The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 239: Kale Does Not Love You Back

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Paul Saladino, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: getting buzzed on liver; Jani's wife's placenta made into pills; the unique nutrients in animals not found in plants; strolling around graveyards; why we were told red meat and animal fat were bad for us; tallow and lard; spurious correlations; how creatine makes vegans and vegetarians smarter; self-care is not selfish; pooping every day; plant toxicity as part of a plant's strategy to not get eaten; Paul takes deep breaths and Steve chugs coffee; how Paul thinks that plants mess you up real bad; how vegans and vegetarians eat meat when they’re drunk; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. Okay, we're here with Dr. Paul Saladino, and the first thing we're going to talk about, did I get that right? You got it, man. Why are we, tell people what we're having in pill form right now. So my hope was that I would get everybody a little bit buzzed on liver pills before we got started on this podcast. So these are desiccated organs. The first sampling, it's like a tasting, like you go to a wine bar or a beer house, you get a sampling, a tasting. So I brought two different vintages today. We've got the bone marrow and liver pills. Steve is over here sniffing them.

Smelling mine, eating them. I have 12 to eat. He has 12 to eat. So the first vintage is bone marrow and liver from grass-fed, grass-finished cattle raised in New Zealand on regenerative farms. And the second vintage is beef organs, which consists of heart, liver, kidney, spleen, and pancreas from similarly raised cattle in New Zealand. And these are super interesting for me

because a lot of people don't understand how valuable organs are. I think as a hunter, you guys probably get this. Or if you think about the way that indigenous people and hunter-gatherers have eaten animals throughout antiquity, they eat them nose to tail. They eat the whole animal, right? Nothing is wasted. And a lot of the organs are sacred. They're regarded as sacred, this Nuer tribe in Africa. They're super tall. Even the women are like above six feet. They think of liver as too sacred to be touched by human hands. But it's just regarded.

They've realized over generations that if they feed the organs, specifically things like liver and spleen and pancreas and heart, their warriors get strong. The young people are fertile. They have healthy babies. It's just by trial and error, they've realized, hey, there are unique nutrients in these organs. And what's so interesting for me about this is the way that we become optimally healthy humans and how much of this we're missing in our diet. So I'm a doctor. I think about nutrition. I think about nutritional adequacy, vitamins, minerals, where we get them. And one of the most striking things that I've encountered

in writing this book, The Carnivore Code, we'll talk about it today, is that, hey, a lot of the nutrients that you find when you're eating animal meat and organs are pretty difficult to find elsewhere in our diets, which really speaks to this evolutionary program, this evolutionary blueprint that humans have to eat animals and in their entirety throughout our whole existence. And so one of the passionate projects that I developed was this company called Heart and Soil to make these

desiccated organ supplements for people who can't access the organs or who don't want to eat the organs because if you've ever seen a pancreas, it looks like a little alien.

I mean, you can eat it, but a lot of people won't do it, but I still want to be able to get people this good nutrition. So like my sister's kids, niece and nephew,

and my parents, and my grandparents, they're probably not going to eat a pancreas or a spleen, but they'll take these pills. And so everybody in this room is now getting a little bit buzzed on the unique nutrients found in these two rare vintages that I brought. When I was a little boy and you got into an argument about vegetarianism, you'd be like, you can't be a vegetarian because you won't get B12, right? Or vegan or whatever. Yeah. But then I read that you get enough B12 off insect contamination

in your produce. Probably not. But what is it that you need? Man, I got a thousand questions. That's a good one, though. No, can we back? Hold that question. Okay.

Because I want Yanni to tell you about his special pills. All right. Oh, Steve wanted me to tell you about how I think it was our firstborn. We took the placenta. I love it. And had it turned basically into a pill. Did you eat it? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, but it was more like witchcraft than health. I ate the pills. I didn't eat the raw placenta. But it was kind of like witchcraft-y more than like health, right? Like it was like spiritual, metaphysical. It wasn't like good for your health. Well, I think it's kind of both. No, I think it was the latter.

Oh, it was meant to be good for your health. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I thought it was more like metaphysical in nature. I think it's kind of both. I think that a lot of the stories around the organs came from observed health benefits. People think, oh, we eat the heart. It makes me strong.

That's interesting because there's extra coenzyme Q10 in heart. So I think the question you were going to ask was what are the unique nutrients in animal foods? Oh, yeah. That's what I was going to ask. Yeah. What are the unique nutrients? Because I used to know about B12, right? But everybody knows that one.

Right. But the list is really, really long. This is so fascinating. So one of the interesting ideas that I've come across in this sort of this realm of carnivore and animal-based diets is that if you look at plants and you look at what we can get nutritionally from plants, there are no nutrients in plants. And this is going to sound crazy, but it's true. There are no nutrients in plants that we this is going to sound crazy, but it's true. There are no nutrients in plants that we cannot get from animals if we eat them nose to tail. Meaning if we eat- Yeah. Yeah. But the reverse is not true. There are so many unique nutrients in animal foods

eaten nose to tail that you cannot get from plants. And B12, which is a molecule called cobalamin, is just one of them. And it's really a myth that you can get enough B12 to have adequate methylation and all these other physiologic processes you need in your body from just animals on your produce. That doesn't happen. You really should eat animal foods. But the list is very long. You guys heard of creatine? Oh, yeah. I don't know what it is.

Creatine. So it's a molecule that your body makes, but it only makes a small amount. And you get creatine in muscle meat and liver and things like this. And then carnitine, choline, carnosine, anserine, taurine. I can talk about any of these. Vitamin K2. The list is long. There's probably about nine to 10 unique nutrients just that we know about that we need to be optimal humans. And there's medical studies on all of them showing this has this benefit, this has this benefit, and we only get them from eating animal organs and meat so a question that i'll ask people is and this is just a question that a doctor would ask somebody because it's a nerdy

question where do you get your riboflavin man i don't know i think it's been special k don't they advertise that yeah i was to say some breakfast cereal. There's a breakfast cereal company that sort of introduced Americans to the idea of riboflavin. You're like, I don't know what it is, but I accept that I need it. I need it, right? Well, you definitely need it. Riboflavin is vitamin B2. And if we get it in a synthetic form, it's two different molecules.

This gets a little complex. I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but a lot of the molecules, a lot of these vitamins have like mirror images when we synthesize them. But in nature, they only exist as one form. They're called enantiomers. They're these mirror images that look like your hands. They're not the same image, but they're a mirror image, but you can't overlay them, right? So they have what's called chirality. They're enantiomers. And when you synthesize vitamins like riboflavin in a lab, you get both in antiemers. But in the natural world, only one of them is occurring. So the riboflavin you get in liver, liver and heart are the main

place that humans have gotten riboflavin throughout our evolution. And it's a nutrient that's critical for humans to do a process called methylation for our biochemistry to work right, for us to make sex hormones and neurotransmitters and to have energy metabolism, basically to feel as good as possible and experience life as richly as we can, we need these little micronutrients. And when you get the riboflavin made in the lab from Special K, this other mirror image can block what the actual biological molecule is supposed to do. So the takeaway here is that the real form of the vitamin, quote unquote real form, that occurs in natural food is always better. It's a concept that's not too far from our intuition, but it's been corroborated by science. So yeah, you can

get a little riboflavin or a little bit of folate from your special K, but the versions you find in real food, especially animal foods, are much more utilized and easily utilized and help us become better individuals. I mean, that's what's so fascinating to me as a doctor. How do we kick the most ass as humans?

How do we enjoy this life, these short 85 years that we get on this planet? If you're lucky. If you're lucky, right? If you're lucky, yeah. I was talking to a guy the other day

and his dad all of a sudden died at 72. I'm like, I don't like hearing, I'm at the point where I don't like hearing that kind of stuff. How old are your parents? Well, my mom, my dad died at 80. My mom's 80 now. Okay. So your parents have gotten, I mean, your dad lived 80 years.

Yeah. Your mom's lived a good life. My parents are both 70 and it's thinking, you start to think about mortality when your parents get close to that age. And I told you I was walking around a graveyard here in Bozeman, Montana last night. That's what I do when I come to new towns. Not all the time, but I like thinking about that stuff. And we were looking at grave sites for people from 1890 and even 1906. And you think, what happened?

What was their life back then like? And mortality is clarifying, but- Well, they've sat around talking about how this place got too crowded and it went to shit. In 1906. 1906. And, you know, you think, wow, what was it like? But it also reminds you, I'm going to die one day. And I think as a doctor who started out as somebody that just liked to be outside, I'm kind of straddling both worlds.

I want to live as well as I can. And that's why I went to medical school was that I enjoyed doing things outside. I enjoyed hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I through hiked it when I was 21 years old. And I've been, you know, like a casual mountaineer for a long time. I love backcountry skiing. And I thought, man, this is a beautiful life. I love being outdoors. How do I do this for as long as possible? I want to surf and ski and climb mountains for as long as possible. And that's why I think human health is fascinating. And I think that if we can understand how humans are really programmed to eat, we get to do those things longer. You guys get to go on expeditions longer and hunt animals in a beautiful way.

And you just get to have more fun in life when you get your riboflavin. Yeah. I remember reading about hide hunters, like commercial hunters on the texas plains and how there's there's there's a reference to how they would just eat like the the finer cuts on animals and they would get nutrient deficiencies and they had to learn um they had to learn he had to eat all this stuff. Exactly. They had to eat the organs and they would like put bile. They would put bile on meat and do all these things, just eat as much stuff as they could.

And they found that they would get better health than if they were just eating like back, just eating backstrap. Exactly. Backstrap and tongue. Yeah. They like the tongues. And that happens today too. I mean, we see that over and over and within the carnivore animal-based community, you see that. I work with people who just eat the muscle meat because that's all we're really used to today in 2020. And they get

folate deficiency and you get all kinds of things that don't really go that well. But if you eat nose to tail, you feel really good, which is why a lot of times when people do things like the desiccated liver supplements or eat fresh liver, they get a little buzz. So any minute now, the buzz is going to be kicking in for you guys. Yeah, but we eat a lot of heart and liver. So you guys are probably pretty good. Yeah, we're tuned in. You're tuned in. But this is, I think that what's so interesting is these trappers, these hide hunters didn't understand what the Native Americans did, right? Because the Native

Americans knew that. They ate these animal organs. They ate the animal fat. They ate the kidney fat, which we call the suet, the perinephric fat. They ate these animal organs. They ate the animal fat. They ate the kidney fat, which we call the suet, the perinephric fat. They ate the gallbladder. There's all these stories of kids in indigenous cultures using the gallbladder like salt because it's salty and they'll squirt the bile on meat and stuff. And there's valuable nutrients throughout it, but it makes all of us kind of go, ooh, it's gross. And so I really think that a lot of the illness that we suffer today as humans, a lot of the chronic disease, a lot of the non-optimal living that we do is because of these nutrient deficiencies. And so that's why it's cool to get to do this work because it's so awesome to get an email back from somebody who says things like, I have so much more energy. My libido is better. I lost weight. I can sleep now. Or my autoimmune disease went away when they make dietary changes. The first of which is probably including these organs in their diet. And we can talk about other dietary changes you might make to get that way.

But that's what's really cool. And it's this sort of ancestral wisdom that's been lost. I got to hit you with my first question before we get into details. And I want you to talk about your diet too. But here's my first question is there's a criticism of american society today that we don't agree on that we no longer agree on the objective realities right that there's two versions of truth um or multiple versions of truth when i think that we have this nostalgic attitude that once upon a time there was only like one version of truth and and i wonder is it infiltrated diet like i don't remember when i was a little kid i don't remember there being like

two versions of what healthy what was healthy i think everybody knew like the food pyramid and they're sort of like i get it i'm not gonna do it but i accept that that's correct but we've now entered into a spot where you can have a version of reality being that meat's really bad for you and it's healthy to be a vegetarian because meat kills you and that's by some people accepted like well that no that's that's objectively true that's categorically true you might choose to eat meat because you don't have self-control or you're a glutton or whatever but we all know that that's right and then then you can have another group of people being like, oh, no, no, no, no. Fat and meat, it's an objective reality that it's good for you.

You might not do that because you have a sugar addiction or you have a problem with animal ethics, but we all know that this is actually true. Like, how do people pick? Like, who's right? There's only one truth. Yeah, I know. So, right, there's one, but whose is the one? That's why I do what I do, man.

That's why I do what I do. I think that truth is what we're after. And I really love that you bring this up because I think this is a little bit of an insidious notion that there are multiple versions of truth. There's only one version of truth. And either what I'm saying is right or what the plant-based people are saying is right. And that's why I do what I do because I believe with every fiber of my being that humans have been eating meat throughout our entire evolution.

We can get into this and that it's essential for human health. And in the book, in the carnivore code, I break down why have we been told that meat is not bad,

not good for us, right? Yeah, I'd love to know. I can tell you why it's not good for you. I will. Okay. What else did I do to you? Elvis Presley died and they found a giant burger in his colon.

Like you can't digest it. I don't know. I always feel like, why do I feel, I always wonder why I feel so good. When you eat something that's so bad for you. I don't even know that I'm dying. I feel like I'm great. You feel amazing. I hear that all the time from people who email me at Heart and Soil because you can email me there if you have questions.

People say, I feel so good when I eat liver. I get high. I get a little buzz. I feel these nutrients. Conversely, there's a little bit of selection bias here in terms of who emails me with these stories. People email me and say, hey, doc, my doctor recommended that I go on a plant-based diet because XYZ. I just feel like garbage. My energy is down.

I don't feel good. I'm gaining weight. And I go, yeah, that's because you're eating the junk. You're eating survival food. So that's why I do what I do is because I feel like there are objective truths that need to be understood. And so probably for the rest of my life, this will be my life's work, is helping people of all walks of life, of all vocations, understand the science that I've seen. And I'll be debating vegans and plant-based people forever, forever trying to help people understand that what they're saying, in my opinion, is so badly mistaken.

And the reason you're misled, I suppose you understand this, but the reason a lot of people are misled is because of epidemiology. And we can get into what that is and why the science is not all the same, but there's, it's not being told to us accurately. We're being told things that are based on studies that are observational. They're not actually interventional real science. And it's very hard for someone that's not a medical doctor or a medical researcher to understand that. So we are being misled. And what's cool is that I think that people will eventually realize what you've realized. If you eat animal meat and organs from well-raised animals, you are going to thrive. You're going to feel good.

Your kids are going to be healthy. You're going to be fertile. You're going to have a healthy baby. Your depression might get better. I've seen autoimmune disease get better. And you're going to go, wait a minute. There's so much cognitive dissonance here. How can this be bad for me?

And I want to be the voice or one of the voices who says, it's not bad for you. And that spark comes on in your brain and you go, of course it's not bad for me. I'm being misled. This is bad information. I don't necessarily believe that there are evil people out there or that they're trying to do harm. I just think that people are not,

they're not thinking about it properly in the plant-based world. Where did it come from? Like, I don't even know what year it was or approximately that all of a sudden that because I grew up thinking you know what if I just ate broccoli probably every day all day and maybe

an apple I'd be like the most healthiest person in the world right? Like because the food pyramid man. Was it just the food pyramid? That's the earliest thing I remember is you had like fill in that little pyramid. I don't know I mean I don't know I'm guessing. But where is this as a society did it come pyramid. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm guessing. But where as a society did it come from and emerge? I think we know where it came from.

Because if you go back two or three generations, it wasn't that way, right? You go back to your parents' parents, they understood that meat was valuable and that meat was something that was more expensive because it was more valuable nutritionally. It's really only in the last 70 years. And you can trace it back to Ancel Keys in the 1960s. There's a series of epidemiology studies that were done that began to vilify saturated fat. Tell people what epidemiology is. Yeah, I was just about to do that. So epidemiology is observational research. It's a survey. They're going to take a thousand or 10,000 people and hand them a survey that says, what did you eat for the last 10 years? How much McDonald's? How many

steaks? How many French fries? How many of these things? How many things did you eat like this? And then they're going to look at how healthy those people are. And in Western countries, in Western countries, that's a really important point because I'll contrast it with Eastern countries in a moment. But in Western countries, if you do that epidemiology today, and like we've been doing it for the last 50 to 60 years, oftentimes you will see an association, a correlation between people eating red meat and adverse health outcomes. But we know- I see where this is going. Yeah. We know correlation does not causation make. We can't draw a causative inference from a correlation. And these epidemiology studies, these observational studies were never meant to do that. They were meant to generate a hypothesis, a guess,

which you then test with interventional studies. And interventional studies with red meat have been done. They're just never talked about on the evening news. We'll get to those. They don't show any problems with meat. But the epidemiology studies show often, not all the time, but often in Western countries with Western narratives, that meat is associated with bad outcomes. Now, here's the question I have for you guys. How many times have you been to a barbecue and seen someone only eat meat? They just eat a hamburger patty. They don't eat anything else with it. There's no ketchup. There's no bun. There's no mayonnaise. There's no French fries. There's no coleslaw. There's no potato salad. How many times have you ever seen that happen happen how many times have you ever seen someone walk into mcdonald's and just

get a hamburger patty if you took my five-year-old and bought him a hot dog and only gave him the hot dog you might see that result right right maybe but he might eat the bun he might uh you might wonder later like what happened to the bun because he's just standing there with the hot dog i think at the height of atkins I might've seen it once at a restaurant where someone literally just ate two hamburger patties on their plate. Right. Yeah, I've never seen it.

But you get my point, right? Yeah. People who eat meat, generally, because we have been told, because you guys have heard this narrative, you just told me, we've been told a narrative throughout our whole life for the last 60 years that red meat is bad for you.

So who eats red meat? It's people that are out there and they're ape hangers on the Harley with tats and the hell's angels or the wild hogs. They're doing other rebellious stuff. They're looking at this health advice and going, I don't care about health advice. I'm going to discard that health advice and every other piece of health advice there is. I'm not going to exercise. I'm not going to get a colonoscopy or a mammogram. I'm going to smoke. I'm going to ride this motorcycle. I'm not going to get in the sun. I'm goingogram. I'm going to smoke. I'm going to ride this motorcycle. I'm not going to get in the sun. I'm going to eat French fries with my hamburger.

Drink plenty of alcohol. Yeah, drink alcohol. And so this is the problem. You can't, epidemiology studies cannot differentiate the meat from everything that gets eaten with the meat. And how often do things get eaten with the meat that might also be causing problems? And we can get into this. And I think that the real, the real problem, and this will be interesting for your listeners here, the real problem is not the meat. It's not the liver. It's not the

hamburgers. The real problem is the processed food. And the reason the processed food is bad is because of processed vegetable oils. And we can get into that when the time has come, but processed vegetable oils, linoleic acid, like this is the real thing driving problems. And if you look at meat, it is so often eaten with vegetable oils and so many processed foods have these vegetable oils and the linoleic acid, which is a complex word in there. So that's a whole nother rabbit hole we have to go down. But the point is people eat a lot of junk food. They had a lot of sugar. They eat a lot of bread. They eat a lot of alcohol and cigarettes with meat and epidemiology can't differentiate. But every time you or I or anyone hears on the news, red meat is associated with X, that word is associated. You will never hear on the news,

red meat causes. Because if you actually look at the interventional studies, the studies where they actually go to a laboratory or they take people and they do an interventional trial, they'll take a hundred people and they'll say, okay, this study has actually been done. And I referenced it in the book. They say, okay, we want you to remove, we want you to remove 250 calories from your diet of carbohydrates. And we're going to have you put in eight ounces of red meat per day. And they follow those people with a control group. So they have two groups. One group has eight ounces of red meat, half a pound, pretty substantial amount of red meat in their diet, extra per day. The other group has diet as usual and they follow them for four, eight, six, 10 weeks. And they look at the end of the study, the group with more red meat is better. They have lower inflammatory markers, lower inflammatory markers.

I'm getting a buzz. I can't tell if it's from the liver pills or because of what you're telling me. Because you're so excited about this red meat. Well, the main thing that's giving me a buzz is, and you haven't even gotten into it yet, but I recently switched and started cooking. When I fry fish, I fry it in beef fat. That's the way to do it. In pork fat. Tallow.

Don't cook it in vegetable oil. I switch. And here's the thing. Every time I fire that thing up, I feel guilty, but I also feel like, but I just want this to, I like it better. And it's better for you. But I feel like something in the back of my head is telling me I'm being bad. No, and we should talk about it.

I'm always doing like what I think it makes sense. It's like, there's what I think, like as a human being who studies sort of human history, world history, whatever. Right. I like, I do things that I think make sense. Right. I can just see it. But then I'm always in the back of my head is like that someone told me that it's bad,

but it goes against what my general tendency would be like if i could take an animal and it has fat on it nothing's just been out like feeding on grass and it has fat and i make an oil from that it's like i'm like it's hard for me to picture that that's worse for me than some shit a chemist made and it's just hard for me to get there but i'm like but i have to accept that it's true because i've been told kind of exactly and so before 1911 there was no such thing as vegetable oil in fact before 1865 so in 1865 cotton seed oil was made from cotton seeds these are not food nobody eats cotton seeds in 1911 crisco was founded and they started making vegetable oil and ever since between 1865 and 1911 human health got a little bit worse but In 1911, Crisco was founded and they started making vegetable oil. And ever since between 1965 and 1911, human health got a little bit worse. But between 1911 and now, we've just

absolutely, we've tanked. If you look at the rates of diabetes, if you look at the rates of chronic disease, they are skyrocketing in the last hundred years. And they're really going up since the 1970s and 1980s. And so vegetable oil was not even a thing. It didn't even exist. Our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, really our great-grandparents in like the early 1800s, all those people who died and they were in that cemetery last night that I saw who died in 1880, they were not eating vegetable oil. It didn't even exist. They were eating tallow and lard. And the pigs that were making that lard were not fed on corn and soy. They were just fed on things you know, things pigs are supposed to eat.

But the tallow- Grasshoppers. Yeah, grasshoppers and carrots. And, you know, they were just doing things wild hogs are supposed to eat. And those ancestral animal fats are what are treasured in indigenous cultures. And that's what we see over and over. That there was really, in the medical literature, there was really no such thing as a heart attack

until the really 1920s, 1930s, early 1910, that type of region. And we didn't even think about heart attacks as American people until the 1950s when Eisenhower, I believe, had his heart attack. So it's just been, it's a new invention. It didn't even happen when we were eating animal fat. Yeah, but people used to, in the old days, people like, when I was even, like my grandparents my grandparents you just people used to say like he died of old age right but i think now we just put names to it i'm gonna go back to saying people died of old age well people because now no one dies old age anymore now they die from something very specific that was like diagnosed right but you just bucket it all as being old age

yeah so i don't know but i don't know if people were dying of heart attacks or what they're just dying they get old and die and no one knew why they died. Well, I think that what we knew of medicine then was different. But even in the early 1900s, there was really no heart attack in the medical literature. People didn't like go and say, oh my God, I have so much pain in my chest. You know, people didn't have that. They would die of pneumonia or infections or things like that. But heart attacks are, I mean, we could tell when the heart arteries are blocked or you could tell if somebody has like this heart attack and they have this pain in their chest.

It just wasn't even something that we recorded until then. And even in the early 1920s, 1930s, it was rare as we were getting more and more medical knowledge and getting a sense of the heart and how it worked. And then over time, it just got to be more and more common. And so you're absolutely right, Steve. Vegetable oil is completely synthetic. It's something humans would have never eaten. And the amount of this fatty acid in there, linoleic acid, is really giving our bodies this evolutionarily inconsistent signal and causing massive problems. Not to mention that because

of the molecular structure of this oil, it oxidizes. It becomes rancid very quickly. And in order for us to eat it and not notice that and not just spit it out because it tastes like garbage, it has to be bleached and deodorized. But you're right. It's made in a lab. If you look at the way vegetable oil is made, there's nothing natural. There's nothing even that our ancestors could have ever done with that. Our ancestors could have never ground a cottonseed or a rapeseed or a soybean into oil.

They could have never done these things. What about olives? Yeah, I was just going to ask about olive oil, man. Is that a better oil? Yeah, olive oil is different. So when I think about oils, I think about, and again, I don't want to get too technical, but I think about the linoleic acid content in that oil. Linoleic acid is an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat. And olive oil is about 10% linoleic acid. And it's mostly monounsaturated fat, which is oleic acid, which is actually a fat that our body makes is an 18 carbon monounsaturated fat called oleic acid.

We don't make linoleic acid in the human body. We need a small amount, but we store extra, which means when you're eating foods that are drenched in vegetable oil, you're storing it and storing it and storing it. And that leads to major problems. So olive oil is a much better oil to eat. I think that I'm with Steve. I want to eat tallow. I want to eat animal fats because that's going to have more of the nutrients, but olive oil is probably significantly better than vegetable oil. But if you're going to cook in an oil, you got to be a little careful.

You don't want to heat it too much. But this is the point that a lot of the foods that we're told are healthy for us are completely contrived. I mean, kale has the best publicist in the whole world. When did we start thinking that broccoli and kale were healthy? So I just want to go back and complete. I want to go back and complete this stuff. I'm laughing because I got like a kale patch you wouldn't begin to comprehend in my garden. And we were talking about how kale, like growing up, whatever, you didn't pay attention to it. Well, holy shit, people are high on kale.

People like kale. It's got a good publicist, man, but it doesn't love to it. Well, holy shit, people are high on kale. People like kale. It's got a good publicist, man, but it doesn't love you back. And we can talk about why. But you were saying something earlier about broccoli. And that narrative is what's been told to all of us. And so there's both the unhealthy user bias, which is all the people who are eating red meat, doing all this other bad stuff. And all the people who are eating vegetables are doing all the healthy stuff. And so you see it over and over in Western cultures.

But if you look at epidemiology done in Asia, and there's two studies in the book I mentioned with over probably close to 300,000 people between both studies. If you look in Asia, the men who eat the most red meat have the lowest rates of heart disease. And the women who eat the most red meat

have the lowest rates of cancer. Is red meat good for Asians? Is it good, you know, and bad for Westerners? No. The narrative is completely different. The narrative. Because in Asia, red meat is associated with affluence. I was thinking this might be,

that's where you might be headed. Yep, red meat is affluence. So who eats red meat? The people that are affluent, the people that are going to actually think about health behaviors, the people that have a higher socioeconomic status,

which allows more care to doctors, which is going to give better health outcomes. So that's the huge thing that we're seeing with epidemiology. It's telling us about a cultural narrative. We can generate a hypothesis

and we have to test it. And those tests have been done, but they don't get on the news. And the tests clearly show red meat and organs are not bad for humans. And why would they be? We've been eating them for millions of years. Can you touch on something real quick? I mean, you made the point great, but I just want to double back around on it.

Where you're talking about the correlation causation thing. Yeah. I read a great explanation this once where some group was putting out how pet owners live longer insinuating that right go get a pet and you'll live longer right i remember reading like a sort of deconstruction of what that meant about well let's take a look at pet owners in america versus non-pet owners in america right there are a lot of things that are sort of in the package of pet owners that they tend to have a home and some amount of expendable income and on and on and on and so yes i would believe that that's true i don't think it's owning the pet that is

making you live longer like how do you how do you describe that? Like that problem that people run into? There's an amazing website called spuriouscorrelations.com that's done this very well. That's what I'm trying to get at, spurious correlations. Spurious correlations. And I have a couple of graphics of this in the book. And you can see this correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the per capita margarine consumption. And they're very highly correlated. They're extremely highly correlated.

Are you serious? Absolutely. It's in the book, yeah. The idea with Maine and the margarine is they're highly correlated, but are we thinking that if people eat less margarine, they're going to get divorced less? No, that makes no sense. There are things that happen in the world that are correlated that have no actual causal relationship.

I mean, the most hilarious one that's always quoted is the number of movies Nicolas Cage appears in is highly correlated with like, I think it's something morbid, like death hangings by suicide or something like that. And so you can see it. There's these charts are in that website. So you can, and people would say, okay, Nicolas Cage movies are causing people to kill themselves. So if he does a lot of movies, a lot of people will die. A lot of people will kill themselves, right?

It's a highly correlated fact, but it doesn't mean that they cause the same thing. You have to really break it down. You generate a hypothesis, and then you test it. And when you really get to the nitty gritty and you do the test, red meat is not harmful to humans, but we never hear about that. And why would it be? Why would a food, and this is the kind of, this is the way that I think about this, and I think you guys get this because you think about it the same way. Why would something that has made up the majority of the human diet, that is crucial, that has all these unique nutrients that we were talking about at the

beginning of the show. I mean, like you can't get B12 without eating meat. You can't get choline in any significant amount without eating meat. You can't be an optimally functioning human without eating meat. Why would it be bad for us? There's an amazing set of studies where they gave vegetarians creatine. So creatine is this muscle. It's a muscle-derived molecule. It's a molecule we find in the muscle in the brain that holds onto a phosphate group so it can donate its ATP, which is the energy currency of the body. So we need it to think and run neurons and flex muscles and things like this. When they give extra creatine to vegetarians, they get smarter. They do better on memory and

recall tasks and court card sorting tasks. They get smarter because they're creatine deficient in their vegan and vegetarian diet. Why would a food that provides us with all of these unique nutrients be bad for us? This makes no sense. And it begins to kind of crystallize when you think about epidemiology. That's why we've been so misled. You know, I think part of where it comes from, you'll know this better than I do, but I'm going to explain it using a different example. There's a group called the Wildlife Conservation Society, okay?

And they've always been opposed to wildlife trafficking. So particularly trafficking in endangered species. They've always resisted. On a conservation standpoint, they've opposed markets that sell illicit wildlife materials. Tiger hides, whatever, panda bear claws, what have you. When COVID hit, they took a new tact where they're like see wildlife we told you wildlife markets are bad it gave us coven but it was like i know that you believe wildlife markets are bad but you've always said wildlife markets are bad because it encourages illicit trade and endangered species you could point out to me that here's another reason but

you can't have it be that the whole reason switched and now we should hate wildlife markets because what you really want is you want wildlife markets to go away because you're trying to protect endangered species you're now being opportunistic by attaching your argument to covid transmission and i think that a big like much of the anti, I think much of the anti-meat thing is they're saying, I don't want people to be mean to animals. I don't want there to be animal exploitation. That's only going to fly with so many people. My message will resonate with far more people if I could make a health thing. And I think that's like a huge part of this. It's a very big part of it.

And I think that a lot of people in the plant-based space, I believe, are well-intentioned. I just think that they're not thinking about the studies properly. And if you ask them, a lot of them do believe morally that the consumption of animals is not a good thing. And those are sticky arguments to get into with people. I think that- Do you wade into that ever? I try because I've hunted- You get into the ethics of it?

Yeah, because I've hunted. And I'll just state at a high level that if you look at the regenerative agriculture space, which is grass feeding, grass finishing of cows and regenerative, you know, rotational grazing, that's essentially the way that bison and other ruminants have always lived on the plains. And that is carbon negative, meaning it sequesters more carbon into the soil than those animals produce. And that's been one argument, is sort of the environmental argument. So to say that cows are killing the planet is completely false because they're not. It's just how they manufacture cow meat these days. In some sense, yes.

But it's a deep rabbit hole because that also is very misleading as well. And there's been conflation of data from the FAO versus the EPA. And in my book, I have a graphic of EPA data showing that if you look at tailpipe to tailpipe, quote unquote, meaning if you look at the amount of methane emissions in dioxide equivalents that comes out of a cow versus what comes out of a tailpipe in the United States of a car, those are essentially tailpipe to tailpipe. There is no comparison. No comparison. Cars and trucks and transportation is like 26% of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2016 when this EPA data came out. And ruminants are 1.9%. And that includes even the CAFOs, the clustered animal feeding operations.

But I agree with you. Is that right? You're talking about 1.9% are 1.9%. And that includes even the CAFOs, the Clustered Animal Feeding Operations. But I agree with you. Is that right? You're talking about 1.9%? 1.9%. Now, this is U.S. data from the EPA, and it's tailpipe to tailpipe. What's so misleading is people will show data in plant-based circles from the FAO. And the FAO did a survey, and they looked at worldwide data, and they took life cycle analysis of a cow and compared it to tailpipe emissions of a car.

Life cycle analysis means how many carbon dioxide equivalents do we use up or do we put in the atmosphere in the whole life cycle of the cow? Well, if we have to put them on a truck and move them somewhere, what about the amount of carbon it takes to run the factory that has to slaughter them?

What about the carbon it takes to run the store that sells it to you? You know, that's the life cycle of a cow in terms of carbon dioxide equivalents. And they're comparing that to what comes cycle of a cow in terms of carbon dioxide equivalents. And they're comparing that to what comes out of a tailpipe of a car. No one's ever done

a life cycle analysis of a car. Of a piece of corn. Oh, well, they've done that, but they've never done life cycle analysis of what comes out

of your car. They've never done life cycle analysis of petroleum and transportation. So nobody knows. And this is what's so crazy. And I really think that the transportation industries

are protecting themselves because they are hugely contributing to this in a big way. You know, if you look at how much carbon dioxide equivalent or how much... You mean they're sitting there going, ah, it's not us, it's the cows. Exactly.

Exactly. And nobody's ever looked at the life cycle of a plane or a train or a car. Yeah. Dragging all that metal out of the ground, smelting it. Making roads. How much it costs to maintain the car, how much it costs to do the parts, how much it costs over the life cycle of the car.

Changing the tires. Exactly. The rubber. Right. So all we can really do- That's a good point, man. Nobody's done that. Nobody's done that.

All we can look at is tailpipe to tailpipe. Any PhD student sitting out there looking for a dissertation. You're not going to get funding. Don't ask the auto industry for funding. Nobody's going to fund that, you know, because they don't want you to know. So I'd be curious to hear from you guys about your experiences with hunting, but I've hunted a small amount, but I've found it very spiritual. And I don't mean that to sound flippant. So I've hunted deer three seasons now with my bow and I've gotten a deer twice. And both times that I've killed a deer with my bow, it's been one of the most memorable experiences in my life. And the first thing I think of is, holy shit, I better

live a good life because this is a responsibility. This deer gave itself to me. This is an incredibly, incredibly privileged position that I am in to eat the most nutritious food on the planet. And this is a requirement. This is an ask from however you think about the universe and God and the spirituality in our place and all of it. This is sort of life asking me to be a good person. What I've realized from the work, I read this one with Tom Brown's book. You ever read The Tracker, Tom Brown? No, but Yanni has. You read that? Yeah.

Grandfather, in a point in that book, says, in order for something to live, something else must die. And it's so true. You know, the lion on the plains doesn't feel bad about killing the antelope. It's what it must do to live, and it's part of the cycle of life. We're all going to die. I'm going to be food for worms one day. And if I'm out hiking and some bobcat or cougar decides to try and take me,

I'm going to fight. But, you know, maybe I'm part of the circle of life, and i'm gonna accept that and so oh it's the it's the human burden right the human burden is um is that like no other species has any remorse any even any even compassion for suffering it's just amazing the internet would tell you otherwise to watch predators kill shit man dude it just they just don't i'm not criticizing them i mean god bless them but um it's not they're not like i'm gonna go in there and make a good clean kill you know it's just not on their mind man and it's an interesting thing to think about, but that's the way I imagine it. And so when people, I think if someone wants to

want, chooses not to eat animals because they, they don't want to cause suffering, I think that's your choice. You know, that's your moral choice. And you have to be careful about how it's going to affect your own health. And will you come hunting with me or somebody who is more experienced with me and see what it's about and see what the responsibility is like and realize that this is how we do what we do on this earth. I mean, we kind of talked about this at the beginning of the podcast. I, what's, what I am so passionate about is helping as many people as possible live well, live as fully as possible by getting, getting the nutrients into them that are lost. These nose to tail nutrients with hardened soil and this eating animals nose to tail,

understanding that animal foods have been incorrectly vilified. In order for me to do my work in this short life as well as possible, I need to be nourished. I have to have nutrients. So in order for me to carry out the mission that I think is most important, like my responsibility is to nourish this body.

And I don't drink alcohol for a lot of the same reasons. I just, I want to be a healthy individual. Tell us about your diet. I can do something good. Okay. Yeah. But I think that that's what we do and we need to nourish ourselves to do the work that we're going to do. And the nourishment has to come from animals.

And I don't think that we should feel bad about that. That's an interesting point you bring up. And I guess I had felt that a little bit, but hadn't articulated it. And we had the founder of black rifle coffee company was on the show and it was when um it was early in the pandemic and he said something interesting to me where he was talking about um everybody was stressed out right like everybody's stressed out and we're kind of like everybody's like really analyzing their obligations and and you know you're like sort of triaging all the things in your life like it was i don't know this is a

few months ago it seems like a million years ago now but like a few months ago everybody was kind of like holy shit and he had made this point of like that he he views his obligations in these concentric circles that build out from him so and and he has this this this view of it that i thought sounded selfish but once he explained it it wasn't he's like i sit at the center of the concentric circle absolutely wrapped around that is my family you know and he said for me wrapped around that is my company the people that rely on this company to have a living. And he went on to say that like, that's where I take care. I have to take care of the center because if I don't take care of the center, then the concentric circles out from that aren't in a position to be properly serviced.

And it was like interesting to hear someone put it because the obligation you have to be like with it, to be present, to be healthy, to be like mentally clean, to not be hung over every morning. Right. It's like, it's not just you like looking out for yourself. You can imagine it as a way that you're protecting those things that are wrapped around you because there has to be that like strong core and center. If you don't protect yourself, who does that fall to? Yeah. Listen, no one's going to do it. And then, and then, and then, and then. Yeah, exactly. No one's going to do it. And I mean, look, we've all got this life to do good work. I mean, art, we're all here to do art. We're all here to make our own art. And for me as a physician, I've realized that in order to make art,

you have to be healthy. And I know you guys, we can talk about how to define healthy, but nutrition and nutritional density and nutrients and absence of inflammation and autoimmunity, that allows people to make their art. There's so much beautiful art and whether it's painted art or singing art, or this type of spoken art or writing art, like this allows us to do our work. And that's what makes life meaningful is to create something beautiful. You got to be healthy to do it. And that's why I want to do what I do is to help people make more beautiful art because God knows we need more beautiful art in this world.

And that sounds woo-woo, but you get it. And it's exactly the same thing that we have to take care of ourselves. And for me, when I was hunting, I'll just wrap this thought up and then I'll tell you what I eat. Like I realized, okay, this is the most nutritious food on the planet. Those two whitetail that I've eaten have been some of the most nourishing food. But I also remembered every single bite, like, okay, I took this life. This is my responsibility to do well remind me to be a good human. And I think that's one of the tragic things about getting your food from a grocery store all the time. And you guys probably get this. I mean, I think that if more people could hunt, we would be a different society. And that's the way it used to be. You know, I mean, think about how many generations ago,

it wasn't that long ago when a lot of the food we got was from hunting. And if people just look below the surface, I'm sure that would have reminded them, this is, I should be gracious for this. This is bounty. This is nutritious food. I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to eat all the organs, get all my nutrition, and it's going to nourish me to do whatever I find meaningful in this life. That's my take as a doctor. It's cool stuff. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer,

you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club,

y'all. I think there is a lot of value in the mental aspect of it. I mean, you know, it's not all chemistry too, because when we're eating fish and game that we caught ourselves or hunted ourselves, or even eating things that we grew ourselves, I just like,

I become aware of it and otherwise wouldn't pay any attention to it. I would just be like, Oh, whatever, you know, it wouldn't be interesting to me, but also it becomes like intensely interesting to me. And there's probably more.

And I like, and I pay more attention to it and focus on it more. And I'm more concerned about the quality because it like, it becomes a thing of spiritual mental interest to me. And it heightens its, it heightens my awareness and involvement with it. Whereas otherwise it would be just like another blase boring thing that I wasn't even considerate of, you know? And I think that humans need wild places

just like they need nutrients. Every time you take a bite of food that you've grown or gathered or hunted, there's a memory of being in a wild place or being outdoors somehow. And that's nourishing for us too. You think, oh man, I think about the camping trip and the hunting trip I went on in January

in Junction, Texas, where I got that deer, you know, with my bow. And then I think about the one in Flagstaff, Arizona a few years ago, where I got my bow and I know exactly where it happened. And I know that space. And in order to get those animals with a bow, I had to know that space well. I had to become a part of that space. And I had to think, where am I in relation to these animals? How do I smell? What time of day is it? And so you get this wilderness experience and that's also valuable for humans. So the whole thing kind of wraps into each other and gives you this such a powerful experience that I think for me has always spoken to the ethical consideration. Like, yes, we don't want

anything to suffer. And this is such a rich experience. And I would suggest an indispensable, invaluable part of being a human to be interacting with animals that way in a respectful way. You really become part of the whole community, don't you? You do. You're part of an ecosystem. You know, you become part of an outdoor ecosystem, an outdoor community. And I think that, I mean, going to grocery stores is kind of tragic. We all have to do it today, but how cool would it be to get back into that more? And that's what you guys do. And that's why it's so cool. And I want to get back to doing more of that. And I think that it starts with the nutrition and then you start getting back into those

wild places. And I'm hoping to get to a point in my life real soon where I can do a lot more of that. Now, in the book, in the carnivore code, I outline five tiers of a carnivore diet. And before I start into this, I'll just tell people who are listening, my intention in talking about carnivore diets and animal foods is not to convince everybody in the world to stop eating plants. It's really to construct a diet hierarchy in terms of nutritional value and like the way that these foods make us who we are or allow us to become as optimal as we can be as humans from like a medical, biochemical, nutritional perspective. And so my thesis with a carnivore diet or an animal-based diet, which is a little more of an inclusive idea, is that kind of like we've been talking about, animal foods, eating nose to tail, organs, and meat have been at the center of our ancestors' existence forever, since we were hominids, and that they are the most

valuable foods on the planet. And yet, again, as we've talked about, they've been vilified for the last 70 years. They should not be vilified. So I think that the first step to doing our art, to being as optimal as possible, is remembering that animal foods eaten nose to tail are the most nutritionally dense and valuable foods on the planet. Like I said earlier, they have nutrients that are not found anywhere else that are very difficult to get. They're magical foods, quote unquote. They're just the most nutritional foods on the planet. These are the most important foods for us to get. We should not believe that they are harmful for us. And then beyond that, in the book, I've created a broad strokes perspective on what I believe are more and less toxic plants. So I don't want people to think that they can't

eat any plants or they shouldn't eat any plants. Some people do really well with no plants in their diet. I haven't eaten significant amounts of plant foods in over two years and I feel pretty darn good. And I'm not combusting with oxidative stress or, you know, backed up into ridiculous amounts with constipation. I poop every day, guys. I know you're all wondering about this with no fiber in my diet. I actually wasn't, but it's good to hear. It's good to hear. So I, you know, there's this, there's this spectrum of plant toxicity, which plants are more and less toxic. And if people want to include plants in their diet, which are the least toxic parts of plants and the least toxic plants? Yeah, you better explain plant toxicity.

Yeah. Because, I mean, it's a thing that plants, I mean, as much as you can say a plant intentionally does something, it's like a part of a plant strategy. It is absolutely a part of a plant strategy. And it makes sense evolutionarily. When you go hunting animals, they're going to run away from you. They're pretty crafty. They can bite you or kick you or gore you or they can just run away. They're flying away or they're fast or they're crafty. They, they fear better than us or smell better than us, but plants are rooted in the ground. This is not surprising to anyone, but there's been a co-evolution between animals and plants for over 450 million years. And animals and plants have

been in this kind of ongoing warfare, this chemical warfare. Plants have had to evolve defense chemicals to meter how much they get consumed by herbivorous animals or omnivorous animals, or there would be no such thing as ecosystems. If every tree was just made of chocolate or whatever, you know, delicacy, a bear or, you know, any animal wants to go eat, there would be no plants left on the planet because animals would eat the plants, they would reproduce more, and there would just be more and more animals and less and less plants. So there is this delicate balance. And that delicate balance is really, it's just, it's coordinated, it's orchestrated by these plant chemicals. And we're familiar with some of these. A lot of us know about some plants that are toxic around,

you know, around Christmas. If you have a poinsettia in your house, you're like, don't let the kids go by the poinsettia. You guys know the poinsettia plants? Oh yeah, but I didn't know they'd mess you up. Oh, they're super toxic. Oh, I didn't know. Oh yeah, they're super toxic. Maybe I knew that and forgot. I don't know. They're toxic like in what way?

If you eat them? If a kid eats a poinsettia, yeah, they can get really, really sick. And there's a lot of other plants like that. And we're familiar with gluten and lectins. It messes up a lot of people's guts. I mean, there's a lot of plants out there that are just totally freaking toxic. There are people that have died from eating too much sorrel and sorrel, you know. And that's because of the amount of oxalates in there.

So that's a whole other thing we can go down a rabbit hole with. But there are a lot of plant toxins out there. And the idea is that the roots, the stems, the leaves and the seeds of plants are plants kind of just saying, hey, I'm here and you're there. I'm good. Don't mess with me.

I won't mess with you. Let's just try and be friends. I'm going to put some toxins in these foods, these parts of my plant and dissuade you from over-consuming them. And if you eat a lot of them, you're not going to feel very good, or you might even die. I might make this fruit every once in a while, and that's going to be less toxic, because I kind of want you to eat that and then poop out my seeds somewhere else where it has this

fertile pile of manure for me to grow. But there's a clear communication here. And so if you look at plants, the seeds of plants, which essentially are seeds, nuts, grains, and legumes, so beans, are all seeds. They're all plant babies. They're all plant reproductive efforts to reproduce, to put their generation forward, to put the next generation of DNA beyond them. And these are some of the most highly defended parts of plants. And this won't really be totally foreign to anyone who's heard of things like gluten intolerance or celiac disease. Well, wheat is a grain and it has a lot of lectins. Gluten is one. Lectins are these one type of plant defense chemical compound,

but it has other lectins like wheat germagglutinin. A lot of things in wheat are not good for humans. It's a plant seed. It's a grain. A lot of other grains are not so good for us, like beans. Beans are, well, excuse me, a lot of other seeds are not so good for us, like beans. If you eat, you ever try to eat a raw bean, like off the plant? What kind of bean? Like a kidney bean. You ever seen a kidney bean or a lime bean growing? No, I've never eaten them off. They're super toxic.

I've eaten raw soybeans. Really? Yeah. How'd you feel? I didn't eat enough. I knew that it'll mess you up, so I never ate enough to mess you up. It'll super mess you up. But I read about a kid, a three-year-old kid that got lost in a soybean field one time, and he'd eaten a bunch of soybeans and got sick, and I just ate one to see what it was like. Yeah.

So if you eat raw beans, they will make you violently ill. And there are hundreds of recorded episodes now of people getting food poisoning from undercooked kidney beans. So a lot of the seeds out there are, frankly, toxic to humans. You know, apple seeds have toxic things in them like arsenic or cyanide. I should stop eating those. My dad was always like, eat the seeds and the core. Out of the apple. Yep.

I mean, you could eat them. Eat the whole thing, just the stem. Don't chew them. Don't chew them. I guess I've been poisoned. Let me hit you with one of the things you'll think is in it. You'll appreciate this one. So are you familiar with snowshoe hares?

Yeah. They're famously cyclical. Uh-huh. And they're on these seven-year, eight-year cycles where their populations explode and then they collapse and explode and collapse. And people used to try to correlate it to all kinds of things. Sunspots or whatever. No one could ever find an explanation. A lead theory on why snowshoe hares have a cyclical spike is they predominantly will feed on willow.

As the willows are getting overgrazed, they'll start putting a ton of energy into toxins. And then the primary food source of the animal actually starts to not be nourishing and kills it. All of a sudden you trim off this whole population of rabbits. The plants aren't getting grazed anymore. They don't put energy into plant toxicity. And eventually this very small amount of remnant rabbits that are left are back to eating a healthy food source. And this cycle seems to run in about a seven year cycle. And this cycle seems to run in about

a seven-year cycle. And this is after many people postulated many things, but it's a lead theory on what drives that. Is that plant's response to getting eaten by it? And if you look at grazing animals, there are many historical examples of large herds of grazing animals dying en masse when they're cordoned off by fences or made to graze on a small amount of area. If you look at ruminants or grazing animals, they don't eat just one plant. I mean, this example of the hares is interesting, but a lot of them will pick a little bit of this one, a little bit of that one, a little bit of that one, because they realize every plant has a toxin in it. And if they get too much of this toxin, they're going to get sick, but they can

get a little bit of this toxin, a little bit of that toxin, a little bit of that toxin, a little bit of that toxin, right? So these are herbivorous animals. But the thesis that I advance or kind of the hypothesis, what I'm saying in the carnivore code with this idea is, look, eating animal foods made us human. And we can talk about why I think that way. If you look at the evolution of the human brain, it exploded in size, not literally, but figuratively in the last 2 million years. And that correlates very strongly with the advent of hunting. There were these ashulian, these bifacial tools, cut marks on bones, mass graves. And you can date, you know, how old these bones on these animals are that have cut marks and stuff. It looks like humans

started hunting about 2 million years ago. Our brain was about 500c's and it had been about 500 cc's for the previous 90 million years and you know you go up and in the last in the next two million years it grows from 500 cc's to 1500 cc's it triples in size which is a massive energetic input for humans we had to change all sorts of things in our gut and that was probably because there were more calories and there were these unique nutrients and animal foods niacin ribof riboflavin, choline, carnitine, creatine that our brains needed to grow. And suddenly when we had those, boom, we can grow a bigger brain and that gives us more survival advantage. We get a neocortex. We can plan hunting with our tribe. We can evade predators better. We don't have claws and talons anymore, but we can fashion spears and nest the human race goes on. And so a food that lies at the center of our evolution is, is what we need to grow. And that really made us who we are. That's the statement I make in the book that eating animals,

nose to tail made us human. It made us human. And I think that because of that, and there's good evidence for this, looking at stable isotopes of, you know, fossilized remains of teeth that are, I think, at least a million years old, which is crazy to think about that.

And even more recent hunter-gatherers from 50,000 years ago, you can look at stable isotope analysis of co-living Neanderthal and Homo sapiens in Northern Europe and see that the majority of their protein was coming from animals. And you can look at these barium and cesium and nitrogen and carbon and sulfur isotopes and say, man, they were eating a lot of animals. It looks like they were eating like more animals than known carnivores like hyenas. So the thesis in a lot of anthropology circles is, hey, we were essentially high level quote carnivores. We weren't eating all animals, but we were eating the majority of our diet as animals when we could get them. So I really think that our blueprint as humans is in stark contrast to what we've been told today.

It's not kale that's the superfood. It's the animal foods that are the superfoods. And you see this in indigenous cultures too. They seek out animals preferentially. And they'll eat plants as fallback food, as survival food. But they don't really, if they've got a big kill, they're not going to be like, hey, we got a whole elephant or a whole water buffalo. Well, let's just put that aside.

I'm going to go gather some tubers, you know, or I'm going to go gather some, there's some good acorns over here. They're like, no, I'm going to eat this freaking buffalo, man. But we're adaptable as humans and we do have the ability to be omnivorous. And I think that we've used that throughout our evolution to, during times of scarcity, use plant foods as fallback foods, as survival foods. And this is because plants have toxins. So what have we done? We've learned how to ferment them. And you see this over and over. A lot of times when indigenous cultures eat plant foods, they're fermented. Things like sauerkraut, this comes from fermented cabbage. A lot of the toxins that are in cabbage, which are

a lot of the same toxins in kale, are degraded when you ferment the cabbage. A lot of the toxins that are in cabbage, which are a lot of the same toxins in kale, are degraded when you ferment the cabbage. A lot of beans are fermented in sort of South American culture. So we've figured out ways, but if you look at the number of ways, the sheer volume of ways that humans have figured out to make plants more edible, it's clearly indicating they are full of toxins, whether it's cooking or de-hauling or sprouting. Yeah, it's an interesting point, man. Like the amount of plants we eat or, you know, the grains and stuff we eat, you don't eat, like you can't eat raw. Can't eat raw. You got to do shit to make them edible. You got to do a lot of stuff.

You got to pressure cook the heck out of them. I mean, look at white rice. You know, in Asian cultures, it's a staple and they figured out, oh, if you take the hull off the rice, it's way less toxic for humans. And we've been told the reverse. Oh, brown rice is more healthy, but brown rice has a lot of arsenic in it because arsenic is concentrated in the hull of the rice. And a lot of the things that prevent us from absorbing minerals are in the hull of the rice, like phytic acid, things like that. So humans realize, hey, if we take the hull off the rice, we can get the grain out of the middle. And there's not a lot of nutrients in there, but there's at least calories to keep me going till tomorrow. But where do we then get our

massive micronutrient doses? We get them from animal foods. So what do you eat every day? Okay. This is my long-winded answer for what I eat every day. And the reason I had that whole sort of explanation was I wanted people to understand that this is my perspective on it. Because when I say this, people are just going to be like, click, off goes the podcast. This guy's a loony bin. You mean when you tell us what you eat? Yeah. Because you're doing an extreme version.

We should have started with that. Yeah, that way they'd all be gone already. Yeah. No, no. I mean, so I don't eat plants, all right? I don't eat any plants. I haven't eaten any plants in over two years. I did a short experiment for a couple of days where I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor

where I included some berries and some squash in my diet just to see what would happen to my glucose. But I found that I feel better without plants. And the reason I don't eat any plants is because there are no nutrients in plants that I can't get from eating animals nose to tail. And I take- When you say plants, you're talking like flour, like wheat. No, like plants. Like any plants.

That's what I'm saying. I mean, you're including that. Oh, yeah. I'm including like grains and flour and wheat. You're not just talking about skipping green vegetables. No, all of it. Shit made from plants. Every once in a while, I'm on a date with a girl and I go, I don't eat plants.

And she goes, well, do you eat bread? No, I don't eat bread. I don't eat plants. Well, do you? No no i don't eat bread i don't eat plants well do you know no i don't know just i don't think people understand like i don't eat plant products like all i eat is animals i'm with you all i eat is animals and you know i i people say well then you just eat meat how's that go over on the date they're they usually that's usually the end of the day or they're like they kind of roll their eyes or they're just not sure what to think i think they're in shell shock after that i'm not sure yeah i try to get that to like the second or third date. I try not to let that.

So you don't do dinner dates. No, I'm not. They're like, hey, you want to go to a restaurant? I'm like, about that. Let's just go for a walk. Let's just go hiking or something. So it doesn't go over so good. People think it's a little strange, but I don't eat.

I don't eat plants. I eat only meat. But by meat, I don't just eat meat, right? I eat meat and liver and organs. So I eat two meals a day. I'm interested in time-restricted feeding, meat, right? I eat meat and liver and organs. So I eat two meals a day. I'm interested in time-restricted feeding, which is eating, I eat breakfast and I eat lunch. I eat late lunch. And then I don't eat dinner because I want to have some period in the day where I'm not eating. Kind of like this intermittent fasting type of idea. And if you look at this,

you know, I take my ketones in the morning and I actually have ketones in my blood every morning. So I'll get into ketosis, which I think is a good thing for humans to kind of cycle in and out of ketosis, but not be in it all the time. I think when you're done telling us about what you eat, then we should talk a little bit about keto, ketosis. Oh yeah, but do that, but finish this because we, but I want to, I got to have you do that. You wake up in the morning. So I wake up in the morning. So this morning I eat the same thing pretty much every day. I've got it works for me and I'm easy. But again, it's not to say that you have to eat this way. There's a lot of variety. We're building a cookbook around this too. So I eat a lot. So I eat grass fed, grass finished meat

from regenerative farms, a lot of good farms. I want to support that type of agriculture. If I can't eat an animal that I've hunted, I'll eat meat from those farms. And so I'll eat about a pound of meat twice a day, a little less than two pounds of meat a day. And again, it's right now, it's a lot of stew meat and I make bone broth. So I'll make my own bone broth with knuckle bones. It has all the tendons on there. And what I'll do is I'll blanch the meat in bone broth and then add salt to it. And then I'll eat the bone broth and tendons and I'll get my glycine, the connective tissue, and I'll eat the meat. And then I also eat some organs. And so as many of the fresh organs as I have, I'll eat those. So most days I'll eat liver, heart, spleen, pancreas.

If I've got thymus, I'll eat it. If I can get testicle, I'll eat it. Your butcher's got to love you, man, because you're buying the stuff they have no, it's not even at the butcher. It's hard to get. I got to talk to my farm. You're buying all the stuff that winds up in a rendering plant. Yeah, yeah. And that's important, you know?

So I get all the organs I can in a day, a few ounces. And then I'll eat some suet because I'm really interested in this kidney fat. It's high in a compound called stearate. How do you eat the suet? I just chew it and I have like a swig of bone broth with it, kind of warm, because the suet's really waxy. So I'll either like- Just straight ass?

Straight ass. You don't like render it out in a pan or like make a crackling? Nope. I just eat it. I just take the suet raw and I eat it with bone broth. And then I'll add some Redmond real salt. And then, so for the first year and a half that I was- So you're okay with salt?

Yeah, yeah. Totally okay with salt. Before you get to how it felt, tell me about just blanching stew meat. Because that to me sounds real tough. It's actually not bad at all because I don't over blanch it. I mean, I'm just doing that because I find stew meat to be affordable. People will sometimes criticize my diet and say, I can't eat two ribeyes a day. That's 50 bucks in me. And I go, well, I eat $8 a pound grass-fed, grass-finished stew meat. And I think it's great.

So you take the bone. Yeah, that's good. Yanni had a good question. You make bone broth, which I get. And then imagine you probably pick all the stuff off the bones. and i eat all of it yeah and i actually will chew on the bones too and then and then you'll take stew meat slice it just slice it thin or cut it however yeah and you'll heat up bone broth to cook the stew meat and this is how i'm doing it now you can also do you ever uh do you ever just take animal fat and then fry meat in fat? I don't. Why not? I have in the past, but because I'm a scientist, because I'm a doctor and I think about lipid peroxides and all this other kind of stuff.

Come on, tell me about this. So, you know, I think you have- No, no, keep talking about your food. I'm going to add it in my notes. All right. Was it lipid peroxide? Lipid peroxides. Man, don't tell me about this shit, man.

Why frying's bad for you, Steve? All right. Now I'm disappointed. I put it in my notes. I've done a lot of that. Okay. I think that's probably, if you're fine in animal fat, I think you're probably fine. There's a lot of cultures that do it, but I do experiments myself all the time.

I'm trying to optimize because I realized that I'm like. So you're like against frying stuff in animal fat? I'm not against it. I just like doing the experiments in myself to see because I'm like the pirate, man. I'm like the astronaut on the way to the moon. Nobody's ever done this before. And I just want to be like, is this better? Is it worse? I want to be the person that kind of helps people understand like this is the ideal, but you can do it this way too. I'm not completely against frying things in animal fat. Um, I used

to do that a lot. I just do a lot of the blanching now. And so I'll put it in the, in the bone broth for maybe less than a minute. So I like my meat really raw. And so you just cook the outside and then, you know, the, the inside's pretty much like blue rare. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not my meat really raw. And so you just cook the outside and then the inside's pretty much like blue rare. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not overcooking it. And the meat I get from these regenerative farms is pretty darn tender and I love it. It's affordable. Now, are you not into fish? We can talk about fish. We can talk about fish. Dude, don't be telling me you're done on fish. So I love fish. I just feel like a lot of fish is from sources that are polluted. If I could eat fish from clean rivers and lakes or oceans, I'll do it.

So you don't like the heavy metals? I don't like the heavy metals. Plastics. I get worried about this. The microplastics. Yeah. I think about this because I test my heavy metals all the time, and I test the metals in my clients. And I have had clients who eat opah.

They go to the store, they get opah. It's wild opah. I don't know what that is. It's just like I think I'm one of these bigger deep sea fishes. Oh, I thought you meant okay yeah halibut was on his don't eat list swordfish

yeah halibut swordfish those kind of things a lot of metals and you'll see this interview is going down we should have started with this

if you're guinea pigging yourself like all I mean I think that's awesome I think we should have just started with this intro to like set the record straight he's you, I think that's awesome. I think we should have just started with this

intro to, to like set the record straight. He's, you know, I think it's great, but there's no reason to apologize for it. It's not weird. It's just, you know. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, it's like, you feel a little bit of burden, right? If I'm going to write a book as a physician, I'm going to test all my labs. I've probably done over a thousand blood work tests at this point. And I talk about, yeah, I test my labs all the time. I had a couple of blood tests like last week. I've done it on my podcast multiple times. I love doing blood work and looking at things and looking at my inflammatory markers and my heavy metals. And I want to know these things because I'm writing a book and I have to be able to tell people, this is what I think works. This is what I believe works. And I work

with clients doing this too. So I see it all the time. And what I was saying about the OPA or the, um, uh, the, I had someone eat a lot of tuna and then you see the mercury in the blood rise immediately, even three weeks, three times a week, wild salmon, I'll see the mercury bump a little bit. And I'm like, Oh, is that ideal? Have we just over polluted all the oceans at this point? And I think, well, I like fish and I love fishing and I love, I've only fly fished a couple of times, but I fricking love being on rivers. I love being in those places, but I ask myself, is it the best food in 2020? Was it fantastic food 300 years ago? Absolutely. But the thing I worry about is that is fishing, I'm not telling people

I can't fish. I'm just trying to offer tools that might be helpful for human health. But is fishing now like eating beef grown in downtown Tokyo? You know, if you eat beef that's inhaling lots of polluted air all the time, is that the best kind of beef you want to eat? Like, I want to eat beef that's grown on the idyllic farm in Northern California. Well, yeah, but just eat short-lived, non-pasivorous fish. That's probably the way to do it. That's the way to do it. Eat bluegills.

Yeah. Eat small fish that don't accumulate metals. Yeah. Avoid big old fish to eat lots of big old fish. There you go. That'd probably be the way to do it. Eat bluegills. Yeah. Eat small fish that don't accumulate metals. Yeah. Avoid big old fish to eat lots of big old fish. There you go. That'd probably be the way to do it. So if I did more of that, maybe I'll go- Not that I do that, but I mean, one could do that. You could do that. You could do that. And also if you were eating fish, you could eat the fish nose to tail too. The fish roe is very beneficial and has been treasured by cultures for many generations as well. And the organs. Sheets, eyes, brain.

Yeah. Those kinds of things are valuable. Fish eyes, fish head soup. This is what we're talking about. Nose to tail. Okay. Let's get back to your daily diet. Okay. My daily diet.

There's so many cool things to talk about. You got your bone broth. I got my bone broth. I blanched some stew meat in it. How much bone broth do you drink? So I make a big pot and it lasts me three to four days. I drink probably 16 ounces a day of bone broth. No coffee?

I don't do coffee. That's a plant. Yeah. Do you got any kind of coffee type thing you make just to get that sensation of drinking coffee? I do deep breaths. I just go, you know. Or just the organs. He probably doesn't need anything.

Did you have to quit drinking coffee at some point in time? Was it hard? It was hard. I used to be a bike racer, so I used to race road bikes, and there's a big culture in road biking around, sipping your cappuccino with your finger out. Yeah, like coffee and road biking and stuff. Yeah. Oh, you know, that kind of rings a bell.

I've seen that. Like a bunch of old dudes on bikes with the little clicky shoes going in to get coffee. And there's spandex. Yeah, you wear spandex. You drink coffee a lot of the time. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Yeah. Going in to get coffee. And there's spandex. Yeah. You wear spandex, you drink coffee a lot of the time. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Yeah. They're super excited. Maybe they shouldn't be wearing spandex, but that's a whole different story.

So, and yeah, when I had to stop drinking coffee, I got a wicked headache for a week and I was like, okay. But it was giving me- But you got through it. I got through it. Oh, that's- How much were you drinking to give you a headache? Do you drink coffee?

I do, but sometimes I'm like, I don't want to drink it for a week, and I don't. I drink caramel tea in the morning. You're the exception. If I wind up where I can't get any coffee, I take an aspirin or ibuprofen.

What's the word I'm looking for? Proactively. Prophylactically. I'm like, well, if I can't get a coffee I'll get a headache So I just treat I just treat the headache And I used to take Excedrin I used to carry around Excedrin

Seriously? Because it's got caffeine in it Just I don't know Stick your head in some Cold water And do like 25 pushups You're golden It's painful

Really? No but that's not what He's trying to It's not the fact that He's not waking up It's the fact that You're going to get a headache The caffeine addiction.

So Excedrin has a little bit of caffeine in it. And I used to bring it camping. And if we were doing a thing where there wasn't going to be coffee in the morning, I would bring it and just take it instead of coffee so that I wouldn't get the coffee headache. But we don't need to talk about coffee all day. All right. So there you are. You have, you're drinking all this bone broth.

Drinking bone broth, eating tendons, blanched meat, and then I'll eat the organs. And I eat the organs raw. So I love to eat the organs raw. Oh shit, really? I'll do shooters. And I was talking to Corinne about this before. I think a good way

to eat liver is to do a shooter. But I realize a lot of people won't do this, which is why we made the desiccated organ supplements as well. So I'll do the organs.

And then, so for the first, I was just saying this, for the first year and a half I did this, I had no carbs in my diet. It was zero carb, but a lot of protein. But hold on a minute. Let me ask you this. Okay, we'll come back i did this i had no carbs in my diet it was zero carb um but

a lot of protein but hold on let me ask you okay we'll come back to that no no just a quick digression are you okay do you ever find yourself do you ever sneak a donut i don't i think that i'm okay i think that are you ever my God, do I want a donut? You know what? I will never eat another cookie as long as I live. Really? I just don't crave them. See, that's like Yanni.

He's all anti-sugar. Well, I just don't- You may not like the next thing I'm going to say, but I don't- I just don't crave those foods. I think in my mind, I've been able to- Did you used to though? No, I never did. Not even like a little kid?

I mean, sure, as a little kid, I did. But at some point, there was a shift in my mind, I've been able to. Did you used to though? No, I never did. Not even like a little kid? I mean, sure. As a little kid I did, but at some point there was a shift in my mind and psychologically I just connected the way I felt afterwards. And I was like, it's not worth it. It's not worth it. Nothing tastes as good as healthy feels. Tony Robbins said that. I love it. You know, like I just prioritize it. I was like, you know what? In medical school, I was doing jujitsu, man. I'm getting choked and shit. I don't want to feel bad the next day. I can't eat a donut or drink alcohol. You know, I was running and being in the woods. There's so many cool things I want to do in my life.

It's not worth it to me to eat bad food. Oh, that's why I quit drinking so much alcohol. I love drinking alcohol. I just don't like being hungover. Do you feel like you're more connected to how your body feels than maybe the average person? If you ask, how do you feel after drinking five bottles of beer?

How do you feel after eating half of a pound cake? That you're... Or, for example, four Diet Cokes throughout the day. Or that you're actually tuned into a certain visceral feeling and experience of yourself like moment by moment

that you just there you don't crave it because it feels like pain absolutely and i think this is one of the key points is that when you simplify your diet enough when you get clean enough quote unquote you get you get a good baseline a lot of people can't separate signal from noise so they always feel shitty or they always feel a little bit hungover or they always feel a little bit brain fog or they're always a little depressed. Yeah. I see what you're saying, man. Once you get clean, quote unquote, and a lot of people experience that for the first time when they fast because it's really tricky for people to understand what good food is. But if you really don't know what to eat, just fast for a few days, which is not easy, but fast for three days and you

will feel the best you've ever felt in your life because you have no negative inputs. Now, the trick is being able to do that long term because you can't fast forever. You will die. But if you can feel as good as you feel when you are fasting, when you're eating food, then you've found food that really works with your body. And that's the way that I and now thousands of people feel when they're doing an animal-based diet, where mostly animal foods eat nose to tail. And so, yes, I think that I've gotten so refined in the laboratory of this corporeum, my body, that I know when I eat something bad, I'm just like, man, I ate something, I'm off.

Either my stomach feels off or I get brain fog. And I've heard it from my friends too. I mean, you know, I'm traveling with a couple of my friends from Heart and Soil here. And, you know, one of the guys had to eat a sandwich in the airport and he did it kind of sheepishly. I was like, Doug, where'd you go? He's like, I had a sandwich. I was like, what? Why'd you do that? You didn't want to eat it in front of me, did you? And, you know, one of the guys had to eat a sandwich in the airport and he did it kind of sheepishly. I was like, Doug, where'd you go? He's like, I had a sandwich. I was like,

what? Why'd you do that? You didn't want to eat it in front of me, did you? And he's like, yeah. Oh, sandwich shaming. Yeah. And then he was like, you know what? I don't feel good. And he was farting all last night and stuff. And so, you know, it's, you can tell, but once you get your body kind of refined, that makes it so much easier to make behavioral change because you know, like I actually saw what it felt like to feel really good, to sleep well, to wake up clear-headed, to have energy to, like, do one workout and then be like, you know, I could go work out again. Or, like, do a workout and then play with your kids. Or, like, proper human libido. Or not being depressed or anxious.

Or, you know, all those things. That's what makes life worth living. That sounds like training, right? It's like if you keep sticking your hand inside a, I don't know, a raccoon cage or something and it bites your hand, you're going to stop doing it. You're speaking Yanni's language now. He perked up. He perked up at raccoon cage. But I mean, you know, I think you guys get it with drinking.

A lot of people who drink all the time don't even understand how good you can feel when you don't drink. And I hear this from people all the time when they cut things out of their diet. I never knew I could feel this good. I never knew I could feel as good as I felt when I cut bread out of my diet. I never knew how good I was going to feel when I cut all these plants out of my diet. When I cut kale out of my diet, I had somebody email me that the other day. I never knew how good my gut, you know, my stomach could feel until I cut kale out of my diet. Sort of like mysteriously bloated. Mysteriously bloated, you know, I was trying to have and like,

I mean, I'll tell you, one of the best things about being, eating a carnivore diet is you don't have to worry about farting. Because that's really

socially awkward and uncomfortable, you know, like, I mean, if you think a carnivore diet is hard on dating, try being a vegan

because I was that too. I was a raw vegan for seven months, about 12. Oh, you did that? I was a raw vegan for seven months.

No shit. Even an experiment. I lost 25 pounds of muscle mass and all the people hanging out with me were just like, man, you did that? I was a raw vegan for seven months. No shit. Even an experiment. I lost 25 pounds of muscle mass and all the people hanging out with me were just like, man, you have the worst farts.

Now, when were you doing that? So bad. Why was I doing it? No, when? Oh, like 13 years ago. Huh. Long time ago. So you like do a lot

of guinea pigging. I love it. Now, I'm kind of annoyed by this question, but I have to ask you. When you're traveling, how are you rigging up for your meals? It's just so simple because you're eating such simple things.

It's not hard to get it. It's super simple. I think that that's one of the reasons the desiccated stuff is super helpful, right? So we took the desiccated stuff on the plane if you don't want to travel with liver and spleen and pancreas. It's hard to get. Which I have done. Yeah. But it's hard to get.

You know, we went to the co-op here in Bozeman, and I was like, do you guys have any spleen? They're like, no. What about pancreas? No. Do you have any liver? We in Bozeman, and I was like, do you guys have any spleen? They're like, no. What about pancreas? No. Do you have any liver? We might have a little liver. I was like, oh, sweet. I got one.

They got an ad for a cat psychologist hanging up in that place. Maybe I should apply. When you come in the door, there's like these, you know, those old signs where you like tear off a tab. Cat psychologist. Yeah, to get a shrink for your cat. I had to quit going into that store. But they had good meat.

I'm sure they did. They had good meat. I'm sure they do. They had good meat. Maybe you can tell me. Not as good as the meat I have. That's right. Well, I'm waiting for the invite to dinner at Steve's house. I didn't get it yet. So that's about all I got right now.

But yeah, I mean, it's super simple. So I think for traveling, I think, okay, what do I need to eat? I want to bring some suet. So I packed a little, I got a little glass container. I brought some kidney fat. Who brings kidney fat on a plane except this guy? I brought some kidney fat. I brought some meat and I forgot the liver. So I went to the store, I got some liver and yeah, I brought some salt on the plane and I'm good. And so I didn't finish

telling you guys what I eat in a day because there's one other thing. No, we're just dragging it out. I know, because it's so interesting. So for the first year and a half I did it, I had no carbs, right? No carbs. It was all keto, low carb. And then I started thinking about this a little more and I thought, you know what? I think our ancestors would have had fruit occasionally, seasonally. I know that the Hadza really treasure honey. I got really interested in honey specifically. And there's really interesting data on honey being used to treat periodontitis and gingivitis.

Honey is actually good for dental health in like the true form, which makes sense. It's a whole food. There's all kinds of compounds in there. And I was living in San Diego, and I thought, you know what? I feel a little cold sometimes. I'm going to reincorporate honey back in my diet and see how I feel. And of course, part of me is like, I can't do that. It's not meat.

And I thought, oh, it's stupid to be dogmatic. It's not a plant. Yeah, it's not a plant. And if vegans won't eat it, then I can eat it. That's the way I think about it. So I incorporated honey back in my diet, then I can eat it. That's the way I think about it. So I incorporated honey back in my diet and I really like it. So a lot of days I'll incorporate honey in my diet. That's great, man. That makes the whole thing seem a lot more appealing to me.

And that's why I want you guys to read that chapter in the book about the tier one carnivore diet, where I say, hey, it's not about just eating meat. It's about eating meat and organs, but also knowing which parts of the plant are less toxic. And there's a whole section of a carnivore-ish diet in there where I say, okay, eat meat and organs. And then you can eat honey and then like things like avocado and berries and squash. These are fruit. I think that fruit is the least toxic part of a plant. A plant is trying to get you to eat it most of the time. And so I think that generally speaking, fruit has been seasonally in our diets.

And so berries. So when I thought about this, okay, this is a version of an animal-based diet. This is really how I want people to think about a carnivore-ish diet, an animal-based diet. And we're going to make a cookbook that's based on a carnivore-ish diet next year with the same publisher. And it's the idea like, hey, eat animal meat and organs as the center of your diet. And then you can also have, you can have carbohydrates if you want them, but eat it from the least toxic plant sources. Get rid of the kale and we can talk about why and get rid of the seeds. But if you want to do things like avocado or squash or berries or an apple or seasonal fruit, those are probably really fine for you. And that I think opens up the doors for a lot of people to,

to do this type of a diet. And it's the, the goal is not to be dogmatic. The goal is to help people get back to living well. Are you doing honey right now? I do. How much? I do about 100 to 150 grams of honey a day, which is a lot. What's that? Give it to me in volume. So a tablespoon is 15 grams. So it's about seven to 10 tablespoons a day. No milk. No, I don't do milk. I don't do dairy. Now, a lot of people have trouble with dairy immunologically.

And I think our ancestors wouldn't have eaten a ton of milk. I know the Maasai eat milk. But if you can tolerate milk, it's an animal food. It's great. But I have trouble with casein and whey. I had eczema really bad, which is the reason that I did a carnivore diet in the first place. You ever know eczema? It's like bumpy, red. Oh, shit, yeah, I know what eczema is. Yeah, yeah. But my eczema went away completely when I did a carnivore diet and I tried everything else. I tried keto and paleo and all this other stuff and it couldn't, it didn't fix it. So

that was the reason I did it, but dairy always triggers my eczema, so I don't do it. Okay. Do you think, if you're giving recommendations to people do you think that like distilled down is your message more that you need people need to add to their diet or they needed to take away from their diet i think if you had to do one thing it would be to simplify okay and the one thing the first thing think if you had to do one thing, it would be to simplify. Okay. And the one thing, the first thing, so if you wanted to make a hierarchy, right? If people wanted to, if I were going to recommend people do one thing,

it's get rid of those vegetable oils. And this hasn't been the total focus of our conversation. You're hitting another question I had. Yeah, go on. So I think that if you're going to do one thing, it would be get rid of those vegetable oils. And they're in a lot of things, right? So this is corn, canola, safflower, sunflower,

soybean oils. They're in a lot of foods. If you eliminate those from your diet and change nothing else, I think a lot of people will get to a better place in health. Now, I hope people won't stop there. I hope they will then add in animal meat and organs. And then I hope they will think about the plants they're eating and if they can get rid of the most toxic plants. There's like three steps, but that's the first step. And the first step is just simplify and get rid of the processed foods, which are really full of those oils and stop cooking with those oils. And part of that for a lot of people is also getting the best quality meat they can too, you know, because a lot of the

meat that's fed corn and soy, these are not species appropriate diets and it can accumulate. So what we know about things like pigs is that if you feed pigs, corn and soy, their fat is going to be enriched in linoleic acid. And so that's probably a problem for a lot of people too. But first thing, cut out those vegetable oils and everything with them in it. That's higher than cutting out sugar. It is. Now I'm not saying I want people to keep eating sugar, but I think that the single greatest driver of chronic disease and metabolic dysfunction in humans is excess linoleic acid. And you can actually look at this. There's a fascinating set of graphs out there.

You can look at human consumption of sugar and grains, and you can look at the rates of obesity and the rates of diabetes and the rates of chronic disease. And if you look at those graphics, you can look at from 1960 to 1997, our consumption of grains and sugar went up. And so did our consumption of vegetable oil massively. And then around, and rates of diabetes and obesity and chronic disease went up too. But around 1997, between now and 1987, rates of grain consumption and sugar have actually gone down. But vegetable oil has continued to rise and we are still getting much fatter, much sicker, much more diabetic and much worse from an autoimmune perspective. So again, this is just all correlational sort of inference. But what you see here is like, huh, this is interesting. And I think, huh, this is interesting.

And I think, yeah, sugar is not a great thing for humans at all. And honey actually looks to behave differently than sugar in humans. But if you had to do one thing, it would be vegetable oils, in my opinion. No shit.

Yeah. Real quick. Explain to me, what's the problem with, with if you're like, what's the problem with frying meat? Like if the meat's okay and the oil's okay, what happens when you get it super hot and cook one and the other?

If you're going to cook meat in oil, you want to do it in animal fat. Can I just tell you one of my new favorites? We've had it three times in the last 10 days. I braised a bunch of wild turkey thighs and legs and then I've got a jar of Brody's bear grease, bear oil from last fall. And I've been just frying that. It's funny if I do it. Fry and braise turkey meat in oil? In bear oil.

Yeah. It's funny because if I did it in like vegetable oil or peanut oil, I'd be like real careful about like taking the meat out and sort of like straining it or draining it or whatever. But when I do it in that bear grease, I'm just like, man, I hope it soaks it up so that me and the kids are eating it, you know, because it's good. It is good. And so.

I got, can you explain it a little bit better? I mean, the same way that you say like you like to crisp up your. Oh, I didn't know if you meant your drop, like you're dropping a drumstick, like frying a drumstick. No, like picked braised meat. And then you fry it and then put it on something. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

And what are you getting? Let me look up the word again. You're getting all messed up on lipid peroxide. Yeah. Okay, break that down for me. This is very bad news for me. Maybe, maybe not. So you heat it up and something bad happens.

You heat it up and something bad happens. Now, humans have probably been dealing with this for a long, maybe not. So you heat it up and something bad happens. You heat it up and something bad happens. Now, humans have probably been dealing with this for a long, long time. We know that when we heat foods, there are compounds produced. When we heat foods in dry, heated, high temperatures, there are lots of things produced that our body has to kind of detoxify. Now, a lot of people will point to meat and say, oh, you shouldn't eat meat that's charred or grilled because of these compounds. And some of these are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic amines. And the body has a way to deal with these. But the question is just, how much can we detoxify? And are we putting a stress on the body? I think that most people,

if they're healthy and have enough nutrients from good animal meat and organs, can make enough glutathione, which is our endogenous antioxidant. It's how it's part of how our body deals with this to detoxify these compounds. But as the astronaut, I just thought, what if I decrease them as low as possible in my diet? Do I feel better? Do my labs change? That's why I do it. I just want to experiment and see like, what's the end? You know, how do we get people there? The same kind of things happen when you cook food. I mean, when you cook plants. So coffee has heterocyclic amines as well.

And so there's a lot, even if you cook bread and you brown bread or you toast bread, there are things like Malliard products, advanced glycation end products. So cooking food creates things that the body has to detoxify. We probably have the ability to do it somewhat. You just don't want to overload the system. Okay. And I think that your underlying health probably determines how well you're able to detoxify that. So in my mind, I thought, well, what if I just don't give my body any of that or the smallest amount possible? And that's kind of the experiment I'm doing. I'll agree. Cooking a ribeye in tallow is delicious. When you get the crust on it, what you're talking about there

sounds delicious. Crispy things are delicious. And if you're going to cook in oil, cook in animal fat. Do not cook in vegetable oil, please. When you cook fats, you get what are called lipid peroxides. These are essentially free radicals formed by lipids. So a lipid is a fat molecule. And what we're talking about here now are electrons. And we're talking about unpaired electrons. And these molecules are reactive. They can move around the human body and cause damage. And so your body has to detoxify them. So I think it's just, for me, it was the experiment. How do I get the least amount of these if possible?

And then can I see in my blood work that things like lipid peroxides change or other markers of oxidative stress? You know, esoteric markers I use in medicine like 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, which is a marker of DNA damage or malondialdehyde, all that kind of stuff. So that's why I do it. Now, if somebody came to me and said, am I eating too much of these? I'd say, well, let's just check some blood work. We can see, you know, we can look at your oxidative stress. I can look at how much glutathione you've got and how much of it's oxidized versus reduced. So I could tell you, you know, like, oh, maybe you want to stop doing that as much. Or maybe you just need some more of the nutrients that are going to allow your body to detoxify stuff.

But that's why I do it. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. And I'm really not trying to be a party pooper or, you know, talk about like the most boring way to eat food. I just think about it medically too. Hey, folks. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex

Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxm maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all remember earlier we talked about objective realities Okay. I imagine that in the medical community, it's possible to draw someone's blood and then look at the blood, do the blood work on someone. And there probably is an academic consensus about what the markers in there, whether that's a healthy person or not.

Is that true or not true? Generally, yes. Or is there something still to argue about? There are a few things to argue about, but 98% of it is like, yeah, we can look at inflammatory markers. We can look at markers of oxidation, lipid peroxides, all that kind of stuff.

Yes. Okay. Yeah. So if we drew yours, let's say I drew yours and I took it and just showed, I drew your blood and had your blood work drawn up and I took it and just showed, I drew your blood. Yeah. And had your blood work drawn up. And I took it and showed it to just a random doctor coming down the road.

Yeah. I'd be like, hey man, what's up? What do you think when you look at this? Right. Would they be able to tell me? Would they say, man, that's really surprising to see such low or such high this and that? They would just say that guy looks really healthy for the most part, except for one thing. And we can get into that if you want.

Well, I mean, what is the one thing? The one thing is LDL cholesterol, which is a whole rabbit hole to go down. But that would pop out to them. That would pop out to them for sure. You have a lot of it. I have a lot of LDL in my body. I do, I do. And everybody's been told that LDL is bad for you, but there's a whole

chapter in my book kind of breaking down that myth and talking about how the lipid hypothesis is really wrong in my opinion and widely challenged. So we can go down the track. So they would see that. Well, or not, they'd be like, yeah, the guy looks great. If you don't show my LDL, if you just cover up LDL and they look at everything, they'd be like, wow, there's no inflammation. His kidneys look fine. His liver looks fine. He's got plenty of vitamin markers. He's got his vitamin D is high, wow, there's no inflammation. His kidneys look fine. His liver looks fine. He's got plenty of vitamin markers. He's got his vitamin D is high. Man, his testosterone's high.

Everything looks good. What am I looking at this guy? Like, what am I looking at here? And then you show them the LDL, and they kind of like fall out of their chair. And they'd say what? They'd say, he's going to die. He's going to die. He needs a statin.

Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, they'd say he needs meds. Yeah, absolutely. And I can tell you the story. It's a pretty interesting story. But you don't need one. I definitely don't.

So when my dad, so I'm 43. When my dad was 43, he had a heart attack. So I have a primary relative who had an early onset coronary artery disease. Right? I've had a high quote LDL, low density lipoprotein, which is colloquially known as bad cholesterol, which is totally the wrong- Now I'm tracking. Yeah, yeah. I've had a high LDL for probably three-plus years.

I mean, the whole time I've been doing a carnivore diet, my LDL has been over 200, and the last one I got was very high. And so we can go down rabbit holes. This is a very complex discussion about why LDL goes up and down. It probably has to do with ratios of saturated fat, unsaturated fat in the human body. And that goes back to previous discussions about whether saturated fat is actually bad for humans. I don't believe it is at all. It's part of something we've been eating forever.

But if you just pause there in my story, or I'll tell you the rest of the story. So I've had a high LDL for over two years and because it was so high, I thought, oh, this is a great opportunity to illustrate something. So I had what's called a coronary artery calcium score. They do a CT scan of your heart and they look for calcium in your arteries, which is calcified black. Not a perfect test, but pretty darn.

Same shit on your teeth. Yes, except it can end up in the heart arteries and this is sort of telling you you have atherosclerosis. This is what people worry about. The plaque that ruptures in the arteries is this plaque, right? So I have zero, zero. And so in talking to cardiologists and in talking to cardiac radiologists, if you showed them my blood work, they would say,

oh yeah, that guy has a family history and his dad had a heart attack at his age and his LDL. Right now, my LDL is 534 milligrams per deciliter. Most doctors want to see it under a hundred. So I'm like superstar in LDL. I'm like massively high. And they would say, oh yeah, that guy's going to have plaque. I have zero plaque. And there are so many stories like mine about this. Now you could say it's not a perfect test, not a perfect test, but it's pretty darn sensitive for that kind of plaque. And I have a primary relative who had a heart attack in my age. Now I'll just keep getting them and showing people that it's zero, but it

challenges the idea that LDL cholesterol equals heart attacks. And I challenged this broadly in the book. This is such a big misunderstanding. And it's a lot of the reason that vegetable oils get recommended to us as healthy because vegetable oils lower LDL. Saturated fat raises LDL. And yet what do we know about vegetable oils? We know they're very unhealthy for people. And what do we know about saturated fat? Well, it's pretty darn healthy for people. There's a really famous trial called the Minnesota Corn Area Experiment, which was done in 1968 to 1973. And they took, I think it was over 9,000 people. This is a randomized blinded study. It's an interventional study.

This is not epidemiology. They took over 9,000 people in Minnesota, and they put half of them on high saturated fat diets or higher saturated fat, and another half on higher polyunsaturated fat from vegetable oil. And that trial went five years. And at the end of the trial,

the people who had more polyunsaturated fat had higher rates of death from cancer, heart disease, and overall all-cause mortality. They clearly died more of all sorts of badness when they had more polyunsaturated fats. It's a huge study. It's very well done. It's sort of like cut and dry. Vegetable oils are horrible for humans. And these are the oils that our cardiologists will tell us to eat because they lower LDL. And our framework for cardiovascular health is entirely LDL centric, totally LDL centric. If it raises LDL, it's bad. If it lowers LDL, it's good. Except if you actually dig into the medical literature, and this gets to be a little esoteric, and you look at this, what you find is that when you give

someone polyunsaturated fats, like linoleic acid, like vegetable oils, their LDL goes down, but their oxidized LDL goes up. And another marker called LP little a, which is a marker for oxidation and LDL also goes up. What we now know is that it's not so much about the LDL that you have. It's about how much of that is suffering oxidation. There's that word again. So oxidation, that's the kind of stuff I'm worried about with lipid peroxides and free radicals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is oxidative stress. We're talking about the movement of electrons.'m worried about with lipid peroxides and free radicals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is oxidative stress we're talking about the movement of electrons so you really don't want your ldl to be oxidized and when you give someone vegetable oil more ldl gets oxidized

the overall amount ldl goes down but more ldl gets oxidized so this is one of the sort of last or it's just not even a last one it's just a very widely held belief that needs to die because it's just wrong and it's hurting people. And in the book, I kind of break this down. There's lots of other studies that show that more LDL does not always equal more coronary artery disease. And it's not the fact that LDL just goes

into your arteries and causes plaque. That doesn't make any sense because LDL, low density lipoprotein, is a boat in your body. It's like a bus. It moves things around the body. It's valuable for humans. just goes into your arteries and causes plaque. That doesn't make any sense because LDL, low-density lipoprotein, is a boat in your body. It's like a bus. It moves things around the body. It's valuable for humans.

It moves steroid backbone molecules to your testicles, to the ovaries, to the adrenal glands, to your brain to make all the hormones that make us human beings. We need this molecule. LDL and HDL, its counterpart, also play a role in the immune response. If you talk about kids who don't have enough LDL and HDL, its counterpart, also play a role in the immune response. If you talk about kids who don't have enough LDL, they get sick way more often. There's a genetic condition with a mutation in the enzyme that makes cholesterol. Now, cholesterol is a steroid backbone molecule

that gets packaged into the LDL particle. LDL is a bus that carries triglycerides, which are fat molecules, and cholesterol. And so LDL and cholesterol are sort of synonymous colloquially, but that's not really the correct terminology. Cholesterol is a steroid backbone molecule that gets made by our body can't make LDL, or they can't make cholesterol, which results in very low levels of LDL. A lot of these kids die in utero, and those that are born have pretty seriously bad medical conditions. They have a lot of times mental retardation, they have recurring infections, and the way they are treated is they are given egg yolks. They are given lots and lots of egg yolks, which are super rich in cholesterol. So we give kids back cholesterol and they do better when they can't make it. And yet we are told by the medical establishment that this molecule, this LDL cholesterol molecule, or cholesterol in general, are trying to kill us.

And it kind of goes back to this theme that we've been talking about throughout this podcast. Why would something that has been an essential part of our evolution suddenly be bad for us? Whether it's eating meat and organs or whether it's a molecule that's essential to human health, why would that be bad for us? We have to rethink these paradigms. But so much of medicine moves so slowly. It's like the Titanic. You just can't change these paradigms. They're just so bent on it, but that's why I do the work I do. LDL is not the enemy. The enemy is the underlying metabolic dysfunction and or it's synonymous with insulin resistance or prediabetes.

That really lights the LDL on fire, but it didn't cause the blaze. So at a very broad strokes level, I ask people to think about it like this. Imagine LDL like wood in your garage. You're not gonna get spontaneous conduction into that wood. You have to have a spark. And that spark is underlying metabolic dysfunction. Without a spark, that LDL is actually

just valuable because you can build a house out of it. You could build a house or a cabin, or you could build a tree house for your kids out of that wood in your garage. But if you get gasoline there and you light a fire, that wood's going to go up. So because LDL is involved in a plaque doesn't mean that LDL caused the plaque. It's the spark. And so what is the spark? The spark is metabolic dysfunction. How does metabolic dysfunction come about? Linoleic acid and vegetable oils. Explain to me as though I'm five years old.

Ketosis. Okay. It's a keto diet. So this is a completely different, we're going off topic here. Oh, no. Yeah, we're going, yeah. Okay. I'm just being mindful of where we're at,

where we gotta get. Okay, so we're pausing. And if I walk out of here, oh no, there's a pause? Because I thought we were, I thought that felt like a great summation. I just thought, I just thought maybe you guys had questions. Okay. No. I never knew any of that stuff. He's over here shaking his head like, whoa. You don't like it, Yai? No, I love it. It's just, I'm gonna have to listen to

this podcast again, because there's just a lot of words that, you know, this is the first time I've heard them. Right, right. So let me know if you want me to clarify them, and I'll do my best. I think we can move on. No, I want to go.

We'll talk about keto. Yeah. We got a little checklist of stuff we got to do. I know. We got a lot to talk about. Yanni weirdly put one down and took it away. Oh, no, it's back again. What?

What did I take away? Oh, no, it's still there. Sorry. What did I take away? Oh, no, it's still there. Sorry. Okay. Ketosis? Like I'm five. Okay. Like I'm five.

We hear a lot these days about the keto diet, going into ketosis sounds like a bad thing would happen, like something bad's happening to you. Traditionally, people have thought about ketosis as a bad thing, but I don't think it is at all. I think it's our body's very precisely evolved defense mechanism against starvation. Okay. It's basically how your body uses stored fat as fuel. So you have a couple of gas tanks in your

body. You're like a car with two gas tanks. One gas tank is called glycogen. It's in your liver and your muscles. And the other gas tank is called fat. And generally speaking, if humans are fat, they can survive a long winter. You got stored fat. We don't want to be extra fat, but we've all got a couple of pounds, many pounds of fat on our body. So that if we don't eat or we don't have a successful hunt, we can turn that into fuel. Can I pause this for one second? Is it true that, uh, that, that fat people, um, stay warm better? Seems like it. I think thermodynamically, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, just from a, I mean, whenever I've been out surfing in the ocean and there's fat guys out there, they are often way, way, way warmer than I am.

Okay, go on. I mean, it's like seal blubber, right? Like it's insulating. Yeah, because people are always like, oh, yeah, you're cold because you're skinny. It's possible. I am cold. Well, and sometimes people get cold because you're skinny. It's possible. I am cold. Sometimes people get cold because their thyroid doesn't work.

All things being equal, if we have equivalent thyroid function and equivalent baseline metabolism, which is how you generate heat, because your body can generate its own heat with brown fat, things like that, mitochondrial uncoupling, if you put on

a bunch of layers, you would be warmer. Now, hold on. Do you understand what mitochondrial uncoupling is? No, but I understand if I put on a few layers, I'll be warmer. Well, you know that if you put on a neoprene suit, you'd be warmer. So that's what it's doing. It's just like- Insulation. Okay. Now I want to get back into the keto. So keto-

We got two energies. One's in your muscle and livers, one's in your fat. One's in your fat. And the way that you access your fat is through ketones. So in order to pull that fuel and burn it by the rest of your body, you turn that fat into ketones. Okay. So you can do something called beta oxidation. And the way that you move that fat around your body is in ketones. It's one way that it happens. So ketones are just an alternative fuel that your body uses when you don't have enough carbohydrates or when you're starving in general. And that's essentially how it happens. You use that fat, you turn it in ketones, those ketones move around the body and they get turned back into substrate that your body can use

to burn. And the goal being to get rid of the fat? Not necessarily to get rid of it. I mean, the goal of ketogenic diets is yes, to get rid of the fat, but you can get rid of fat without being ketogenic. So what is the goal? Ketogenic diets were originally developed for kids with seizures because they really, yeah, because they realized medically that's why they were developed. We humans have always been in ketosis. If you're out hunting and you don't have a, you don't eat anything for 24 hours or 72 hours, you're going into ketosis because your body's going to you. That means everybody that fasts goes into ketosis yeah and our ancestors definitely had periods where they didn't have any substantial meaning you're

tapping into body fat you're tapping into body fat and it's not you can also eat but if you don't get enough calories because your body has it's like you have a car that car needs a certain amount of energy to run every day the lights in the studio you have to put energy into those lights you have to put energy into this brain. You have to put energy into this brain, these eyeballs, everything in your body needs energy. So you, if you only eat 300 calories a day, how does your body make up the difference? It makes up the difference by pulling it from fat. Once it pulls it out of glycogen, the first gas tank your body uses is glycogen, generally speaking. And then it goes into fat once you exhaust the glycogen. So for most people, it takes about 24 hours to exhaust the glycogen and then your body switches over to burning fat

And making it in ketones Some people have less the glycogen, but if you don't eat carbohydrates, your body doesn't really make as much glycogen that's a broad stroke statement because It's not entirely true But in broad strokes, that's what we're talking about that you have less stored carbohydrate when you are in ketosis Oh, and that's then it puts you into ketosis quicker. Quicker. Or you stay in ketosis long-term because generally speaking, we have thought about ketosis as starvation or not eating, but you can eat food and still be in ketosis if you don't eat carbohydrates, depending on the ratio of protein and fat.

If you eat too much protein, you won't be in ketosis because your body can turn protein into glucose, right? But if you eat a lot of fat and a't be in ketosis because your body can turn protein into glucose. But if you eat a lot of fat and a small amount of protein or a moderate amount of protein, you can get into ketosis. Now, what we know is that— And is there a benefit to being in ketosis besides the fact that you're diminishing fat? Like, what are you really getting from it? There are absolutely benefits to being in ketosis, but that doesn't mean you should be in it all the time. So it's kind of this evolutionary switch. We certainly would have had it occasionally.

At a broad level, things change in your genetics. Different genes get turned on and off when you're in ketosis because these ketone molecules, there are two major ketone molecules in your body. These ketone molecules affect which genes get turned onone molecules in your body. These ketone molecules affect which genes get turned on and off. And you'll hear people talk about this as quote, cellular housecleaning. And so what your body does is autophagy. I don't know if you guys have heard that word. It's cellular housecleaning. It means eating yourself. So it cleans up old, dead, kind of broken proteins and cells when you're in that autophagy state. And when you are eating less carbohydrates or when you are fasting is when your body kind of goes toward autophagy. It's a balance

between building and tearing down. Is that what people talk about when they talk about doing a cleanse? Yes and no. Why is it clean and what? Well, there's a lot of stuff to clean. I mean, there are, there's a lot of cellular components for humans to clean and we need to do this occasionally. And your body has mechanisms to kind of clean house, just like your house gets dirty. Whether you have kids or not, if you have kids, you know, your house just gets dirty by itself because of the kids. And even if you don't have kids, your house still gets dirty. This is entropy. Things break. They kind of go wrong. Your body needs time to do this cellular house cleaning. And this happens when you are fasting or when you can enable your body to do it

when you have a caloric deficit. So like I said, if you have a baseline requirement for 2,500 calories a day or 2,000 calories a day, and you only eat 800, your body's gonna make up the rest by burning glycogen or by burning stored fat. And when you are in that state, when you are in a calorically deficient state,

your body does this housecleaning state, this autophagy. That's been associated with a lot of good things in humans, a lot of better outcomes and all kinds of things. So it's helpful, but you can overuse it. It's something we should cycle in and out of. And it doesn't have to be complex. This is the way it always would have been. You don't get an animal every day. You go hunting. Our ancestors didn't either. There were times they were fasting. There were times they had caloric deficits and there were times they feasted and they had caloric excess. It's built into our physiology. The problem in 2020 is that we eat every day. A lot of people eat every day and they have caloric excess every single day. They never do time-restricted feeding. Remember earlier

when I was talking about, I was talking about my diet and I eat two meals a day. I have a time-restricted feeding window. That's just something I leverage most days where I eat breakfast and a late lunch, and then I'll fast for about 16 hours every day. And I wake up in ketosis even though I'm eating honey, right? So even though I'm getting 100 to 150 grams of carbohydrates, I'm using my liver glycogen. My body's using stored fat to make ketones. But ketones are beneficial for humans in that they change things and it's valuable, but it shouldn't, I don't think it should happen all the time. And so it should be cyclic. And so the ketogenic diet is leveraging a lot of these ideas, but you don't have to be keto to get into ketosis.

You can eat carbohydrates and just fast, or you can eat carbohydrates and just do a calorie restricted diet on some days. Does that make sense? So, but it is valuable, I think, for humans to go into that state of caloric deficiency one way or another. The keto diet just makes it long-term for people because they don't eat carbs. I think there are downsides to that as well. And we can talk about those if you want. Do you believe, like, do you ever use the term fad diet? I mean, not for a carnivore diet.

I've heard the term. But I had a friend one time that was on a diet where you were on a diet six days a week, and then you had a cheat day. Right. Okay. And I remember when every dude that lived in certain towns where I hang out, like for instance, I remember when like every dude in mile city was on the Atkins diet, but they're not now.

Okay. You're about like the keto diet. And I'm assuming that soon people will not be on the keto diet just because the ebb and flow of diets, like where does the carnivore diet fit into this? Like, will it have a, does it have a life expectancy?

I hope not. And I hope that thinking outside of the box a little bit, not making it dogmatic will, will give it that, that, that absence or will exempt it from a life expectancy. It's more of a lifestyle. And I hope I've done a decent job of helping people understand that it's, it's just the same asking the question, what did our ancestors do and how do we eat to thrive? It's a lifestyle. It's not a this diet or that diet. It's like, what are the foods that nourish us? What are the least toxic plants?

How do we feel as good as we can as humans? That's my idea with a carnivore diet. You got to call it something, right? Yeah. I wish, you know, you could call it the carnivore lifestyle, but people wouldn't understand what it was. But that's the way I think about it. It's just asking questions. As a physician, as an outdoorsman, as somebody who likes to go run in the mountains and hunt, how do I get to do these things as well as I can?

How do I help my patients and my clients? And what did our ancestors do? Those are the questions that are most interesting to me. So I don't want it to have that. And I certainly didn't make it up. I mean, I think our ancestors have been eating this way for a long time and there's plenty of tribes. There's an Amazonian tribe called the Kiowimeno who eat a lot of this way. They eat animal meat and organs and fruit when it's seasonal. Indigenous people don't eat vegetables like we think they do. They kind of get that stems, roots, seeds, and leaves, especially the stems, leaves, and seeds are not really good human food. They're not very calorically dense a lot of the time, got a lot of toxins. So that's the idea there. So it's not intended to be a fad diet.

And I've never been a super fan of the cheat day idea either, because it doesn't work. I saw the cheat day get abused. Yeah, yeah. Because look, I mean, a lot of the people who are finding benefits with a carnivore diet- Like spending a day at Cheesecake Factory. Right, right. They're finding benefits from an autoimmune perspective. And that's what's so interesting to me about it. A lot of the diseases we see in Western society today are autoimmune. Lupus, Sjogren's, autoimmune thyroiditis, all this kind of stuff. I mean, eczema like I had. These are autoimmune diseases. Our immune system is overactivated. There's something going on here. And the immune system

has a longer memory than seven days. We know this with things like celiac disease or gluten intolerance. So if you really want your immune system to calm down, you got to keep, you got to prevent, you know, exposing it to foods that are going to trigger it every seven days. A lot of people think about diets and food just from a weight loss perspective. And that's why I think a carnivore diet is different. We're thinking about things in terms of human health and how we can help people live the most quality lives. Weight loss is secondary, but Atkins was all about weight loss. All these diets are about weight loss, weight loss, and how you look as a human. I'm more interested in how healthy you are. Yeah, that's a good point, man.

I forgot about that. It wasn't like optimal performance. It was aesthetic, right? Aesthetic. I'm more interested in how you feel, how your mood is, how well you think, how poised you are, how emotionally calm you are with your kids and your wife or your husband or your partner, you know, like quality of life. And I think that if you do that, you'll look good too. That's like a bonus, but I'm not going to sacrifice nutrition and optimal human health at the expense of somebody looking good.

Yeah. And Weight Watchers, probably the most famous diet ever, and it's right in its name, right? And that's exactly what it's focused on. It's focused on aesthetics and weight loss. That cheat day diet was that way too. Right, with no attention to human health. What was that diet called? I don't know.

It wasn't called the cheat day diet. No. I think a lot of them have that. Tim Ferriss had a cheat day. I know, when he talked about his, the way he ate. But paleo sounds pretty similar to this, right? I mean, they're always talking about eating what the ancestors ate, right?

Is there a big difference? There is a big difference. It asks the same questions. It just answers the question differently. It's saying, what did our ancestors eat? And actually, you know, what's funny is I had, I'm good friends with Rob Wolf, who wrote The Paleo Solution, and Lauren Cordain, who wrote the Paleo Solution and Lauren Cordain, who wrote the Paleo Diet. I've had them both on my podcast.

And I think as we start to think about this more, I love that question. How did our ancestors eat? I just have a different answer. And my answer says, leafy greens and seeds hate you and don't want to get eaten. Kale doesn't love you back. You know, in a Paleo Diet,

they're like, eat your leafy greens. And I'm like, no, leafy greens, spinach and kale hate you. They don't want to get eaten. Don't eat those foods. So as much as you could call it the carnivore diet, you could also call me the anti-broccoli crusader. That's what's different about it. I just want people to understand, we draw the ideas a little different. We ask the same questions. They're valuable questions, I think. But we just answer them differently based on anthropology and ethnography and biomedical science and say, why are we eating kale in the first place? Does that make any sense?

It is interesting, man. When you go into a garden and you're like, you know, you grow tomatoes, you're like, yeah, man, that's a member of the nightshade family, dude. That family's full of shit that'll kill you. It'll absolutely kill you. But if you eat this one, it's a certain way. But, you know, you look at the animal kingdom, I mean, you can point to that puffer fish liver, but generally, like my kids are like, is that bird edible?

I'm like, listen, man, all birds are edible. They're just edible. They're like, they might not, I'm not telling you they're going to taste good, but they're edible. And they'll be like, is that animal edible? Yes. Yes. That's exactly what we talked about earlier. It just is.

You know, there are a few rare exceptions. That frog in the Amazon. Yeah, for sure. The ones we know about, right? Yeah, and the puffer fish. But 99.99% of animals are edible. You can't say that about plants, right? You just can't.

And all the unique nutrients in them. Yeah, you pull out like any vertebrate out of the lake. You're like, can I eat that? You can eat that. Yeah, even invertebrates. I'm not telling you you'll like it, but go ahead. You can eat it. And yet, if you and I walk into the woods and we just start eating swaths of plants,

we're going to be pooping our pants before we get very far down the trail. Dude, we get excited about the ones that don't mess you up. Yeah. They're like, you mean I can eat this? The plants. There's like a very small proportion that won't kill you on the spot. In the woods, you point out the ones. You'd be like, no shit, you can eat it?

Yeah. It's not going to be good for you. Which mushroom is not going to kill you? Yeah, we get excited about get excited about yeah you mean this one won't kill me sweet man you see there's such a good point right anything that's like still and growing out of the ground you have to be worried about it to be you have to have almost a doctorate to know if you can eat it or not yeah but if it runs or flies good to go like a book oh yeah like berries kids like can we eat this one man i don't know they're, I don't know. They're not. I don't know if they're not.

But that one I know is actually safe. That stands out as safe. Isn't that so interesting? It just makes so much sense, right? No, it's a funny point, man, the more you think about it with the plant toxins. Can you touch on satiety? I read that word, or satiety. I think there's two ways to pronounce it but that word was in the book a lot talking about how like our current diet basically just you just never get

full oh yeah yeah this is super interesting and how do you pronounce that word i say satiety yeah like like comes from you know insatiable right satiated. Exactly. So there are a couple of reasons that our current diet is not satiating, but I've had a lot of friends anecdotally tell me they try plant-based diets and they're like, I'm always fricking hungry. And then they try an animal-based and they're like, wow, I felt full for the first time in so long. And I'm thinking, yeah, right. So satiety is complex. It's complex physiology in the human brain. But just going back to what we were talking about with linoleic acid, there's really good evidence that linoleic acid makes us hungry. There's molecular mechanisms in the brain by which linoleic acid triggers hunger and saturated fat, which is found

in animals, triggers satiety. And we don't have to get into why that works, but in the hypothalamus, which is part of the satiety center in the brain, these two fatty acids affect our cells and our mitochondria differently. So that's the first thing is that vegetable oils make you hungry. They are sabotaging your satiety. We talked a little bit about sugar, processed foods absolutely make you hungry. And I think there is nutrient density sensing in the human body. If you are not getting the nutrients found in meat and liver, all those magical nutrients, quote unquote, that I talked about earlier, choline, carnitine, carnosine, you are not going to be satiated because your body's like, I am deficient in something and it knows it. You can't tell. You don't have like your computer

chip, like a diagnostic in your car, like I'm deficient in riboflavin. I should go eat some liver. Right? But you get cravings. But you get cravings. Yeah. And they go out of whack when you're pregnant and it winds up being the thing everybody talks about. Exactly. And you only can crave things you've had. So people will say, well, why don't I crave liver? Well, when was the last time you ate liver? Right? Like you, all you know is that you crave something and that's, so satiety is huge.

And I think that I, I've never liked weight loss strategies that put people in a mental prison. You're never going to be able to calorie restrict for your whole life. Calorie restricting and starving yourself is a fantastic way to lose weight. It's also a fantastic way to have your life suck really bad. And like, why are you living life if it's so miserable? And your body will find a way. You will never stay in calorie prison your whole life, unless you are super motivated. And what's the point of living in that way? So that's why dietary constructions like this are fascinating to me that actually emphasize nutrient density and ancestrally consistent diet.

And they create satiety without making us feel like we are depriving ourselves. And you don't even have to have caloric deficit. So it's a huge topic. And I think that you can starve yourself, but it's not going to work long term. I so appreciate that just because I think the mindset of focusing on the outward appearance of someone's body and being calorie restricted has just led to so much, I don't know, so much pain to say the least. For both men and women. Yeah, absolutely. But traditionally we think about it with women. You know, I have a younger sister and when she was growing up, you know, I see it because

I have a younger sister. Like there's so much body image. I know men experience it too, but for women it's especially destructive. You know, it's really hard. And it's the same kind of idea. And while we're on the topic, you know, a lot of women don't think about red meat and organs as food because they're afraid of making them fat. But I really believe strongly that this is a game changer for women as well because it's like this is the food your body is craving.

And I talk about this in a study in the book. We can look at things like evoked response potentials in the brain. This is one of the coolest parts of the book. And you can show vegetarians and vegans and omnivores pictures of meat. And you can look at it with an EEG, an electroencephalogram. We can look at the way different parts of the brain fire. And you can look at deeper regions of the brain, like the brainstem, kind of these lizard brain parts or, you know, diencephalon parts, like more ancestral or more, I should say, more ancient

parts of the brain. And you can look at the neocortex, like the more recent parts of the brain. And when you show a vegetarian or a vegan, picture of meat they get this sort of conscious aversion but the subconscious part of their brain still goes please give me that that's fast yeah so you're saying like evolutionary evolutionarily over time we have we are encoded to recognize something as nutrient-giving and good for our body, but other parts of the brain, which are like we've programmed during this lifetime based upon messaging and learning, to be like, no, that's bad, but ugh. So we're just not in – And that's why they make plant food look like sausage and bacon. Oh, yeah. You know what northerners makes me think of is that – sausage and bacon. Oh, yeah. You know what Northeanism makes me think of is that, yeah, like, yeah. Wow.

Why you take shit and try to get it to look like that. Like, why. Why is it not its own thing as opposed to mimicking. Why did veggie burgers, or what do they call them, soy burgers, why did they steal the burger's groove? But there's another part of this too that's like they find that um i don't know how they measure but there's a similar thing humans like overlooks and humans like shorelines and it'd be like the the rich you know like when you look at human district like the the african diaspora and when humans started colonizing the world it was you

know coastal routes coastal routes. Coastal routes and river routes. And so it seems that there's this sort of association with shorelines, land meets water, like the beach, right? Triggers a thing where you're like, that's a good spot. And then also this idea that humans like an overlook.

They like to be like, ha! I can see everything around me. And it pleases some deep down thing in you to just see what's up. It's safety. Not going to be surprised. I know what's going on down there. People going in the restaurant and wanting the corner seat and two, you know, their back is to both walls so they can see peripherally everything around them. Yeah, don't have that feeling some shit's going to happen behind me.

You know? Yeah, don't have that feeling that some shit's going to happen behind me. You know? Yeah, totally. I'll tell my wife to stay out of the way because someone in Baja told me that, and you know, it's like the old thing when you open a door and let a woman go in first. And someone in Baja was telling me that, you know, he's saying that's cultural.

I mean, that's like, it's cultural, but it's regional. And he was saying, here it would be that you'd go in first to make sure everything's cool you don't open the door and be like you go in first i'm not going in there it's like you go in everything looks good things are cool everybody your family comes in there there's no dogs stand there and send them all in and then be like good luck i'll be through last going in the bunker first do you guys know what percentage of vegetarians and vegans eat meat when they get drunk?

Shit, man. It's astronomical. I think it's 30 to 40 plus percent of vegetarians. I mean, like almost half. You know, it strips away the neocortex, man. It's exactly the same. It starts getting you down to your reptilian brain. If that's not an incontrovertible argument that meat is for humans, you know?

And, you know, maybe it's even more than 50%, but it's a massive amount. You asked me earlier about truth. Well, there's your truth, man. There's your truth. Yeah, wouldn't you say that both, like, carnivore dieters and vegans, when they get drunk, they all eat pizza? They all want donuts and pizza. And they want their dough. It's possible.

It's possible. And, you know, I think you could say that, but I wonder, I don't think you could draw the inference then that that's necessarily good for humans, just that that's like a uniquely addictive false food for humans. Because nobody's going to say like, well, pizza is clearly a vitamin. Yeah. Like that doesn't work that way. But yeah, I think that we've figured out, that's a whole separate discussion about the way that we've hijacked human satiety. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And the fact that we've made these things super addictive. But evolutionarily, there's no such thing as pizza. There's a thing I wanted to mention earlier that my wife does with our kids that I think is helpful. It came to mind when we were talking about earlier that to try to get yourself into a position where you feel really good, where you have an awareness of your body and to strip things away to a point where you're like, okay, like I feel optimal right now. Like, let's say you go on, you know, a hunt for a week and you're not at home snacking on normal garbage and you're really pouring it to it physically every day, your meal structure changes. And at the end of you're like, God, like I never feel this good. And then you just like lazily go back into all this shit that makes you not feel good. But you hit a point where you're like, this is what I would like to feel like.

Wide awake, a lot of energy, sleep very soundly at night, right? And you hit kind of like a thing to strive to. And just listen to your body. When our kids are in a situation, like let's say they go to a birthday party, and all of a sudden, for whatever reason, someone just hands them a piece of cake the size of a book, right?

She'll say, she'll introduce this idea. She'll say, go ahead, listen to your body. And it's funny, man. Love it. When you remind them of that, they will not eat as much. Because just make them be like, oh, that's right. And they'll be like, you know what? My body's telling me I'm done.

But they need to be invited. They need to be invited and reminded to be like, ask yourself when you think you've had enough of that shit. And hopefully. And they're like, oh, yeah, you know what? I think I have had enough of that shit. And they they're like, Oh yeah, you know what? I do. I think I have had enough of that shit. They're more likely to walk away. And hopefully, you know, parents can help their kids or, you know, realize after they binge on Halloween candy or the cake, when the kids are like, I don't feel good. I feel anxious. Or I'm just, you know, like, do you think this is related to the food you ate? Listen to your body. I love it. I think that's what we need to teach our kids.

But you bring up this great point that we talked about earlier. It's just how many of us have taken the time to get to the point where we know what that optimal feels like, and then you can see the deviance. It's signal versus noise. Yeah. I used to have it where I'd tell my wife, like, God, I'm like, it's just so depressed today. And she goes, let's walk back a step.

Let's walk back a step. Were you pretty drunk 48 hours ago? And I was like, by God, I was. Forgot about that. She goes, yeah, yeah, maybe. Maybe something there. Funny that. We've had this conversation 30 times.

Yep. Totally true. All right. So Paul Saladino, MD. How long have you been a doctor for? All along? A long time. been a doctor for? All along? A long time. Like you went out of college and...

No, I guess it depends when you describe me as a doctor, but I finished residency... I got out of medical school six years ago. Okay. So, yeah, I'm a little bit... You're non-trad. I'm a little bit older than most docs who've been out that long because I took six years off after college and just played and explored into my own venture.

Yeah, yeah. Did you immediately, and I wanted to ask this earlier, I just never got to it, but did you immediately get into diet type stuff? Or what was your original medicine that you were going to work in? Yeah, yeah. I've always been interested in diet. So before, the reason I said a long time was because before I went to medical school, I was a physician assistant. Oh, okay.

And I worked in cardiology. So I wasn't a doctor technically, but I was working in medicine as a PA, and then I went back to medical school. I got you. And the whole reason I went back to medical school was because I got fascinated by these connections between diet and health.

I just was like, you know, I think this is a big lever. Of course, stress and family and community and environmental toxins, but diet is the lever that I wanted to get interested in. So I always knew that in my work, I was going to be kind of drilling down these ideas. I obviously haven't been thinking about a carnivore approach for, you know, since I was a PA, but that was the reason I went back to medical school was to think like, how is this connected? The Carnivore Code is not your first book. It's my first book. Oh, it is your first book.

Yeah. So you're saying, so you're working on a cookbook. Oh, okay. But that's not going to happen yet. That's next year. Got you. So The Carnivore Code, Paul Saladino. It's out now, soon?

Out now. And then how do people go find you online? The best place to find me is all of my stuff on my podcast is at heartandsoylsupplements.com. And what about when you're hanging out on, do you do stuff on social media? At carnivoremd. Oh, that's good. You like that? I'm going to steal that shit. That's real good. At carnivoremd. Carnivoremd. Dude, that's a great idea, man. Yeah. Animal-based medicine. You know, people think about plant-based, we're doing animal-based medicine. That's a great handle. Thanks. Congratulations. Animal-based medicine. You know, people think about plant-based. We're doing animal-based medicine.

That's a great handle. Thanks. Congratulations. Meat doctor was taken. He's like, shit! Someone got meat doctor. Every once in a while, girls are like, can I call you Dr. Meat? So I was like, no, I don't think that's a good one. Dr. Meat was the other choice. It was a toss-up between DrMeat.com

I think you did the right thing. Yeah, me too. CarnivoreMD. Alright, so check out the book. I mean, we only just touched on like a smidge what's in the book. So check out the book, The Carnivore Code. Paul Saladino. Dr. Paul.

And it's out now. You look real good in your author photo. I mean, that's my... Dude, you look intimidating. You look like a mean lawyer. You look real good in your author photo. I mean, that's my... Dude, you look intimidating. You look like a mean lawyer. You look like a mean lawyer that's going to get you out of jail. Oh, yeah, with that. Yep.

You might drive a car real fast and pull out a 9 mil. Oh, yeah, or he looks like a dude from the Fast and Furious on there, man. That's a better way to put it. I wish my editor told me that. Man, you're too serious in this photo. Oh, no. You just look like, yeah, you look like you're going to be in an espionage thriller. Maybe I was trying to be a little James Bond here. We're up against some serious stuff here, you're too serious in this photo. Oh, no. You just look like, yeah, you look like you're going to be in an espionage thriller. Maybe I was trying to be a little James Bond here. We're up against some serious stuff here, you know, you guys.

Yeah, you're like, dude, we're not joking. We're talking about human health. We're talking about human health. I'm putting my suit on. Yeah, I mean, you guys know me in person. Man versus cow. Yeah. I'm putting a suit on, man.

I smile a lot more than that picture makes me look like. I think the picture demands some respect, man. Brooding. All right. Thank you very much for coming on. My pleasure. It's a pleasure and a privilege. I'm going to go home

and just drink animal fat, not fry anything in it. Drink it cold. Well, you can just eat your animal fat with some... Eat your animal fat with some bone broth. I'm going to experiment.

This was in Light High. Is it going to change what's for dinner tonight? I made the mistake of not. No. No, because we had fish cakes last night, and we had so many suckers that we now have a giant bowl of fish cakes. We're having exactly what we had last night tonight.

I don't want to waste. No. I'd rather be unhealthy than waste suckers. I hear that. But the next night, I'm going to tell everybody, kids, bacon and steak tonight.

Raw. You guys get a buzz? Are you buzzing? Oh yeah, I'm flying high, man. I'm all hopped up on liver. I can't tell. This might be the creeper that you gave me. Yeah, he threw he threw some of that horse tranquilizer

in the eye alright thanks a lot man thanks Paul thanks guys Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps,

waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.