary. And I think that's a gross oversimplification because if you look at the data, we smoke less now. So in 1955, there were 45% of people who smoked. And today there's 14% of people that smoke. We now have essentially the same cancer prevalence that we had, you know, 20 years ago. More of us exercise. In 2018, 54% of people reported exercise relative to 1995 44% and more

Americans are quote eating healthy in 2018 there's 59% of Americans adhering to healthier eating and yet if that's crazy if you look at rates of obesity so this is the screenshot that is 10 1940 Jamie look at the percentage of obesity in America but that's just nuts that so many more people smoke and yet there's... Less people smoke. I mean, so many more people smoke in 1940, but yet there was less cancer. Yeah. Look at obesity. Wow. That's just obesity. If you look at obesity and overweight, it's over 70%. These are just arbitrary... So this is just from the 70s. Just the 70s to today. So what is going on? What is going on?

We're exercising more, smoking less. Rates of cancer are the same. We drink essentially the same amount of alcohol. And that's where the story gets to be really interesting. And none of this is causal. None of this is interventional studies. These are just kind of detective work. So look at the 10.18.41, Jamie.

That's diabetes prevalence. It tells the exact same story. It's scary. So something is going on. And we kind of have to say, we kind of have to be, as a medical community, we have to be honest and say, look at diabetes. That's formally diagnosed diabetes with hemoglobin A1c and fasting glucose. Like these are people who are very far on the spectrum of metabolic dysfunction. Again, it's skyrocketed. And so what's going on here? And so now, Jamie, if you go to 10.16.56,

that was the first one you brought up, we can look, and this is detective work, but we can start to make inferences, or guesses at least, based on trends and calories from major food groups. This is actually a pretty cool graphic. So the top line there, the green one, is grains. It goes up a little bit, but since 1995, it's gone down. You can even look at sugars and sweeteners. Again, they go up a little bit, but in the last 20 years, they've gone down. And the consumption of meat has gone up, so we'll consider meat as a probable driver. But look at that red line in the middle. You see what that line is?

That's vegetable oil, man. And then if you dig into that meat as a driver, this is the 10.18.34, Jamie. Look at the total meat consumption by type, that one. So what are we eating more of? It's not red meat, the type that's getting vilified. We're eating more chicken. So you might say, oh, red meat is driving the problem. No, we're eating less red meat than we did. And clearly that doesn't correlate. Quite a bit less red meat. Quite a bit less red meat, right? If you look at the middle between 1970 and 1980, the spike to what we have now in 2020, that's a significant drop.

Yeah. And then if you go back to one of those other ones, Jamie, the 10.18.26, you can see Americans are eating less saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium, because those are all things that get vilified, right? And I don't believe saturated fat is a villain at all. Saturated fat is incredibly healthy for humans when it's from well-sourced animals, but we're eating less saturated fat. That's the blue line, or just essentially exactly the same. So these are not driving it. Red meat is not driving it. Nobody thinks chicken is driving the chronic disease epidemic. And then you look at 10.18.19, we're eating more plant foods. And I'm not saying that plant foods are driving this, but that doesn't look like we're going in there,

you know? Like that's certainly not, you know? And the real driver here, I suspect, is the last one, Jamie, 10.18.09. If you look at the consumption of vegetable oil by Americans since 1910, and that is a staggering amount. You don't want to skateboard that ramp. That's Tony Hawk worthy, man. Yeah, that's Tony Hawk. That's Tony Hawk worthy. man. Yeah, that's Tony Hawk. That's Tony Hawk worthy. Look at that, man.

And you can see soybean is the main one, but canola, sunflower, cottonseed, peanut, and other. This is completely evolutionarily inconsistent. This is completely dyssynchronous with our evolution. We would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil. We didn't have the ability to do this.

And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be doing this. But as I kind of dug into this, it gets a little bit deep in the weeds. But at a molecular level, these polyunsaturated fats, they act differently in our body. And we don't fully have this figured out. But at the level of our mitochondria, it does look like these polyunsaturated fats, this linoleic acid-rich vegetable oil, is signaling things differently. And I think there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that linoleic acid is driving adipocyte hypertrophy, meaning fat cells are getting bigger. And fat cells can do two things. They can get bigger or they can divide.

When fat cells get big and they don't divide, they eventually start leaking out inflammatory mediators, leaking out free fatty acids. And so what you see is you start to see this interesting set of data that points to the fact that maybe all these excess linoleic acid is driving our fat cells to get really big, but isn't allowing them to divide the way they're supposed to. You can imagine evolutionarily that as winter is coming, we might've had a few more seeds, which are foods in nature that have linoleic acid, but nothing like our consumption today. So maybe it was advantageous to get a little bit more linoleic acid when things might be scarce in the winter in northerly climes. Maybe there's an evolutionary mechanism here, but the potential is that every single day,

all of us in the Western world, if we're eating excess vegetable oils, excess polyunsaturated fats, specifically linoleic acid, we are driving a signal to our adipocytes that winter is coming. Get fat, stay fat. So it's just this evolutionary inconsistency and it's not rocket science. It's like, wait a minute, just stop eating those oils and really stop consuming animals fed corn and soy, especially pigs and monogastric animals like chickens. Ruminants are unique. Because they have a rumen, ruminants can take polyunsaturated fats and make them into saturated fats.

Humans can't do this. Monogastric animals, humans, chickens, pigs, they can't do that. Anything, any polyunsaturated fat you give a pig is ending up in its fat. Any polyunsaturated fat that you or I eat is ending up in our fat tissue. We don't, we need a small amount, but there's an evolutionary amount that I think has always been seen.

If we look at cultures of indigenous people, they all have two to 3% of their calories as linoleic acid. You look at how much- What is the source of that usually? Usually animal fat. There's about 1.6 to 1.8% animal fat in a grass fed cow. And to be fair, in a grain fed cow, it's not a whole lot more. There's about 2% linoleic acid in the fat of a ruminant animal, a deer, a cow, a bison. But if you look at chicken, they're up at 23,

24%. Pork, 15 to 16% because they're fed corn and soy. Like you said earlier, if you let a pig, like if you're out hunting hogs, that hog is going to have a fat, you know, maybe 5% to 6% linoleic acid. And you can totally, it totally changes, you know, chickens. The same research has been done showing that chickens in the wild, I don't know what a wild chicken looks like, but like wild flightless birds, their fat looks different than when they're fed corn and soy. Not surprisingly, because monogastric animals, chickens, turkey, duck, pork, you know, pigs, humans, we store the polyunsaturated fat. So I think this is a really interesting hypothesis.

We don't have enough data to say this, but man, it's so compelling. And you know, the other side of the equation is certainly high fructose corn syrup is not helping anything. But I think it's important for people to understand that that might not be the only villain and that a lot of people might get rid of the sugar,

but then continue eating processed food or hummus with canola oil or chips from the store that are cooked in soybean oil and not understand it. And this could be driving a lot of the disease that we're seeing in a really subtle way. It's fascinating because the narrative has always been unsaturated fats are good, fats are bad and a lot of this came from those studies that were sort of uh they were kind of hijacked by the sugar industry

and this is this has been proven and this is something that is not that widely known because a lot of people aren't aware of it still there was a time where the sugar industry bribed off scientists to pass the blame off on saturated fat for heart disease look it up jamie it's in the new york times look up sugar industry pay you know it's like not that much either it was they paid him like 50 grand and in that in those bribes they literally ruined the american diet and because the narrative gets like most people work all day they have kids they have hobbies they have friends how the sugar industry shifted blame to fat yeah this is from 2016 this is a four-year-old it's not even that old well yeah not that old that that this happened yeah they discovered they discovered it but this was the the actual studies were from what

was the 60s i think so yeah this is. This is the beginning of it. Oh, okay, 1967 review of sugar, fat, and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat. So that scared everybody

and got everybody to eat margarine. And margarine is fucking terrible for you. Vegetable oil. Yeah, and now people know what's really good for you is grass-fed butter. The grass-fed butterine is fucking terrible for you vegetable oil yeah and now people know what's really good for you is grass-fed butter the grass-fed butter is actually not bad for you at all suet yeah animal fat have you had suet i haven't i heard you talk about it kidney fat and it's particularly high in steers good it's kind of waxy i think that you'd eat it if you were in the wilderness but you might not eat it other times you want some of that raw liver bro jamie

we got some raw liver for you said that it that it was going to give you a thing. 100% I would regurgitate instantly. Promise you. But it didn't. It would, though. But it didn't to me. I could tell. How about I slice you off a nice little slice?

Nope. Just a little time piece. I need some salt. A little char on the end. Oh, char. Okay. We could do that for you. We could make it happen.

We need a little Traeger in here. I brought you guys some desiccated organs too Maybe desiccated organs Are more Jamie style I take those I take pill form Yeah Because I'm not gonna get

Into my diet every single day So I take a bunch I know you have a company But I was actually taking A different company stuff Yeah yeah Well you know I thought about that

That a lot of people When I talk about spleen And kidney and pancreas People do like What I'm never eating that Right But I wanted like my mom and my sister to have desiccated organs and when you put them in a freeze dryer you can freeze

dry them at like 38 degrees preserve most of the nutrients put them in a capsule it's amazing and yours is heart and soil heart and soil heart and soil supplements and i'm sure that is that available on amazon it's available it's available on amazon or there's a website people can go to for heart and soil too yeah i buy everything Amazon. It's just so easy. I'm so addicted to only clicking once. I know. I know. Well, I'm pretty sure in Austin, we'll get you hooked up if you want some joke.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's so cool to be able to put organs in there. We start with like liver, but we have a beef organs that has pancreas, liver, kidney, heart, and spleen. That's really cool. There's unique benefits to all these different organs. How much is lost in the transition between it being raw and in natural form and then

put into pills? Not a lot because it's freeze-dried. So you think about, you still save some if you dehydrate it at 140, but in a freeze dryer, they lower the pressure and then they pull out the water at a low pressure. It's essentially sublimation where you can go from solid to gas without going through liquid. So you preserve as much as possible, like a pretty good amount stays in there so maybe you lose a certain percentage of that and you could make that up with volume probably volume yeah volume and it's just

what's so cool is you know when you hear about these desiccated organs you think that's not gonna work and then you get i get hundreds of emails from people who are like i took your organ pills and i feel better. And I'm like, is this for real? You know? Yeah. And it's just so cool. Like my mom takes it, my dad takes it, my sister takes it.

She like opens it in the food for my niece and nephew. She like puts it in their avocado or applesauce or mix it in a ground beef. And I just think that's cool, you know? And people feel different. We've got all kinds of different stuff people can check out, but there's different things. Have you thought about selling it in a spoonable like powder so you can add it to whatever people don't want to taste it no no they don't want to taste it the capsules are amazing because you can just take them and they're portable maybe if people really want the powder we'd make it but i think

the capsules are better for people and it's portable and it's easy and you can condense you know an ounce of organ into you know a reasonable amount of pills it's real food so there's no additives or preservatives or anything in there so it doesn't get that you'd have to take six to eight pills to get an ounce of organs but that's a good amount of organs is that what you recommend on your on the bottle yeah six to eight six to eight capsules of each and so if you are really gung-ho about organs like get the fresh stuff if you can i want people to eat fresh liver and fresh heart and fresh pancreas i don't know if you want to eat it the way i just ate it. But if people can't do that, I just thought this is a cool thing that I can do that I believe in. Jamie's shaking his

head. This is made for me, I think. Yeah, the pills are made for you. I'm going to get some for you right now, Jamie. Hold on. Hold on. I'm going to eat for you. Is it going to help them, you think, immediately? Yeah. Jamie, you should try to eat the raw liver just once. We'll get you a bucket it's not that i've not like i've tried it and i know that the response that's gonna happen you've had raw liver before i've tried all sorts of like weird shit because i worked in a restaurant for 10 years so like i wasn't afraid to try it right but like i once i tried it i was like okay this doesn't for me and yours are all from grass-fed animals yeah they're all grass-fed grass-finished

animals from new zealand and we're actually working really hard to develop a regenerative chain in the U.S. Really? Yeah. So that's in the pipeline. Trying to do that with those folks at the, is it Hope Ranch? Is that what you're saying? White Oak Pastures and Rome. What's the one that's in?

Rome. Rome Ranch. Yeah. How many should he take? Like two or three or six now? You want a water bro? I got a water over here. Okay.

Oh, all right. All right. That's a lot. Yeah. We're going to talk to you in about an hour and 20 minutes, which is exactly how long it takes mushrooms to kick in. I'll do six. Six.

Okay. Should I do eight? Do eight. Do eight. Go for it. You're a fucking savage. Come on. Get after it.

Now, how much liver do you think I just ate there? About an ounce. About an ounce. Yeah. So that's about what you can get in those 68 pills. Yeah, yeah. If it was a pure liver pill. So this one is a beef organs pill.

So there's a little less. It's like a fifth of an ounce of every organ because it's liver, heart, pancreas, and spleen. And what does your diet consist of? Like what is a daily meal? What do you eat on a regular basis? So I eat twice a day. I like to do intermittent

fasting, but I like to do it earlier in the day. So I like to eat my dinner, quote, at three or four o'clock. And I eat breakfast at eight or nine. So I've got like an 18-hour eating window, 16 to 18-hour eating window most days. Why do you do it that way? Because I think there's some evidence, or at least I think there's a little bit of evidence, at least in diabetics, and then personally, if I've experienced better sleep when I finish eating dinner earlier. Melatonin and insulin do have a little bit of a contradictory effect.

You know, if you eat late at night, is the insulin spike going to affect your body's ability to release melatonin from the hypothalamus and actually initiate sleep? It's like, are you supposed to be eating right before you go to sleep? I'm not sure. I just thought, ah, it's easier to sleep if I eat earlier in the day.

What do you do if you're on a dinner date? Oh, in that case, I'll eat later in the day. I'll make an exception. I'll make an exception. But yeah. So when I have total control over my eating- Dietary choices. Yeah. It's morning and night. I eat two meals a day. I don't really find that I need more than that. And you exercise. So when do you exercise? I've actually started doing a lot of the Pavel Sosaline grease the groove stuff. Okay. So I've got a little gym outside my house. It's outdoors. And I'll just go out probably three or

four times a day and do pull-ups, do some kettlebell swings, hit the punching bag for 10 or 15 minutes multiple times. If I do multiple, if I do like a big exercise, it could be any time. You have some cotton stuck on your thumb there. Amazing. It's distracting. It's like when you walk out of the bathroom and you have like the toilet paper on you.

Cotton from your bottle. Yeah. So I do a lot of that Pavel stuff too. I enjoy working out that way. I think there's some real benefit to these long,

like sometimes I'll lift weights for two hours and the reason why I do it is I have these giant gaps in between my sets. And then I drink an electrolyte drink. I drink liquid IV and watch some fights. And it's a casual workout.

But I'm still getting a lot of reps in, a lot of work done. But after the day is done, I feel great. I don't feel completely crushed. Because I'm not trying to get my endurance in that way. I get my cardio in through other methods. So that is just really just strength training. And I've actually gotten some good benefits from doing it that way.

I love the idea that he said when he was on your show, you want to feel better after you work out than when you started. That's kind of cool. And again, it's ancestrally consistent. Unless you were running away from a hippopotamus, you know, or a wild cow, which we talked about before the podcast or something.

Are you going to crush yourself? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Right. The only time it makes sense, I think, is endurance training. Yeah. You have to kind of push your threshold. Yeah, when you're hunting.

Yeah. Like persistence hunting or anything. I mean, David Cho was talking about that. He was running after the hodgs and he couldn't keep up and they were running and running running and you can imagine a long you know but i also wonder how fast they run so there's lots to learn there you know i don't think they're sprinting or running six minute miles maybe but maybe there's kind of like cruising along like ultra marathon pace i used to run ultras but not anymore did you really yeah it was intense when did you stop doing that uh a number of years ago it was too much for me it was like this is this is a lot it was because

you know you're running an ultra you're like racing you're trying to go really hard i like long distance hiking though so when i was younger i threw hike the pacific crest trail which is one of the coolest things i've ever done and i love that i love just like walking 30 miles a day more than i like running 30 miles a day well than I like running 30 miles a day. Well, it's interesting to me that there are people that thrive doing that, that they can do it. Like my friend Cameron Haynes, that fucking dude can run a marathon a day.

He does it all the time. What is this? Staying fit isn't a New Year's resolution for these hunter-gatherers. Oh, that's the Hadza. 2017, they did a study where they strapped heart rate monitors on 200 or so, 198 different Hadza men and women,

and tracked them to see what their cardiovascular fitness was. Probably off the charts. Their findings here. Examination of blood pressure, cholesterol, and other biomarkers showed no evidence of risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Yeah, they're probably super fit. I mean, it makes sense. It's kind of that low-level activity throughout the day.

It just feels good for your brain too. And I'll be at home working, writing, or answering emails or something, and I don't want to do that for three hours. I want to do it for 45 minutes or an hour, get up, do some pull-ups, go outside, breathe some air, go see the natural world, go outside barefoot and move around. This is something that I want to discuss too. Cardiovascular disease and heart attacks, the difference between the rate of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks today versus like the

early 1900s. There's a giant spike, a big change. Same as those other graphs. We could, it would be essentially the same, the same reflection on the graph. It would be an up angle that you would not want to skate. And again, it's the question, what is driving this? What is driving this? Because we were eating more saturated fat in 1900. We were eating way more saturated fat in 1800 or 1840. And the only oils we used were animal fats, which are not entirely saturated. They're about half mono and half saturated. Half mono unsaturated, half saturated, with a very small amount of polyunsaturated. So to say that it's saturated fat driving this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Again, this is just correlation, but there's not even a correlation there. The correlation is with vegetable oil. And if you get into this research, it's's complex but it's pretty darn striking if you look at linoleic acid so and you look at the molecule it's polyunsaturated so it's a long chain carbon and polyunsaturation means it has double bonds between the carbons and those double bonds can be oxidized remember we talked about oxidation earlier and this formation of lipid peroxides well those molecules polyunsaturated fats and even monounsaturated fat, any unsaturation point in a carbon skeleton molecule, like a chain, long chain fatty acid, is going to make it susceptible to oxidation. And then lipid

peroxides, which are lipids that have had an electron stolen from that double bond, then those are more susceptible to, those are more reactive with other lipids, and they create these lipid peroxide reactions. And then you're getting oxidative stress from the lipids. And if you look at, so we should back up for a moment. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The reason, one of the reasons saturated fat has been thought of as bad for so long is because it raises LDL. But if LDL is not de novo causing atherosclerosis, then we have a whole different equation. Well, let's get into that

because this is one of the big questions that I got when I told people I was going to eat an animal-only diet for a month. They're like, what about your cholesterol? What are you going to do about your, and I'll be like, ugh. And then I try to tell them that dietary cholesterol does not raise cholesterol in your blood lipids,

and they just glaze over, and they're like, well, you know, you're taking in a lot of cholesterol. And it's just most people don't have the time to research this or to get into the weeds and to try to shift their perception about what cholesterol is, about the benefits of cholesterol, the necessity of cholesterol for the human diet, for production of hormones. So let's get into that.

LDL and HDL, what is the difference? So LDL is low-density lipoprotein, and it's formed from VLDL after it becomes IDL, which is intermediate-density lipoprotein. So when you eat fat in your diet, it is generally in triglyceride form, which is packaged into molecules called chylomicrons, which move from the intestines to the liver. In the liver, cholesterol, which is actually a steroid backbone molecule, is packaged with triglycerides into a VLDL, a very low-density

lipoprotein particle. It's like a bus. It moves triglycerides and cholesterol around the body because they're nutrients, because they're essential for human life, because like you said, hormones are made from a cholesterol backbone. And if you did not have cholesterol, you would be very sick and die. There's a genetic condition called Smith-Lemley-Opitz syndrome, which is a mutation in one of the enzymes that makes cholesterol. It's pretty far down in the pathway.

But a lot of these far down in the pathway. But a lot of these kids die in utero. Those that are born have severe retardation, both mental and physical. They're extremely resistant. They're extremely susceptible to infections. And they have a lot of problems with sleep and diabetes and other issues because they don't make cholesterol.

They have extremely low LDL because they can't make cholesterol in the liver and probably in peripheral tissues either. And so the way we treat these kids is with egg yolks. We just give them tons and tons of dietary cholesterol in hopes that that will be some sort of a supplement that they can use to make LDL. As their LDL goes up, they do better. They're never going to have a normal life, but there are so many studies that point to the value of low-density lipoprotein. many studies that point to the value of low-density lipoprotein. And if we just think about it evolutionarily, why would nature, why would evolution have designed a particle that kills us

within our body, that at the same time defends us from infection? So there are good studies in animal models that show that if you knock out the LDL receptor in mice and rats, the levels of LDL in the blood drop a lot. And those mice and rats are protected against infections. So they can infuse bacteria, gram-negative bacteria into those rats, and the higher levels of LDL are protective in those studies. And the same thing has been true in human. You can look for, this is correlation, so this is epidemiology. At some point, we should definitely talk about why epidemiology can be so misleading. But higher levels of cholesterol are correlated with lower admission to the hospital for infectious complications. And we definitely see in animal models and essentially with humans with the Smith-Lemley-Opitz genetic

model that lower levels of cholesterol predispose to infection because LDL, lower levels of serum cholesterol, meaning low density lipoprotein, predispose to infection because LDL, lower levels of serum cholesterol, meaning low-density lip protein, predisposed to infection because that low-density lip protein particle is part of the immune system. And so is HDL. So HDL is high-density lip protein. It leaves the liver as kind of an empty bus. LDL leaves the liver as VLDL, a full bus, drops off people along the way, becomes a less full bus. VLDL becomes LDL. HDL is an empty bus that goes along the body picking things up and then returning to the liver. But HDL and LDL both have roles in the immune system. So why do we think that a molecule,

a lipoprotein particle that serves an indispensable role in human biochemistry or at least human physiology is killing us? That's just the first step. Can I stop you there? What is the standard model? What do people believe? If you asked a doctor that doesn't have a lot of nutrition training about HDL and LDL,

what would they tell you? At a very high level, they would say HDL is good, LDL is bad. You want less LDL and you want more HDL. Why would they say that? Because there's something called the lipid hypothesis. And the lipid hypothesis is that essentially in a concentration dependent manner, LDL ends up in the arterial wall. Okay. This is the lipid hypothesis. I disagree with this. I think it's an incomplete hypothesis. And so they would say, if you have more LDL,

it's just going to kind of leak into your arterial wall because it naturally gets taken up. And as more LDL ends up in your artery wall, you get more atherosclerosis and more plaque. What's the root of this hypothesis? It's a lot of epidemiology, Mendelian randomizations, and genome-wide association studies. So this is really interesting. We should dig into this. So if you look at basic epidemiology, so let's just think about epidemiology. You've talked about this on the show before, but I want to define this for people. So epidemiology is essentially an observational study. There's no experiment done. They're giving people surveys and they're either

following them moving forward, prospective, or they're looking back at what they've done in the past, a retrospective study. And so epidemiology can generate correlations, but we cannot draw causative inference from that data. We can have a correlation, which we then test with an interventional study. LDL is kind of tough to test with an interventional study, but there's some really cool stuff here that starts to break it down. If you look at overall cohorts of people, so if you look at the Framingham study, for instance, and you look at LDL on the x-axis and incidence of cardiovascular disease on the y-axis, I actually have two graphs of this that I'll show you that'll make it really helpful to break it

down. So if you look at those two and you don't do anything to, this is in the lipids and CVD folder, Jamie. You see that CAC LDL only graphic. So if you look at this, this is the basic data from Framingham. Okay. This is correlation. This is epidemiology, increasing risk of cardiovascular disease on the, on the Y axis, LDL on the X axis. Okay. So it's things like this that make people say, oh yeah, LDL, it's probably causing atherosclerosis, which is the formation of plaque within the arterial wall. But go to the other one, Jamie, CAC, LDL, HDL. So this is the exact same data stratified by a third variable. And this is what is never considered with LDL, in my opinion.

The lipid hypothesis is flawed because it's incomplete. It misses the third variable or fourth variable. In this stratification, we've looked at HDL. We've looked at the, quote, good cholesterol, which we really don't know a whole lot about, probably an immune participant. But HDL levels do correlate with metabolic health, synonymous with insulin resistance. So what can we say about these people? This is the exact same data that I've split into four lines here. Those with the lowest level of HDL are the most metabolically unhealthy.

These are the most obese, the most likely to have diabetes, the most likely to have insulin resistance. You can see they have a pretty good relative risk of cardiovascular disease as LDL increases. But look at the bottom. Look at the people who are most insulin sensitive. There's essentially no correlation, or the correlation is massively different between people with a high HDL, good metabolic health, and LDL increasing. Does that make sense?

Sort of. It says increasing LDL is very little increase in the cardiovascular disease risk with high HDL. Yeah. So as you increase your LDL. As long as you have high HDL, increasing LDL has very little risk. Very little cardiac risk. And we see that over and over and

over. But what if you just have high LDL and low HDL? Then you probably have diabetes. And in that case, you're in trouble. So the issue is not LDL, it's low HDL. Well, the issue, low HDL is reflective of an underlying pathology, which is metabolic dysfunction and or insulin resistance. is reflective of an underlying pathology, which is metabolic dysfunction and or insulin resistance. The issue is insulin resistance, metabolic dysfunction. So we're using HDL level as a proxy for metabolic health here. What is an optimal ratio?

Of LDL to HDL? Yes. I actually, it's tricky because there's a whole group of people now, right? So I have a good friend, Dave Feldman, who's doing, he's an engineer, super smart guy. He's doing a lot of really cool work on this. And they're actually about to start a study with lean mass hyper responders. Within the space, the carnivore ketogenic space, there are people who begin eating this way and they see their LDL go up significantly. So some people don't see LDL rise, but I did.

I have a pretty high quote LDL. And so within the space, there's a lot of people with high LDLs who look like me, pretty fit, active, don't have chest pain, don't believe I have cardiovascular disease. We can talk about my blood work and what I've done to confirm that, but there's a whole group of people called lean mass hyper-responders. And Dave's hypothesis, which I agree with completely, is that elevated LDL alone is too simplistic a metric. Mainstream medicine gets hyper-focused on LDL or more specifically ApoB, which is a proxy again for the number of LDL particles. That's too simplistic because I think there's context here. And the context is

that I don't believe there's sufficient evidence to say that high LDL in somebody that's metabolically healthy is the same as high LDL in somebody that's metabolically healthy is the same as high LDL in somebody that's metabolically unhealthy. There's a third variable. We have to think about multiple variables because there's a context. And it makes sense, right? There are other things that are like this. Uric acid is a good example too. Incidentally, both LDL and uric acid rise when humans fast. So if you stop eating, your LDL is going to go up. And that's been demonstrated multiple times in studies. Fasting raises LDL. They've even shown this in hibernating bears. Hibernating bears have a rise in LDL, but they don't develop atherosclerosis over the course

of their hibernation period. There's actually a screenshot at the bottom in the lipid CVD a screenshot at the bottom in the lipid CVD folder, Jamie, and I'll pull up, there's another study here with the hibernating bear study. It's pretty fascinating. The bear's atherohybernation. And so we see this over and over in humans that fasting raises LDL, fasting raises uric acid, but fasting, people who fast, people who do ketogenic diets they don't get gout they don't get atherosclerosis in quite the same way or at least that's the hypothesis certainly bears don't and we observe strange that fasting would raise ldl it does until you think about ldl as a nutrient a nutrient carrier so dave is developing something called the lipid energy model and i want to give him all credit for

this i've actually got a set of slides that'll probably make it clear when i talk about but dave's hypothesis is that if you are burning mostly fat as energy and even somebody that eats some carbohydrates can be burning mostly fat as energy you are going to be moving more ldl in your blood to move that fat around okay and we certainly know that interventions can do that. And it makes sense. When you fast, you're depleting liver glycogen, your ketones are going up, and you are burning fat. You're not burning as much glucose, you're burning more fat.

Your free fatty acids are going to go up, your LDL is going to go up. And so you kind of scratch your head there, at least I did, and looked at this and thought, are you telling me that in something that would happen routinely for humans, fasting, like we talked about, intermittent fasting, unsuccessful hunts, that's killing us in a way? That's causing atherosclerosis? That doesn't make any sense. And it certainly doesn't happen in bears and other hibernating mammals. So LDL will rise in response to fasting. LDL seems to rise in response to what we choose to burn as our primary fuel. Now, we're still kind of trying to figure this out. Dave's had, he just texted me this morning. He's like, I've got all this really great data.

He's almost ready to share it. It's super interesting stuff. But the whole idea of what LDL is doing in the human body, I think has been misconstrued and misunderstood. Again, the lipid hypothesis would say the more LDL, the more atherosclerosis. Well, if that's the case, and it's kind of tied into that model,

is the notion that LDL must cause atherosclerosis de novo, or in and of itself. Because if more LDL equals atherosclerosis, then LDL is causing atherosclerosis. I don't think anyone who subscribes to the lipid energy model is going to debate that. But if LDL causes atherosclerosis de novo, why don't we get atherosclerosis de novo, why don't we get atherosclerosis in veins? Why do we only get atherosclerosis in arteries? There's the same amount of LDL throughout our body. Veins and arteries are a contiguous system. And so why are we developing plaque in arteries but not veins? And we never see plaque in veins unless they are transplanted into the arterial system. So there's clearly more things going on. And in the case of arteries versus veins, the prevailing hypothesis is that it's

endothelial damage. So the inside of a blood vessel is the endothelium. And something has to damage the endothelium for this to happen, it seems. And higher pressure systems, the arteries, seem to damage the endothelium and this network of glycoproteins on the surface of the endothelium called the glycocalyx. And that doesn't happen in veins. They're lower pressure. At least this is one hypothesis. But for LDL to cause atherosclerosis in and of itself, it just doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to work. And studies like that with Framingham make me think, there's a third variable. So if you look at the general population, sure, you might see a correlation between LDL and cardiovascular disease. But if you look at the general population, sure, you might see a correlation between LDL and cardiovascular disease.

But if you look at it a little more precisely or a little more carefully, you start to separate out those who are metabolically healthy, which granted is the minority from those who are metabolically unwell. If the majority of people in our society are metabolically unwell, of course, it looks like there's a correlation. But what about this group over here? You and me who are metabolically healthy, if our LDL goes up, is that going to cause atherosclerosis? I think the evidence for that is paltry at best and is not there. And I think that we are eating

a diet that we believe to be ancestrally consistent. Why would that kill us, right? And so one of the things that I've done, so I have an elevated LDL. I will freely admit that. My HDL is also very high. I have all my labs if you want to see them. What would happen, can I just talk to you here? What would happen if you went to a cardiologist? Like if you went to a cardiologist and said, Doc, I'm feeling great, but don't tell him shit.

Just say, but I just like to get my blood work done, get a little checkup. Tell me what you think I should do. They would fall out of their chair when they saw my lipids. How bad is it? Or I shouldn't say how bad. what is the number uh it's it's high so and the re and so the um the ldl has been above 300 for 300 milligrams per deciliter which is a essentially a density measure for all two years that i have done a carnivore diet before that i don't have familial hypercholesterolemia though but my ldl is as high as people with homozygous that you say you don't have what was that familial hypercholesterolemia that means it's not your family it's not a genetic there's a there

are there's about 2 000 plus genetic polymorphisms that actually result in a high ldl independent of diet right and they change lipid metabolism okay okay? So this is really important. The problem, a lot of people, a lot of proponents of the lipid hypothesis would say, look at people with familial hypercholesterolemia. They get accelerated atherosclerosis. The problem is that in order to get an elevated LDL, you had to disorder normal lipid metabolism. Within the framework of healthy, that is non-disordered lipid metabolism, there's no evidence that elevated LDL leads to atherosclerosis. So in my case, my most recent LDL was very high.

It was 533 milligrams per deciliter. What's normal? Less than 100 or around 100. So 100 is preferred? Preferred by the mainstream cardiologist, right? Now, again, I can pull up labs. Are there any cardiologists that agree with you? There are. Okay. Yeah. I've had a number of them on my podcast. There's definitely cardiologists who do not subscribe to the lipid hypothesis.

Certainly the majority do. And any mainstream doctors who are hearing this are just wanting to throw daggers at me right now. It seems like there's, uh, that's gotta be very controversial if you're a cardiologist that follows your line of thinking. Yeah, I think it is, but I think it's gaining traction because what often happens is people will do that. They'll go into their cardiologist and the cardiologist will look at them and say, Frank, you look great.

You've lost 20 pounds. Your diabetes is better. I mean, nothing but margin, Mike. Right, no, but then they'll say, then they'll say let's say and they'll say great and they say doc i feel good and they says oh wait but your ldl is too high you got to change anything and then they won't they won't tell me anything and they'll say oh i'm eating meat and they oh you got to change that whatever you did that cured your diabetes causal this weight loss that couldn't that's that's bad for you because your ldl has gone high because we have this

myopic ldl centric perspective that excludes the contextual variables, metabolic dysfunction, metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance. How did that gain such prevalence? Why is that so universally agreed upon by so many cardiologists? I think it's because, it's hard to say. So before I went to medical school, I was actually a physician assistant and I worked in cardiology for four years. And I think it's a lot of what we are taught in medicine is all we know, right?

We're taught this is the model. And if you look at it, there is evidence, there is correlational evidence that shows the lower the LDL, the lower the incidence of heart disease, but it misses the context. And if you start to put in the contextual variables, the model breaks down. And so I think it's just, it's been parroted over and over and over. And the prevailing thinking is just, this is what it is. This is what it is. But there certainly are cardiologists. I've had three or four cardiologists on my podcast that don't subscribe to this model. And there's a lot of them out there. A lot of my friends and colleagues in the medical world are skeptical of this model.

So I'll finish my story because I talked about my super high LDL. Before we get to that, these doctors that don't prescribe to that model, it seems to me that if you're going to step outside the mainstream, it's kind of a precarious route. And would they be hesitant to do so if you're dealing with non-metabolically healthy people? So would they make the distinction like, hey, I'm looking at you, Paul. You look very fit. You're lean. You exercise. You look great.

Your LDL is high. Your HDL is high. But all the other biomarkers are excellent. Or would they look at a guy who's fat, who doesn't have a good diet, who's not metabolically healthy, but who also has high LDL? Would they treat them differently? Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely, because these cardiologists are savvy enough to understand context. So if you go to a cardiologist and they

don't check fasting insulin or hemoglobin A1C or put a continuous glucose monitor on you, they're missing the context. And so these are just laboratory markers that give you a sense of your metabolic health. And so absolutely, these colleagues of mine would treat those people completely differently because it's context, right? The way that I've talked about it in the past is just this analogy. If you have dry wood for the winter in your garage, it's not just going to spark a fire, right? Dry wood can be good.

You can build things with it. You can build a house with dry wood. LDL can be good in the absence of metabolic dysfunction. It has all these roles. It's protective in the immune system. It moves nutrients around the body. So do you think that it is detrimental in the presence of metabolic dysfunction? It looks that way. Yes. Yes. So it's all about the context. So LDL is getting wrapped in. And people have said, LDL is not the arsonist. It's the firefighter who shows up to quell the

blaze. And that's kind of a complicated analogy,ist, it's the firefighter who shows up to quell the blaze. And that's kind of a complicated analogy, but you get the idea, like a policeman shows up at the scene of a crime, does that mean he committed the crime? Because there is evidence that LDL ends up in atherosclerotic plaque. And so there's both pathology, pathologic evidence, and this epidemiology evidence. But when you bring in the contextual variable, it starts to break down. What do you think does cause that plaque then if it's not LDL? It's the fact that in the setting of metabolic dysfunction, the LDL, and this is just my hypothesis, right? I don't think anyone knows this. The LDL perhaps gets retained. So LDL is a lipoprotein. I think it moves in and out of the endothelium into the subendothelial space

freely. And there's potentially something about the LDelium into the subendothelial space freely. And there's something about, there's potentially something about the LDL moving into that subendothelial space, getting retained in that subendothelial space. So if you were to take a blood vessel and cut it lengthwise and look down at like a tube, there's multiple layers. Look, I got more foam here.

So distracting for Joe. Sorry. You know, there's multiple layers, right? The innermost layer, if the blood's in here, the innermost layer is the endothelium. Below that is the intima and then the submucosal layer and the adventitia. And just below the endothelium are immune cells called macrophages. And what appears to happen with atherosclerosis is that the LDL particles get retained in

there for some reason. And the macrophages kind of pick them up. They eat them. They endocytose them. They phagocytose them. And so they kind of eat these LDL particles potentially as, you know, they're trying to take care of something that could be problematic. And then they become foam cells. They get full of more and more lipid. And that's the beginning of a fatty streak. And again, this is very high level basic stuff. It's not, it's a little more complex, but there's something going on, I think, at the level of that subentima, that endothelial, the subendothelial space,

that these macrophages are not responding properly to LDL, or the LDL looks damaged. And so now you start to get into ideas of oxidized LDL versus native LDL. And what causes LDL to oxidize? Well, there's good evidence that excess linoleic acid in the diet might be doing it. Excess oxidative stress might be doing it.

Or at the level of the macrophage, when you have metabolic dysfunction, it's broadly disordered insulin signaling. Is there a correlation between arterial plaque increase and increase in vegetable oils? Well, I mean, there's a correlation, yeah. We could draw the same graphs, yeah. So what you're

saying about uh ldl and hdl is this something that you've ever debated with uh like a cardiologist that you know follows the mainstream ideas of what what is good or bad about hdl and hdl there's a there's a family doc who's going to come on my podcast soon that I'm planning to debate about it. I think he's open to the ideas. But yeah, it would be interesting to debate these guys. Yeah, I would like to see someone who hardcore disagrees with you on this because I'm too dumb to know who's right.

I think it'd be super fun to talk to those guys and have all the studies up and stuff. But you can find studies. So there are studies, and I've got these on the folder again. I'll put all these studies on the website so that people can find all this stuff if they want to dig into it. There are studies that show that the more linoleic acid you eat, the more enriched in linoleic acid your LDL particles become. And then the more oxidized your LDL particles become. And if you decrease linoleic acid, there's a decrease in the oxidation of the LDL particles.

So there's a lot of kind of pieces that look like the dots are connecting. It's pretty compelling. So all LDL is not created equal. All LDL is not created equal. All LDL is not created equal. And even mainstream lipidologists. So I recently heard a podcast between two folks who are pretty prominent in the lipid community. And even they were admitting, and they're proponents, I believe they are proponents,

I don't want to put words in their mouth, of the lipid hypothesis. And even they were admitting that the quality of the LDL particle matters. And as soon as you introduce quality of the LDL particle, you introduce that third variable. And what determines the quality of the LDL particle? It's the context. It's our overall metabolic health as humans.

And we should not be looking at lab markers or metrics in isolation as humans. I know that cardiologists are intelligent and well-meaning, but I fear that within the medical establishment, we're just myopically looking at LDL. And I worked in cardiology for four years as a physician assistant before I went back to medical school and did my residency and all this stuff.

So we're very LDL-centric and it's becoming more and more ensconced. It's just all about lowering ApoB, which essentially means lowering LDL. And I just don't think that's the right thing for people. If someone is not willing to make dietary lifestyle change, yes, you probably should lower ApoB. But if we are telling people the full truth, in my opinion,

it is, hey, your lifestyle is causing this. And here's how you should eat. Now, the problem there is that the mainstream medical establishment is so hung up on the fact that saturated fat raises LDL that they can't possibly recommend the animal foods that people should be eating. So they don't even know what to tell people. They'll tell people to eat more vegetable oil, which is the wrong thing. And there are some really good studies. The Minnesota Corn Area Experiment and the Sydney Diet Heart Study were pretty fantastic studies.

I've got them both in the notes here if you want to see them. Chris Ramsden, who is the investigator on both of those, or at least the second publication of both of these is national here in my opinion. But in the Minnesota coronary experiment, they were randomized. It's a randomized interventional trial. And it's a blinded trial where they had one group that was higher saturated fat and one group that was higher polyunsaturated fat. And the polyunsaturated fat diet clearly did worse, clearly did worse. More heart disease, more death, more cancer. That's the other thing about polyunsaturated fat is there are a lot of signals for increased cancer. The Citi diet heart showed exactly the same thing. More polyunsaturated fat, more death, more cardiovascular disease, more cancer. So

there's some interventional studies that are pretty hard to ignore, just putting them head to head. And yet, because we are so myopic, because we are so focused on LDL and we don't think about context or metabolic health, how could a physician recommend tallow? Well, just breaking down all the shit

that you've said in this podcast is giving people a headache right now. I guarantee you, they're listening to this. And most folks who would just say to me, if I said, I'm eating only meat, well, what about your cholesterol? They really don't know any of this stuff. So it's, they have a tiny piece of information in their head. Cholesterol equals bad. You put that in their heart attacks, heart disease, you're going to die. You're going to die. You're eating like that. You're going to die. Why do I feel so good? What's going on? What's

happening? Why did you lose weight? Why did your vitiligo get better? Why did you have energy throughout the day? It's weird. It's very weird. Back to your lab results. Your lab results are very high. You have high HDL, high LDL. And low triglycerides. What about arterial plaque? Zero. Whoa. So now there are a lot of people who would criticize this finding, but I mean- Zero. Zero. And I'll tell you, so it's with a CAC, so it's a coronary artery calcium score. It's a CT scan of the heart. It's not a perfect test, but it's a pretty darn good test. So Dave and his colleagues are doing a study where they're going to do CTA, which is CT coronary angiogram. And I'm going to try and be a part of that study as well. They're going to take people who are lean mass hyper responders. They just got all the funding

for it, I think. And they're going to do CT coronary angiogram one year apart. So what's interesting here, Joe, is that for kids with familial hypercholesterolemia, now again, granted, they're disordered lipid metabolism, disordered lipid metabolism. They're not healthy lipid metabolism, right? So they don't look quite like me. They have a high LDL, but their LDL metabolism doesn't work properly. They develop atherosclerosis within the first few years of their life, okay? And they have LDL levels that are equivalent to mine. Now, I've had an LDL above 300 for more than two years. I also have a family history of early heart disease and of primary relative. My dad had a heart attack when he was 43.

So I'm 43. Whoa. My dad had a heart attack when he was 43. So I have risk factors for coronary artery disease. What was your dad's diet like? And what was his lifestyle like? Oh, I mean, he was an internist. So he was not sleeping well.

He was not eating well. He didn't think about this at all. He didn't know. Right. And that's what's so ironic Is my dad is such a role model for me, you know amazing guy He was texting me all excited us coming on the podcast today And he's such an amazing guy and he meant so well for his patients

But I just don't think that mainstream medicine thought about this contextual stuff. Is he following your diet? He's not but he did wear a CGM and I think he's gonna try and move his diet in the right direction when he sees What his post prandial after eating blood sugars are. What kind of diet is he on? It's getting better and better. But I saw a part of his dietary recall from the folks at Nutrisense, which is the company that does the CGM. And it was, he was eating grass fed meat.

He takes the desiccated organ supplements and he's eating some white rice. And I think he had like some banana bread. And the thing I keep trying to get him to stop is eating glucerna or vegetable oil, because he's eating these weight loss shakes that have soybean oil in them. And, you know, he hasn't shared with me his CGM, and I want to be respectful. And if he will share with me his continuous glucose monitoring, we can look at his metabolic health, because I'm not going to order blood work for my dad. But I can look at his continuous glucose monitor. Like this is the kind of stuff that really tells you about your metabolic health. There's no way to lie with a

continuous glucose monitor. And so I think that he has some room to improve, but it's slow. He helped me like edit the book. I think he was so proud when I wrote the book and just so excited that I was thinking this way. It was so interesting to have this traditionally trained father, this internist, read my book and go, whoa, that's kind of interesting, Paul. I mean, he's reading the chapter on lipids going, this isn't what I learned. Maybe there's more I should be thinking about. So we've had a lot of conversations. And I mean, one of the reasons, the whole reason I think about this stuff, Joe, is because I want people that I care about to be around. and then I want to be able to share that with other people so that they can experience

their life better. What are you going to tell him about the diarrhea? The disaster pants? Because there is a diarrhea that you get from the carnivore diet that I only got for the first like two weeks or so.

But my friend Tom Segura tried it and his words were, it's astonishing he says his diarrhea is astonishing i go dude it's no joke i took some photos of my toilet bowl and it it looks like a goblin threw up in there i mean just just black tar. It was crazy. Yeah. What is that? So there's physiologic changes in the human gut that happen when you stop fiber abruptly. So we don't know entirely, but I think that the most compelling theory that I've heard or been able to come up with is it has to do with bile salts.

And we talked about the bile earlier in the gallbladder and, you know, putting it on liver. So your bile is in your liver on your right upper quadrant. And when you eat meat or fat, your bile contracts, there's hormones, cholecystokinin, you release bile. Bile is a combination of cholesterol, bile salts, bilirubin. And bile salts are supposed to be reabsorbed in your small intestine. So, you know, you have this stomach, a duodenum, a jejunum, an ileum, which is your small intestine. Then you have the ileocecal valve and the large intestine. The large intestine is like the colon, right? And the colon goes up and over and down.

And so if bile acids end up in the colon, they are cathartic, meaning they will cause diarrhea. And so I think that for the majority of people, if they are going to do a transition from a fiber-full diet to a zero fiber or a lower fiber diet, you want to do it slowly. Because I think that in the small intestine, the small intestine needs to catch up and reabsorb these bile acids.

If the bile acids move through the ileocecal valve into the colon, they'll cause diarrhea. And so your body takes time. And so I think what happened in your case, because I was following it closely, I was texting Mark Bell. I was texting Mark Bell. I was like, Joe's having diarrhea. See, I mean, if he just send him this information, maybe it'll help him, you know? So what can you do to mitigate it? You would want to go slowly on the fiber. So when I work with people and they get the diarrhea, I have them add back avocado or something with a little bit of fiber to help because the fiber will bind up the bile acids a little bit. But in your case,

it sounded like what happened was something adjusted and eventually stopped. And my suspicion is that the small intestine eventually catches up and says, hey, there's more bile acids. I'm going to reabsorb them. They don't end up in the colon. It was a dangerous two weeks. It was very dangerous. A little bit of avocado would have gone a long way, I think, for you. I got through some podcasts where I was like, boy, I barely made it out of there. You just like sweating bullets. Jamie, you saw some of those where I ran out of the room.

I like clenched my butt cheeks like I'm trying to make a diamond. Ran out of the room. And so, again, that's why I think there's a lot of ways to do this. It's not that – I don't think the only way to benefit from the things we're talking about is to go a hundred percent carnivore. I think it's, you know, understand that meat and organs are critically important. Understand there's toxicity of plant foods on a spectrum. And if, if a little bit of fiber helps you get through that, do that, you know, and if a little bit of fiber doesn't bother you, don't do it.

But for a lot of people, the complete elimination of fiber in their diet is really helpful. It's a really amazing thing. How many people say less gas, less bloating, even less constipation when they remove fiber. But a little bit of fiber can go a long way in that sort of transitional disaster pants phase. The common perception of fiber is that it's essential and that it cleans out your body and that to live without fiber, you're going to get constipated. You're going to have all these problems. Why is that not true? The fiber is such an interesting thing. So none of it's true. If you actually look at the medical literature, there's no evidence that fiber improves constipation. So fiber can give you bigger poops, but there's good meta-analysis. There's interventional studies

that show that fiber doesn't relieve the other symptoms of constipation, which are pain, difficulty with passage, bleeding. Constipation sucks. Nobody wants that. But fiber will give you bigger poops that are usually more painful to pass. And fiber also causes a ton of gas and bloating for people. There's a really fascinating study from 2012. It's an interventional study with fiber. And they had three groups of people, I think it's 60 people, they divided them into three groups of 20. And they all had idiopathic constipation. So the doctor doesn't know why you're backed up. One group fiber as normal, one group moderate fiber, one group zero fiber. Which group did the best? Zero fiber. How many people resolved idiopathic constipation? 100%.

What? 100%. 100% from zero fiber? how many people resolved idiopathic constipation? A hundred percent. What? A hundred percent. A hundred percent from zero fiber? Jamie, it's in the constipation folder. What is the cause of constipation? It's complicated. I don't think, it's the fiber constipation. Oh, not the meta.

It's the, let's see. Stopping fiber constipation in the constipation folder. Yeah. So you see. Stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation, its associated symptoms. That's bananas. So constipation is probably multifactorial. It probably has to do with dysbiosis, the overgrowth of the wrong type of organisms. I think it's potentially inflammatory in the gut, but in

this interventional study, it completely reversed it in these people. Well, when I was drinking kale shakes for a while, I was drinking kale shakes in the morning, and it had a similar effect to the carnivore diet in the first two weeks. Like, it just, whoo, it opened up the canyon and lubed up the old water slide, and things are just flying out of me. Maybe not a good thing. Well, I think it was also, I was doing it with MCT oil. That'll do. And I was adding fruits and all sorts of other stuff to the kale shakes.

But I thought I was doing the right thing, and I was feeling pretty good while I was doing it. But not, absolutely not as good as I did when I went to the carnivore diet. I think I was getting this burst of carbohydrates and sugars and nutrients. And also, I was thinking because the poop was coming out so easy and quickly, I was like, this has got to be good. It's cleaning out the old pipes. Because that's what you want, right?

You just want to clean them out. Yeah, that's, I was like, this has got to be good. It's cleaning out the old pipes. Because that's what you want, right? You just want to clean them out. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. My thought process was like all that fibrous plant material was just- Scraping them, scrubbing them like a little towel. That's how you look at it. That's not how it works at all. There's so much interesting stuff about fiber, but I'll tell you, I was a vegan. I was a raw vegan for seven months when I was a physician assistant. And I want to take this opportunity to apologize

to the people I shared an office with because I was such an olfactory nightmare. Oh, you farted up? It was so bad, Joe. Well, you're breaking down and fermenting all these things inside your gut, right? It was just every, I mean, people couldn't even be around me. You couldn't hold it in?

There's only so many farts you can hold in before your intestines explode, man. They're that bad. They're that bad. I always hoped that if you just hold your farts in, they would come out as burps, and it never worked. It never worked. And then when I was a vegan, I lost 25 pounds

of muscle mass and all kinds of other issues. 25 pounds from where you are now? Yeah. Wow, you must have been very, very thin. Very skinny. So I'm 170 to. Wow, you must have been very, very thin. Very skinny. So I'm 170 to 175 now, and I was around 140, so even maybe 30 pounds. Wow. 30 pounds of muscle mass.

How did you feel? Not great. And you did it for health because you thought it was a good thing to do? Yeah. So it was the beginning of my medical career. It was probably 15 years ago. I hadn't read the literature. And the ideas are interesting, right?

Right. The ideas are interesting, right? Right. The ideas are interesting. Meat causes problems. This is a pure diet. It's not cooked. It's what our ancestors have eaten. Except these are the far too back ancestors. Yeah, there's a lot of people that think that going, you know, air quotes, plant-based is the move for heart health.

Yeah. For, you know, to be a healthy person. My friend C.T. Fletcher, he is a power lifter, and he had a terrible diet at one point in time and wound up having heart disease, and it runs in his family, and he had to get a heart transplant. Oh. Yeah, and so now he has a heart transplant, and he has a new heart, and he's exercising again, and he's gone completely plant-based

and he thinks it's a good thing for his health and for his body and he used to be a guy who ate a lot of cheeseburgers and McDonald's shakes and stuff and just wasn't really eating that healthy and now just kind of completely changed his diet and I don't have the knowledge to tell him that that's not the way to make your heart healthy. What would you say to CT?

I think that the first thing is I'm glad that he's making an intentional choice with his diet. Like you said earlier, what he's doing now is probably better than the standard American diet. Yes. If you are very careful about supplementation and you think about creatine and carnitine and choline and vitamin K2 and B12 and bioavailable proteins, I mean, you could sustain yourself on a vegan diet, in my opinion. I'm sure he's doing that. He's a very disciplined man. Yeah, I don't think it's optimal. to ignore the evidence on polyunsaturated fatty acids and to be sure that with his transplanted heart that he's carefully watching it and looking at the right metrics and really looking at

the right measures which may give him some indication of atherosclerosis progression. So if somebody were to do a vegan diet with no vegetable oils, they might be able to do okay given they were getting enough calories, enough protein, enough of these nutrients, and were supplementing with the right things. But I fear that a lot of vegans are gonna think, canola oil, that's great, that's vegan, or soybean oil, that's great.

Or they're gonna eat these plant-based garbage burgers, which are full of this vegetable oil. We gotta get to that. Yeah. That we have to get to, but. And it's just not, it's not a precise enough approach. And I hope he's working with a cardiologist. So I would, I would respect his choice a hundred percent if he's doing good.

That's amazing. But there's a lot of nuance there. And there are a lot of nutrients, like I mentioned earlier in the podcast, that are not found in plant foods that are only in animal foods. We'll give him some of these. He probably won't take them. Maybe he would. Maybe he would take the pills.

Yeah. only in animal foods we'll give him some of these he probably won't take them maybe he would maybe he would take the pills yeah but if you could get him to just completely objectively learn and not disrespect his choice to become plant-based what would you say would be the optimal thing for someone to do having recovered from heart failure and a heart transplant what would what would you recommend this is for c CT or just anyone? Anyone. Let's just have CT listen to this because I'm going to send it to him. Right. But anyone in that particular, anyone without any ideology, what would you say would be

the optimal thing to eat? Eat like your ancestors. Eat like the Hadza, you know, not your doctor. So eat like, eat meat and organs as a center of your diet from well-raised animals roam ranch white oak pastures polyface farms don't fear the organ meats don't fear red meat i really think i mean there's tons of stuff in the book about why this information is bad know which plants are the most toxic eliminate the most toxic plants and eliminate vegetable oils and processed sugars like the plague and And I think if you do that,

you're going to thrive. And I think you're going to feel really good. Now, we're at a crossroads, Joe. The mainstream medical establishment doesn't agree with this. And I'm fully ready. And I think this is going to become my life's work. It's really exciting to be in this pace and say, hey, I think these ideas are wrong and they need to be refined. And I think that more people will benefit if we refine these ideas. I think people are suffering because of incorrect information foist upon us for the last 70 years by the mainstream medical establishment. Well, it's fascinating when people follow along with the mainstream ideas and like professional athletes, they watch Game Changers and they go, well, that's it. I'm going to go plant-based and they're getting injured and they're not well, that's it. I'm going to go plant-based.

And they're getting injured and they're not recovering well and they have all these issues. Psychiatric issues, mood instability, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is a, it's a real concern and when you bring it up,

people go, oh, here you go again with all your bullshit propaganda and it's been proven. Haven't you watched the documentary? Yeah, I watched it. I watched it. I've talked to experts. I'm not impressed by any of this. You know, I think you can do it.

I think you can be healthy and you can live off a vegan diet the way you said before. But I don't believe it's the optimal way to do it. I just don't. I don't think it is for humans either. I think people like to think it's the optimal way to do it because it makes them feel better ethically and morally. That they're not responsible for the death of animals, even though they absolutely are. And I think that's the optimal way to do it because it makes them feel better ethically and morally, that they're not responsible for the death of animals,

even though they absolutely are. And I think that's where we need to shift the perspective. I think that vegan diets have become popular because they're a meme, because they've become an identity. And that identity is something that we all identify with as humans. Being a kinder person.

A kinder person, empathetic person. But the reality is that the actual practice of a vegan diet is nothing like that. Nothing like that. There's an Instagram handle. I think it's so true. Carnivore is vegan. And it's such a, it's not my handle.

It's somebody else's handle. That's so true. If we're actually talking about empathy, talk about the least amount of suffering. You raise one animal in an ecosystem that is cycle. That's the way it's been going for thousands, millions of years. Maybe you even take that animal ethically by hunting it.

Maybe you even spend time in the wilderness while you're hunting an animal. Maybe you spend time with people while you're hunting an animal. And I'll tell you, so I've hunted twice in my life, Joe, and I'm gonna hunt this season with a bow, and I've hunted twice before with a bow. Both times that I killed an animal,

walking up to that animal was one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. It was just this strike like responsibility very psychedelic Be a responsible human you took this life, right? I think that as humans it's okay to To be a part of the cycle of life and death and we will all die And we will all go back to the earth at some point these atoms that I am renting will return to the earth And so I think that it's okay to take life respectfully in a hunted way

But if more people did this, and this is not necessarily scalable in 2020, but I think if more people did this, it's like a sacrament. And I don't mean that in any sacrilegious way, but it was just like, it was one of the most clarifying things I've ever done to remind me, be a good person. bounty to you. And I hope this doesn't sound too woo-woo, but it was my personal experience. Like here is the universal bounty to you in this moment. Like you better be a good person because you are so fortunate to have this nutritious food here. It's just very striking. I think it would, I think it would change. And that's completely different than the vegan ideation that we're being harmful to animals or we're being disrespectful. It was like, wow, it was almost like that animal gave me the gift, like be a better human. Well, I had this thought before I started hunting that I was either going to become a vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter. I had seen a lot of those documentaries and those videos online about factory farming. And it's appalling.

It's disgusting. It makes you sad. It makes you sickened. And I was trying to figure out what can I do like would I be capable of killing an animal I never killed an animal before and then after I did I went hunting with Steve Rinella on his television show I shot a mule deer we ate it over a fire and I said right away I'm doing this from now on this is what I'm doing because it resonated it made sense it felt good it was a very difficult thing to do it took took days and days of hiking many, many miles in the

mountains to find a mule deer and to shoot it and then to haul it out of there and then to cut it up and eat it and cook it or cook it and eat it. It was, it was, it was, it's a weird word, spiritual, but it is a spiritual experience because it connected you with the life that sustains you. Like you were there. I looked at that animal when I squeezed that trigger off and watched it drop. And then when we were cutting it and hauling it out and eating the liver and eating the heart and cooking meat over the fire, immediately it all made sense to me. I was like, okay, this feels so much different than buying meat in a store.

When I take a piece of elk meat, I shot an elk last week in Utah. When I take a piece of elk meat two weeks ago and I put that on the Traeger, I season it, I put it there, and I cook it, and then I'm eating it and I'm feeding it to my family. I have a connection to that meat. I looked in the eyes of that elk when I released that arrow. I watched it drop 15 seconds later. I felt the relief. I felt the happiness, and I felt the gratitude that this animal is going to be how I get my meat.

And hundreds of pounds of meat, I'm going to give it to my friends. I give it to— To your tribe. Yeah, I love it. I love all of it about. And the people that I've met through this pursuit have been some of the best people I've ever met in my life. Some of the nicest, most disciplined, most warm, friendly, loving people. They're not animal haters. They're not cruel people. They're people who understand where their food comes from. And it's a different connection to food. The hunters have a different idea of life and death than the average person who's shielded by it, who's using their credit card to pay for a supermarket hitman to make cheeseburgers for them. way to go. And I know that it's not sustainable for everybody to do it, like you said, in 2020.

But there's a lot of things that everybody, not everybody becomes a black belt in jujitsu, right? Not everybody becomes a race car driver. Not everybody becomes a doctor. It's fucking hard to do. There's a lot of shit that's hard to do. Like, I'm not saying you have to do it, but for a person who chooses to have a connection, it is available for you. But the price of entry is difficult. It's hard to learn how to do it properly. It's really hard to learn how to do it with a bow. It requires a lot of physical exertion. There's a lot of workouts that I do all throughout the year, specifically my cardio workouts,

that I'm doing so that I have endurance in the mountains. That's why I do it because I've been exhausted trying to make it up a hill, especially with my friend Cam Haynes, hunting with that fucking guy, just trying to follow him, just trying to walk behind him, forget about running. I'm doing it because I understand that come the moment of truth, you have to be at

your best. It's not easy. But if you don't want to do that, you can get meat from sustainable farms. You can get meat from sustainable farms you can get meat from places like polyface farms butcher box which is a great company that's one of the sponsors of my podcast all of their all their meat is grass fed grass finished from sustainable places that are ethically raised animals you can get that food you can you can get it the right way you don't have to hunt it but if you want to hunt it, that's available too. Most people are not going to have the time or even the desire to do it.

But it can be done. But I don't like that argument where people say, well, it's not sustainable for everybody. Well, neither is most things that are hard to do. Most things that are hard to do, you're not going to do. Most people are not going to win the CrossFit Games. Does that mean we should stop the CrossFit Games? Well, it's not sustainable. most people can't do it what does that mean we should stop marathons because most people aren't going to run a marathon there's hard things to do that

are very rewarding and most of those things come with like there's there's a immense satisfaction in completing them and this is where hunting is different than any other source of gathering food because it's a discipline. It's in many ways an athletic pursuit. And then it also sustains you and sustains your family. It's a very different connection with food. And I think it's a spiritual pursuit.

And like you said, every time you eat, you have a story. You remember. Like every time you eat that elk that you got with a bow, you're probably going to remember that time in the wilderness. And think about if that was all the food you ate, every food had a story like that. How are you going to live your life in a different way? And so one of the things that's been so interesting for me recently is realizing that the carnivore diet and thinking about animal-based diets was just a stepping stone. It was kind of the entree to think about a broader concept about the way that we as humans have forgotten,

that there's this broad amnesia. And I've thought about this and kind of called it the remembering, just this idea that it's about more than the way we eat. It's about the way we live on the earth, being in nature and doing things like hunting and getting back to these roots. Like this to me is what gets me really Excited that we're starting to think about the way our ancestors ate and an ancestrally consistent diet But we also need to think about how the heck did they live and I've heard you talk about this so many times But social media is such a double-edged sword and it is such a I think a destructive thing this new documentary out social dilemma Like it's amazing. We are not communicating with humans in the same way that we used to. We're not over a fire. You know, you got to cook that first meal

to get with Steve Rinella over a fire. That's a freaking human connection. That's real. I remember him laughing because he said, so what do you think? And I said, I'm doing this from now on. I go, this is it.

I'm a hunter. And he started laughing because it was a satisfaction. It was like, all right. You know, it was like a happy thing where he saw that I was hooked. Welcome to the tribe. That was it. Yeah, I was in 100%.

That was 2012. I've been in 100% for the last eight years. I think about it all day long, especially now that I've become a bow hunter. It's funny. I was with my friend John Dudley, and we were at a UFC fight. John was in the crowd right behind me.

It was a big fight about to go on. And I said, this is what I'm thinking. I was thinking about archery. That's what I was thinking. I was pulling a bow back. And when I'm in my, like, anytime something's boring to me, I think about archery. If someone's talking about something I'm not really interested in, I'll listen. But in the back of my head, I'm thinking about centering my pin, centering the bubble,

drawing back, pulling with the scapula, getting a surprise release. It's a massive obsession. And there's a different spiritual connection to bow hunting, I think, because it is so difficult and it is so physical. And it requires this being in the moment in a way that nothing else does. Because there's so many moving parts that you have to align correctly in order to execute. Oh, it's amazing. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done.

And I just got a new release. I just got one of the thumb releases. And so I'm all over the place now. It's super frustrating. Yeah. But I love that pulling with the scapula and I love that surprising release. Have you ever used a tension-based release like a silverback?

This one is a wise choice. Okay, I know what it is. The thing about those is you cheat. You hit that button with your thumb. Have you had a real good coach? No, I need to talk to John Dudley. Yeah, you should get with Dudley. He would put you on a tension-based release.

What people don't understand what we're talking about is it's hard in the moment of truth to, when you're anticipating the shot, to not flinch or move. And with archery, it is so important that the shot goes off in a surprise manner. And I'll say this for most people, because there are a lot of people that are extremely good archers that don't do it this way but they have practiced their way by pulling the trigger and consciously pulling the trigger what they call a command release they've practiced it for so long they could pull it off my friend cam haynes is one of those people my friend remy warren he's another one of those people there's there's great archers there's a guy named Tim Gillingham.

He's one of the best archers on earth. He wins world championships and he pulls the trigger. He has a finger trigger and he pulls it and he beats everybody. And he's very well celebrated as one of the best archers in the world. But for the most part, for most people, you're better off having a surprise release. You're better off taking the idea of the shot going off and you just go through the motions of getting to go off, but you really have no idea when it's going to go off. Yeah. But it's hard to do with the thumb thing.

Really, a lot of people cheat. They pretend they're doing that. Like, yeah, I'm getting a surprise release and I'm watching my pitch. You're hitting that shit with your thumb. I know what you're doing. I think I'm cheating everybody's i need a good coach i need a good coach yeah it's hard man it's hard but i love how everything kind

of drops away and i'll tell you joe for people that haven't bow hunted i've actually never killed an animal with a rifle so i don't know if it's the same way you can tell me if it is the first time i drew back on an animal it was like it was like i got hit with adrenaline i mean you know yeah like your heart is just pound it's such like that's a primal instinct it's very primal whoa there's something cool about that and it's like everything fades it's absolute flow state if you can go through the heart pounding but it's a it's a special experience when you pull back on an animal my elk in utah this year was very unusual in that i had to run to get to the waterhole before the elk did. I was in a patch of trees and I was hidden and I heard the elk screaming and we knew there was a

waterhole here and he was trotting down and there was no, I tried a couple spots, but there was no clean path to shoot through the trees. And I managed to do it quickly and quietly enough so that he didn't see me moving and I was hiding behind trees, but I knew I had to get through the trees. And I managed to do it quickly and quietly enough so that he didn't see me moving and I was hiding behind trees. But I knew I had to get all the way to the water hole before him. So I had to run and I had to jump over logs. So there's these downed trees. I'd hop on top of these trees and jump over them. So I ran about 50, 60 yards until I got to this spot where he was. I really had to sprint. and then i had to calm myself down and i looked at him i ranged him i and i was i had the bow in my hands he looks up at me and i drew back

as he was looking at me and he was just because i'm in full camera with gloves face mask head gear the whole full sitka gear he was like what the fuck is that and then you know i probably had a second before he realized what i was before he was going to bolt. And I released the arrow right at that moment. So it was intense. And it was super adrenaline packed because I knew I had to run too. So there was all this like he's at the waterhole. I range him.

He steps away from the waterhole. And then he looks up. And as he's looking up, I'm just drawn back. And I think I had a second or two before he was like oh that's a fucking person man dressed up like a tree but it was so it was so it was it was a moment where if i hadn't prepared properly i would have never been able to pull it off if i wasn't physically in shape i would never been able to run there and have my heart rate drop down. If I wasn't confident enough in my shooting that I shot

so many thousands and thousands and thousands of arrows, I wouldn't have been able to execute because it was a weird shot too. It was downhill, 52 yards. It was a lot going on. But I'll never forget that. When I eat that food, I think about that animal. Absolutely.

It's like such a cool thing to have the story wrapped up in all of it. It's so rich. It's such a different experience than we get as humans. Sometimes I think about the irony of 2020 or even the last century that we have. We've put ourselves in digital worlds to work on computers indoors to make fake numbers in a bank account or green pieces of paper that allow us to go hike and do the things that we were doing in our whole, I mean, how enjoyable is hiking? How enjoyable is being in the wilderness? How enjoyable is hunting?

And just, just hiking alone is cleansing, right? Like there's something about being around trees. I don't know what it is. I mean, whether it's the oxygen that you get from them or whether it's just a signal to your body that this is a natural way to exist, to be in wilderness, in nature. It feels good for you. To just be walking through and just seeing it, it enriches your soul. There's something about looking at mountains and trees and a stream

that it's this crazy natural beauty, this natural artwork, that it's this crazy natural beauty, this natural artwork that your senses react to this in this incredibly pleasing way. Like, wow. Like I remember we came over this ridge and there's a creek below us and there's this beautiful green hill and there's a mountain behind it. And I heard this bull elk on the hill above it scream. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, this is gorgeous. the hill above it was screaming and i'm looking at this i'm like this is gorgeous it's so pretty like everything about it just made my whole body just feel good like like a drug like a happy drug cell phone didn't work you know there's no signal out there it's just peaceful just peaceful just just nature the way it was for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years before people ever even came here.

I think that's what the remembering is about. And that it's like there's something bigger than us. And I'm not religious, maybe a little spiritual in nature, but I've had those same experiences on a long run or just being in the wilderness. You're like, there's something here. There's a connection that we have to this wild world that we evolved through that we don't, we're just, we're like neutered when we're out here with the concrete and we're looking at buildings and it's, you know, the way we live and it's, there's a lot of great benefits to living in cities and all that stuff.

But there's something about it when you're in a car, you're just, you know, you're sitting at a desk, you're, you're muted, you're muted and neutered, both those things. It's like, you're not connected to the muted and neutered, both those things. It's like you're not connected to the wild world. I agree with you completely. And I think that in some ways, I suspect that it's built into our consciousness, just like that ERP study that I showed you with meat. And I think there have been similar EEG studies with nature scenery that we just, ultimately we're animals. And we try to pretend that we're not. And I think that we're trying to become the best animal that we can be the most ethical, kind, empathetic animal.

But we still, I think that we would do well to consider the fact that if we discard everywhere we've come from, we may end up in a position that's pretty miserable for humans. If we discard wilderness, if we discard what I believe are the most ancestrally consistent foods, if we discard the patterns of human interaction, we're just going to go further down. My fear is that this is inevitable and that what we are going to become is some sort of a symbiotic thing

where we're part... We're going to be a cyborg. We're going to be part electronics. We're going to be more immersed in the electronic world than even we are now. And that this trend of becoming addicted to your phones and constantly online and all these different things that we all see with people, that this is just a step in this inevitable process. But right now we're not there. So right now that is not enriching to us. It doesn't feel good. This might be what a person is a thousand years from now. It might be

out of our control. It might be just the way of entropy, the way the world works, the way of innovation, the way of just the evolution of the biological thing that is a human being. It might inevitably move in that direction.

But it's not that way right now. And if you live that way right now, you'll be miserable. You'll be depressed. You'll be disconnected. And that's why you see all these people that are living online most of the time on Twitter, just fucking arguing and throwing shit at each other, like insane patients. They're like people in a mental institution and they really are mentally unwell. They're in a depressed, crazy, agitated state most of the day arguing with people. And this is, I would imagine, like, I don't know what the number is, but maybe 40% of all interactions on Twitter are people yelling at each other. It's so scary. And I've experienced it firsthand because when you start, I mean, I'm new to this whole thing, you know, like I went to residency. I didn't expect this

to happen. I got interested in stuff. I started talking about my ideas and then suddenly you put ideas out there and there are people slinging shit at you all the time angry angry and charlatan calling you a clown or an idiot it's like you know like would you do that to me in person i don't think so like i would hope not i love debating people i love having respectful conversation that's what we're about. If I'm wrong, awesome, because then we understood what's right. Good for you.

That's ultimately, and I want to live up to that. You know, I think all of us have ego, right? That's the best version of you though, right? Like when you're confronted with an idea that's contrary to what you believe, you recognize it and you adjust. And I've had to, you know, when I first started the carnivore diet,

I thought, okay, all carbohydrates are bad. Even in the last year and a half, I I've had to, you know, when I first started the carnivore diet, I thought, okay, all carbohydrates are bad. Even in the last year and a half, I've kind of said, you know what, maybe there's some nuance here. And it's so strange because there's definitely a religiosity in the carnivore community that I don't identify with. And there were people just, you know, hating. Well, there's a lot of people in the carnivore diet that are basically meat eating vegans.

I know. And it's, it's a and it's a sad thing. It is weird. Like, they just have this idea in a way that is, it's, they've got an identity, you know, and their identity is meat-eating. And I don't know, I don't think that's a good way to sell it. I don't think it is.

I think we've got to move past that and say, you know what, it's about human health. It's about people being able to live in the best way possible. And there's a lot of ways to do that. And if these tools are unique, they certainly challenge the mainstream. So I think they're valuable. I think challenging the status quo is indispensable because we have to have the dissenting voices. Sometimes the dissenting voices are wrong and sometimes the dissenting voices are right, but we can't silence the dissenting voices. And they're valuable. And I think it's, I love the disruptors.

I love disruptive ideas. They challenge us. But as a society, we rebel against disruptive ideas. I mean, look at the cancel culture that's happening now. And so the carnivore diet and animal-based diets, these are disruptive ideas. And at the same time, I think that could be really helpful. But let's understand.

Let's find out. Well, I think when I was younger, I would look at any idea that was contrary to mainstream as likely being incorrect. But then as I've gotten older, I realized most people are not really paying that much attention. And then when you find out how little, when it comes to nutrition, how little nutrition education doctors receive. So many doctors that are giving you advice. Like I've had doctors say, you don't need to take vitamins. Just eat a well-balanced diet.

And I'm like, what are you talking about? First of all, you look like shit. Like tell me what a well-balanced diet is. You have a gut. This is a crazy conversation. You look like your shoulders would rip apart if you tried to pick up a piece of weight. I think they would. They would herniate a disc in their back.

A lot of people that are just there's their their physical condition is so poor and yet they're giving advice about sustaining their physical condition i'm like come on man you know very little about nutrition this is crazy that you're giving advice and then you start to look at people outside the norm like yourself and you go okay this guy has spent so much time thinking about this stuff. Maybe he's got some insight that other people have not acquired. We hope so. And that's why we have productive, respectful conversations, you know? Yes. And then people can decide because ultimately it's just about everybody understanding what's going to benefit them the most. So I wanted to, before we get going, I wanted to talk about the benefits of like what, when you talk about grass

fed, grass finished meat, what is the nutritional benefit of that over in terms of like essential fatty acids and nutrient content over animals that are fed grain? So if you look at the absolute nutritional content of grass versus grain, grass finished versus grain finished animals, they're pretty similar. What's different about grass-fed animals, in my opinion, is what they're not fed, what they're not subjected to. So you remember that the majority of any cow's life is spent on a pasture. So most cows are eating grass for the majority of their life. When you bring them to a feedlot, they're CAFOed, you know, they're clustered animals, and they're fed grains.

What's CAFOed? Concentrated or clustered animal feeding operations. And they're fed grains and cookies and plastic and waste products. Cookies? Yeah, they're fed like waste products. They're fed like cookies and garbage. Yeah, yeah. Why are they fed plastic?

I think they're just trying to fatten them up. Sometimes it's just in the feed. Yeah, yeah, there's a reference in my book. On purpose? It may be mixed in with stuff. They used to be able to feed them incinerator waste i think they can't feed them incinerator waste anymore but incinerator waste yeah like what are they burning in the incinerator either other animals or just waste products yeah oh so they're you they're not i mean they're not even feeding the cows they're not feeding the cows organic grains

first of all so the cows are full of... Here it is. Legal plastic content in animal feed could harm human health. What? Small bits of plastic packaging from waste food makes it where an animal feed is a part of the UK's permitted recycling process. Oh, so it's...

So they're not penalized for accidental plastic. So it's allowed. Microplastics. Yeah, it doesn't seem like they're doing it on purpose. Maybe not's allowed. Microplastics. Yeah, it doesn't seem like they're doing it on purpose. Maybe not, yeah. It's part of it. And so this is what they're showing. Is that their poop?

That's their feed. Oh, so their feed. Those are like pellets. So those little pieces of blue and shit, that's plastic? I think so, yeah. Oh, gross. And so you gotta figure, the grains that are making that are moldy, right?

Oh, yeah. The grains are sprayed with glyphosate and atrazine, which is a known xenoestrogen. So it's a pesticide that turns male frogs into females. It's feminizing. Look at that. Now you're going into Alex Jones territories. They're making the frogs gay.

650,000 tons of unused food from loaves of bread to Mars bars are saved from landfills each year in the uk by being turned into animal feed whoa so this is what this is what grass finished cows are not fed so it's you got to figure the fat of a grass-fed animal you got you talked about this with frank von hippel franklin right yes uh you know the polycyclic aromatic hydrogen no the persistent organic pollutants the dioxins so you've got to imagine that cows eating good grass are going to have less of that in their fat. Yes.

It's in the soil, so the longer a farm has not been using those, the better. But the cleaner the cow, it's going to have less of that in its fat, less of this, less glyphosate. Glyphosate's water-soluble, so it'll probably be in the muscle. Atrazine is fat-soluble.

But this is the kind of stuff that's never been really looked at. So grass feeding is not as much about the increase in nutrient content. Grass fed, grass finished, or grain finished, they're both nutrient rich. But the grass finished is gonna have less of the bad stuff in the meat

and less of the bad stuff in the fat, in my opinion. And it's also a thousand times more ethical and part of an ecosystem, which is the only way humans are gonna persist on this planet. What about the essential fatty acid content of grass fed, grass finished beef? Is it similar? Pretty freaking similar. Really? Yeah, pretty similar. So is the talk of it being more nutritious? Is it just propaganda or is it just wishful thinking?

I think it's probably wishful thinking. Yeah. I mean, I think there's no shortage of reasons to eat grass-fed, grass-finished meat. But they look different. That's what kills me. Like, if I buy domestic cattle, if I buy domestic beef, and I buy grass-fed beef, it looks closer to, like, what I get from an elk or a bison. It looks like wild game. It's red and dark. Whereas if I buy grain-fed, it's, like, pinkish.

Maybe, yeah. I mean, they might be depleting some nutrients. At least in the studies that I've seen, they're comparable. Comparable. But I mean, maybe it's just the quantity that you're eating. Because when I look at it, I'm like, well, something's going on. It's a different color. Yeah.

And you see the same thing in fish too. I mean, certainly you can imagine there's going to be more carotenoids from the grass if the cow is finished on grass versus the grains, which are not going to be... You see that with salmon. They have to give salmon these coloring pills if they're farm raised to get them to make the flesh not pale. Yeah, not pale. And sometimes you'll see that with grass-fed fat. It's more orange because it has more carotenoids. But at a basic level, I mean, I do think there are probably nutritional differences, but there's not good literature to support it at this point. Well, there is literature to support it with wild game in terms of protein content.

Yeah. It's far more protein rich. Like a piece of elk is much more protein rich than a piece of beef. You get like ounce per ounce. I think it's almost double. Is that because of the lower fat? Is that because elk is so much more lean? That's a good question. I don't know if the

fat in a beef steak could be that prevalent, where it's 50%. No, it wouldn't be 50%, but by calorie... I just think it's an athlete. I think when you're dealing with a cow, you're dealing with something that's kind of just chilling and eating grass. When you're... If you eat an elk, you're dealing with something that's

running from mountain lions and wolves. I mean, it's just a different kind of animal. I mean, I prefer venison and elk when I have it. I love the gamey flavor and everything. Well, do you know what you're saying? If you eat liver, that it gives you like this kind of boost? Yeah. Nothing gives me a boost like elk meat.

There's something about that dark red gold, that rich meat, that when you eat it, it's just like, whoo! You feel great. It's rewarding to your body. Your body is saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude, give me some more of this. This is what we need to recover. This is what we need to rebuild cells. This is what we need to rebuild tissue. It would be super interesting to do some studies on that, to take the elk meat that you've hunted, to put it through gas chromatography, mass spec, do some analyses and look at it compared to like grass-fed beef or something. See if it's like excess carnitine or maybe some more choline or carnosine or something. I'm sure there's something in there that makes it special. I mean, it's wild.

Well, acetylcholine is a nootropic and it's one of the ingredients in alpha brain. Is that the same thing as choline that you're talking about, or is there a different kind of choline? Choline is a precursor for acetylcholine. So acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter, and I think AlphaBrain has huperzine, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, and that allows more acetylcholine in the synapse. So if you increase acetylcholine in the synapse, it can be a nootropic. Absolutely. But choline is a precursor for acetylcholine in the synapse, it can be a nootropic. Absolutely. But choline is a precursor for acetylcholine and phosphatidylcholine, which is the phospholipid that makes up all the cells of our body and the myelin sheath on neurons. And again, really, really, really hard to get an optimal amount of choline without eating animals.

That's why, that's why I'm bringing it up. without eating animals. That's why, that's why I'm bringing it up, that's why it's, there's been studies that have connected eating meat to brain function.

Oh yeah. Creatine too. Yeah. And this is very controversial because people get up in arms about this. I think it's pretty straightforward.

Maybe straightforward scientifically, but I don't think it's controversial. The plant-based folks get very, they get their panties in the water about this one in a big way. So Jamie, but the plant-based folks get very, they get their panties in the water about this one in a big way.

So Jamie, in the folder nutrients, there's one called creatine enhanced veggie. There have been interventional studies on vegans and they give them 20 grams of creatine for five days, which is a loading dose and they get smarter. And what are they using for the source of creatine? I think they're just giving them synthetic creatine for five days, which is a loading dose, and they get smarter. And what are they using for the source of creatine? I think they're just giving them synthetic creatine. And how does one make synthetic creatine? I think there are a couple of different ways to make it. We'd have to talk to your manufacturer.

So let's say consumed either a placebo or 20 grams of creatine supplement for five days. Creatine supplementation did not influence measures of verbal fluency and vigilance but in vegetarians rather than those who consume meat creatine supplements resulted in better memory interesting and there's another study in the responsive of dietary style the supplementation of creatine decreased the variability in the responses to a choice reaction time task creatine is a critical nutrient for humans, for the human brain. There's another one also, Jamie, there. This one's even a little bit better study.

It's creatine DRBP. Do you see that one? Yeah. So oral creatine monohydrate supplementation improves brain performance, a double blind placebo controlled crossover trial. I have read that, that creatine can be a nootropic. Do you take it or do you just get it from meat? Meat. So I think that the studies pretty clearly show that if you're eating what I would consider to be an ancestrally appropriate amount of meat, you don't benefit

from more. There's a place at which you can saturate your muscles with creatine. It's about five grams a day, which is about the amount of creatine in one pound of meat. I eat more eat more than one pound of meat per day but if you're eating one pound of meat per day you're probably a supplement no need to supplement with creatine would supplementing it increase your muscle strength though um because that's what a lot of people do that's what they do it for yeah yeah i've done it it made me kind of fat like i gained well it can cause puffy you can super supplement and you might be able to retain more water yeah yeah but i think if you're eating a pound of meat per day plus you're probably not going to get a whole lot of performance benefit supplementing with creatine but the gaining the

water though i think was why people like your muscles are getting larger because of that i think they felt stronger right in people who are creatine deficient certainly supplementation is powerful and again there's no creatine in plant foods. You can make a small amount of it in your body, but there's a lot of evidence that it's inadequate. But you would recommend if someone is on a plant-based diet that they probably should supplement with synthetic creatine. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's so many nutrients like this, creatine, B12, niacin, that are probably essential in the formation of the human brain.

You know, we didn't talk about it today. Maybe we can if we have time or offline. You know, if you look at the way the human brain grew. We got all the time in the world, Paul. This isn't the presidential debates. This is the Joe Rogan experience. Well, it's the internet. I love it.

You can just go as long as you need to make your point. If you go to the evolution folder, Jamie, there's a brain size change graphic. That's pretty cool. So this is a graphic from my book. And you can look at the size of the human brain based on the cranial vault size. And this is fascinating. And there's a lot of theories as to why this happened. But some of the most compelling, in my opinion, are around the advent of hunting in humans.

But some of the most compelling, in my opinion, are around the advent of hunting in humans. And when you had Bill von Hippel on, so you can see here, this is millions of years on the x-axis and the size of the human brain on the y-axis. You have the primate ancestors, Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, fire, and then Neanderthals, and then Homo sapiens. So something really clearly, this is another Tony Hawk skate ramp, right? What the heck happened there? Something happened. I think the most compelling ideas are right there

that I labeled in the graph that around 2 million years ago, we see the occurrence of stone tools, these bifacial tools, these Acheulean tools, and evidence for hunting, cut marks on animals, bones, and evidence for mass animal graves. So this is really cool. I would postulate that humans becoming hunters,

becoming hunters made us human. So, you know, Steve Rinella is like doing the happy dance right now because he's right. Hunting animals made us human by providing indispensable nutrients like creatine that were prime releasers or allowed our brains to grow in this special way. It's kind of written into who we are. It's probably a bunch of other coinciding

factors too, right? Well, I mean, other people hypothesize, some people hypothesize fire. The oldest evidence we have for fire is about a million years after you start to see that cranial vault size increase. And that was because of the increase in the nutrients that were bioavailable because of cooking things over fire? Supposedly. But what's interesting is that nutrients in meat are bioavailable whether it's raw or cooked. Nutrients in plant foods, or at least in tubers, are more bioavailable when you cook them,

or at least the calories are. You ever tried to eat a raw sweet potato? I used to do that a lot when I was vegan. No. Not a good thing. Is it nasty? Nasty. Not a good thing.

I've never tried it. Have you ever listened to Terrence McKenna and his discussions about the stone ape theory? Yeah, yeah. Fascinating idea. I mean. That's a crazy theory. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely possible as well. His brother Dennis makes a very compelling argument for it as well because his brother Dennis is a scientist and he goes deep into the actual physical changes to the brain and to synapses and to the body's ability to produce language that occur while under the influence of psilocybin. And he thinks, well, it could be they were happening at the same time. I mean, this is also, they think that it might have made people better hunters because psilocybin, particularly in low doses, increases visual acuity and probably makes you more creative too. Makes you figure out how to hunt better and maybe responsible for the development of tools and other forms of creativity that benefited human beings to evolve and become better hunters. I've done it once. Only once? Only once. Interesting.

I want to do it again, but I think about it set in setting and kind of respectfully. The first time I did it was a few years ago. And so I'd never done it before in my life. So it's only within the first few years that I tried it, last few years. But my experience was profound. And I don't doubt any of that with what I experienced. It was clarity. I felt so at home in the natural world. It was incredible. And I was out hiking in Seattle where I was doing my residency. And I was with a friend. And we were by a lake.

And it was just me and the wilderness. I was by myself. I had a different connection with trees and plants. And it felt so different. It was just like a door opened to this, this experience. It was like a whole different unique thing. And, um, I was with a friend, he had to go back. He was on call and I said, just leave me here. I just want to say, I never wanted to leave.

I felt so at home in the wilderness. And so, you know, I hope that, um, it's probably controversial, maybe not in 2020 for a mainstream physician to say I've used psilocybin. I don't think so anymore. It's now being used in trials for PTSD. John Hopkins, yeah. I mean, it's incredibly powerful, which actually gets to an important point that I should make about plants, which is that I don't want anyone to think that I'm against

plants as medicine. I think there are many plant compounds that are very valuable for humans. Medical marijuana, psilocybin, clearly impactful for humans. But there's a real dividing line between that and using plants as food or using plants to make you better every day. So we should just say that. But yeah, I mean, my experience with psilocybin was profound. And I think that it's something that I hope more trials will happen with the FDA. But I was so curious, you know, I was reading about it. I knew they were doing studies at Hopkins

and they were doing studies at NYU. And I thought, I almost felt irresponsible as a physician not knowing what this experience was like. I wanted to turn off the default mode network. I wanted to see what it was like without ego. And it was an incredible experience. So having had that experience, I don't doubt it. When I was at White Oak Pastures a couple weeks ago,

I was walking through a pasture with cow pies and there were psilocybe cyanuses growing. And I was like, ah, stone deep. Just makes sense that they would try it, right? I mean, they flip over cow patties. If you watch primates, they do it to get bugs and grubs. It makes sense they would try the mushrooms. And if they did try it and started tripping and found it to be incredibly euphoric and enjoyable i would imagine they

would consume it quite a bit and what terence mckenna's research shows is that it corresponds with a climate change and a decreasing of the rainforest and it's rescinding into grasslands and that that would also increase the number of ruminants and these cattle that were, these undulates that were leaving these piles of shit and then these mushrooms would grow on them. It all makes sense. It totally makes sense. I'd never seen it before and I was like,

that's actually real. Yeah. They do grow. It's a fascinating theory, you know, but who knows. Listen, man, this was an awesome talk. I really appreciate it. Your book, The Carnivore Code, is available right now. Is there an audio?

There's an audio. I read it. Thank you. I'm so glad you do the reading because most people are going to fuck up half of the words in this thing. It's very complicated. You do a fantastic job of breaking this down, though. And the fact that you do this all on memory with no carbohydrates, it's quite amazing. I had a little bit of honey today but not a lot

i'm definitely definitely in ketosis right now and some grass-fed bison all right uh and paul saladino uh the carnivore code thank you very much brother thanks for having me on brother it was very fun thank you bye everybody Thank you.