The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 409: Lung King

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Dr. Jonathan Reisman, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Spencer Neuharth, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics include: Discussing déja poo; the defining of flatus; preserving, rather than killing, bacteria; gathering ginkgo biloba nuts from trees in NYC; eating wild game and keeping kosher; holy blood; meeting your cadaver; how badly Steve wants to go on NPR's "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross; eating everything but bones and teeth; eating embryonic eggs; getting curdled mother's milk from the calf; Jonathan’s quest to overturn the why it's currently illegal to commercially sell and eat lung in the United States; bullshit food beliefs; Jonathan's petition to the USDA; the non-pasteurized milk craze; how eating cholesterol doesn't raise your cholesterol; overdosing on fat soluble vitamins; the hormones you can and can't eat; teaming up with the haggis folks in the UK; the Anatomy Eats dinner series; Jonathan's book, "The Unseen Body"; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See 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 First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt.

First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Listen up. This is Giannis Patelis from MeatEater and I need your help. I'm going to be at the National Wild Turkey Federation's annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee this year and I'm looking for the best turkey storytellers alive. Now, I know we all have a good turkey story to tell, but I want you to think about who you know that tells an absolutely riveting turkey tale. A person that draws everyone in the room to their story. Bring them to me. I'm going to be at Ryman Studios in the same building as a convention, set up with recording equipment, and Phil the engineer is going to be there to make sure it sounds great. I have a goal of creating a national archive of hunters' stories and my first stop is the southeast because I know you all down there can spin a good story. This is our oral history. I believe there is immense historical value to these stories and

they should be preserved for future generations. Don't let your grandpa's stories die with him. Bring him to the convention and have him spin a yarn for me. The stories can be funny, sad, educational, exciting, but most importantly they have to be engaging. This is where the good storyteller part comes in. All storytellers will get 20 minutes to tell their story, and I will be on hand to ask questions to fill in the blanks. We'll be recording at Ryman Studio C from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of the convention, which is February 16th, 17th, and 18th.

There will be posters directing you to our location. To sign up for a time slot ahead of time, go to themeateater.com and search Turkey Story Sign Up. We will also have sign up available on location at the door of Ryman Studio C. Meat Eater will use these stories in a forthcoming audio project, most likely in podcast format, so they will be available to everyone as long as the internet is alive. So please come to Nashville

for the National Wild Turkey Federation Convention and bring me the best turkey storyteller you know. Our hunting legacy depends on it. Okay, joined today by Brody, Cal, Spencer, Phil, Corinne, and Dr. Jonathan Reisman. Corinne describes him as a medical doctor, hunter, author, and the man who wants to overturn the 1971 federal law against selling and eating lung. I want to overturn Yellowstone National Park. Let's join forces. We'll do mine.

There's a couple things I want to make it so the whole country is the blaze orange laws or orange hat crossing cart, like Supreme Court ruling. Orange hat, nothing more, nothing less for firearm hunting. Less, but not more. Then I want Yellowstone to be turned into a wilderness area and all the infrastructure removed, just the main highways going through it, and just a giant, just to restore it to a pristine state. What do you think about that? I'd support it.

And you want to make it that people can buy and sell lung? Right. You can buy and sell it as a dog treat for dog food, but you cannot buy it or sell it or serve it in a restaurant for human food. I got one for you. This has nothing to do with lung. I thought we'd put this question to rest,

but this is a medical question for you. There is a phenomenon. This is going to get mighty scatological because there's a lot of stuff. So if you don't like scatological stuff just move on do you guys remember when we explored the phenomenon known as deja pu meaning spencer you i wrote about this for our website. I did a fact check on it. Go ahead. What'd you come up with on that?

I don't even remember that. That it's not. Go ahead and explain what it is. Dejapeu would be where, say, you just got done hunting deer the day before and you were successful. I wouldn't do that one, but go ahead. No, you go ahead and lay it out then. Rabbit. Okay. Rabbit is the worst offender.

I'm just going to quickly define scatological. Relating to or characterized by an interest in excrement and excretion. There's been a lot of that in this podcast lately. It's starting to really wear me out. It's starting to wear me out, but you know how stuff like leads to more stuff. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, Spencer.

Define deja vu. I'll read you the claim. This is how we lay out fact checkers on our website. And this article is called, Fact Checker, Does Gutting Deer Make Your Farts Smell Like Guts? That lays it right out. Okay, and here's the claim. After field dressing a kill,

your gas will start to smell like animal organs within 24 hours. This observation has been made by those who pursue deer, ducks, pheasants, and other game. So in this hypothetical, you were successful rabbit hunting on, say, Saturday morning. And then Saturday evening, you have a bowel movement. And you notice that your bowel movement smells like the rabbit guts. And that's what you call deja poo. Yeah. So Dr.

Reisman, you'll come into this in a minute. So we had explored this and I think someone wound up saying the reason they call it deja poo is he's thinking some person was explaining some medical professional was explaining that it's a trick of the mind it's a trick of the brain um I was just on Rogan's podcast and he and I were doing some hunting afterward and he brought it up to me

because he knew a person who was a bear guide and their daughter was exposed to so much bear skinning and bear gutting and she was having such bad gas that smelled so terribly of bear guts that she had to go home from school wow had to call her mom to come get her i told i told joe i told joe i told joe i'm like it's, I said, we kind of explored this. I don't remember the details, but it's not, it's a trick of the brain.

And I said, alternately, if it's not a trick of the brain, what it means is somehow those microbes have gone in your nose gotten into your gut proliferated in your gut and inhabited your gut and then passed out as flatulence which just like seemed far-fetched to me who sent her home that's what i want to know she opted to go home oh i got it she called her mom because she was the teacher wasn't like god damn you smell like bear shit here's the guts here's the takeaway i got from from the physician i talked to about this phenomenon and then it's dr reisman's turn to put the final because this is this probably right up his alley they said there are potentially two things that are happening here one is that the nose hairs are trapping some like micro particles that were related to what you

were doing. And then when you have like a strong smell later, you're, you're smelling that again. So it's like, you're physically smelling that same thing you smelled earlier. That's one possible explanation. I don't buy that. The other explanation is that, uh, your olfactory receptor cells are strongly tied to your memory. And that smells are like the strongest thing that you can tie to your brain when it comes to recalling something. And that your mind is just playing a trick on you. And that when you smell something bad down the line, it makes you think of that thing that you just smelled earlier. The same way. That's the conclusion that we came to before, but this was not satisfactory to my interlocutor.

And this, they, this physician said the same thing happens. Like if you smell cookies and it makes you think of being at grandma's house or something like that, memory is strongly tied to smells, but what they did rule out, it is absolutely not that you're inhaling,

um, a bunch of fumes that get into your gut that come out your ear end. They breed in your gut. Yeah, that's not the case. Dr. Reisman? Scatological is definitely up my alley and my daily job, basically. I would say, I guess a few questions. You know, whenever we try to show causality or do a medical study, we always think of confounders, things that are confusing it and leading you astray from true causality. I already like this answer. So one,

I guess my question is, did the person eat any of that meat between gutting it and taking a dump? Or eat the guts or the meat? I guess I'm not positive that would then change the smell of their stool, but that could be something whether or not they ate it is a question. It takes me hours, if not days to wash my hands. And I want to give you another, like, the hypothetical that happens to me. If I were to be, like, bow fishing or duck hunting, and I'm wading through some, like, really swampy, nasty water

that has, like, some deep mud. That gets into your farts. That swamp smell is the one that I recall worst, like, way worse than a gut pile or something like that, but it's that swampy water smell. So I'm not eating that. But what's that got to do with farts? Because that's what I smell later on.

I'm smelling the swamp water later. Is that a word? He flagellates that swamp essence back out again. This is a phenomenon I've never experienced in my life. You will now. You will now. My kid just shot a rabbit. He got some pellets

in the gut, smelled real bad. No problems. Do you know what I'm talking about when you're wading through some cattails in a swamp? Oh, yeah.

You're kicking all the methane out. That's what I smell the strongest later on. But then later on, I don't re-smell that stuff. That's because it's not traumatic to you. That's what I'm talking about.

This is a symptom of a post-traumatic stress. I want to add some context. It's not always about eating. I want to rule out. He's saying confounding factors. Eating is not a factor. Right. So another thing I would wonder if the

flatus or the stool always smelled that bad. What was that word? Flatus. Oh, that's like fart stuff. Oh, is that right? Flatus, yeah. F-L-A-T-U-S. I have no idea. You're going to start using that word big time now.

I already learned something today. Like, wow, this flatus smells like the animal. I got it earlier, for instance. Yeah. So I guess I wondered, did the flatus always smell that way? And just because you had this stinky experience in the recent past, you're now associating it with it. The other thing is I seriously doubt you're inhaling microbes that are then populating your gut. Otherwise, you could do like a fecal medical transplant just by inhaling stool.

And that has not been demonstrated yet. But maybe more research is needed there. So you're buying, you're weighing in on the memory thing. I think it may be, I guess if I had to put my money down, it'd be a trick of the memory that it, maybe it smelled that way or similar. And it just reminds you of that recent smell you had, or the person who's hunting also eats a lot of maybe wild game or, or awful or something that makes their stool smell in that particular way. Or I can't remember the last time I gutted an animal and then had like a full change of clothes ready

within a period between then and my next constitutional movement. So I think there's all sorts of traces of smell if my dogs tell me anything. On my pants, on my hands, on my jacket. Nose hairs too. But what does that have to do with? I think that would be like somebody taking a poop and they are smelling parts of the animal gut and stuff like that.

But it's remnants on their boots, remnants on their pant cuffs, remnants on their... Yeah, but it'd be there whether they went and defecated or not. Yes, it would. It would, but they're picking up on that extra scent and saying like... It's flavoring. Yes, exactly.

Accentuating. Yeah. And when you go to the bathroom, you kind of ruffle your clothes in some way. Maybe that releases some more of it. That's not it, dude. Listen. What it is is this.

It's a trick of the memory. Here's the way to test it. Get a bunch of seasoned rabbit hunters. Old rabbit. Okay. Get a bunch of seasoned rabbit hunters who haven't rabbit hunted in forever. Not hard to do. Right?

You get some guys who haven't been rabbit hunted for five years 10 years put them with a person who's prone to deja vu okay have him you paying attention to this because this is a little do you do you publish much in academic not as much these days more you're more and well if you get back publish much in academic not as much these days more you're more and well if you get back into academic check this out get all these people and you get a rabbit hunter you haven't got a whole bunch of rabbits okay he then changes the clothes takes a shower goes into the room full of old rabbit hunters who haven't rabbit hunted. What's the verb for flatuates? To be honest, I'm not sure if there is one.

Produce flatus, perhaps? Yeah, he produces flatus. This individual produces flatus. He's like, God, smells like rabbits. Right? Well, they're in an airtight room warm do the other people think it smells like rabbit guts that's how you test this so when we publish this article the facebook comments were littered with mostly dudes being like my wife claims that my farts are the worst after a pheasant hunt, which I think is, is awesome.

I want to tell you how I know that it's, it's in your memory. It's in your head. I wrote this article on November 21, 2019. This had never happened to me before. A few days later, I killed a deer and that night it happened to me because I had been thinking about this I killed a deer. And that night, it happened to me.

Because I had been thinking about this and it was on my mind. The same way, when I was in college, I had never heard of sleep paralysis. Didn't know what it was. And then we had a whole class one day about sleep paralysis. And it happened to me like two months later. And I think it was just like I have a weak mind when it came to that kind of thing. And then I was exposed to it and it happened. Yeah.

Like if you told me right now you had testicular cancer, heaven forbid, my nut would start hurting. Like, I had that same type of problem. That specific? Oh, yeah. If someone tells me they have a problem, instantly I get an ache there. Yeah.

Either I'm, like, very self-centered or very, very, what's it called? Empathetic. Impressionable. Incredibly empathetic or something worse. Okay, we got a bunch more medical questions. This one I don't want to, let me do it kind of quick. A lot of people backed up C Corinne on psyllium fiber. Corinne was saying as a backwoods technique,

staying on scatological, as a backwoods technique, she eats psyllium fiber, which is metamucil. It's in metamucil. But this is just the pure ingredient, single ingredient itself. It forms a gel inside your intestines.

I mean, in a way, cause it absorbs a lot of water. Yeah. It, it, yeah. Helps keep things clean. As Corinne mentioned, also grabs cholesterol on its way out. This guy says it's more than safe for your listeners to take it while they're out in the woods to have a cleaner stool. Or a whipless poo.

What do you buy? What do you buy in that? Definitely. Well, Metamucil or any other psyllium-containing product or any fiber supplement is really good at keeping you regular, getting rid of cholesterol and other things,

slowing the absorption of sugars and other things. I've said recently if fiber was a new pharmaceutical drug, it would be hailed as like a medical miracle. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Like the effects on metabolic health, cardiovascular health are pretty astounding. They'd get a Nobel Prize.

Two maybe. Oh, cool. So then you get all those health benefits, plus you have a whitelist poo. So many, like I'd put this to bed, this frozen, we're talking about how to be responsible out on the ice or responsible in the wintertime or whatever when you need to go number two out in

the woods or out on the ice. And so many microbiologists wrote in to contest the idea that somehow the cold temperatures will render it safe that i can't put it to rest and have to bring it up once again people like if you're trying to save bacteria you make it cold. They're like, heat kills it. There's no, it's like, that's how you preserve it is by freezing it. Don't make the mistake of thinking that

if you vault it in the ice, it somehow will later be safe for users of the water in the summertime. We got letters from a septic processor, multiple microbiologists, everybody's fired up about that. I'm glad we got that cleared up because I didn't like your vaulting idea one, one bit.

Oh, one last thing to add, um, before we get into the, before we get into better stuff, I was, I was laying out for my kid, my argument about how my growing unease and skepticism of these fall turkey seasons where you can just rape and pillage for turkeys in the fall. And how I think it's short-sighted and taking the turkey for granted. And I told my kid, I was saying to him my argument, that I said to him, if God didn't want you hunting turkeys in the spring, he wouldn't have made spring. And he said, why do you make fall? Like, great question. He's got you there.

Sharp kid. So I had to stop saying that. All right, Dr. Reisman, where do we begin, man? Where do we begin? Talk about your background a little bit. Sure. I grew up in northern New Jersey in the suburbs of New York City. Normal suburban upbringing.

What makes it normal? normal well what is normal i guess um i guess typical maybe typical suburban new jersey upbringing um i guess by normal i mean uh specifically like related to outdoors and hunting and fishing i had no exposure as a child to any of that never ate any kind of wild game, probably till my 20s. Didn't know anyone who hunted. Didn't know anyone, no one in my family even fished. I never went fishing as a kid. Like had zero exposure to it.

Didn't know anyone who owned a bow or a gun. Never even thought about it. I mean, meat came from the store, you know, cuts of meat. I mean, I knew they came from animals. I just never thought more about it. Wasn't interested in it from either a being horrified perspective or a interested, I want to learn more perspective. Just was not. Just wasn't on my radar. I mean,

I guess if you, you know, if you don't know anyone who does it, you never, I never read, read about it. I mean, I guess I didn't even really read like adventure books about the old West or as many, maybe the young boys do. So maybe, maybe that would have piqued my interest. I guess I just wasn't exposed to it in any way. So it was a complete blank in my knowledge and experience. What, what happened to, uh, to burst the bubble? Um, well, I was, um, an undergrad at New York university and I don't even know. I just got interested in wilderness survival. I took a wild edible plants tour of Central Park in Manhattan and kind of learned to identify my first few plants,

first few trees, and first few edible. We found some raspberries, things like that. In Central Park? In Central Park, yeah. What else did you find? Like ginkgo biloba trees are kind of all over Manhattan They're supposed to be sort of the non fruit bearing Sex, but I guess a lot of them end up bearing tons of these stinky fruits that have an edible nut inside you often see

Actually elderly Chinese people gathering them in New York and many times I've gone up to them and been like what how do you process it? What do you do with it? And they didn't speak any English, so I didn't learn anything that way. What's your exposure to that, Corinne? I've often heard that. Everybody says that Chinese women will gather the ginkgo fruits. Yeah, I actually didn't know that. My exposure to ginkgo was probably in high school, just going to health food stores and seeing that and the shape of the leaf on a box of tea and starting to buy like the teas are supposed to be kind of calming effects supposedly. And then looking up around me and seeing the leaf like falling from trees in New York. And so I-

Oh, and you're like, hey, that's the shit from the tea box. Yeah, really, exactly. And then I was like, I wonder if this is the same exact thing or something slightly different. And I do remember seeing these little kind of fresh, you know, it's like a, I don't know, it looks kind of like an acorn, hazelnut size, kind of green outer shelf.

It's fresh. And I just remember seeing those and wondering like, if I can pick them up and eat them like a squirrel, you know, but maybe it's nasty because it's fresh and i just remember seeing those and wondering like if i can pick them up and eat them like a squirrel you know but maybe it's nasty because it's new york city so i shouldn't do that so got it what would you define as elderly say elderly chinese woman how far behind is corinne 40 years so she's got 40 more years to figure this out. We'll check back in with you, Corinne. In 40 years, you're going to get a text message.

Are you picking? Well, now I might start real early the next time I go back to New York City. We'll see. So that did it. Wild edibles. Did you guys do like lamb's quarter and nasturtium? Lamb's quarters. We didn't see nasturtium.

We saw poor man's pepper. We did see lamb's quarters. We saw Kentucky coffee tree. I mean, a lot of the, I guess all those trees were planted by a human at some point. Yeah. Probably the poor man's pepper, the lamb's quarter, the raspberries were not, and just sort of naturally ended up there. But I guess either way, it was sort of being able to identify a tree and then later seeing that tree again, especially Ginkgo below was kind of all over Manhattan.

That sort of just got me interested and just led to I wanted to learn everything about wild edible fungi. I hadn't gotten into hunting yet, but it was sort of getting into tracking and trapping and making everything from stone tools to wooden longbows to hide tanning. Yeah. Living in Manhattan, actually my dorm room, I lived right off on 14th street, um, near Union square park.

And like my dorm room literally, literally started having like, you know, half made baskets and like bark shavings. It was a mess. And some like dried animal hides. Um, my roommate was not happy. Was it like, was it motivated when you got into early on was it motivated by a reverence um for like native american skills was it motivated by that you were going to go live in the woods i think both of those were important there's definitely

that like romantic uh romanticization of the past and pre-contact native americans and how they lived you know quote unquote in harmony with nature. And when you read a lot of that literature, you end up getting sort of infected with that romanticization. And I definitely thought about going off, maybe not living in the wild, but certainly exploring it, understanding it,

learning how to, you know, to identify all the wild critters in it, how to live off, at least knowing how to live off of it was a big interest. And you got into brain tanning. Yes. Brain tanning.

Started picking up roadkill to my parents' dismay. And how was that going? I loved it. I mean, you know, and suburbia is like great for roadkill. I mean, the deer, hosta-fed deer are littering the streets, basically.

And I started picking up squirrels and making, you know, rawhide thongs out of their skins and brain tanning the deer hides. Thongs? Not the underwear. Like feet? Oh. Just like long leather strips. Yeah, I'm with you now.

Long leather strips. I got excited for a minute there. I suppose you could, but. It was turning a tidy profit out of the dorm room and meeting fascinating people. We could put some of that on the website. So were you learning how to, did you learn how to brain tan? Like actual, like using the, you know. Yeah.

Sometimes just from the animal I picked up, sometimes buying separately, whatever brain was on sale at some ethnic market or grocery store. All this is before you went to med school? Yeah, this is all before I went to med. So I came to med school sort of with this kind of understanding of, you know, of skin from the high tenors perspective and sort of just a deep interest in early humanity how they lived how they made everything where they got their materials from and how they used different parts of animals body to make tools and other things and were you eating a lot of wild game

at that point i was not i did i did have um a few instances where some as you know my friends and family knew of my strange interest in roadkill and more than once someone called me about a deer that was not dead yet. Um, by the time, both times, by the time I got there, it was dead. And so I butchered them and ate them. What was the variety of roadkill you were picking up? Squirrels deer. Did you like have any cats, dogs, coyotes, anything like that? No, raccoons, possums, although I guess I wasn't impressed with the fur, so I didn't end up keeping it.

But I would say raccoons, squirrels, and whitetail deer were the big ones. And where were you doing this tanning? Like in your dorm room? So a little bit in my parents' garage and my parents' backyard. And after a while, they kind of stopped asking me what is that smell because they really didn't like hearing the answer. But yeah, I had, you know, like my father came home from work one day i was scraping the hair off a squirrel hide in the garage or you know they'd go into the backyard and there'd be a deer hide and a lace into a frame back there stuff like that's great man yeah i mean i loved it and still love it don't have as much time to do, but it opened my eyes in many different ways.

How familiar, you were familiar as a youngster with kosher law. Correct. Though I didn't follow it. But you're familiar with it. Vaguely familiar with it. Now I know a bit more about it. You know a bit more about it. Are you familiar with, I don't know if you'd call them a sect or what the hell you'd call it, the Chabad?

What would you call the Chabad? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the the i don't know if sect is the word it's one of the kinds of ultra orthodox or it's it's kind of an organization of um that ultra orthodox that tries to proselytize to jews that are less religious never to non-jews jews don't proselytize to non-jews yeah so i was tagging along with a jew who's being proselytized to by the habad and i got and so since i was there anyways i asked the question and i said how would it how would you go about i'd like you to back this person up or elaborate on this i said how would someone who's keeping kosher how would they be able to consume wild game? He said, you'd have to catch it in a net

and then bring it unharmed to a kosher slaughter. Is that your understanding? Correct. And can you explain why that is? So there's many, many rules in kashrut, which is kind of the collection of rules that we think of as, you know, to produce kosher food. Many, many rules, like mind-boggling number of rules that you have to follow. But one of the big ones is that all blood must be drained out of the animal. So there's some rules in kosher where, let's say, you don't eat pork because it's, quote-unquote, dirty, but you don't blood because it's so holy, it should be left for God. And some say that's left.

Is that what that's from? Yeah. So it's sort of the spirit, the animating force of the animal or the human is in the blood. And so actually, you know, in before, I'm not sure what year, but many centuries ago, millennia ago, Jews ritually slaughtered animals and the big temples in Jerusalem, people describe it as like running with volumes of blood. So some think it might be leftover, even though we don't ritually slaughter in that way anymore. Some think maybe that bloodletting or getting all the blood out is part of the, is sort of leftover from that ancient tradition of slaughtering. And it was an offering to God. I got to interrupt because I wish we had that.

You remember that picture someone sent us, Corinne? When we were on that, when we talked about Samaritans a bunch? Oh, uh-huh. What the hell country were they in? No, I think that— Where they had that place where you hang all the lambs and kill them, and they had those special troughs to collect all the blood and divert it into like a big master blood vault.

I'm going to have to look that up. I wonder if that was a, if that was in the West Bank actually. I was kind of half paying attention to it. Anyhow, elaborate like blood collecting. Right. Apparatus. Right.

Well, you're getting rid of the blood in the case, in this case. So you'd have to catch the animal, hang it upside down from its hindquarters and slit its neck. Specifically, someone trained to be what's called a shokhet would have to do the slaughtering. That's how you say that word? Shokhet. Yeah. And usually that's a rabbi, though not always. So for instance, in a halal, the sort of Muslim version of kosher, any Muslim can do the actual slicing of the neck. But in Kashrut, it has to be someone trained to do that. So if you're slaughtering cattle, you're not obligated to get that thing hanging up by its hock alive, are you?

You are. I've been to a kosher slaughterhouse. They put chains around the back legs and lift it up and the cow's mooing its face off. then someone gets in there oh yeah with a knife about this long you have to be like a knife fighter to get in there i don't know well and that i mean that part can like hypothetically be botched as well right like if they don't have a clean knife swipe that animal then is not kosher if it doesn't die a certain way within a certain amount of time. Is that correct? I believe the rules do stipulate that. Yeah, it has to be like a very sharp knife. It has to be very quick and clean.

But yeah, so getting the blood out of the meat is a big part of it. Even the liver, you actually have to take the liver out of the body is not kosher. Even if that animal is kosher, you have to actually cook it over a fire in some way to get the blood to all drain out, and only then is it kosher to eat. What? It's true. Explain that to me again. You have to get the blood out of the liver. You know, the liver is a very bloody organ.

When it sits in your fridge every day, it does a new pool of blood around it. So you have to actually slowly cook it. So buying raw kosher liver these days is basically impossible in the u.s it has it's already slightly cooked and to get the blood to drip out can't be cooked in a pan because the blood would then sit around it they cook it on like a grate basically so all the blood can drip out of it so they're not eating blood sausage definitely not only god can do that, I guess.

And then, just to stay on this subject for a second, on the kosher slaughter subject, is there an inspection of the animal then to determine had it been healthy? Correct? Correct. And it focuses on the lungs. Okay. And there used to be actually a more involved process

where you have to check, I forget if it's 17 or 20 something body parts. But sometime in the middle ages, all the big rabbis decided that we can just check the lungs and they'll sort of be a proxy for the health of the whole animal. So when you're in the kosher slaughterhouse, there's a bunch of slaughterhouse workers, you know, moving the half carcasses along the ceiling and the, the, the racks that are moving along the ceiling. And then there's a bunch of show hits or rabbis that are looking at the lungs. So after they cut the animal and open his chest cavity, they pull the lungs out, bring it over to a table and look at the surface of it

to see if there's any white scar tissue on it, which would be evidence of pneumonia or other lung infections in the past. And these are religious figures, not food specialists. Correct. But it's a career path you can go on. Many rabbis do choose to get trained as a shokhet to then go into that industry as well, like a side hustle, I suppose. I like to imagine that they all start at the same rabbinical school. And there's some back and forth of like,

hey, so what are you going to do? Right? And I feel like I would be much more on the slaughterhouse floor path than the, you know, having a congregation of sorts. Right. It's like choosing your medical specialty. It's like, do you want to be hanging around cows

hanging upside down or just want to do bar mitzvahs for suburban brats? Right. Exactly. And this slaughterhouse equipment is not doubling is like non-kosher slaughterhouse equipment as well, right? Like they're not doing all the same process with meat that's also going to the local grocery store that's non-kosher. No, you can't. You cannot have any non-kosher animals in that facility at all. Although, to be fair, the one that I wrote about in my book,

The Slaughterhouse, another time I went there and there was a pig hanging on the side and the guy's like, you didn't see that. Oh, what was going on with that? I don't know. Just, you know,

he had the walk-in freezer space and someone with a pig wanted to put it there. And he's like, wow. No way. That's a scandal. I think that's a scandal. I think that happens a lot.

Like, let's say you slice the, honestly, you slice the animal, it doesn't die right away. Like, I'm sure sometimes they're like, oh, you know, slice, slice, slice again. That's why a lot of, there's so many gradations of how strict you are. And there's a lot of fudging,

which is why some very religious people will not eat even something stamped kosher, depending who stamped it. They might not eat it because they don't trust that person or this person. I just had another thought. Just play it safe. Yeah, exactly. Play it safe. Your knife man, would he also then be more sought after to perform a bris?

Good question. It's like did a couple of kosher beef different technique also different knife size sure sure he brings his big machete uh you got into buying whole animals yes so? Not live, but actually that same slaughterhouse, they would do lamb or sheep and goats. And so I picked up a whole animal from them several times. That was while I was in medical school studying anatomy. But were you doing it just because, like, why? Did you know it was going to tie into your career? No. I mean, I was just curious. I guess I'm still not was going to tie into your career no i mean i was just curious i

guess i'm still not sure it has tied into my career i guess just right writing made it tied into my career coming on podcasts like this made a tie-in but um i think i was just curious i mean i was sort of fascinated so once i started dissecting the human in anatomy lab uh in medical school like on the first day of medical school we start the process in this class in anatomy lab in medical school, like on the first day of medical school, we start the process in this class called anatomy lab. You meet your cadaver and start dissecting. They're laying face down on the metal gurney and you start with learning the superficial muscles of the back, like the lats or latissimus dorsi and others. But that first day for me, it was very eye-opening. It was really revelatory in some ways i just absolutely

loved it and actually there's a triangle roast yeah well so i didn't know too much about different kinds of cuts yet but i i did decide on that first day to donate my own body to that same process like to donate it to a medical school to be uh dissected by medical students just because i was super fascinated with the process does every med student cut into a person? Nowadays, less so. There's actually some really very high quality virtual dissection programs. There's actually this digital, it's the size of a table, the size of a metal gurney lying in front of you. It's called the anatomage. And you literally can go through it to an amazing degree.

Before I saw that, I thought that virtual could be no substitute, but after I saw that, I'm honestly not sure, but I'm still very glad I got to cut open an actual person. What's that feel like, man? Does it feel like sinful? What's that feel like? I think the most surprising thing was how quickly everyone got used to it. I think everyone was super worried when they were going in,

like, holy crap, day one, like, here's a dead body, now start cutting it apart. And, like, I think within a week, everyone, it was just, like, another day at the office, honestly, which is a sign. Who was your person?

Some overweight old man. That's what I was going to ask. There's no way for you to get any, like, history of that, like like getting curious about that person and figuring out who they were and what their deal was. No, I mean, to be graphic, their face is sort of smushed. Why is their face smushed? Just because they're laying face down on the gurney. And so their face is sort of like stuck in that smushed, not that seeing them would

tell you who it is, but are they fresh or not fresh? So they're embalmed. So they drain the blood out, not too dissimilar from kosher meat, and then put a big hose into the big veins of the neck or upper chest and run in formaldehyde or whatever the latest version of formaldehyde is.

So the body's generally preserved and smells like preservative. And you don't know where they came from, how they died? No, I mean, you can tell, like you can see medical evidence of disease. You know, like my guy had bad coronary artery disease. Like literally the coronary arteries were like crunchy.

You could crunch them with your hand, like calcification, which goes along with coronary artery disease. What should they feel like? Just sort of spongy, soft tissue, like muscle, let's say. But things get calcified as we age, especially when you have hardening of the artery. The hardening is actually calcium being deposited. He also had like, he was clearly a smoker based on the color of his lungs, which were

like ash, gray, and also they looked like emphysema. Emphysema lungs looked like extra bubbly kind of extra big and extra bubbly um so he was a smoker which probably contributed his coronary artery disease and i don't know what he died of specifically like you could look at the heart and actually see evidence of a heart attack you know part of the heart muscle would die and turn uh another color depending on how long you live after the heart attack it goes through color changes you know if you die right away you it would be stuck in that initial color but if you live another five years it continues to remodel and scar so you can tell I mean that's

what pathologists do and they do an autopsy to find the cause of death you know you could cut open the lung arteries and find a huge clot in there and maybe oh they died of a pulmonary embolism did you check see were you able to check his stomach contents? I don't think we opened the, no, we didn't open the GI tract. I've done that on animals many times now. Sure, man. Having no background in this, it doesn't seem like this guy fits the profile of somebody who normally donates their body.

I would imagine those folks are like quite fit and proud of what they got going on. Not an overweight smoker. Oh, I don't think there is. I think you're reading a lot into that. Let's hear. Right, like you want to show off to the medical students. You think people that donate their bodies are proud of their bodies? I would imagine that's more likely.

Don't you think they ain't packed? Wait till they get a load of this shit. They're going to remember me forever. I'm going to appreciate it. Yeah, so what is like the normal profile of a cadaver? Yeah, don't you think the vein, though, would want to keep it all to themselves? No, I think they'd want someone rooting around in there. Yeah, I've really let myself go.

I think I'm going to update my body donor shit on the back of my driver's license because I'm just not looking my best. Thankfully, we have someone here who can tell me if I'm right or wrong. So what's like the normal profile? I mean, all the bodies, there was probably about 30 bodies in that room, and they were all elderly. So not in the prime of life. I mean, I can't say any

looked great, but I didn't really look at them. None of them caught your eye when you walked in? I mean, they all smelled terrible and looked sort of gray. But definitely, like, my cadaver was very obese. Like, the layer of blubber on his

back was, you know, two, three inches at least. And that made me think, while thinking I want to donate my body to this process, like, I should really stay fit so that the medical students who are picking me apart my carcass don't have to deal with the fat it's just you get grease spots all over your the scrubs you're wearing there's little bits of fat all over your gloves and on your scalpel and scissors and

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Here's something I learned not too long ago, which is something I like to think about during these winter driving conditions is that there's mobile cadaver labs. Did you know that? No, I don't know what that means. So.

They scoop you up? Well, like different facilities, right? They don't have the space to offer like full. Oh. Medical learning there, right? And so there's companies that are mobile. Like the bookmobile, but with dead bodies. Exactly, Brody.

And occasionally, like during like our ultra horrid driving conditions. Sometimes they mix up the two vehicles. Right? Horrible for the children. And you're like, oh, there's a semi laying over on its side how do they how uh like what level of dissection did you go to were you like peeling back all the skin and the muscle and getting to the bone and like yeah all breaking things down or yes um you

know the first day was just the superficial muscles of the back then the deeper muscles of the back um and then maybe we turned them over and started doing, you know, you do all the muscles first, you do the extremities. The forearm is particularly interesting. You see all the muscles and the tendons, how they go down into the hand. And you really, you know, look like a puppet

from that perspective, a string puppet. And then, you know, the head and the neck, we ended up, I think we sawed the head down the middle to look at the cross section. And we also used a circular saw to like cut down each side of the chest and sort of lift the chest off like a plate, like a big plate to expose the lungs and heart. Regular circular saw. Yeah. What kind was yours? I'm not even sure.

Do you mean like one that you'd get at a hardware store? It looked pretty similar. It didn't say like Dremel on it, but it did look similar and probably was a knockoff brand of that. Where do they drain the blood from on a cadaver? Like into? Or like where do they draw it from? Are they pulling it out of the neck or what? I think it's probably just the veins of the neck, the internal jugular or the subclavian,

which are the two big veins that join together to make the superior vena cava. The superior vena cava is sort of deeper in the chest, so not as accessible, but the internal jugular is very easily accessible in the subclavian as well. We often put large IVs called central lines in those veins because they're pretty accessible. And the femoral also kind of right there in the inguinal crease, you know, where your leg meets your torso is another big vein you can drain from or get access to with a big IV. Oh, you know what I wanted to ask you about?

I didn't listen to it, but you got to go on fresh air. I did. Was it Terry Gross or did you have to settle for Dave Davies? It was Terry. Oh God. So chill.

Not knocking him. Not knocking, no. Dude, my career goal is to go on fresh air but i want to have to be terry gross i know i got very lucky that's great man i didn't get to go into the studio even though she's in philly and i live in west philly uh but they're remote they're doing it remote yeah just what'd you talk about in there crew sent to me i never listened to it we talked about um you know anatomy and food quite a bit, about different, my experience of dissecting a cadaver.

Huh. Maybe you could go on fresh air and talk about deja poo. I'll have to pitch that. This is my career goal, man. Talk about eating liver. Or like, you point out that you can eat everything on a person except the teeth and the bones? Yeah, I mean, they'll, you know, if you try to bite them, they'll hurt you. Sorry, sorry, not a person.

I mean, you could do that too, except it's illegal and immoral. Yeah, a creature is edible barring the what? Well, I mean, anything that's going to break your tooth or stab you in the esophagus when you try to swallow it. That's the limiting factor. I mean, you can make a bone broth still. You could boil it, make the broth, you know, soften it. I mean, some bones, as you know, are soft enough to just eat.

Bigger bones, not so much. I mean, everything else as what we would call soft tissue is just eat bigger bones not so much i mean everything everything else or as what we call what we would call soft tissue is just that it's soft like you can chew it up and swallow it uh it might not be great i mean as long as it's not overtly toxic yeah um you know i wouldn't eat like lungs filled with tuberculosis or something like that but um but yeah everything's edible i mean and when you when you look around the cuisines around the world and what body parts they've cooked i mean people cook absolutely everything this might sound like a goofy question but like what is how different is meat like muscle

from liver say very different i mean in composition it's different looking at it's different on the microscopic level it's different in terms of what it's made of i mean the muscle fibers that comprise most of meat are just you know protein laid out in that linear arrangement to contract and create force and the liver is kind of just like a bunch of cells and veins and arteries and bile ducts so it's pretty different tastes different too oh yeah uh but you you enjoy eating it yeah i never liked it as a kid so just you know i grew up my family ate a lot of chopped liver on every holiday and i thought it was absolutely gross and also i never like meat i never thought beyond that that it's gross and i don't want it i never thought oh this is a liver that came from the abdomen of an animal and i have a very similar

organ in my abdomen and oh how interesting i want to learn more like chopped liver on toast or on crackers yeah or just spoon straight which is totally you know acceptable and i do that too so now now i learned to like it through, through medical school, learning all about the liver. I mean, you just learned so much about the liver. I probably forgotten more about the liver than I know right now, or ever will know. And, um, and that got me fascinated that, oh, this, you know, this muck that my family likes to spread on crackers is this same incredible organ that lives inside of us and inside of animals and does a million and one even more than other organs the liver does a million

and one things to keep us healthy uh from moment to moment and uh and then that becomes liver or becomes something edible or you're eating the exact same thing that that thing uh is in life and so that realization got me interested and then i learned to like it just by trying it and trying it again people point out that what people who don't like liver or who think you shouldn't eat liver will point out why would you eat a thing whose job it is to filter impurities out of your body you know which is a Right. Well, so it's not totally accurate. I mean, the liver does metabolize a lot of toxins. So for instance, drinking alcohol or taking too high doses of Tylenol, you know, things that toxins that come from the outside that we ingest, the liver is responsible for detoxifying that. And the liver can be injured in the process of detoxifying it. That's why it is injured,

let's say in a Tylenol overdose, because it's the one detoxifying it and all those sort of radicals that are produced injure it. But that doesn't mean that that liver has that toxin in it. And if you eat it, you will be poisoned. And even the liver processes toxins that we ourselves make. Like, we turn over all the protein in our body constantly. There's a constant turnover. And when you break down protein, you create ammonia. It's just a natural byproduct because proteins, the molecule with nitrogen in it, right? Carbs and fat do not have nitrogen, but protein is the nitrogen containing molecule that we're mainly made of. And so by breaking that down, you end up with ammonia, which injures your liver, injures your brain, can kill you if it gets too

high. And so it's the liver's job to detoxify that. The liver can be injured by it as well because it's the one that's doing the detoxification, but that does not mean that eating it will poison you. I mean, that being said, some things are also stored in the liver, which I think that's the question is like some heavy metals and other things can be stored in the liver. And so you might not want to eat those. Why would it be that like you shoot a yearling whitetail and the liver is like super mild, not real strong flavors, tastes good, but then you shoot a six-year-old buck and the flavor is just way stronger and not as pleasant.

Is it just stuff building up over years? Because you said, you know, it's detoxifying in some capacity. So are there things that are building up in the liver that cause it to taste much different? That's a great question. I do think that is true. You know, older animals, the liver is stronger in flavor and sometimes tougher in texture.

And I don't know why exactly that is. It could also be a normal part of aging. Like muscle also becomes more tough as you age due to things like collagen cross-linking and other things. So it could be part of the normal aging process. I've also noticed like chicken livers are much softer and almost like drippy. If you put as much as chicken livers on a skewer they're almost like dripping off of it as where like a cat even a young calves liver is not that drippy it's just more solid yeah i'm not totally sure why that is what about eating kidneys i think they're good just gotta snip off that little triangle where the renal artery and renal vein enter the organ.

But people say when you eat kidneys, you're eating piss. I don't think that's true. Well, it's not true. It's not true. I mean, similar to the liver, as we discussed, you know, the kidneys make urine. They get blood through the renal artery, extract things into the urine, and then whatever's left over flows back out to the systemic circulation through the renal vein. There's not much storage for urine in the kidney. It's not like the bladder's up there in the kidney, right? There's just a few little beginnings of what'll coalesce into the ureter, which is the tube that brings urine from the kidney to the bladder. So there's

very minimal space for urine. It doesn't really sit in the liver. It sort of drains out immediately. Sit in the kidney. Yeah, sorry, in the kidney. And whatever's left, probably when you take it out of the animal, now that the ureter is severed, when you take it out of the animal, whatever little bit is in there probably drips out immediately. Have you, yourself, or did you ever encounter anybody

who had eaten a fetus? No, but I am curious about that. I there's a filipino dish called balut and i've had that yeah and i understand some of the plains indians particularly liked what was the fetus from what's that what was the fetus from that you ate balut is you're eating a um embryonic duck oh the chinese have a thing like that with chicken and they the i like if the if the egg would normally hatch at 27 days you're getting you know i might have my numbers are off let's say the egg would hatch at 27 28 days you know there's 15 day balut there's 20 day balut and and you when you're eating it you got you could even be so late in the development that you're in the, this is a popular dish in the Philippines.

And they also kind of like, like to serve it to outsiders to make them squirm a little bit. So you're always getting presented with, with embryonic ducks and you'll be eating it. And there's like little kind of like, you know, there's like bone is starting to solidify inside there. I never, I didn't enjoy it. But you never encountered anybody who was eating the fetus from a mammal? No, I never did. I did actually, I remember in Iceland, gathered some wild goose eggs and boiled them and there were tiny little birds inside that we just crunched on through. But I have read that some of the planes that

bison hunting Native Americans ate fetus. I think of it as super veal. It must be delicious. Yeah. There was a few dishes I've stumbled into in reading about that, that I thought were interesting is one from calves getting the curdled mother's milk from the stomachs of calves that are nursing? Is that the same as marrow gut?

I don't know. No, from the chuckwagon. There is like, there's a dish, I think Mexican dish called trepas de leche, which is intestine with partially digested milk in it from youngsters. Yeah. intestine with partially digested milk in it from youngsters. And there's also in, there's this like the chuck wagons, which used to follow the cowboys around Texas, I guess, they used to cook for them. And there was a dish called son of a bitch stew that supposedly had this ingredient called marrow gut, which is a similar, it looked like marrow, I gather, because it was sort of a tube filled with this partially digested milk.

So I'm on the sort of researching this to figure out what it is. Some people say it's a little tube that connected the third stomach to the fourth stomach. But then in the same breath, they'll say it's the same as trepas de leche. And if you ever look up a YouTube video of someone cooking trepas de leche, it is not a little tube. It's a really long, clearly intestine. So not totally sure what that is. We had somebody who wrote in to the podcast that they had taken the fetus from a cow elk that they had killed in the winter. And they described it as though they were, they had air in their mouth when they were eating it. It was so tender and like almost non-existent that they were just chewing on air. Incredible. I guess that, I think fetuses and feces

might be the, the last frontier for anatomical cuisine. Talk about why you can't eat lung in America. Or like, why you can't sell,

why it's illegal to sell lung in America but they're eating it all over the, not all over the world. Let's start this way. Who eats lung?

Everyone but the U.S. No, I think it's also illegal in Canada, actually. So common things you'll find it in are in haggis. It's an ingredient in haggis from Scotland, which is one of the U.K.'s biggest culinary exports besides scotch whiskey, which is why they want to overturn the law in the U.S. Because when they send their haggis over here,

they have to do a lung-free haggis. Correct. So the U.S. government said either submit a scientific brief that shows with rigorous studies that lungs are not dangerous to ingest or create a haggis recipe that does not contain lungs. And so obviously they went with the latter

since it's much cheaper to do that. And they export haggis recipe that does not contain lungs. And so obviously they went with the latter since it's much cheaper to do that. And what's the substitute? They export haggis. Oh, yeah. Big time. Especially like to Canada and the U.S. There's a big, you know, descendant of Scottish immigrant population. I'm not, they think they'd be super interested in haggis.

I guess I'm not so sure. Well, the only time I've had it was at a bobby burns festival in the u.s and they had a haggis and it wasn't even in a stomach really it was in like a bag of some sort and no lungs in it probably what's the long substitute then that's a good question that might be proprietary though i'm not totally sure what they do i guess i've heard that lungs provide this traditional this desired crumbly texture to haggis that people swear by. And there's somebody in the haggis marketing world sitting over there going, if we can only overturn this law in the U.S., sales are going to explode. Right.

That lung demand. He's got dollar bills in his eyes, man. That lung demand. He's sitting there with his bagpipes. Literally, that's what they think. We've all pulled a bunch of lungs out of various big game animals. And it's hard for me to imagine what would happen to it when you cook it. If you took a chunk of a deer lung the size of a piece of pie and threw it in a frying pan. I can feel that question.

What would happen? I'll tell you. What's it going to look like? So when I was in, so, you know, Mo Fallon? Mm-hmm. Okay. When Mo was working on all the board, like working on all the Bourdain stuff, traveling for that show, they're always wherever the hell. And he was somewhere, maybe in North Africa, I can't remember where it was, working on No Reservations.

Was that the first one? Parts on, no. Yes, No Reservations was before. Okay. And they were eating all kind of lamb lung, wherever he was. So then I was with Mo and we were in New Zealand. We shot a wild lamb. And he was real, we made a big organ scramble and he was real into emphatic about putting

dicing up the lung and putting it in there it's it's frothy you had brain there's no yeah but there's no like chew to it or anything it's like it's like a i don't i'm i haven't found a way that i enjoy it you have to think about what it's made of right like it it had it it holds oxygen right and so i was talking to ya when he shot his first book he said that his you know dad did all the butchering he didn't want anyone to touch it needed to be butchered the proper way with everything preserved because they eat everything and he was actually saying that there's a mung dish that includes a whole bunch of ofal together and the lung you know it's kind of like if i remember correctly it's almost like a little bit foamy or a little bit slimy it's tofu-ish

it is tofu-ish i think of like chocolate mousse when i like see one or have it in my hands. But then cooking the water out would be, well, I don't know. I'm sure Jonathan can speak to that. I mean, the organ is more air than flesh, which makes it a little weird in texture. But I guess I've just thrown a deer lung in the pot. It does firm up a little bit and you can take a bite of it. I mean, I did that without any seasoning or anything. Just boiled up a deer lung.

Just to see what the texture would be like. And you can, you know, just like any protein, it sort of firms up when you boil it. And so it did get some firmness to it, and you could cut slices out of it. Unseasoned, what did it taste like? Like not much? Just, yeah, not much.

I mean, it had like a little bit of an organ-y, unpleasant taste to it, I would say. I have had delicious lungs, though. One dish I had in Israel, actually, at a Bulgarian restaurant, it was called lungs in juice. And it was basically a tomato juice soup with lungs, and they were delicious. Yeah, kind of cubed up. And you could see, I was sort of dissecting and you could see i was sort of dissecting you could see airways and how they branch and the lung had broken down into what we'd call lobules you know lung is broken down into lobes and those are broken down further into lobules and just like you know collagen holds the whole thing together like it does every body part so when you boil it

the collagen turns to gelatin and the thing kind of falls apart. But that was actually delicious. So when, like, what was the timeline on the, on you not being able to sell the stuff in the U.S.? Right. So it began in 1969. The USDA decided to determine kind of once and for all, this is the language in the federal code, you know, determine if lungs are fit for human consumption or not. And who pushed for this or why is unclear. I did a bunch of research to the National Archives, and it's not clear who or why they pushed for it. But they set up a study where USDA pathologists in the late 60s started examining livestock lungs specifically from, I forget if it was calves or cattle or what age, but they took about 100 or so lungs and started cutting open all the airways kind of all the way down, you know, with a scissor,

the same way you would look through lungs, let's say, as I mentioned, to look for a clot in the branching pulmonary arteries. You can do the same with the airways. So you just cut down the trachea and then cut down the bronchi and cut down the bronchioles and all the way. And they sort of sampled from these deeper, deeper airways and found things that alarmed them specifically like pollen that the animal had inhaled, dust, fungal spores, and rumen contents. So stomach contents had come up the esophagus and down into the lungs, maybe after death, maybe before death. And so because they were in such deep airways, I feel like the USDA is always making decisions on what's practical and what's efficient. And so they

decided that when they do a postmortem examination of an animal and look at the lungs, they're not cutting down into the deep airways. And a significant proportion of these hundred or so animals had these, quote, contaminants in their deeper airways. And so for the sake of efficiency and practicality, they said, well, we're not going to examine every lung specimen that deeply. And since a large proportion of them have these quote contaminants, we'll just ban it completely from, you know, human consumption, basically. So they declared it unfit for human consumption.

That's what the federal code says. But the same declaration, there's no declaration about that, about kidney, liver, intestine, brain. Well, they don't, they're not, I guess, exposed to those very specifically airborne contaminants, right? So the lungs are exposed, you know, the atmosphere just continues on deep into our chest. It's contiguous with the atmosphere. So whatever's in the atmosphere we're getting in our lungs, including spores and pollen and dust. And our lungs do have a cleaning mechanism. In animals and us, we have what's called the mucociliary elevator or a mucus elevator. So our lung lining constantly secretes mucus that flows and picks up all these debris,

picks up pollen and spores and whatever, and sort of drags it all the way up the airways. And these microscopic hairs called cilia sort of beat in a very rhythmic pattern that moves the mucus along. The mucus gathers up, the trachea comes into our throat and we subconsciously swallow it. So the lungs are always cleaning themselves through this mechanism. So when you kill an animal, the airborne contaminants you find in their lungs at that moment would have been just what they've inhaled in, you know, I don't know, the last few minutes, few hours, because their lungs constantly cleaning itself. But at any specific moment when you kill them, there's some left in there that has not yet been cleared. So then the question is like, is that unhealthy? Well, why would that be determined to be more dangerous than, for instance, when you eat bratwurst, okay? When you eat bratwurst, it's in a casing. It's in a hog middle. Now, if you went and tried to find some dangerous stuff, I would go looking around in a hog's gut. gut well they might argue that well that gut's been totally cleaned and the inner surface which

is the mucosa has been scraped off and any remnant of a microbe that might hurt you is totally gone maybe they soaked it and you know what do they soak it in lime or lye or something like that got it um so they'd say you can clean it out real good yeah the lungs you can't clean out specifically in the much deeper airways there there wasn't like a specific pathogen they were worried about. It was just a general, this stuff's not good for humans. Correct. It's always obviously been,

you know, USDA code and the Federal Safety Inspection Service, you know, the code about which lungs or which organs must be discarded. You know, if you find actual disease or infection, you discard it. So if the lung has an abscess, you know, I don't know, has a cyst with worms in it, has whatever evidence of anthrax, something like that, obviously that's, you know, you should, that should be condemned

as they say. But yeah, this was just, they were afraid of people ingesting literally dust, pollen, and fungal spores from the air so when you found this out what prevented you from just being uh from saying to yourself hmm that's interesting and then moving on well i think so i came at medical school from the like interest in um you know kind of uh early humans and how we get everything, how we eat everything, how we make everything. So I came to medicine from that. And then that combined into my interest in food. So I was bringing my kind of that sort of wilderness survival sort of idea with my anatomical and physiologic knowledge that I was learning in medical school. And that made me

question these things. You know, I was like, oh, is that actually dangerous? Like, does that make sense? I guess I'm always questioning everything. Like there's a lot of stuff that we take for granted dogma that's been passed down. That's true in the medical field. So much of what we do is bullshit for lack of a better term. Um, there's so much dogma. I mean, in food, the dogma is just off the, off the chain. Give me, give me a couple of examples. Medicine or in food? Food and give me, give me a couple of examples. Now I'm interested. Medicine or in food? Food and, give me, give me a couple of bullshit food beliefs. Um, well, I would say that the lungs is a great example. Like I don't believe those things are unhealthy in any way to eat. And let me just say, when you, when your own mucus elevator is cleaning

out your lungs, you're subconsciously swallowing all that stuff anyway, all day, every day of our lives, we're all swallowing everything we inhale subconsciously. And it's uncooked. That's a good point. And it's uncooked, right? Because it's directly from our lungs. If you're going to cook an animal's lung, like, there's no way that's dangerous. I just don't believe it.

It makes no medical sense. Another thing I question, like, you see this said everywhere, which is that tender cuts come from muscles that the animal used less in life. That makes no anatomic sense. That's true. Is it true? Because when you don't use a muscle, it atrophies like the bodies. I think that statement assumes the body's inefficient and would maintain muscle it's not using or using, you know, inadequately, but bodies don't do that. They maintain just the amount of muscle that they need. It's not, it sort of indirectly has a point to make

about which muscles have more collagen in them. Yep. But it's not that they were used less. So it's a little bit of semantics, but, you know. Understood. Well, think of the heart, right? Medium rare heart is tender stuff. Yeah, and that sum some bitch's working away.

Has to. Has no other choice. You got a big problem if it's not. Yeah, that's a great point, Kel. And I was thinking too, tongues are real tender. Yeah. Well, I mean, once you get them. And that's a hard working, well, I don't know, they work.

Doesn't it seem like it's working away? Yeah. Trying to get what I mean is not working away. Every time you speak. We're talking, we're eating, we're, yeah. I think people assume that, oh, you know, muscles from the legs and the arms work a lot as opposed to like, say, in a quadruped, the muscles along the spine, like the tenderloin or the backstrap don't work as much because they're not upright like us. But I do not believe that's true at all. So just as I said, the body's constantly remodeling itself and breaking down protein and rebuilding it.

If you're not using a muscle, it wastes away. Just like if someone has a limb and a cast for some months, they can't use that muscle. And when they take off the cast, it looks like skeletal because all the muscle is wasted away. Before we get back into the lungs, what does your tenderloin do? I believe, so the tenderloin connects, so it's the psoas major muscle and it kind of combines with the iliacus muscle, which is on the inside of your iliac crest and they go down and attach to your leg. So I believe it's hip flexion. They're involved in hip flexion. Hmm.

That's what a deer's one is. Uh, I believe so. Those are tender. Very. But they're working every time he flexes his hips. Yeah. And I mean, even though, and so there's another way that meat scientists will say it, which is that locomotive muscles are tougher than postural muscles. So muscles like of the legs that make you move are working harder than postural muscles that are maybe just doing small adjustments to your spine,

let's say in a quadruped. But that also doesn't make sense. You know, when they did these, the sheer force tests of all the muscles in the body, they discovered, oh my God, the flat iron is super tender, like, which surprised everyone, even though it's a locomotive muscle, it's involved in the forequarter. And there's some other ones in the back of the hindquarter that they found were super tender. and none of that makes sense with the locomotive postural dichotomy doesn't make sense with the using the muscle more or less dichotomy i have heard that 100 million times yeah you hear it absolutely everywhere and it again it has a point but anatomically it makes no sense it assumes the body's inefficiently maintaining a muscle it's not using or using less than it needs to to get back to the lung thing you actually took the time to write a letter to the usda to say you boys got it all wrong on lungs right did they take you

seriously i haven't heard back yet though they did acknowledge receipt of the petition. You know, you can, this is the FSIS. It was a petition? Well, that's what they call it. You can, you know, on their website, you can submit a petition by emailing this address. It's the FSIS, the Federal Safety Inspection Service, which sort of, you know, creates the rules for what you're supposed to do with different body parts. I submitted this, the explanation that I just gave about the mucociliary elevator and how we're all eating this stuff anyway, and there's no evidence that it's unhealthy in any way, especially cooked. And I submit, you know, I printed out or

included a chapter from a lung physiology textbook and highlighted the part about the mucociliary elevator. So let's see. I mean, there's no push. This law makes no medical sense and it's not keeping anyone safe, but there's no great push to turn it over because no one cares about lungs, only the haggis lobby, apparently. Even I spoke with the dean of the law school at University of Pennsylvania, which is down the street from my house. And he is a specialist in food and drug law. He never heard of this law. Like no one's ever heard of it. It's just on the books and forgotten. And it's there because of what we call regulatory inertia. Like no one's pushing to overturn it.

Where do lungs, like from a slaughterhouse, where do they end up? Like do they get used elsewhere or end up in the trash or? So that's a great question. Actually, in the law that bans lungs for human consumption, there's a stipulation that pharmaceutical companies can still get them because they harvest

something from them called surfactant, which is a soap-like molecule that helps the lungs not collapse when you exhale. And it's actually turned into a drug that is squirted

into the tracheas of premature babies. I've done that before. So one of the last things to develop in your body before you come out of the womb is the surfactant. Because you're not breathing the whole time you're in the womb, you're about to take your first breath. So the surfactant helps the soap-like molecule,

you know, half is dissolved in water, half dissolves in lipids. It keeps the alveoli, the microscopic air sacs, open when you exhale. Otherwise, they would just collapse on themselves. And that's what happens when babies are born premature and don't have surfactant yet. They have respiratory distress syndrome and often have trouble breathing. So you actually take this stuff that is, I think there's some synthetic varieties, but some are actually still harvested from bovine lungs. And you literally, you know, like you're intubating someone putting a breathing

tube in, you actually just squirt this stuff. And you actually, you roll the baby to one side, squirt a little in to get into that lung. And then you roll them over to the other side, squirt a little more in to get into that lung. After they're born. After they're born, immediately after they're born. Actually, well, I guess depending on the age, you might wait to see if they have the respiratory difficulties or depending on their age, you might just give it because they're very likely to have it if they're very premature. And that was written into the law.

Yeah. So I've heard a conspiracy theory that the pharmaceutical companies are behind the law because they wanted more surfactant. Yeah. I don't buy that. How much could they possibly use? I don't buy that. There's no shortage.

I think there's no shortage of long. There are these synthetic alternatives. Are they used for like dog food or fertilizer or anything like that? Yeah, so there's dog treats also that are, you can see them in grocery stores, like lung dog treats. Oh, really? Yeah, they're like air-freezed dried. How about a long-term VO2 max study on these kids with the bovine lung juice shot into them? Yeah, I mean, a lot of them do end up with chronic lung issues.

I mean, I think the surfactant lessens them, but isn't perfectly curative, because a lot of those kids still have trouble breathing and need a lot of support. So it's probably much better than it would be if you didn't do it, though I don't know the evidence behind it. Are the specifics of the law that you can't sell lung or that you can't eat lung?

Like, can we legally eat the lung from a deer? Yes. There's nothing about, it's more about selling or serving in a restaurant, which is sort of indirectly selling. Wild game, or if you slaughter your own, you can absolutely eat lung. This is off lung too, but I feel answer you might know the answer to this question what is all the hubbub um do you know about the do you do you know much about the like non-pasteurized milk craze and all that i'm aware of it i don't know a ton about it

do you know what's dangerous about it um well i know one i mean i feel like i was just thinking about this the other day there's a lot of movement towards you know what's dangerous about it? Well, I know one, I mean, I feel like I was just thinking about this the other day. There's a lot of movement towards, you know, raw milk and just everything raw and less processed and less oversight, less pasteurization, whatever. And I think, I mean, there are, you know, probably nowadays we have a cleaner food supply than they did 100 years ago when these laws were probably more important. But there probably will be some disease. I don't think it'll be common. But, you know, the risk is very small.

I think not zero. One of the things, though, is there's actually something called bovine TB, where there's a kind of, it's mycobacterium bovis, I believe, as opposed to the one that infects humans. And I don't know what its prevalence is in cow milk these days in the US,

but there is a kind, that kind of tuberculosis that can, and it would go to your intestines and cause kind of an intestinal TB, or we'd call it a TB enteritis, not like in the lungs because you're not inhaling it. That was one of the reasons for the processing of milk. And I'm sure there's others as well. I don't know as much about yeah uh when you why like do you do you really care about the lung issue or is it just academic for you well it's i i don't care a lot i mean i surely i want the laws of our country to be sensible especially when they're in the area that i know most about which is medicine and health um they shouldn't be stupid i feel like don't be stupid is a good you know philosophy for laws but um i mean it part

of it's fun um maybe bragging rights if they actually overturn it i don't know oh it'd be great you put it on your resume yeah have you followed cwdD much? A little bit. Yeah. What's your take on the idea that those prions, are you a prion or prion guy? I say prion. Okay. That the prions, I've heard people smarter than me say prion though, but I still like saying prion. Okay. The prions that, that cause mad cow disease, uh, scrapey,

uh, Jakob, Kreutzfeldt, whatever, all these things. Kuru. What is it? Kuru.

K-U-R-U. That's the one that was common in Papua New Guinea when they would eat their ancestors. Oh, okay. Eat their relatives brains brains that in an animal those prions are apparently more prevalent in the nervous system so more prevalent in brain and spine. So you'll have people like guys like me, whatever, who may be used to saw, um,

little chops, little bone in chops. And people be like, Oh, don't do that because you're getting the prions all over everything. Are we, is that all mental masturbation? If you're eating the animal anyway?

Well, I think I'm not an expert in this area, but I do think that the danger is very low and might be zero. I mean, I guess one, you're cooking it. I mean, prions can survive. Thousands of degrees. They can survive. Can they survive like cooking temperatures? I know they can survive autoclave. No, I heard they can like survive the surface of the sun like that oh no not powerful no it's

like 900 wildly hot no i remember when some politician was making a some politician made a thing against cwd uh research and he was saying well just cook your meat and someone pointed out that you'd have to be cooking your meat to 900 degrees, which is- For several hours, I just called it. Which is way outside the capacity of your average- Not going to have any meat left. Of any homeowner's oven is hitting 900 degrees isn't going to happen.

Well, I guess I'm mistaken about that. But I mean, there's a lot of people out there eating similar chops as you. And if there haven't been any cases yet, I'd say that's pretty reassuring. So are you not worried about CWD? I'm not trying to put you in a given medical device. But when you look at the fact that no one's gotten it from deer meat. Yeah, if you shot one and got it tested. Would you just be like to hell with it?

You personally would just be like to hell with it. I'm eating it anyway. And I know that it has CWD, this animal? Yeah. Good question. Honestly, I would probably not eat the nervous tissue in that case. But you'd eat the meat. Maybe.

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Well, here's one for you. Jumping back to our milk question, okay? The journal Tuberculosis. Independent study. They, you know, gathered a bunch of studies from 1980 to 2021. 67 articles, 83 studies. And found a consensus of 5% of milk would be infected with bovine TB. If it wasn't pasteurized.

If it wasn't pasteurized. Is that a gamble you'd be willing to take? Good question. I guess I'd want to know what, you know, do all of those have an infectious dose worth in them? How much you'd have to drink to get infected? And what's the, you know, what's the infection rate? I mean, a bunch of humans drink salmonella. Not all of them are going to get sick. So I guess, you know, it's always a percentage.

Yeah, salmonella was a big one when I was punching in milk, like raw milk. Yeah, salmonella seems to raise more hairs than bovine TB does. I spent some time with a, I did a story years ago about livestock theft, cattle rustling. And I got to spend a bunch of time with a stock detective in California, also an idol, but this guy in California had been tasked with breaking up these

little non-pasteurized milk schemes. And the way it goes is this. You go undercover. Well, check this out. So here's how they get around it. You don't buy the milk. You buy a share of a cow and then you get your portion of your, you get your shares worth of your cow's milk because you own it. Okay.

So I have a dairy cow. I sell 10 shares to people and then they get one 10th that dairy cow's output i haven't sold them the milk i haven't sold them the raw milk i've sold i just sold them part of my cow what they do with their cow's milk is their business okay when he was working these little schemes um what he started doing was finding out who are, okay, who are the owners? Give me their names. I'd like to go visit with them and see their brand inspection papers and all their paperwork

for the cow that they own. To which no one had any idea what he was talking about. Pretty clever. So you, yeah, talking about pretty clever so you yeah it was like so you don't own the cow because you don't have anything that signifies your legal ownership of livestock registered to the state and that was how they got after these milk shares that's a i don't mean to stereotype but that's that's a real hippie business but that that's probably one of those's probably one of those areas where the left, the radical left and the radical right come around and meet.

Yes. They come around and meet in a weird land. Because hippies are like, natural is good. Then on the right. So on the left, like everything anything natural is good on the right you got the government can't tell me what to do they don't want me eating raw milk therefore i'm going to eat it and they come back around and they meet where hippies meet yeah it's like the crazy ass right wing people having a big party at a dairy farm

that that would be like a great um you'd never be able to sell it as a TV show But it'd be a good book If you did 10 chapters And each chapter was where Crazy ass hippies And super right wingers Meet up And you spend time in those 10 worlds

That's what I love about dive bars in Bozeman like during ski season is that you are at the bottom of the horseshoe for both sides. Like especially if you go to like Stacy's or something. Like the horseshoe is very apparent there. Yeah. It's great.

I used to go to a bar in Missoula and it was like ranchers and earth firsters. Yeah. You know? And I always want to be like, do you know what the guy down the bar does? He keeps buying rounds. Yeah, I got to think about that book where I might be on to something, man.

Oh, there's some good ones. It's called The Bottom of the Horseshoe. Yeah, you go to like Stacy's like this time of your ski season, you'll have fellas that are in like cowboy hats and chaps, like real cowboys. And they'll be. Listen, there's no real cowboy at a bar in chaps. I have the point. Okay. And they'll be bellied up.

You might be at a different kind of bar. They'll be bellied up. Spencer's like. Were they saying hey cowboys to you? These aren't cowboys? You got me there. But they have hats on. Spencer, I'd like to show you the hitching post. Yeah. You got me there. But they have hats on. Spencer, I'd like to show you the hitching post.

You got me there. They'll be bellied up next to somebody who's got a hemp sweatshirt and dreadlocks. It's great. I love it. That book idea is so good, you just might want to edit it out of this podcast. I know. I know, man. Plus, it's going to piss enough people off to where it's going to sell real well.

It's good. Oh, shit. Did we cut it out, Phil? Or do you think me talking about it has gotten... Listen, here's the thing. going to piss enough people off to where you know it's going to sell real well it's good oh shit do we cut it out phil or do you think me talking about it has gotten listen here's the thing i am writing a book your helmet okay i just started it i have begun work on a book called the bottom of the horseshoe and it is about where crazyass hippies and radical right-wingers meet. Guns, unpasteurized milk. Homeschool. Vaccines.

Homeschool. Vaccines. It exists. I've actually read the first chapter. It just says chapter one. That's it. My book. It's great.

Your book, yeah. The Bottom of the Horseshoe by Stephen Ornella. The subtitle is Where Crazy-Ass Hippies and Radical Right-Wingers Agree. It includes chapters on firearms um oh chickens backyard chickens would be a great backyard chickens vaccines milk non-pasteurized milk homeschooling i'll think of some more yeah that's kind of livingston's whole tourism campaign. Like literally it is. Yeah, where artists and cowboys meet.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, something like that. So, Dr. Reisman, now that you've become familiar over the last six years with hunters and hunters, okay, and wild game consumption. What are your warnings and your hot tips for people that butcher their own stuff, eat their own stuff? Do you see our community doing shit where you're like, I would not do that from a medical professional standpoint? Or where you're like, I wonder why those people don't do that. Um, well, I guess, you know, all doctors give advice based on their own levels of fear and worry and things. And I kind of don't worry too much about those things. I mean, I, you know, process animals, gut them and butcher them without gloves.

You do. I do. That's great. I mean, maybe I shouldn't. I mean, when I was in India, I also ate everything street food, you know, the restaurants with more roaches had the better food. Honestly. Um, I'm just not like, uh, nervous about those things. Maybe I should be more so, but my usually like with milk, I kind of feel like the people who are saying it's dangerous are exaggerating. And the people who say it's going to make you live

forever are exaggerating. I kind of think everyone's just who are saying it's dangerous are exaggerating and the people who say it's going to make you live forever are exaggerating. I kind of think everyone's just exaggerating. So you don't impulsively put on, not impulsively, you don't in a calculated fashion put latex gloves on when handling game? I don't. I mean, I guess sometimes when I'm trying to keep the fur and, you know, tarsal glands off the meat and stuff like that. Sometimes I will, but not because I'm afraid of, like, hurting, you know, getting any, contracting a disease myself. Yeah. But I'm just kind of, like, not, like, a nervous, precautious person.

Precautious? You're not a nervous Nelly. I'm not. Who is Nelly? Nervous Nelly. Or is it nervous Ned? Both. I don't know. I is it Nervous Ned? Both. I don't know.

I don't think I've ever heard Ned. Yeah, pick your audience, though. We'll get it. So there's that one. What about if you're eating a whole bunch of bone marrow all the time? Is that super bad for you? Not that I know of. It's delicious.

Why? What's the danger? I don't know, man. When we got into eating a lot, I always felt like I was, like I was doing something bad. I'm not sure. You know, I'm sure an, you know,

infectious disease or food inspection specialist might, specialist might have more to say. I've been. I say eat all the bone marrow you want. I've been making a lot of duck stock lately. Mm-hmm.

And have found that the duck stock is better, like the nastier your duck carcasses look on the way in. Right. So like basically all I do at this point is make sure that, that, uh, the end of the digestive tract is out of there. So it's basically poop free, but there's no rinse involved or anything like that, but there's chunks of lung, kidneys, you know, lots of congealed blood, stuff like that. Yep.

And that duck stock is. You're not scrubbing it. I mean, it doesn't smell good on the way in, but I'll roast a batch or I'll just throw it all in the pressure cooker or roast it and then put it in the pressure cooker. And it is within five minutes of basically heating that stuff, it, you're ready to dig in. It's awesome. Hold on a minute. You're taking, you're roasting it in the oven, the carcasses, just to put a little brown on them.

Yeah. And you're pressure cooking yours. Just, just for the, the speed. For how long are you doing it? Half an hour, you know, cause I'm trying to put a lot of liquid in there too, so. And then you're sieving it off and clarifying it and shit. Yeah.

I'm not a big clarifying. Like the actual clarifying with the egg yolks. You don't do anything. No, no. I like it. I like the stock to look like it's going to provide some oomph. Yep. Cloudy.

Yep. Cloudy stock. Yep. Where are you guys at in the medical world right now about eating all kinds of animal fat? Things seem to be in flux. I know, like, for instance, with salt, I spoke to a nutrition researcher from Canada a few weeks back. And it seems like, you know, I guess they did the largest study ever, a multinational study, you know, better high quality study, better ability to compute the data than ever before,

and found that basic, you know, everyone agrees that super high salt is bad, but I guess the question is, where's the cutoff? And the cutoff, this study suggested the cutoff people have been giving is much too low. Like you can have more salt than people have been saying and suffer no ill consequences. I do think, you know, there's a lot more coming out on saturated fat and stuff like that i feel like the whole nutrition world is in flux and people think doctors are a bunch of idiots on nutrition and they're correct um i think people don't know what to think and honestly most doctors don't know what to think either so i would say eat animal fat Do you picture a world in the future where all of a sudden, um, someone's like, damn sugar, lots of sugar is super good for you. Like what are the things that we right now think

are bad that you think will always be bad? And what do you think are kind of baseless when you look at it? Well, like saturated fat cholesterol was, uh, and salt were sort of the old enemies. Sure. Um, and now it seems like sugar is more of an enemy. I guess the thing is they're doing new, better, and bigger studies with better methodology, better ability to compute and process the huge amounts of data. And they're finding that a lot of the old studies are not so great. So cholesterol, eating it does not change your cholesterol. Eating cholesterol does not change your cholesterol. Correct.

It seems with the latest studies. See, that's why we thought bone marrow was, I don't know why, I don't even know if it has a lot, but that's why we thought bone marrow was bad. I know it has a lot of saturated fat. I'm not totally sure about cholesterol content. But, yeah, I mean, I think, I would say if you're being truly scientific, you should never say, we'll never think sugar is good for you. I mean, you should never say never because you never know. I mean, you should do large studies and see what they show. But I kind of, I eat saturated fat.

I don't, you know, I feel like when I was a medical student advising my primary care patients, it was sort of like eat more greens, you know, but don't fry it in anything that'll make it actually taste good. I feel like they're going to be like, what are you kidding me? Like, I it in anything that'll make it actually taste good. I feel like they're going to be like, what are you kidding me? Like, I'm just going to continue eating what I was like. Um, I feel like if you tell people like fry your vegetables and bacon fat, they'll probably eat a lot more vegetables. And, uh, I think overall that might be healthier. Got it. Got it. That's my own, again, my own personal take. Every doctor has their own style and the science is so in flux the evidence is in flux i know you've had strictly carnivore people on this podcast before yeah but i don't know that that's yeah it seems a little extreme to me yeah i in my long absence from the podcast have you guys

covered the the recent find of like pale, Paleo Man and their diet? Like, all the interesting things that popped up and a big, basically, like, evidence of, like, actual meal making, right? Oh, hmm. And just this concurring theme that we have, the long- running theme of, um, like Neanderthal, right? Like now we have a better picture of the fact that Neanderthal was combining ingredients. Oh, we have talked about that.

At mealtime. Yep. Versus this carnivore belief of it was just pure protein, animal protein, animal fat all the time, or there was nothing. Yeah. They're using grains and other things and making like what one might describe as a recipe.

Right. Yeah. Right. Like it's a, we have a better picture now of like, that was very likely, which if you do think about it, like if you watch a small child or any other animal wander around, Like they're constantly trying stuff. It's hard to imagine.

Neanderthal was like, nope. Like I'd rather starve. Yeah. I think you need to take it into larger context of activity level and what, you know, just the diet overall. But I feel like a mixed diet variety is good. You know, like the Inuit ate a super high fat diet in the past and needed it. Do they need it today? You know, where they're not expending

as many calories, I guess it's a totally different setting, totally different context. So context is important for what the healthiest diet is. I got one last one for you. Arctic explorers and others that would get vitamin a poisoning from eating polar bear liver the hell does that mean so um you can overdose on the fat soluble vitamins which are a d e and k you cannot overdose on the water soluble vitamins which are are all the others, B, C, and the rest. So the fat soluble, I'm not totally sure why that is, but you can overdose on any of those. And we also- What are the fat soluble ones? A, D, E, and K. Okay.

And you can overdose on them. So you could overdose on vitamin D as well, and that could make your calcium go very high and cause a whole lot of problems and other things. But so, yeah, you can, you know, a lot of animals store especially fat-soluble nutrients in the liver. Got it. And the polar bear happens to store a lot of vitamin A, so you can overdose on it. I don't know how much, if you, you know, eat a molecule of it, if you eat a tiny little

portion of polar bear liver, you'd probably be fine. I'm not sure how much the lethal dose would be. But sit down to a pound of it might. Might be too much. And why do they have so much vitamin A in their, like, is that, do they have a vitamin A rich diet from eating all the, all the marine mammals or something? I'm, I'm not totally sure, to be honest. I mean, they eat a lot, a very high fat diet, diet um as all animals in the arctic do i guess

but um they so i'm sure they get a lot of it uh but i don't know why they need so much or why they store so much in their liver to be honest but it's the only animal i know of where there's that vitamin overdose danger he's not here right now but our colleague seth ate uh large pelagics, large pelagic fish for about 30 days in a row and got mercury poisoning or got some mercury poisoning. Do you believe him? His hands went numb. I'm not totally sure. What was his mercury level?

Did he have like memory issues too? He had memory issues. His wife's hands got numb. She didn't mention it to him until he mentioned it to her. And she like oh my god i've had the same problem did he go crazy you know the mad hatter's mad because no he went no but he went well a little bit crazy he went a little bit crazy seth is gonna be here for trivia if you want to talk about it then i'm curious what his what the blood levels showed and he didn't do any of that. No? He just laid off. Yeah. But I had him over there all night, and that son of a bitch was digging back in.

Bluefin tuna belly. So basically eating bluefin tuna fat. Sounds okay. I don't know. I don't know a lot about it, but this guy isn't cautious at all. Maybe in moderation. What insight can you provide on how a buck would taste different? Say you're hunting in Indiana peak rut is November 12. You kill a buck on November 12 versus if you killed one on

September one, um, should those animals taste different? Like before the rut and during the rut? Yeah. Like when, when they're at like kind of a baseline of, uh, just have a very stable pattern of they're hitting this cornfield every night. They're not chasing does anything like that versus a buck who is rutting real hard in mid-November. Well, I guess, and you're talking about just taste, not tenderness. All of it, yeah, tenderness, taste, anything. Well, I guess there's some thought about the hormones of the rut and what they can do to meet. I guess, do the bucks lose weight also in the rut? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they kind of, they throw caution to the wind and they don't drink as much as they should. They don't eat as much as they should. They don't sleep as much as they should. I would say it's like a stressor for them, sort of, because of the activities they're participating in. Right. Well, I guess. Also avoiding hunters at that period. Right. I guess I've heard a lot about hormones, like, you know, just sort of the rut related hormones like testosterone and such versus the stressed out running away and dying slowly hormones like adrenaline, cortisol and other ones.

I guess my understanding is that it's inconsistent in terms of I guess you guys would know more than I do about that, but it's inconsistent in terms of how it affects taste and tenderness. But I guess less fat, you know, intramuscular fat in particular or marbling contributes a lot to the quote-unquote tenderness you feel in your mouth because you're biting through fat in addition to protein fibers. So maybe losing less fat might affect the texture. Having less fat might affect the texture.

I guess I'm not totally sure. I've heard meat scientists on this show and other shows talk about the role of hormones and I guess I'm a little confused and it seems inconsistent. Oh, is that right? How about specific to like the testicles? I've tried to take note of this and I've never noticed a difference in taste between like a buck in September versus November versus January. Should I notice any taste or like texture difference with those? When you're eating the buck nuts? Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't think so. I mean, there's a lot of those hormones

are released into the bloodstream. You know, there's not really a testosterone storage in the testicles, unlike something like the thyroid, which has a lot of thyroid hormones stored in it, ready to be released. The testicles just sort of release testosterone into the bloodstream.

So I don't think that would, you know, the hormone shouldn't, it should affect them the same. It affects any other tissue that's being perfused by the testosterone containing blood. Testosterone isn't made in your testicle. Is it? It is. Sperm is too.

I get that. Can we speak a bit about thyroid hormone and then what hormones you can and can't technically consume and why not? And then also, like, can you in the cooking process, like, what what does that turn? I mean, do you like kill hormones when you cook meat? So sure. So there's this condition called hamburger thyrotoxicosis, where you get a dangerous or toxic dose of thyroid hormone in your hamburger. And there's some medical literature. I read a bunch of studies like in the 80s, I think it was in like Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota area. There was a few slaughterhouses that were not dissecting the neck properly of the cows they were slaughtering and some thyroid tissue was ending up in the

ground meat. And so if some of that ends up in the middle of the burger where you're cooking it less, some of that thyroid hormone can survive intact to be swallowed by you. And unlike many hormones, you can eat thyroid hormone. You know, many are broken down either in your intestines or by your liver before they get anywhere. But thyroid, you can eat and it can arrive into your bloodstream intact and, you know, active, which is why, you know, hormone replacement like thyroid replacement or pills, you can take them by mouth. And some people even take desiccated

cow thyroid, which is literally dried cow's thyroid. And that provides you with T3 and T4 that you need to replace your underactive thyroid. So there was like an outbreak of thyroid, you know, severe hyperthyroidism to the point where it makes your heart race, makes you sweat, makes you feel terrible and horrible diarrhea and things like that. And so that condition, hamburger thyrotoxicosis is, you know, sort of well known. And it's actually also very common in dog chew toys because the gullet or the trachea is often dried and given to dogs as just sort of a chew toy. And there's less oversight of the butchering process that goes to dog toys, just like lungs, you know, oh, they're too dangerous for humans, but let the dogs eat them. So these chew toys, there's actually often every few years, like an outbreak of dogs getting hyperthyroidism.

Well, how many hunters got to be grinding up a deer's thyroid and putting it in their burrow? Yeah, totally. Probably a lot. I mean, I butchered two deer earlier this week, actually, someone gave them to me. And I was really looking in the neck. I could not find the thyroid. I don't know if it's very small or what. I'm not sure.

But maybe it's so small or maybe just people cook it's not as bad as with beef maybe spencer makes this raw deer dish that we've all eaten before are you are you being careful because maybe like i had the sweats after eating that last i didn't i would not say being careful and trying to not have neck meat in there now. Tiger meat's real heavy on the salt. Yeah, tiger meat, that's what it's called. And raw onion, yeah, yeah. There's also like, you know, certain species hormones can be active in the human while others are not. So it could be that

deer thyroid hormone is not active in humans as cow is. I do not know if that's the case. So you could be eating, you could get a cow's hormones and then they run in your body and act on your body And you're acting That'd be like a great

That'd be like a great defense What if I ate testosterone? Would I like start like growing hair out of my face If I was eating like buck nuts during the rut Or like sashimi buck nuts? No, because testosterone digests, right? Correct It's not digest in the gut

But is processed in the liver and actually mostly turned to estrogen. And made in there. Which is why when people say, like I was at a testicle cooking contest in Serbia and all the men, super drunk, are like, yeah, we're getting virile or whatever. It's actually the opposite.

Yeah, it's actually. They're getting loaded with estrogen. Probably. But the other thing is, if you've ever seen commercial testosterone preparations, it's usually like a foam or an injection. It's rarely pills. And the pharmaceutical companies try to, you know, they take the testosterone molecule and try to add on little molecular branches to it to try to make the liver not act on it as much. And there is one called methyl testosterone that doesn't get broken down in the liver, but it severely injures your liver, so it's no good.

But that's one of the holy grails. You know, if you could find an orally active and safe testosterone preparation, that would be a big hit. So estrogen and progesterone, you can eat and get into your body, right? The pill, it's a pill because it arrives into your bloodstream active. Testosterone really mostly comes in foams, transdermal, and injections for that reason. Cortisol is active. You could take it by mouth.

Insulin is not. You know, you have to inject it. But pig insulin, you know, pig and cow insulin used to be the treatment for diabetes type 1. But it would have to be injected, obviously. And now we have bacteria and vats churning out true human insulin. So we don't need to extract it from pancreas of animals anymore. Man.

Yeah. Huh. Think about all that, Spencer. Do you think the lung thing will get changed? That's what I'm wondering. Like, in your lifetime, are folks going to be selling lungs? Well, if we start a petition...

Do you get money from the haggis industry? I've written to them saying I want to join forces, not expecting any remuneration. Who do you write when you want to get a hold of the haggis people? So I've spoken to two. One is the former kind of the USDA secretary version in the UK who I spoke to on the phone. And another guy just by email with one of his like secretaries who answers the email. I think he's might've been acting at that time in a similar capacity. Um, but every time they come to the U S they try to convince the USDA to change the rule. Uh, I guess at this

point they've just given up. They're selling the lung free haggis. I love it that there's someone out there that you could call and be like, Hey, I want to talk to you about this lung deal in the U S and they're like, Oh, don't even get me started. Right. Like someone that lives that, uh, problem. Yeah. He was, he was in that tone. He was pissed about it. You know, he's like, well, the U S gets upset. Uh, when we, you know, when, when we limit their food and drink exports or when we put extra rules on it, so why should they do that? And there's no evidence. And we've been eating this for generations in the UK and we export it to many other countries no one's ever reported a problem you know who you need on your side the bottom of the horseshoe

those folks are loud the extremists oh yeah you get a bunch of hippies a bunch of crazy ass right-wingers and you say like say to the hippies like listen it's all natural man it's his lungs it's natural and you go to the and you go to the other room you'd be like government overreach listen bro who's the government telling you what to eat nothing bad has ever happened by putting radicals by giving them a lot of power well no i got them in two separate rooms okay good he goes into the one room and brings says like why is the government telling us what to eat man yeah we should eat more of this if they're saying not to. And you go to the hippies, it's all natural.

You switch your hat, it's all natural. Yeah. And mention the pharmaceutical companies. That'll win both sides. And you get this problem taken care of, and then the haggis people will pay you all the money. There's oatmeal in haggis too, right? There's usually some there is there's usually

some grain it's usually lungs heart and liver ground up stuffed into the stomach and also mixed with some kind of grain sounds lish

oh we can't forget to talk about anatomy eats ah yes well that's the last thing I was gonna do is let him plug his stuff okay

yes talk about anatomy eats so anatomy eats is kind of a dinner series that I started with one particular chef that I now work with several different chefs where we sort of- Was the one chef jealous when he did that? No, it was, I mean, he's moved on to other things as well, but he, I mean, we're still

sort of working together. We did a dinner about a year ago in Philly. So he, I had heard, he's a friend who's also a chef in Philly he had done a heart course at the Philly Free Public Library which has this great culinary space where they do classes and cookbook authors come through and do sessions there as well on their you know publicity tours and so he was telling me how he did a course on the heart and I was saying oh did you point out the valves and the coronary arteries and the different ventricles and atria? And he said, no, why don't you come do that next time? And so we did. We ended up doing a dinner, a series of dinners at the library. We did a cardiovascular system dinner where we served

three species of heart cooked in three different ways. We served some blood sausage and blood cookies, which are sort of like whipped like meringue. Because blood has a similar albumin profile to egg whites. You can kind of whip it, though it doesn't maintain its form as well, but it does to some extent. And bone marrow, of course, where all the blood cells come from. Then we did a digestive system dinner where we did,

we served tongue, and I talked about how digestion starts in the mouth. We served liver, like a liver sausage with intestinal casing and tripe. And then finally, we did a musculoskeletal dinner where we served like a tendon soup, or no, puffed tendon, where it's sort of cooked and then thrown in hot oil and puffs up. A bone broth soup and two kinds of muscle cuts. One that was sort of, you know, good for steaks where you could cook it high, dry heat, flip it over like a steak and eat it versus one that

required slow cooking. And we talked about connective tissue and things like that. And the steak cut was the skirt steak, which is of course the diaphragm, the main breathing muscle. So then, and then since I've done, you know, for each dish, I talk about the anatomy and physiology. I kind of talk about what's going on inside the people who are listening, talk about their anatomy and how it since then I did a dinner in DC, did a dinner in Oxford, Mississippi with two great chefs and did a dinner, a fourth dinner in Philly. Yeah. So it's kind of exploring your own anatomy, understanding how your own body works through eating offal and internal organs. You charge for that? Yes. It's a great idea.

Tends to be a little fancy the one in dc was a a halloween theme it was right around the hot time of halloween and they did a drink pairings with each dish um but the halloween theme was fun because we got to talk about like mummies and how making a mummy from human flesh is basically the same as making charcuterie just longer time span that's awesome so how do people find out if they want to go to an Anatomy Eats? You guys got a website?

Yeah, anatomyeats.com, anatomyeats, at anatomyeats on Instagram and Twitter and TikTok. TikTok? Yeah. I don't know about TikTok.

You guys do little dances about it? Should. Is there a special room in the back where you get to eat some lung? Like secretly? We did think about doing like an underground lung dinner. you get to eat some lung? Like secretly?

We did think about doing like an underground lung dinner. Like a pop-up one? Yeah. Maybe people could buy shares in the lungs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we've thought about underground lung dinners and things like that. But yeah. Well, you could probably do it where like if people are –

I talked to a game warden about this. I'm definitely not, you know, like a proponent of it. But it's like if you attend one of these dinners, you're paying for, let's say, like the other dishes. But like the lung could be potentially served in a way whereby like you're. It's gratis. Right, exactly. I think people do that, but you're getting a little cuteotties. Right. Exactly. People do that, but you're getting a little cute.

That's kind of like, you're getting a little cute. That's kind of like the dairy cow share thing. You're getting like, oh no, no, no, no.

I didn't sell them that part. Right. But it's pre-fixed. It's a free thing when they walk in. Yeah. There was a businesses in New York city that were doing that with marijuana that you could get it delivered to you. But you'd pay them like $100, right? And they would bring you like a candy bar, and then for free they would give you, you know, like a little baggie.

You're being cute. Tell people about your books. So my first book, The Unseen Body, came out about a year ago. And it's kind of an exploration of the human body, tying it into my training as a medical student, my medical career, my interest in food. Some of these anatomy eats topics show up in there as well, like the lungs and how I came to like liver. A lot of travel as well. Great story of me getting horrible diarrhea in India, which should be a bathroom scene in every memoir, I think. And yeah, that's how I got on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Very grateful for that. And my next book, I think, will be along the lines of Anatomy Eats, probably.

Just sort of an exploration of anatomy through food that's eaten and prepared in different ways all over the world kind of i imagine the table of contents will look like a medical textbook similarly like cardiovascular dinner digest sorry cardiovascular system digestive system endocrine system reproductive system and then just sort of an exploration of all the different body parts and how they are cooked throughout the world and your books are on amazon obviously book is on amazon yeah okay dr jonathan reisman author of hit the title again the unseen body that came out about a year ago yeah it was kind of actually one of my favorite books of all time

which i've heard you talk about too is arctic dreams by barry lopez oh yeah man and i my idea of writing the book was to do an Arctic Dreams where it's an exploration of not the Arctic, but the human body. So that's what I, that's what I tried to do. Oh. I tried to emulate Barry Lopez, one of my favorite writers.

Yeah, he's great, man. A buddy of mine the other day, I had recommended it to him and he sent me about how blown away he was by his passage on polar bears, which is astounding. It's so good. All right, thanks for coming on the show, man. You're going to stick around for trivia. Yes.

Are you going to throw him a bone? Yes. Hmm. Seems unnecessary. I think he's going to do really well. If you have doctor in front of your name, you shouldn't get a bone thrown to you. No, your whole life's been a bone thrown to you.

Come on. What kind of bone are you going to throw? You'd love it if you had doctor in front of your name, Dr. Steve. Question three. Question three is the bone. That's the only detail I'll give you. All right, stay tuned for trivia where I beat Dr. Jonathan Reisman soundly, despite the bone.

And Brody, I thought of a good joke about Brody when I was making my kids breakfast this morning. Did they think it was funny? Yeah, check it out. Well, no, because you're doing pretty good on the scoreboard. You know that term, the reigning champion? Mm-hmm. I was thinking about how you're the waning champion. The draining champion?

The waning champion. Listen, we got all year to square things up, man. I'm not worried're the waning champion. The draining champion. The waning champion. Listen, we got all year to square things up, man. I'm not worried. The waning champion. That's so funny. All right, thanks, everybody. Yep. 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.

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