Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Why You Need To Start Keto and Fasting NOW! - With Dr. Ken Berry and Dr. Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Welcome to The Resetter Podcast, where Dr. Mindy interviews experts on everything to do with a fasting lifestyle and beyond! Dr. Ken Berry is a practicing MD, successful Youtuber, and author of Lies My Doctor Told Me. In this podcast we cover: Why surgeons won't operate on people with diabetes The best fast for keeping your immune system strong What fast to NOT do for viral immune system Immune boosting keto foods How to find research on keto and fasting Why insulin resistance is at the root of many chronic diseases Can vegetarians do keto? What else can you do for immune health? Dr. Ken Berry can be found on YouTube and https://www.kendberrymd.com/ 

You put your whole self in, you take the excuses out, you let autophagy win while stem cells grow and sprout, you cleanse detox and couple, balance hormones up yourself out. That's what resetting is all. Okay, resetters, Dr. Mindy here, and I get to bring you on this episode, Dr. Ken Berry. Okay, you are in for a treat. So this guy has over a million subscribers on YouTube. So if you haven't checked out his YouTube channel, please go check it out. He is incredibly passionate about the ketogenic diet. He loves to eat meat. So I'm just warning you now. We're going to dive into meat. But more importantly, he and I share

a passion for the science behind ways that we should be eating, ways we should be fasting, tools that we can use to take amazing care of our health. In this episode, we dove into immunity. So he talks about some of the best diets we can be following right now in this day and age with the coronavirus all around us, what we can be eating, what we shouldn't be eating so that we can keep our immune system at its best. He is funny. He is to the point. He is blunt and you are going to enjoy this. So get ready. I just want to start off and say resetters, you guys are in for a special treat.

And I actually think a lot of you may already follow this man on YouTube or. or you have a great Instagram as well. So let's just start off by welcoming Dr. Ken Berry. Thank you for joining me. Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm coming to you from my mobile studio today, but it's a pleasure to talk to you finally. Yes, I agree.

And, you know, mobile studios are the best, right? This is the greatest thing about the day and age we live in is, you know, it doesn't matter where you are. We can get great information out to people that's very helpful. So I like your mobile studio. It's working for me. Thank you. And I think you're right.

I think in the end, people just want real, useful, meaningful, applicable information. I don't think that people really care where you're from. I don't think they care about your studio or your background. When I first started my YouTube channel, I was literally sitting at my dining room table at home or upstairs in my office at the clinic before the fire. And, you know, people would say, what kind of equipment do you use? What do you, you know, how do you? I'm like, I would pull my phone out of my pocket and be like, this is my studio.

This is it. Yep. That's literally all you need. If your information is useful and applicable and practical and people are like, oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah. Then I don't think it matters. Yeah.

No, I couldn't agree anymore with that. I started doing video after I lost a patient who had been fighting a 10-year battle with cancer. And she was in hospice care. I watched her liver just enlarge. And I remember sitting there and thinking like, cancer can be so avoided if people knew what to do. And so once she passed, I just, I was so on fire. I just picked up my phone and I'm like, I'm just going to start teaching people what to do.

And out of that, just a whole resetter, what we call our resetter movement was formed. So I agree. I agree. So, you know, there's so many paths you and I could talk about. But one of the things I think we have to chat with everybody about today is immunity because the current situation we're in with the coronavirus. I'm curious your take on this, but I feel like there are two ways we could go down the path around the corona right now. We can be totally fearful that we're going to get it or we could become empowered and look at what we can do for our own immune system. So talk a little bit about which camp you fall into and,

what advice we can give people around immunity? Well, very early on in the in the corona saga, I guess you could call it, I made two YouTube videos and I got the videos got partially demonetized and I got really throttle by YouTube. But going back and watching them now, it's like, well, gosh, you know, maybe YouTube should put a little link to my video on the World Health Organization's YouTube channel so that people can get real advice because literally everything I said in that video has now, and so the final thing is, is if you're in public, you need to wear a mask. And I think that's absolutely vital. And I think the research supports that. It's supported it back in late

January, early February, back when everyone, including the Surgeon General, was saying, stop buying masks, masks, don't help at all. Stop that. It's dumb. And I'm thinking, So you tell us to sneeze into our elbow so that the cloth of our shirt will stop some of the, you know, the particles, but yet a mask won't help. I'm like, what? That doesn't make any sense. And actually there's research coming out now that people have dug up that even if you just wear a handkerchief over your mouth, that's going to protect you somewhere between 30 and 50% of just the normal droplets of a sneeze or a cough. And so not only are you protecting yourself from others, but you're protecting others from you because as we're learning, this virus can be completely silent in your body.

Even though you're contagious and you're shedding virus, you can have it and not know it has no symptom, no fever. Anywhere from 5 to 14 days, the final number of days is still out. And so how do you know you don't already have it right now? Right. And you're infecting hundreds of other people by not covering up your mouth and nose. And I think another thing that people just need to understand is that the surface of your eye is a mucous membrane. If someone sneezes and you've got your nose and mouth covered but you're not wearing eye protection,

it doesn't have to be a welder shield. It can just be a pair of wraparound sunglasses or wrap around safety glasses. That's going to protect you. That's going to give you 10, 15% protection just by covering your eyes when you're in public. Those are huge and it's very inexpensive to do that. And if everyone had taken my advice from those two videos over a month ago now, you know, I think the world would be a better place. And it wasn't just my advice.

I didn't just make that up. I mean, I actually, when I saw this thing developing in China, I'm like, ooh, this could be a big deal. I need to research this. And I think a lot of people did that who are trying to help people. And immediately started getting throttled and demonetized by all the social media platforms. But now it's like everything that we said back in February. now the World Health Organization and the CDC are saying it,

and all that misinformation they gave out for a month and a half, two months, we're just not going to talk about that. Yeah, I have a lot of theories on why that is, and I think it all comes back to follow the money trail. But that's for another discussion. You know, on that topic, I interviewed Dr. Zach Bush a couple weeks ago, and he has a real theory about the destruction of the microbiome and how this virus is attacking the body because we're so deficient in so many different

helpful bacteria. What's your theory or what are your beliefs around why this virus is so virulent and why it's spreading so fast? So all coronaviruses are very, very contagious. And actually, 20 to 30 percent of just the standard winter cold is caused by a strain of the coronavirus. this is a novel kind of mutated coronavirus still super. It actually looks like it's actually more contagious and it's sneaky in a couple of ways in that you can be infected and have no symptoms for five to 14 days before you have the first symptom, before you have fever. And then also it's looking like now that even after you've recovered from all symptoms,

you can still shed the virus for another five to seven days. Wow. And so on the front and the back end of this, you can look and feel perfectly normal and still be contagious. So that's different than old viruses. Older viruses, including influenza, do have lag time where you're contagious but have no symptoms. But I don't know of the virus that has a five to 14 day kind of nascent period where you're contagious and shedding virus but have no symptoms. That's a game changer.

I do think the gut bacteria play a role in immunity. I think there's no doubt about that. but if people follow me, they know that I try to give you the information that with the least amount of effort, you can have maximum benefit. And so in that respect, our main defense against a virus or a bacteria we've never been exposed to before is our innate immune system, right? And there is copious amounts. I mean, just reams of data and research showing, and this is both observational data and control data. showing that even a transient blood sugar spike disables every single step in the pathway of your innate immune

system. And so, I mean, first of all, definitely social distancing, wash your hands, cover your mouth and eyes, all that stuff. Absolutely, if you're going to be around anyone who's potentially infectious, or if you're in an area where someone who's potentially infectious has been, because we know this can live on surfaces for days depending on the surface. And so, yeah, you got to take all those precautions now because we're in the heat of battle. But the biggest thing you can do over and above that is to immediately start to get your metabolic health under control.

And so let me just go through this. So we've got a neutrophil, right? And that's he's just floating around in your bloodstream, mining his own business. And all of a sudden, he starts getting a signal from, endothelial cells saying, hey, there's infection under me right here. And he's like, oh, okay, so he attaches to those endothelial cells. And then he rolls along a little bit. And then he actually goes between two of the endothelial cells down into the tissue.

And the cells are giving off signals saying, hey, I'm infected. I've got a virus inside me. And so this neutrophil phagocytizes that cell and just literally engulfs it and eats it and then uses peroxide and other things to destroy the cell and the viruses that it contains. Every single step in that pathway, from the initial signaling to the rolling, to the, where it actually attaches to an endothelial cell to the part where it goes between the cells and goes out of the bloodstream into the tissue and where it recognizes the infected cell and then engulfs the infected cell, every single step in that pathway is mucked up if you have

transiently high or chronically high blood sugar. every single step. And in my YouTube video, I think it's called the best diet for your immune system or immune optimizing diet. The research is listed in the show notes. And so if anybody who's listening to this, like, oh, this Cookeberry, I don't know what he's talking about. It's in my show notes. Go look it up yourself and read this. And definitely chronic hyperglycemia is going to just wreak havoc on your immune system. This is why surgeons will put off surgery on someone who's a type 2 diabetic if their blood sugar's too high. They're like, yeah, we're not doing it.

That's elective. I'm not going to chop your leg off. I'm not going to take this out. I'm not going to do that. You've got to go home and get your blood sugar under control. Surgeons get paid to do surgery. That's how they make their money. That's how they make their Mercedes payment, right?

And so if a surgeon elects not to do surgery on you because your blood sugar is high, that's important. That's a big red flag that that must be a huge risk factor for, intraoperative and postoperative infection and complications. And indeed it is. That's why surgeons will postpone the surgery of a pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic until they get their blood sugar under control. And so I went into the making of that video knowing that.

But then the more I research is like, oh man, even a temporary transient occasional blood sugar spike. So if you're pretty much keto or low carb and then every down then though, you're like, yeah, but grandma's cake. you know, or man, I'm feeling kind of down. I'm going to have some cookies or whatever. Even that transient short-lived blood sugar spike really, really dampens your ability to mount a meaningful immune response to a new infection.

That's huge, right? I mean, that's, and so definitely fasting, that's going to get your blood sugar back under control. But if you're, you know, like some of us who actually enjoy eating and you don't want to fast too much, then you got to cut the carbs down as low as you can possibly get them. That's how you get your blood sugar back in line. That's how you get your insulin levels back in line. That's how you get your levels of inflammation back in line so that when there is a meaningful new infection with coronavirus or whatever, your body can immediately go to town fighting

that infection. Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking, so in other words, there's never been a better time to step into the ketogenic diet. Of all the times, and since we've been talking about this, how many years have we been talking about this? Of all the times, if you're ever going to do this, now's the time. And remember, it's definitely going to help your immune system and it's going to protect you. And so you may still catch this virus. And indeed, we probably all will catch this over the next 18 to 24 months. But wouldn't you rather be one of those people that just has mild, cold, moderate flu symptoms.

Then you get over it. Then you've got immunity. And so you're helping with herd immunity. What you don't want to be is you don't want to be that person that gets a post-infectious complication. And you're in the intensive care unit for two or three weeks. You're on a ventilator for three to ten days. And then you've got pulmonary fibrosis for the rest of your life.

You're disabled because you can't walk up a short flight of steps without getting severely short of breath for the rest of your life. that's the that's so that's literally what changing your diet can do yeah it puts you from one category to the other and that's that's what i'm you know i'm 51 years old i i you know i'm in i'm in the high risk group and so you can damn well bet i'm keeping my carb count as low as i possibly can because i want my blood sugar to be as low normal as i can keep it i want my insulin level to be as low normal as I can keep it, and I want my levels of just chronic, inappropriate, unuseful inflammation to be as low normal as I can get them,

so that if my body does need to mount an immune response and an inflammatory response, it can do it not only strongly, but also wisely, right? Because we don't want our body overreacting, and you may have heard of the cytokine storm that can come with these infections. and that's not, I don't, I don't think side accounts, that's not a, that's not an example of your body overreacting. You want your immune system to be very strong. It's an example of your immune system inappropriately reacting. And so you're having this inappropriate response.

And that comes from an immune system that's compromised and an immune system that's confused because your body's full of chronic inflammation in your gut, your joints and your brain and your skin wherever. And so your body's basically fighting these smoldering fires on four or five different fronts. And then here comes this new insult, this new infection, and boom, all hell breaks loose. And so I would very much, I know I'm going to catch coronavirus. We all are. But I would very much like to be in that former category where I have a mild cold or a mild flu and then it passes and I have immunity. Because if I'm in the ICU, I also can't take care of Nisha and Beckett, can I? I can't do.

I can't. And so I'm basically spending a lot of somebody's money, even if they let me off the hook as a patient and say, oh, you don't have to pay this bill. I'm also not being productive. I'm not working. I'm not taking care of my family. I mean, you basically give up all control and all hope if you're not controlling the one thing that you can control.

And that's your damn diet. And you can start that. It's not like saying, oh, if you start today, then your immune system will be better in a few weeks or a few months. No, no. If you start today, your immune system will literally be better and stronger and smarter tomorrow. Yep, quickly.

That's powerful. Yep. Yeah, I have so many thoughts on that. I have a patient that I've been working with that's in Scotland, and she is working in the hospitals there. We've been working virtually together. And she told me that she had been on conference calls all day long with some of the top experts of the hospital.

And after 10 hours of like triage talk, she said to them, why don't we talk to people about their diet? And their response was, why would we want to do that? I'm like, oh my gosh. Yeah, it's so, it's just, it's confusing the level of magical thinking that, and I'm not talking about just regular people. I'm talking about health care professionals, this magical thinking that, oh, you can eat whatever. Somehow the human body's magical. It doesn't matter if you eat Oreos or if you eat, you know, ribbi.

It doesn't matter. Your body's going to just be the best it can be either way. It's just pure ignorance. And so it's not even just stupidity. It's magical thinking. It's like really you think the human body is somehow magically going to turn Oreos and honey buns and whole wheat bread into something that your body can actually use. And so just, yeah, I could just imagine her sitting there looking at these preeminent

very intelligent health care providers. Yeah. Looking around like, what the hell? What's wrong with you? You really don't think that diet matters. And they don't think it matters at all, not even a little bit. Yep. And in reality, that's 80% of the battle is your diet.

If you can fix your diet and get your blood sugar low normal, your insulin, low normal, and get your inflammation levels down, all of your health gets better, including your immune system. And how could that not make sense to someone who's been a student for decades like the average doctor has? How can you not get that that's important? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we do a, in my group, we fast together once a month.

We take a Monday through Friday and we all fast as a community. So it's really fun. We got about over 100,000 people fasting together. And what I've been telling my resetters is this is why we've been doing this. You thought we were fasting and doing keto? make you look good in your skinny jeans. We actually were doing it for this moment here right now. There's never been a better time to be metabolically flexible. 100%. And I actually tweeted that the other day on my Twitter. I'm like, you guys thought

we were just doing keto and fasting for fun and giggles. We were actually training for this moment. Yes. This is the moment. And I guarantee you, I mean, do you come, you know, one, three, five years from now when people start crunching all the numbers. I mean, we already know that if you have metabolic syndrome, you're sky high risk of having a severe case of coronavirus. But I guarantee you when we crunch the numbers 1, 35 years from now, we're going to find that, you know what, the people with the lowest A1Cs, they fared the best. The people with the lowest levels of inflammation, the least autoimmunity, the, you know,

the lowest levels of insulin, they're the ones who did the best through all this. And they'll call that, what are they going to call that? they're going to call that the paradox, the low, the low, you know, the outliers, the eoglycemia paradox of coronavirus. Like, we have no idea why these people with normal blood sugars did so well in the coronavirus. And completely ignoring all the research that I list in my YouTube video. And it's not like I'm special. Anybody can sit down and go to PubMed.gov and look this stuff up.

It's not like I'm some kind of, you know, brain surgeon rocket scientists. I just took the time and I thought, you know, I'll bet you hyperendent. insulinemia is important with regards to the immune system as well. Golly gee, it turns out that's correct. It sure is very, very important. But just wait five years and you'll see looking back and they'll call it the eoglycemia paradox because nobody will understand how all these keto people, they might call it the keto paradox or the fasting paradox.

These coops that did keto and fasted, it's like they were protected from the coronavirus or something. We don't understand it. Also, their levels of severe complications. from influenza are super low as well. We don't understand that. It's some kind of paradox. Yep. Yep. Oh my gosh. We speak the same language. I absolutely agree. I say that all the time when people ask me about like, well, my doctor doesn't believe I should fast. I say all you've got to do is go to PubMed and type in whatever you're searching for and you have access to all the information that you and I are putting together for these videos. Their doctor has that too. It's just that the

doctor has blinders on and is not willing to step outside of their paradigm to see that food and fasting heals sometimes, many times more than medications can. And the gift of this moment is that the medical doctors are saying, the medical world is saying that the, that the pill's not coming. So we're forced to have to look within ourselves and change something. So if you didn't want to take responsibility for your health now, guess what? I mean, I don't know what to tell people if they're not turning inwards right now. Yeah. Yeah.

And I promise you guys listening, this is not a paradox. It's not unexplainable. Very often when I'm thinking about an idea to make a YouTube video, I will literally go to PubMed and I will type in whatever the topic. And so one of my videos that's gotten over two million views is about toenail fungus. I saw that. I saw that. When I was researching that video,

I went to PubMed.gov and typed in onocomycosis, which is the doctory word for toenail fungus, and insulin resistance. Boom. All these studies, and it's like, it's the weirdest thing. If you have insulin resistance, you're much more likely to have this, right? Same thing goes for tenetous. Same thing goes for macular degeneration. Same thing goes for hearing loss. Like literally every single condition that there's an epidemic of this chronic condition.

We just don't know. People didn't use to have this, but now they do. We don't understand that. Just type in the name of that condition and either insulin resistance or hyperinsulinemia, boom. There's your research right there. And the association is so strong, it cannot be ignored. Now, it's not causation. You know, we haven't done the studies to show causation.

But when anytime something like insulin resistance, and another way to call that is hyperinsulinia, when it's intimately associated with every single chronic disease epidemic that we have today, I don't know if that's just a chance. I don't know if that's a flip of the coin. What do you think, Mindy? Yeah, I, I, exactly. It's this, it's so glaringly obvious, yet it's, it requires personal responsibility. And we have a health care system that has allowed us to get away with not being personally responsible for our health.

because I can show up and throw my symptoms down, get a fancy diagnosis, get a pill, and I don't have to change anything in my life. And here we now sit in a moment in time where guess what, if you want to thrive through this, if you want to survive through this, you've got to go within. So, and, you know, I'm curious your thoughts on, I get this question a lot. What do you think the best fast is right now for keeping your immune system strong? Well, I think really you should be doing an intermittent fast every day. Agreed.

And so if you're just starting out with this, if you can go for 12 hours without eating, whereas used to you only went eight hours, that's good. That's a victory. Good job. Then after a week of that, you can go to 14 hours a day. Then after a week of that, try to get it up to 16. And for most people, a 16 to an 18 hour daily intermittent fast, and then with a six or an eight hour feeding or eating window,

that's going to help tremendously to get you started, right? Now, after you've got that under your belt and you've been able to do that for a month or two and it's become effortless, you don't even think about it anymore, and that's almost always going to involve you eating lots of healthy fats during your feeding window. That's what's going to help you not be hungry. Lots of protein, lots of good healthy fat. You're just not going to be hungry. That makes it so much easier to fast.

But I think for most people, that's the most important fast to understand, to start with, because we all already do it anyway. If you're sleeping for seven, eight, nine hours a night, you're fasting. You're not eating. So you're already doing this for eight hours a night. So you can, yeah, you can tack two hours on that, right? And then now it's a 10-hour fast. Now tack two more.

Now it's a 12-hour. Start to sound impressive, right? And before you know it, you'll be able to do an 18-hour fast without eating. even blinking. It'll just be, it'll become part of your normal routine because you're able to be so much more productive when you're not shoving your face, a snack in your face every two hours. You're like, I actually like this because I'm more productive. I can get more stuff done and have more fun because I'm not having to stop every two hours and have a snack. Oh, it's so convenient. Yes. Yeah. So, okay, I dove into some research showing that, and it was out of Yale and it showed,

it was a mouse study. So we don't, those aren't always analogous to human studies. But it showed that the longer you went, the, the deeper your blood glucose dropped, the more it turned off viral immunity. So one of the things I've been saying is 24 hour fast are awesome. We know out of the research from MIT that a 24 hour fast will upregulate intestinal stem cells. We need your gut to be a really healthy right now. But if you go longer than that, we don't want that blood sugar to drop. And this is for my expert. fasters. We don't want that to go too long for too many days. What's your thought on that? So you're thinking that fasting for too long might cause a weakening of the immune system? Yeah, yeah, the viral. So what they did is it was a study that was done that showed that when you went 48 hours was the exact period, that when you went 48 hours and that blood sugar dropped low enough that it was great for fighting bacteria but not so great for fighting viruses. Maybe, maybe. I haven't actually seen that study, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some fluctuations starting at 48 to 72 hours. But I'll tell you, it's really hard for me to see any

negative effects of fasting. It's just really hard to see any. And the glucose and the insulin mechanism are so evolutionarily preserved in mammals. And so I think even a mouse study is probably useful when it comes to glucose and insulin. Because we all pretty much do it the same way because it's such an important system. We all kind of use that same system. So, yeah, and I, you know, I'm not a huge proponent of longer fasting anyway. If people want to do it, I'm 100% supportive. I think there's probably health benefits beyond 48 and 72 hours.

but I personally just don't enjoy doing that. And I think a lot of people, it's scary. They're like, you're kidding me. You want me to not eat for three days? What the hell? That just sounds so foreign to most people who want their whole life and the longest fast they've ever had their whole life was eight or nine hours. Literally their entire life.

And you start talking about not eating for 48, 72 hours. That's very scary. And so I don't talk about it a lot. But I do think there are benefits from doing it. But the biggest benefit with the least amount of effort is doing that 16 or 18 hour fast every single day. Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. And that's the research shows that.

I mean, that article, the New England Journal, medicine just put out on intermittent fasting, pretty much said, do that forever. So, okay, so now we're going to lower our glycemic index. We're going to bring our glucose down, go keto. We're going to fast a little bit longer. Now let's talk about when you do open up that eating window, what are some foods that you can incorporate that will boost?

Like you, I know you have a video just came out on about zinc. I've been talking about some vitamin C and vitamin A foods. So what would fit into the keto world that would really help people boost their immune system? So it's a lot in the way we talk about, right? So when we say things like boost the immune system, there's a maximum level of immune function, right? And so if you had a normal human who ate a proper human diet who fasted every day, they're going to have the maximum strength immune system possible, right? The average person who I'm talking to on my YouTube videos is eating 250 grams of carbs a day.

They're very inflamed. They're overweight. They're hyperinsulinemic. And so their immune systems operating at about 30% of what it could. And so when I say boost your immune system, that's what I'm talking about, is get your immune system back up to the optimal. normal level where it should be for a normal human, right? And a lot of people have no idea of what a normal human even looks like.

That's why so many of us that have lost a lot of weight on keto or with fasting, people will start to tell us we look sick. We look too skinny. You know, you look like you're smoking meth. It's like, no, this is what a normal human is supposed to look like. This is how we look when we're in our native state. We're not supposed to be obese or overweight. And so I think at a certain point, you're going to max out your immune system.

And I don't think there's any magical herbs or berries or roots or teas that you can use to go over and above that maximal level of immune function. What we're trying to do is get back to our optimal immune function for most of us. But definitely when you break your fast and when you eat, you need to eat lots of fatty meat and maybe a little bit of veg, whether that's fat and seafood, crustaceans, mollusks, whether that's red meat. It doesn't matter to me what fatty meat you eat as long as you're. you eat lots of it. And then if you want to add some veg, I think that's perfectly fine as well,

keeping a careful eye on your body and making sure that you're not having bloating or other signs of inflammation when you eat the veg, right? Because some of us, I think, you're very sensitive to that. But over and above, if you have a dinner plate,

three quarters of it should be fatty meat. And then if you want to put the other quarters fatty meat too, that's fine. If you want to put that other quarter of the plate as keto-friendly veg, that's okay with me too. Either way, your blood sugar and your insulin levels are going back to normal, and you win, and I win, and you're welcome. I love it.

Okay. What do you say to the vegetarian, the keto vegetarian who's listening to that? Yeah. And so if by a vegetarian, you mean you're an oval lacto-pestitarian or a pescatarian. I think you can do a pescatarian keto just fine. But I do not agree with some of my colleagues out there who I have great respect. for who say that you can eat all vegetables and you can somehow do this. I don't know how that's possible.

You're never going to get enough protein. You're never going to get enough fat unless you just eat avocados and drenched in olive oil. I don't know how you're ever supposed to get your macros anywhere close to what they need to be. Now, with that being said, I think a vegetarian diet is much healthier, much less unhealthy than the standard American diet, right? But I do not think it is the part of the proper human diet spectrum, unless you're adding some eggs and you're adding lots of fatty fish, right?

And if you can do that, then you can still eat plenty of veg. And I think that's a pretty darn good diet. And you're going to be moving towards health with that kind of diet. But I just don't think you can do this as a vegan. I've crunched the numbers every way with every veg I can think of. I can't get the macros. to be anywhere close to what I think the macros would have been 100,000 years ago when we could choose the foods that we ate.

We ate as much fatty meat as we could get our hands on, and we would eat a little veg here and there if the berries were ripe or if we wanted some herbs or whatever. We would eat that. But I don't think ever in the history of humanity, did we just eat a plate full of veg? And they'd be like, I don't feel like any meat today. You've been kicked out of the tribe immediately from the end of nut.

They're like, yeah, you're not our kind of people. You need to move on. because you're dangerous. We don't need that kind of thinking of this right. Natural selection. Yeah, that may offend some people, and I'm sorry if it does, but at the same time, you need to hear this and you need to think about this. We are a low carbohydrate, salty species of mammal, of primate.

That's what we are. And if that offends you, I'm again, sorry. But to say that we can eat a high-carb diet and that be okay somehow, I just don't think that's true. I don't think that's appropriate. I don't think the paleo anthropology bears that out at all. Yep. Well, so what do you say to people who either read the China study or what was that

documentary that just came out, game changers or what I forget? I didn't even watch that because I already knew where I stood on that. What do you say about that? Yeah, I watched them and I've read the China study. And so it would take hours to debunk the China study. The best debunking of it I've ever heard is Denise Minger. she has a YouTube video, she just destroys the China study and the doctor behind it.

He was very disingenuous. He cherry-picked a great deal with the China study. And it also is kind of all based on the assumption that Asians are very healthy and very lean. The problem is is toffee, right? Thin on the outside and fat on the inside, it's type 2 diabetes and fatty liver and pre-diabetes are at epidemic levels in Asia and in India, they're slender because their genetics,

that's what their genetics call for. But they are not metabolically healthy because of all the rice and beans that they eat. That's an inappropriate diet. It's not part of the proper human diet spectrum. And they just, they express the disease in another way. People with DNA from the northern latitudes, we're going to get big as a house if we eat all those carbs, right?

And we'll eventually develop type 2 diabetes and fatty liver, but not as quickly as they will. They'll stay quite slender and maybe get a little belly pooch, but that's about it. But then when you check their numbers, their inflammation and their A1C are off the charts, but they're still relatively slender. That's a difference in DNA in genetics. So, yeah, the China studies is just, it's very disingenuous, very cherry-picked and very misleading. Denise Minger just destroys it. If you can watch that YouTube video.

then the movie the game changers uh is that it was a very well done movie that's what everybody says yeah very well produced very um uh opinion sway and there and there are actually tens of thousands of teenagers and young adults who have went vegan because of that movie yep and and and and i surprised uh paul saladino i was talking to him the other day and i said i'm actually glad that they're all doing that and he's like what do you mean i said because they're going to discover very early in life just how stupid it is to eat a high-carb low-fat diet and they're going to quit that because I think we've all, it's many of us at some point in our teens or early 20s, we're like, you know, I feel bad for these animals. I'm just going to be a vegan. And then after

a month or two of that, you either got bored and quit it or you started developing health issues, energy issues, mental clarity issues. You're like, yeah, I don't feel good eating this way. There's a reason you didn't feel good. And so I'm actually glad the game changers came out. I want millions of teenagers and 20-somethings to try veganism. I absolutely do and let them learn very early in life. What you eat matters. Eating the standard American diet is just stupid. A vegan diet is not conducive to a high energy, happy, productive, long life.

It's just not. And so they're going to learn very early and then they can have some wisdom. Yep. Spot on. I get parents all the time that will reach out to me and be like, I'm so worried because once they've gone keto and they eat very similar to what you're explaining, they go, my child just says that she wants to be a vegetarian. And my first response is awesome because you know what?

She picked a style. She decided to step out of the standard American diet and pick a style. Now let's let's let her play with that and see what that feels like. I did that at 20. I read Diet for New America by John Robbins. and I decided, boom, I'm a vegetarian. I tried that for several years, and as I packed on weight and got more fatigued and more unhealthy, I quickly figured out that there was a different strategy for me.

So sometimes this firsthand experience is more powerful. I totally agree. And so, yeah, that's a beautiful point. They've made a dietary choice. Whether it's based on morality or health, I don't really care because at least they're thinking about food. They're not just blindly following the television commercials. Yep. They're actually thinking about food.

And if you're going to go vegan, you're going to at least eat a higher percentage of real whole vegetables, right? Yeah. Right. Unless you're going to live on bread and spaghettios without the meatballs, then you're going to be eating a lot more veg, which is going to help develop your palate, help you develop new likes and dislikes. And then when the vegan diet fails, which it certainly is going to, You'll either start to get fat or you'll start to get free diabetic or you'll just have no energy and fatigue. You'll lose your period.

Your hair will start falling out. Then you're like, you know what? I'm going to try something else. But you're probably never going to go back to the thoughtless standard American diet because that's not your style. You've already dictated my style is to think about my diet. And that's spot on exactly right because then you're going to say, okay, this didn't work. What should I try next? and they're going to keep trying, and they may try Mediterranean, they may try whatever, whatever, whatever,

but eventually they're going to wind up somewhere on the proper human diet spectrum, which I think ranges from oval lactopestitarianism with lots of fish and lots of, lots of eggs, all the way over to just a fatty red meat carnivore diet. They're going to land somewhere in there because they're going to figure out that's where I feel my best, that's where I perform the best, that's where my numbers, when I go to the doctor and have bloods drawn, that's where my numbers are the best. That must be what true health means. Yep.

Yeah. And that's exactly what happened to me at 20 after I read the book is I actually ended up getting chronic fatigue. And I was overweight. I was exhausted all the time. And I had a holistic MD put me on. He called it the Candida diet. But it really was the keto diet.

It was meat and fat, just like you're saying. And within three weeks, I was like snapped out of it. And I was dropping weight. My energy was up. So yeah. So I couldn't agree more with you on that.

Okay, so now we've covered keto. Hopefully everybody listening to this is like, I'm going keto, I'm fasting longer. I'm eating more meat. Okay, what else? I mean, like I just did a video that will go out on YouTube tomorrow about sleep, how important sleep is for immune system. What else can we be doing to bring us up? Let's not forget our dear cousins who smoke.

I don't care if you're keto and fasting and doing everything else right. If you're smoking, you are at exceedingly high risk, not only of contracting any virus, including this one we're talking about, but you're also at increased risk of having a severe complication from that infection. When you smoke, it's like it's as if your throat and your bronchial tubes and your alveoli are a freshly plowed field just waiting for the bacteria and the virus to be. so, okay? You gotta quit the smoking. It's dumb. I'm sorry. I respect you and I love you, but if you're still smoking, come on, what are you doing? Okay? Sleep is hugely important.

And I think that everybody's starting to get that now. I think there was a period in the 80s and 90s when kind of the philosophy was, I'll sleep when I die, right? I'm either going to work for 18 hours a day or I'm going to work for eight and then party for 10. But either way, I'm going to get three or four hour sleep tonight and that's I'm just going to live on that and I think that that fads kind of going away. I think everybody's starting to reembrace the fact that sleep is vital not only for immune function but for hundreds of other important functions in the human body. And so you got to get your sleep. You got to protect your sleep like the silver in the mattress or money in the bank.

You got to protect your sleep. And then not putting any kind of pollution in your body. Smoking would be one of those. and then just the stress level thing. Yeah, that's going to ask you about that. If you're in a relationship that you hate, if you're in a job that you hate, get out of them. And I know if you're in those things, you're like, yeah, there's no way.

Some of the, some of the best times of my life have been right after I have done things that were impossible. Yep. Right? When I got out of a relationship that was toxic and I just couldn't see any way out. Sometimes the best way out is just to jump. Feet first, not hip first, but feet first, but still jump, okay? And the same goes to that job.

I know right now the economy is not great, but if you've got a job that's literally keeping your cortisol levels max pegged out all the time, you're just to sit up for a heart, you're set up for a heart attack, for an infection, for some terrible health event happening. You've got to do something about that, right? And so anytime there's a calamity, like the entire world's experiencing right now, it looks like, ooh, I better lay low right now.

I better not step out of the box at all. But actually, the opposite's true. This is the time for you to try something you've never tried, for you to venture out and say, you know what, I'm done with this. I freaking hate this job or I freaking hate this man or woman that, you know, that's beating me and spending all my money or whatever. Get out of that box. Now is the time.

and I promise you a month from now, you'll thank me for this, even though tomorrow and the next day, you may curse me. Ultimately, you're going to be like, thank God I did that. Yeah. Because I'd still be stuck in that mess if I did. Yeah, I've been really thinking about that they're, you know, they say in any crisis, there's that moment we can rise above. And I feel like it in just talking to thought leaders like you and just people in my world,

that there's going to be this core group that's going to try to cling on to the old and the way that things used to be. And then there's going to be a whole movement of people that are going to say life needs to be different. And in that different life, it means I don't stay in toxic relationships. I don't stay in toxic jobs. I stop eating toxic food. Like, I'm going to be a different person because this scared me enough that it's time for me to make a change. Yeah, I 100% agree. Everybody listening to this, listen carefully.

Our world is never going to be the same again. Okay. And when I say that, I don't want you to panic and I don't want you to give up. I want you to, I'm not saying that the world's going to go to crap. I'm saying that there are going to be opportunities for you that were never available before. There is a whole new opportunity out there that you never even considered in the old way, right? And you can almost can just post-date this. Like we can be AC and PC, you know, before and after course.

Corona, there's literally going to be entire billion dollar industries that are, that are created because the world's never going to be the same again. And whether that's social distancing, whether that's masks, but I don't know, we don't know what it's going to be doing. I'm just telling you guys, this is not a stumbling block. This is the biggest stepping stone that you've ever been presented with in your life. If you look at this with the right perspective, this thing that we're all going through together as a big human family is the biggest stepping stone, the biggest opportunity for you both physically, health-wise, mentally, spiritually, and financially that has ever presented itself in your entire lifetime. You're not too old and you're also

not too young to start thinking the new way and to start doing things the new way. And I promise you the new way is going to be healthy and full of energy and full of mental clarity and full of forward thinking not look what happened to me but look what i can do for the world look what i can do to help people have a better life i can help people have have a better financial life health life spiritual life whatever you can make the world a better place and that's your niche whatever you're good at but this is it this is the moment guys this is that that watershed moment when you can literally just do away with every all the old stuff and start fresh and it actually be the best part of your lot. Yeah, I could not agree with you more on that. And I am, that's my community. I just, my,

the words I keep saying is rise up. Like, if the negative is down here, let's just rise above it. Let's just get a little bit of a view of what's going on because something new is emerging. And I'm in Silicon Valley where, you know, people, you've got both parents working. They were flying all over the world. They've got big homes, big cars. Kids speak five languages and play four instruments and earn three competitive sports. And, you know, I think even those families are like, holy cow, all the things we are putting our effort into do not matter if we don't have our health. And that I am praying that from this situation that we all start to realize health has to be, in this new world, health has to be at the top of our priority list. Because if it's not, a virus can

come to town and take you out. That's exactly right. And everybody listening, the base, the foundation of your health, the absolute bedrock is based on what you eat and what you don't eat. That's literally the 80%. That's the easiest thing you can change. You can start this second and go clean out the pantry in the fridge and start doing this right. Don't worry about that esoteric herb from the Himalayan Mountains or that very that they, none of that crowd. All that's bullshit, okay? None of that matters.

stop eating foods that spike your blood sugar. That is literally the baseline. Think of your carbohydrate intake as the volume of your car radio. If the radio is too loud, if your blood sugar is too high, turn down the knob of your carbohydrate intake. It is literally that simple. Some people who are young and have good genetics, they can eat 100 total grams of carbs a day,

as long as their good, healthy one ingredient foods, they'll do great. And hallelujah for you. Some people like me need to turn down the carbohydrate knob almost to zero in order to have my best metabolic health, the lowest A1C, the lowest C peptide. That is the bedrock, guys. You cannot, you can't ignore that. And buy this supplement and this protein powder and this herb from Australia. You're wasting your time, your money, and your effort.

It's all about your food. It's about what you eat and it's about also not eating. Keto and fasting, carnivore fasting, ovolacto-pestatarian low-carb and fasting. That's literally the bedrock of all your health. And then a close third, four, fifth, and six is the sleep, the stress, and the not putting toxins in your body. Yeah. Yeah, you and I speak the same language. I adore you.

I absolutely agree with everything you're saying. And I, so I have a book that's coming out in a couple weeks called The Menopause Reset. and it's all about how women should do keto and fasting through their menopause years. And my number one thing is that women in menopause are like waiting, I call it the magic mushroom. It's like we're waiting for that magic mushroom for like a little fairy to say, oh, take this. And all of a sudden your menopause symptoms are going to go away. And my big cry to women is it's a lifestyle that has to change for you to meet that

demand. And I feel like the same thing right now. if you want your immune system to thrive through this, you have a lifestyle that needs to change. Yeah. And there are people out there with how to drink bleach and how to use a hair dryer, blow it in your mouth, all this dumb crap, right? And everybody's ignoring the obvious bedrock of human health. What are you eating? What are you feeding this human? That's the most important thing. Yeah. Amazing. Well, I could talk to you forever. So, but I know we, both have busy schedules, let me finish with this thought, and I think you've already answered it.

But one thing I love to know, like, from the people that I speak with, if you had one message for the world, like one thing you could shout at the rooftops to people, what would that message be? The food you eat absolutely matters. The 100% every meal, every time it matters. You might be doing a minuscule microscopic amount of damage to some inconsequential arterial, somewhere in your pinky toe, but you just did some damage with what you just ate. 100% every time without exception. And so that's why when people start talking about cheat meals, I'm like, who are you cheating?

Because you ain't cheating me. You're cheating yourself and your family. That's who you're cheating. Your food matters. Your sleep matters. And when you don't eat, that also matters. You cannot build what I consider. Human beings are the apex species on this planet.

We run this planet for a reason. is because we're kind of superhuman when you feed us properly and when you water us properly and when you give us enough space so we're not stressed out and when you give us enough sleep so that we're well rested we're kind of we're kind of an avenger mutant type mammal but you can't slowly poison us with the standard american diet that kellogg's and crafts and abisco wants you to eat you can't be that superhuman if you're poisoning your body with that crap yeah did you ever see the movie limitless with Bradley Cooper. I always say that's what keto feels like.

Like you can all of a sudden you just become like your brain becomes clear and you can run and stay up. I mean, there's so many things that you accomplish when you're in that. Yeah. So beautiful. Okay. And hopefully everybody knows,

but just so we pointed out, where's the best place to find you? Well, I've got a small YouTube channel that you can check out. Yeah. And you just hit a million. Did they send you a plaque? Just search for Dr.

Barry on YouTube. You should find me. I've got a Facebook page I'm always on trying to post articles and stuff. Dr. Barry ought to find that as well. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. I'm on TikTok trying to help the teenagers understand that they don't have to be overweight and have acne. There's actually a way to fix that.

It's your diet, dummy. Just that's a, I'll spoiler alert, right? It's your diet. So, yeah, I'm all over the place. I've got this little book I wrote called Lies. My doctor told me it's available as a paperback, a Kindle, and on Audible, wherever books are sold. And I'm working on a couple of other books,

which are in the early stages, but they're coming along that we'll probably be talking about later. And I got to get you on my, I got to interview you on my YouTube, Mindy. I love it. Yeah, let me know. Let me know. You and I are like,

you and I speak the same language here. So this was awesome. I absolutely adore you. And thank you for taking the time in your mobile office to talk to me today. Right. Thanks so much for having me. And thanks so much for all the work you do,

helping people understand. understand how a human's supposed to actually eat and how they're supposed to not eat. I think that's the most basic thing a doctor can be doing right now, but also the most important. Yeah, absolutely agree. So thank you. Stay safe. Yeah, see you next time. Okay, bye. That's what it's all about. You put fast cycling. That's what it's all up. That's what resetting is all.