In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with my good friend, Dr. Jay Sheinfeld, to talk about his new book, "Plants Are Good For Us," and why we should all eat more of them. We talk about the benefits of a carnivore diet, why plants are good for us, and what we should do if we don't eat enough meat. It's a really cool episode, and I hope you all enjoy it! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. I'll be picking one lucky winner at random who leave a review to win a FREE place on the next Shreddin8 program! Thanks so much for listening, and Happy Holidays! Cheers, Joe and Jamie. XOXO, Caitie and Joe -- and The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast by day, by night, all day, by night. Check it out! Check out the show on YouTube: , & . And if you like it, please leave us a review on iTunes and tell me what you think about it. We'll be looking out for more episodes like this in the comments section! Thank you! <3 -Jon Sorrentino -Jon & Jamie Thanks, Jon :) <333 -Jon :D Timestamps: The Podcast by Day, by Night, By Night, by Night Jon : All Day Podcast by Night by Day: , All Day, All Day by Night By Day, By Night by Night , by Night? Thank You, - Jon ? ( ) @ , By Night , The Podcasts by Night All Day | ~ ? , & All Day , Can We Thru It? . . , Can We Eat More Than One Thing? , & ? . & More? & Much More! , and Much More , by , And More Than That? - Thank You? , , Thank You For This ? - // , I'll See You Soon? (featuring: & Other Things? ? & ) & Others?
00:00:27.000I've been telling these people that I eat only meat, and they're like, well, if you eat too much meat, it causes colon cancer, it causes this, it causes that.
00:00:36.000And one of the things that I say, and it's a talking point that I actually stole from you, is that most plants are inedible, but almost all animals are edible.
00:00:46.000And when you say that to them, they look at you like, oh shit.
00:00:49.000If you just go out and eat random plants, you'll get sick as fuck.
00:01:48.000I remember there was a story about a guy in a nursing home and he had went out and picked mushrooms for the people in the nursing home and cooked them up and they all died.
00:02:28.000When you look at what we know about the timeline of life on Earth, 500 plus million years of plant and animal co-evolution.
00:02:37.000And there's a lot of people who have speculated this, that essentially plants evolve, animals evolve, animals start eating plants, plants evolve defenses, animals evolve defenses against the defenses.
00:02:48.000And there's a whole series of enzymatic systems in our liver, the phase one and phase two detoxification systems, they're called cytochrome P450 and other reactionary systems in our liver that are meant to detoxify things.
00:03:01.000And a lot of people speculate, and I think this is really reasonable, that the majority of the reason we have those is so that we could eat plants from time to time so we didn't starve during our evolution.
00:03:10.000But there's a real interesting interaction here.
00:03:40.000Well, if you're out in the desert, a cacti's got a thorn, or a rose has a thorn, a spine.
00:03:46.000But most of them just have plant defense chemicals, and that's not even conjecture.
00:03:49.000That's just known botanical science that plants make chemicals, broadly called phytoalexins, That are meant to dissuade animals, insects, fungi from over-consuming them.
00:04:01.000And so my fear is that we've assumed that plants are good for us.
00:04:06.000And we see everything with these plant compounds through the lens of these are good for us.
00:04:12.000There's a whole different part of the story.
00:04:15.000What if we think about it from a plant's perspective?
00:04:17.000What if these plant chemicals are not good for us?
00:04:19.000And we're misinterpreting the research, and I can talk about why I think we are.
00:04:23.000And maybe the plants are just making these chemicals to say, hey, if you eat a lot of me, you're not gonna feel good.
00:04:28.000I'm gonna affect your thyroid, I'm gonna affect your androgens, your sex hormones, or whatever.
00:04:32.000I'm gonna make you have diarrhea or nausea, or I'm gonna kill you.
00:04:35.000And we've just been thinking, more plants, more plants, more plants, when it's like, wait a minute, why are we eating plants in the first place?
00:04:53.000Like where your body responds to these effects that these plants are producing, and it actually, the response by your body is good.
00:05:02.000The same way the response from a sauna is good.
00:05:06.000Your body really doesn't belong in 180 degree temperature, but when you put it in 180 degree temperature, It develops these heat shock proteins, and it's actually good.
00:05:15.000It's good for you to do that for short periods of time.
00:05:21.000I know Dr. Rhonda Patrick is really into broccoli sprouts, and I think for that very particular reason.
00:05:27.000Yeah, so this is really interesting, and if you think about it differently, it starts to make more sense, I believe, or there's a whole different paradigm, a whole different lens through which we can view this.
00:05:37.000So, as I was writing my book, I came up with these terms environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis.
00:06:05.000I don't think we should be doing that.
00:06:06.000I think we have environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis, and they're different things.
00:06:10.000So I won't debate that plants can be beneficial as medicine, but to use them as food presupposes that molecular hormesis is good for us, and I'll tell you why I don't think it is.
00:06:20.000So when you go in the sauna, or when you are in ketosis, or when you're in the sun, or when you exercise, you do generate reactive oxygen species, superoxide radicals, and they activate a system in your body called the NRF2 system.
00:06:34.000I can pull up a picture of it in a second.
00:06:36.000And that turns on genes that are involved in the antioxidant response to manage these free radicals.
00:06:43.000Life is this elegant dance of electron movement and protons too and other functional groups in chemistry.
00:06:49.000But the movement of electrons is oxidation and reduction with the loss of electrons being oxidation, the gain of electrons being reduction.
00:06:57.000And so when we think about oxidative stress, we're talking about molecules pulling electrons from other molecules, creating free radicals, which broadly means that there are unpaired electrons.
00:07:07.000Now, these are very reactive molecules that can then create things like lipid peroxides or, you know, free radicals within proteins, which change the conformation of the protein.
00:07:15.000And we know these can be damaging for humans.
00:07:17.000One of the reasons that cigarette smoking is bad for us is because it creates a ton of free radicals, lots of oxidative stress.
00:07:24.000But a little bit of oxidative stress, or just the right amount, the Goldilocks amount, is necessary for life.
00:07:29.000We don't want to get rid of all of the oxidative radicals in our body.
00:07:32.000They're critical signaling molecules at the level of the mitochondria.
00:07:36.000So this whole movement toward antioxidants and more antioxidant chemicals is eventually, if we snuff out all of the oxidative radicals or all the reactive oxygen species in the human body, we'll be dead.
00:07:59.000So when you are in the sauna or you are in the sunlight or you exercise, you will create oxidative stress.
00:08:04.000That oxidative stress turns on NRF2. This is essentially a transcription factor that translocates to the nucleus, turns on genes involved in the antioxidant response, things like glutathione peroxidase, thioredoxin, things like this.
00:08:20.000And that's just, it's kind of clean, right?
00:08:22.000You have an input to the system, it turns on a gene.
00:08:25.000Molecular hormesis is a little different.
00:08:27.000It's like going to the pharmacy and taking a medicine.
00:08:29.000But what we never get with plants is the package insert, quote-unquote, that comes with medications in the pharmacy.
00:08:35.000If you go to the pharmacy and you get a drug, lisinoprol, metoprolol, a statin drug, even if you get ibuprofen or naproxen and leave at the pharmacy, on the bottle, there's a list of all the side effects.
00:08:46.000When we use exogenous molecules for humans, we know that they don't really play well with our biochemistry.
00:08:52.000They're going to do one thing which may be an intended effect, but then they're going to have other effects elsewhere which could be damaging.
00:08:58.000And invariably we see this with medications we take.
00:09:00.000We know that beta blockers can affect glucose tolerance and they can affect We have sympathetic signaling in the human body with the nervous system, and we know that lisinopril and drugs like this which affect the kidneys can have problems with electrolyte balance or other things.
00:09:14.000They can affect the lungs because they're affecting the way that angiotensin-converting enzyme works in the lungs.
00:09:19.000And so my concern is that we're conflating the two, and we're forgetting about the side effects that are associated with molecular hormesis.
00:09:27.000I think that there certainly are studies with molecules like sulforaphane, which is this isothiocyanate compound from broccoli, that show that it also triggers NRF2. It triggers this antioxidant response system.
00:09:40.000But what we aren't told about much is the other side effects of sulforaphane, the so-called package insert that sulforaphane has.
00:09:47.000And when you look at that, there's a large amount of evidence that this whole class of molecules, isothiocyanates, Actually have many negative effects in the body.
00:09:56.000And when you think about it from a plant's perspective, sulforaphane is pretty clearly a toxin.
00:10:48.000Because if you look at the chemistry of sulforaphane, it actually is a pro-oxidant, meaning it's pulling electrons from other molecules.
00:10:55.000It's not actually coming into our body and acting as an antioxidant.
00:10:58.000It's turning on our antioxidant defense system, but it's also doing other negative things in the human body.
00:11:04.000In the case of isothiocyanates, it's actually been shown to damage DNA, which is a process called clastigenesis, and it inhibits iodine absorption at the level of the thyroid.
00:11:37.000That's hypothyroidism because they're consuming lots of foods that are goitrogenic foods, lots of foods that have similarly isothiocyanate compounds that are inhibiting the absorption or at least the utilization of iodine at the level of the thyroid.
00:11:55.000So the intent of plants is very clear here.
00:11:57.000It's saying, if you eat too much of me, I'm going to affect your thyroid negatively, and that's going to affect every other hormonal system in your body.
00:12:04.000So yes, sulforaphane can be beneficial because it turns on our antioxidant response system, but it also has many side effects which are ignored.
00:12:12.000And we see this pattern over and over and over, and this is what was fascinating.
00:12:16.000We see this pattern over and over and over with plant molecules.
00:12:19.000And then if you look at these two, people might say, well, is the risk worth the benefit?
00:12:26.000Or I would argue the benefit is not worth the risk because you can get your NRF2 system turned on without those molecules because you can do environmental hormesis.
00:12:35.000You can go in the sauna, you can exercise, you can fast, you can be in ketosis.
00:12:40.000There's really good studies in cold water swimmers in Berlin And they show that cold water exposure.
00:12:48.000So they go and they swim in cold water for like an hour.
00:12:51.000And they'll show that their glutathione level goes down, meaning that their oxidized level of glutathione goes up, their reduced level of glutathione goes down.
00:12:58.000They're using their endogenous antioxidant molecule, one of them, which is glutathione, To mitigate these newly produced oxidative radicals these free radicals in the human body produced by cold water swimming and then the next day They'll see their glutathione is a little bit above normal.
00:13:13.000That's environmental hormesis So my argument is can we really say that plant molecules give us a net benefit?
00:13:20.000I don't think we can There's lots of interesting studies here that would argue that we don't really get a net benefit from plant molecules It's kind of a redundant effect.
00:13:27.000We can get This NRF2 system, this antioxidant response system turned on without them, and then we're getting all of the downstream negative side effects of these plant molecules.
00:13:35.000Have there been any independent studies that show people taking like broccoli sprouts and then doing it for a prolonged period of time, measuring their system, and then doing environmental hormesis and seeing if they measure up?
00:13:51.000Well, there's actually studies that show they have two groups of people, and I can pull these up if you want.
00:13:56.000There's studies that compare people that eat essentially no vegetables or low fruits and vegetables to high fruits and vegetables.
00:14:02.000And they'll compare them at 4, 8, or 12 weeks.
00:14:05.000And at the end, they see no differences in the oxidative stress markers, the inflammatory markers, markers of DNA damage.
00:14:12.000So it's pretty shaky ground to say that invariably all the studies with fruits and vegetables show that they provide this benefit.
00:14:19.000In the short term, sulforaphane can create more antioxidant response.
00:14:27.000But if you take it out a little bit of time, it doesn't look like there's any difference between people who are eating things like broccoli or gerlusalum artichokes or carrots or cabbage or any of these other vegetables compared to a group that eats none of them.
00:14:38.000So there's these fruit and vegetable intervention studies which don't show any differences between these people.
00:14:44.000So all the people that are thinking that they're doing a good thing for their system by taking these vegetables and fruits that your body has this hermetic response, you can have the exact same response from cold plunge,
00:17:13.000Yeah, because if you look at the amount of vitamin C, they say there that between the 70 milligram group and the 10 milligram group, there was no difference in clinical outcomes.
00:17:25.000The prevailing thinking is that 10 milligrams is not enough for optimal health, but we don't actually know.
00:17:30.000There are roles of vitamin C beyond the formation of collagen, which is the main thing that gets broken when we see scurvy, or at least that's the physical manifestations.
00:17:38.000You get bleeding gums, your teeth fall out.
00:17:54.000I've definitely got one in here that shows that if you look at people eating, they did another experiment with excess fruits and vegetables.
00:18:03.000And they had one group that had small amounts of fruits and vegetables.
00:18:06.000And now we're going to skip up to 70 milligrams.
00:18:08.000So it's a little bit more than 10. There's no experiments with like long-term 10 milligrams of vitamin C per day.
00:18:13.000But there's an experiment that compares 70 milligrams of vitamin C per day from low fruits and vegetables to 270 milligrams of vitamin C from fruits and vegetables, and there were no clinical differences in those outcomes in those people.
00:18:25.000So one group has low fruits and vegetables, one group has high fruits and vegetables.
00:18:52.000You start to see it pretty quickly when you get lower levels of vitamin C. The higher vitamin C group with more fruits and vegetables certainly had a higher level of vitamin C in their blood, but they didn't have any differences in terms of those markers.
00:19:49.000So you'll see these are interventional studies with vitamin C and there's an RCT there for the common cold.
00:19:58.000It's a meta-analysis, actually, which 11,306 participants and there was no effect on the incidence of the common cold.
00:20:05.000So this gets into the interesting conversation about epidemiology, and I know you know about this, the way that epidemiology is so misleading for us.
00:20:14.000And if you look at the association of vitamin C in the blood, there's an association with better outcomes.
00:20:22.000But when we do interventional studies, we don't see it.
00:20:25.000And in this table, you can see no effect on mortality, no effect on the incidence of the common cold, no effect on cardiovascular events, and essentially no decrease in systolic blood pressure with an intervention.
00:20:36.000No effect on the incidences of the common cold, but what about once someone has a cold?
00:20:44.000That's like when emergency and all these different vitamin C supplements, this is what they're always claiming, is that taking it while you have the cold is what's going to reduce the duration of the disease.
00:20:57.000Concluded that vitamin C supplementation has no effect on the incidence of the common cold.
00:21:01.000However, a modest reduction of symptoms.
00:21:03.000Was consistently found in reviewed studies.
00:21:36.000Or if you have a baseline of unhealth, something that's been super relevant with the current COVID conversation, if you have a baseline of ill health or baseline of metabolic dysfunction, sometimes synonymous with insulin resistance, per a given vitamin C intake, there's lower levels of vitamin C in the body.
00:22:25.000I recently was hanging out with Steve Rinella, and he was telling me, historically, the trappers, like these fur trappers, maybe in the 1800s.
00:22:32.000At some point along the way, we lost this ancestral knowledge that eating organs is so important and that all indigenous cultures do it and they savor the organs really above all other things and they distribute them among the tribe and these trappers went out and they started to just not, they started to get sick from just eating the muscle meat and they had to start incorporating organs in their diet.
00:22:53.000I'm not sure where he read it, but yeah, if you look at the way that indigenous cultures do this and you look at the way that other animals do this as well, they don't waste anything.
00:23:01.000Particularly we have talked about it many times the podcast wolves the alpha wolf will eat the liver and the other wolves have to stand by and there's a crazy documentary about a guy who lived with wolves and One of the ways he tricked these wolves and then thinking that he was the alpha Was he would have an animal and he would put a liver in the animal so they would bring a carcass and he would be growling at them while he ate the liver and they were like wow I guess this guy's the fucking boss he's eating the liver and If you eat liver,
00:23:29.000you get to be an alpha male or an alpha female.
00:23:31.000Well, it was weird that he knew, and that this is just the wolves know in their pack mentality that the alpha is the one that gets the most nutritious piece of the animal.
00:23:41.000And there are even organs beyond the liver that are uniquely nutritious.
00:26:11.000I know you had the guys from Black Rifle on and they were saying that when they were taking the desiccated organ supplements they had a rush of energy but I kind of have this thing that I like to do with people where I have them eat raw liver and it's really cool to see how it turns their brain on.
00:26:26.000The baseline nutrition depends, you know, will determine how much of a buzz they get but Of course, there's always food contamination issues.
00:27:20.000I would say it can't be that bad, but then you hear about, like, the people in Iceland that eat that pickled shark that Anthony Bourdain told me was the single most disgusting thing he's ever eaten in his life.
00:29:24.000So what's supposed to be the reaction?
00:29:25.000It doesn't taste much different than cooked liver.
00:29:28.000I think that in the tribe, so there's an interesting tribe in Africa called the New Air tribe, and liver is so sacred that they couldn't even touch it with human hands.
00:29:37.000I don't know how they got it from the animal to people's mouths, but a lot of cultures eat it raw.
00:29:42.000They'll just cut it up and eat it raw.
00:29:43.000I think that the idea is you lose a little bit of nutrients when you cook it.
00:32:12.000See if you can find them ducks getting fed grains for fog wall.
00:32:19.000Yeah, I wonder if they do anything to the grains to make them overeat it.
00:32:22.000Because there are lots of studies in rodents.
00:32:24.000Sometimes you can use rodents that are genetically predisposed to become obese, but if you alter the food, and we know this with humans, you can alter food in some ways to make it more palatable and to kind of short-circuit the satiety mechanisms.
00:34:14.000There's a lot of corn and soy subsidies that are supported by it, and it's really unfortunate.
00:34:18.000But there's a lot of really interesting discussion about the sustainability of grass-fed, grass-finished meat, and this regenerative agriculture concept.
00:34:29.000Like, could you still have jack-in-the-box if you had grass-fed, grass-finished meat?
00:34:34.000I think we can both agree that grass-fed, grass-finished meat is healthier to consume.
00:34:40.000But the disagreement comes, like Bourdain, again, rest his soul, would say he prefers grain-fed cows because he finds the meat to be more delicious and tender.
00:35:11.000I mean, if you look at the way that cattle are factory farmed, the reason they have all that intramuscular fat is because they are less metabolically healthy than their grass-fed, grass-finished cohort.
00:35:22.000The sustainability or the scalability argument is so important to consider.
00:35:26.000So when I think about this, I think about it from a couple of perspectives.
00:35:29.000There's the land-use perspective, but there's also just the actual mathematics of it, that 99-ish percentage of cows that we eat that are grain-finished We're good to go.
00:36:05.000And then the other aspect is the actual land use.
00:36:08.000And then when you think about how much land is used to grow corn and soy, and then if we get rid of all the corn and soy that goes to animals and feed lots, we can graze cattle there.
00:36:17.000And then there's actually, I believe it's called the Conservation Reserve Program.
00:36:39.000So what I think what everyone is missing, well not the people in the regenerative agriculture space, not you, but I think that the mainstream is missing the fact that in order to regenerate land, in order to make land healthy, you put animals on the land.
00:36:51.000That's why the center of the country where there were millions of bison and elk and antelope and deer and pronghorn had the richest soil anywhere until we monocropped it.
00:37:06.000But when you talk to the folks at White Oak Pastures in Georgia or other regenerative farms and you look at the soil, it's incredible that when animals live on the soil in an ecosystem, It puts nutrients back into the soil.
00:37:18.000The soil is like the color of coffee grounds.
00:37:21.000So I was in Georgia recently at Bluffton at White Oak doing photographs for a cookbook I'm writing.
00:37:26.000And Will Harris, who's a colleague of Joel Salatin, I know you've had Joel on the podcast.
00:38:24.000There's an entire ecosystem that evolves from Around these animals living the way they've lived for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years it makes sense that it all works together synergistically to feed the soil and to provide nutrients for the very animals and those animals will die on that land and they will rot they will provide even more fertilizer and then other animals will live off of them and live in that area and they too will die and they will Shit all over the place and piss all over the place and they will feed the
00:39:41.000I mean, a crazy war that I don't think today in our 2020 version of war, which always happens in some remote, faraway land, and it's always a domination by the United States.
00:39:50.000I don't think we really understand the desperate and terrifying times when they were, you know, asking people to donate metal and rubber.
00:40:05.000And so they subsidized these farmers to grow all this food.
00:40:09.000Now it's become a different animal because now they're subsidizing people to grow corn that is mostly in a lot of...
00:40:16.000Like I have a friend who has a farm and they grow it for livestock.
00:40:19.000They have a huge area that they grow corn.
00:40:22.000And it's all, by the way, Monsanto corn, right?
00:40:24.000They're spraying that fucking Roundup on it, which is, you know, glyphosate is terrible for you.
00:40:30.000And I had a podcast about that recently, about environmental chemicals and how bad they are for you and then how that stuff actually can be in the meat and can, in turn, get into your system and provide you with all sorts of problems.
00:40:44.000And this is why there's subsidizing of farmers.
00:40:49.000I mean, it's also because we need farmers.
00:40:50.000We need to keep them healthy and healthy.
00:40:53.000This is just not the way to do it, though.
00:40:54.000If we could just get people off the tit of corn, get people off the tit of these monocrop agriculture, we would be a healthier country.
00:41:05.000If we can have these giant areas where people can grow all kinds of things, like polyphase farms, the way Joel Salatin runs things.
00:41:16.000He lets all of his pigs, they live like wild pigs.
00:41:20.000They just eat acorns and nuts and all these different things and he supplements them sometimes and he has incredible soil like the other farm you're describing and incredibly healthy animals.
00:43:14.000But if you look at the ground and you look at a square foot of the ground at Rome Ranch, you can see that on the pastures that the bison are in, maybe only 30 or 40% of that earth is growing grass.
00:43:26.000But you know that in the future, if you move it out 20 years like White Oak Pastures has done, When I was in Georgia, every millimeter of that ground is growing grass.
00:43:53.000I'm not going to get near the fucking bison, though.
00:43:56.000I'm going to learn my lesson from other people.
00:43:58.000Well, we go out there with Katie and Taylor, who own the farm and take care of it, and there's people out there who work with a bison, and they know which animals are more aggressive.
00:44:48.000They ate a little bit of berries here and there, but most of what their diet was was meat.
00:44:52.000And there was a benefit to that in terms of the way they could travel, because they could go without food longer than people that were mostly carbohydrate-based.
00:45:01.000The carbohydrate-based guys, like the soldiers, would crash and the Comanches could keep going because their body would just go into ketosis and they would live off fat.
00:45:09.000It was a natural shift back and forth between eating meat and eating fat and eating organs to not eating for a while.
00:45:17.000And so few humans in 2020 have gone for more than 18 hours without eating food.
00:45:23.000Very few of us in how many decades we've lived or have utilized the fat burning systems in our body.
00:45:31.000You know, you can use glucose or fructose or sugars.
00:45:38.000But there's a whole other system where you can either use fat that's coming in or use fat from your body in beta-oxidation and ketones, move the fat, basically, precursor molecules around your body.
00:45:47.000And when we get adapted to that, we have this extra engine.
00:45:53.000But if we go long enough without ever using the hybrid fat-burning engine, we kind of lose it.
00:45:59.000But you can get it back pretty quickly.
00:46:00.000It's kind of interesting today that there are a lot of people that are interested in intermittent fasting or having a very specific feeding window, and they are seeing benefits of that.
00:46:10.000I was reading some article recently that was saying a study shows that there's no weight loss benefit to intermittent fasting.
00:46:18.000And I'm like, who made that fucking study?
00:46:53.000There's a lot of compelling data in both, at least in animal models, and I believe in human models too, that having a feeding window and having time when your body shifts from We're good to go.
00:47:26.000Amp kinase at a very broad level, when you have more of this ketogenic physiology, when you exhaust the glycogen in your liver, you turn on these autophagy mechanisms.
00:47:35.000You do the cellular housecleaning, and that's beneficial for humans.
00:47:38.000Our ancestors would certainly have done that.
00:47:39.000Please explain that to people, the cellular housecleaning, that your body actually does get rid of some damaged cells.
00:47:48.000Damaged cells and damaged proteins within cells and damaged mitochondria.
00:47:52.000So within the cell, there are these, quote, powerhouse factories, which are probably ancient bacteria, you know, billions of years ago that combined with a single-celled organism and we became eukaryotic with a membrane-bound nucleus and a membrane-bound organelle called mitochondria,
00:48:11.000And so Within the body, there are all these organelles within our cells, and some of them, the job of that organelle is to basically be the trash compactor.
00:48:20.000Old proteins are ubiquinated and they're moved to the organelles that recycle them.
00:48:25.000And so you do this cellular housecleaning, and it seems to happen more when you're in this state of ketosis or when you're not...
00:48:34.000Using the glucose from, or when you're not in sort of an anabolic physiology.
00:48:38.000And so you can see that with our ancestors, we would have switched back and forth.
00:48:42.000We wouldn't have been successful in hunts every day.
00:48:44.000We would have had some hunts that were successful and some gathering sessions which were successful and others which weren't.
00:48:50.000And when they're not successful, you're fasting.
00:49:10.000But if we're doing the standard American thing, which is to eat constantly and snack throughout the day, and then can't wait to have dinner, and then can't wait to have breakfast, and can't wait to have lunch, and Your body never really gets a break.
00:49:25.000I mean, it would be so interesting to look at the Western population or the American population and see how many of them actually exhaust liver glycogen overnight, how many people actually wake up with ketones in their blood.
00:49:38.000I think the majority of people never get rid of their liver glycogen, never actually flip.
00:49:44.000To be fair, I actually don't think we should always be in ketosis either.
00:49:48.000I think that that can present some challenges to the human physiology and that intermittent, you know, inclusion of carbohydrates can be beneficial for humans.
00:49:56.000And this is a cycle, it's a circle, like many things are in our life and our ancestors.
00:50:01.000In spite of the fact that they favored meat and organs, they certainly would have had carbohydrates from time to time when they were available.
00:50:08.000I think that personally, when the people I've worked with and in the reading that I've done, everything I've learned, it works better to be cyclic ketosis rather than persistent ketosis all the time.
00:50:18.000Though ketogenic physiology, I think, is intrinsic to humans.
00:50:21.000It's beneficial, super healthy, and a lot of people find massive benefits from it.
00:50:26.000Well, ketosis, particularly for people that have epilepsy, and for SEALs that work on those rebreathers, they found that being in ketosis can keep them from having seizures, which is really kind of fascinating as well.
00:53:05.000And these animals are not even big relative to what might have been here when they were megafauna, you know, tens of thousands of years ago.
00:53:11.000But you just think about the way that currently living hunter-gatherers might have changed their foodstuffs to survive.
00:53:17.000And if you had woolly mammoth all the time, man, I think you're probably going to eat some honey if you can find it.
00:53:23.000But Honey and woolly mammoth sounds like a good diet to me.
00:56:32.000Spots started filling in, which is really strange.
00:56:33.000Because I first got interested in the carnivore diet because of autoimmunity.
00:56:37.000And the way that, just the hypothesis, could some of these plant toxins that we were kind of talking about earlier, could these be triggering immunologic reactions in humans?
00:57:18.000So I have not had any flares of eczema since I've been eating a carnivore or carnivore-ish diet for the last two years, except one time when I reincorporated some plants back in my diet in an experiment with squash.
00:57:31.000So I'll get eczema on my wrists, my elbows.
00:57:34.000So you got it just from taking squash?
00:57:48.000And there are, I mean, squash is one of the foods that I would think is fairly ancestrally consistent and fairly less offensive to humans because in the book, I don't, the book is not meant to convince everyone to stop eating all plants.
00:58:00.000The book is really meant to do a couple things.
00:58:02.000It's meant to help people understand that animal meat and organs are the foods that we've been eating throughout our evolution.
00:58:07.000They're wrongly vilified today, and we can talk about why with the epidemiology.
00:58:11.000And they should be a part of any, they're an integral part of any healthy human diet.
00:58:14.000And then I created kind of a spectrum of plant toxicity, thinking about hunter-gatherer tribes and which parts of plants they favor and which parts of plants they discard.
00:58:22.000And then thirdly, I think it's important to understand what we talked about, processed vegetable oils and processed sugars, hugely bad for humans.
00:58:28.000But I'm really interested in carnivore and carnivore-ish type diets so that the most number of people can benefit.
00:58:46.000So for about a year and three quarters, I had just meat and organs and fat.
00:58:51.000And I was in ketosis all the time, depending how much protein I had.
00:58:54.000And then I had some thoughts about, well, what does my blood sugar look like when I do this?
00:58:59.000I got a CGM. I got one of these continuous glucose monitors.
00:59:03.000And I started incorporating carbohydrates first as an experiment.
00:59:07.000And what I noticed was that with sort of these less toxic carbohydrates, or what I think of as more ancestrally consistent sources of carbohydrates, I felt even better.
00:59:16.000The eczema didn't come back with honey.
00:59:19.000I found that I couldn't overeat fruit.
00:59:21.000I couldn't, if I ate too much fruit, I felt bloated and kind of just farty and didn't feel good.
00:59:27.000Fruit seems to have this built-in mechanism where we can only eat so much of it.
00:59:31.000Honey is, you know, I can eat a moderate amount and feel just fine, but the inclusion of those carbohydrates actually made me feel a little better.
00:59:38.000With long-term ketosis for myself and what I've observed for some people, perhaps not all, with long-term ketosis, electrolyte deficiencies a lot of times develop.
00:59:46.000People get cramps, they get palpitations.
00:59:48.000And we know that when ketogenic physiology happens, our body partitions electrolytes differently than Sodium, you know, sodium retention in the kidneys different.
00:59:57.000And then when sodium becomes a little bit funky, our body wastes a little magnesium, a little potassium.
01:00:01.000And so that started to kind of make sense to me.
01:00:04.000I thought, oh, maybe it doesn't have to be as dogmatic as full meat and organs.
01:00:09.000Maybe we can, you know, maybe more people would benefit if we think about this more like our ancestors, right?
01:00:14.000More like the Hadza, eating berries, or boobab, or baobab, and then honey occasionally.
01:00:19.000And you can always look at your blood sugar with a CGM or other metrics.
01:00:23.000What was fascinating, and I actually have all my blood work, if you want to see it, or any of my continuous glucose monitor readings, but you can see, this is all in the lab work or the blood work folder, Jamie.
01:00:35.000And there at the bottom, there's those three images of my blood sugar, and there's a few other ones.
01:00:42.000But you can see that with honey and mead and organs, don't really have much of a change in the blood sugar at all.
01:00:49.000It's pretty mild most of the time, and it stays very consistent.
01:00:52.000Honey has a lot of really unique properties, too, doesn't it?
01:01:12.000Yeah, I think a lot of honeys can help with that.
01:01:14.000But if you look at the literature on honey, there's studies.
01:01:18.000So when I first thought about honey, I thought this is going to cause dental cavities.
01:01:22.000And I'm good friends with a periodontist.
01:01:24.000Incidentally, a periodontist who has an advanced leukemia, who's on a carnivore diet and doing really well- But he was pointing me to a bunch of evidence that honey's been used to treat oral candida.
01:01:37.000It actually can have activity against cariogenic bacteria in the mouth.
01:04:03.000And actually, the title of this paper is Hadza Fallback Foods.
01:04:07.000But at the end of the paper, they say there's this observed behavior that if there's a lot of meat in the camp, the women will stop digging tubers for two to three days.
01:04:15.000Baobab is this tree in Tanzania that has this fruit.
01:04:18.000I've never had it, but it has this kind of dry fruit pulp on the outside of the seeds.
01:04:23.000Maybe you can find a picture of Baobab, Jamie, but...
01:05:01.000For folks that are just listening, they're really fat and wide, and then the top, they have these tiny little branches.
01:05:07.000Jamie, go to the left side, the left of the other images that you were looking at, and go drop down into the lower right-hand corner of that one, the bulbous one.
01:05:28.000But if you look at tooth decay in the Hadza, there's some interesting findings.
01:05:32.000The women, actually, that eat indigenous ancestrally don't really have significant tooth decay.
01:05:38.000The men have higher rates of tooth decay, and we don't know whether that's because they're eating more honey or because they also smoke tobacco and marijuana.
01:05:45.000And tobacco and marijuana are certainly associated with dental cavities or periodontitis.
01:05:50.000So there's been some concern about that.
01:05:52.000But at least in myself, I haven't seen anything.
01:05:55.000And I've actually talked to a number of dentists who have said, no, honey is protective in the mouth, which goes against everything we think.
01:06:01.000But there are studies that look at the pH of the mouth.
01:06:06.000But when I've been educated by dentists, Tooth decay appears to happen when the pH of the mouth drops.
01:06:12.000When we eat sugar or something that's fermentable or in the setting probably of fat-soluble vitamin deficiency, the pH of the mouth drops and the cariogenic bacteria are able to thrive.
01:06:22.000Well, if you look at the pH of the mouth when you eat honey, it drops and then it rebounds more quickly.
01:06:54.000So, fructose and glucose are different molecules.
01:06:57.000And fructose and glucose have different biochemistry.
01:07:01.000In glucose biochemistry, there's a stopgap.
01:07:04.000There's a rate-limiting enzyme called phosphofructokinase, meaning that if you try and overeat glucose, your body's gonna put the brakes on it and not do glycolysis, which is the process by which you turn glucose that you're eating into energy, right?
01:07:20.000So fructose bypasses phosphofructokinase and can essentially move down the shared glycolytic pathway into the formation of the glycerol backbone and triglycerides, which are essentially fats, without any breaks.
01:07:36.000So the problem is not high fructose corn syrup itself.
01:07:40.000It's that you can eat it without stopping, right?
01:07:44.000That you can get massive amounts of it and they're calorically bereft.
01:07:47.000So if you were to eat, if you, if I were to give you, if you look at isocaloric studies of fructose, there's no evidence that they, that fructose increases uric acid or blood pressure or weight gain.
01:07:59.000But when anything with high fructose corn syrup is going to be so enticing, is going to short surrogate your satiety mechanisms so much that you're just going to overeat it in a way that fruit doesn't do, right?
01:08:14.000You're like, oh, I can't eat any more fruit.
01:08:16.000That's another thing that I noticed about doing the carnivore diet for that one month was that satiety, when you're only eating meat, you don't eat as much.
01:08:29.000It's not just an elimination diet, but in many ways, you're reducing calories just because you're just not as hungry.
01:08:38.000And you eat to satisfaction, but overall the calorie consumption is much less than if you were eating it along with like macaroni and cheese or, you know, cream corn or bread or all these other things.
01:09:54.000I do think that for humans to thrive, we should not fear meat and organs, and you make that the center of your diet.
01:10:00.000And like you're saying, I think that there is a benefit to a carnivore-ish diet.
01:10:04.000Just like you, how many people are going to eat just meat and organs for their whole life?
01:10:10.000Some, a devoted few, and they're definitely going to benefit.
01:10:13.000But I think that the number is 10 to 20 to 100x who might benefit from understanding that meat and organs are valuable, incorrectly vilified, and that there's a spectrum of plant toxicity.
01:11:08.000So in the book, in chapter 12, I talk about this spectrum of plant toxicity.
01:11:14.000And if you think about it from a plant's perspective, There are parts of a plant that it wants you to eat, usually, like the fruit, and a lot of parts of the plant that it doesn't want you to eat.
01:11:24.000And it doesn't want you to eat its leaves.
01:11:26.000Why would a plant want you to eat its leaves?
01:11:29.000Those are the reproductive parts of a plant.
01:11:31.000So if you chew the seeds, that's where this, you were talking about these negative compounds that only happen when you chew certain seeds, like apple seeds.
01:12:18.000There was a big fervor about the Hunza a couple of years ago, maybe a decade ago.
01:12:22.000And there was this widely promulgated false notion that they were having this longevity benefit from this amygdalin in the apricot kernels.
01:12:30.000And it was really potentially dangerous for humans.
01:12:32.000So they ended up with these apricot kernels, the apricot seed in trail mix.
01:12:37.000And the USDA or the FDA had to step in and say, no, no, no, you can't do that.
01:12:42.000And almonds were very toxic and we kind of bred it out of them.
01:12:46.000So a lot of the foods we eat today are sort of, we're stripping the toxins away from the plants, but the intentions were clear.
01:12:51.000One of those goofy vegan doctors who looks like shit was on this podcast and he was talking about how he got really, really sick because he picked these berries.
01:13:29.000He's locked into this world and applauded and that's where he gets his love from.
01:13:34.000And if you leave that world by God, I've seen people do it and they get attacked in the most vicious and horrific ways.
01:13:41.000When their body is falling apart and they incorporate salmon and all of a sudden they start getting erections and they start feeling better, people will attack them.
01:13:50.000I understand where these people are coming from in terms of them not wanting to do harm.
01:16:04.000He's just talking about his own personal experiences, and they've been net positive for him.
01:16:09.000And the story that I've heard, and I don't want to put any words in Rich's mouth, but the story that I've heard from him and other vegans...
01:16:16.000Is valid, but it is often, I was eating a diet of junk food.
01:16:21.000I was drinking a lot, and I did this intentional choice, which is frickin' amazing.
01:17:07.000But there was a point in time where if I was queasy, the texture of that, when I was chewing on it, if I was of a weaker constitution, we might have had an issue.
01:17:21.000So in the evolution folder, Jamie, I don't know if the study will be great to pull up, but there's a study in there, the vegetarian ERP brain study.
01:17:28.000So they've done studies with vegetarians and vegans and omnivores looking at the EEG. So looking at the electroencephalogram and looking at the way the brain responds at a neocortical and a more basic level.
01:17:40.000And so the bottom thing there is kind of a complex statement, but you see what they say.
01:17:46.000The findings suggest that vegetarians' aversion toward non-vegetarian food prevails at the subjective level.
01:17:52.000And it's consistent with personal beliefs.
01:17:54.000But at the neural level, the intrinsic motivational salience of animal food remains.
01:18:01.000So that means that in the deeper brain, they still crave meat.
01:18:04.000Well, they eat it when they get drunk.
01:22:47.000And so now, Jamie, if you go to 10.16.56, that was the first one you brought up.
01:22:53.000We can look, and this is detective work, but we can start to make inferences, or guesses at least, based on trends and calories from major food groups.
01:23:00.000This is actually a pretty cool graphic.
01:23:02.000So the top line there, the green one, is grains.
01:23:05.000It goes up a little bit, but since 1995 it's gone down.
01:23:10.000You can even look at sugars and sweeteners.
01:23:12.000Again, they go up a little bit, but in the last 20 years, they've gone down.
01:23:16.000And the consumption of meat has gone up, so we'll consider meat as a probable driver.
01:23:21.000But look at that red line in the middle.
01:24:05.000And then if you go back to one of those other ones, Jamie, the 10.18.26, you can see Americans are eating less saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium.
01:24:11.000Because those are all things that get vilified, right?
01:24:14.000And I don't believe saturated fat is a villain at all.
01:24:17.000Saturated fat is incredibly healthy for humans when it's from well-sourced animals.
01:25:07.000And you can see soybean is the main one, but canola, sunflower, cottonseed, peanut, and other.
01:25:11.000This is completely evolutionarily inconsistent.
01:25:14.000This is completely dis-synchronous with our evolution.
01:25:17.000We would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil.
01:25:21.000We didn't have the ability to do this.
01:25:23.000And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be doing this, but, you know, as I kind of dug into this, it gets a little bit deep in the weeds, but at a molecular level, these polyunsaturated fats, they act differently in our body, and we don't fully have this figured out.
01:25:38.000But at the level of our mitochondria, it does look like these polyunsaturated fats, this linoleic acid-rich vegetable oil, is signaling things differently.
01:25:46.000And I think there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that linoleic acid is driving adipocyte hypertrophy, meaning fat cells are getting bigger.
01:26:28.000So maybe it was advantageous to get a little bit more linoleic acid when things might be scarce in the winter, in northerly climes.
01:26:35.000Maybe there's an evolutionary mechanism here, but the potential is that every single day, all of us in the Western world, if we're eating excess vegetable oils, excess polyunsaturated fats, specifically linoleic acid, we are driving a signal to our adipocytes that winter is coming.
01:26:53.000So it's just this evolutionary inconsistency, and it's not rocket science.
01:26:56.000It's like, wait a minute, just stop eating those oils and really stop consuming animals fed corn and soy, especially pigs and monogastric animals like chickens.
01:27:41.000There's about 1.6 to 1.8% animal fat in a grass-fed cow.
01:27:45.000And to be fair, in a grain-fed cow, it's not a whole lot more.
01:27:49.000There's about 2% linoleic acid in the fat of a ruminant animal, a deer, a cow, a bison.
01:27:55.000But if you look at chicken, they're up at 23, 24%.
01:27:58.000Pork, 15 to 16% because they're fed corn and soy.
01:28:02.000Like you said earlier, if you let a pig, like if you're out hunting hogs, that hog is gonna have a fat, you know, maybe 5 to 6% linoleic acid.
01:28:11.000And you can totally, it totally changes.
01:28:13.000You know, chickens, the same research has been done showing that chickens in the wild, I don't know what a wild chicken looks like, but like wild flightless birds, their fat looks different than when they're fed corn and soy.
01:28:21.000Not surprisingly, because monogastric animals, chickens, turkey, duck, pork, you know, pigs, humans, we store the polyunsaturated fat.
01:28:30.000So I think this is a really interesting hypothesis.
01:28:32.000We don't have enough data to say this, but man, it's so compelling.
01:28:35.000And, you know, the other side of the equation is certainly high fructose corn syrup is not helping anything.
01:28:40.000But I think it's important for people to understand that that might not be the only villain.
01:28:44.000And that a lot of people might get rid of the sugar but then continue eating processed food or hummus with canola oil or, you know, chips from the store that are cooked in soybean oil and not understand it.
01:28:53.000And this could be driving a lot of the disease that we're seeing in a really subtle way.
01:28:58.000It's fascinating because the narrative has always been unsaturated fats are good.
01:30:04.000Oh, okay, 1967 review of sugar, fat, and heart disease.
01:30:07.000The studies used in the review were handpicked by the Sugar Group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
01:30:18.000So that scared everybody and got everybody to eat margarine.
01:30:21.000And margarine is fucking terrible for you.
01:31:24.000But I wanted my mom and my sister to have desiccated organs.
01:31:28.000And when you put them in a freeze dryer, you can freeze dry them at like 38 degrees, preserve most of the nutrients, put them in a capsule.
01:32:11.000So you think about, you still save some if you dehydrate at 140, but in a freeze dryer they lower the pressure and then they pull out the water at a low pressure.
01:32:19.000It's essentially sublimation where you can go from solid to gas without going through liquid.
01:32:23.000So you preserve as much as possible, like a pretty good amount stays in there.
01:32:27.000So maybe you lose a certain percentage of that and you could make that up with volume?
01:33:13.000The capsules are amazing because you can just take them and they're portable.
01:33:15.000Maybe if people really want the powder, we'd make it.
01:33:18.000But I think the capsules are better for people and it's portable and it's easy and you can condense an ounce of organ into a reasonable amount of pills.
01:33:25.000It's real food, so there's no additives or preservatives or anything in there.
01:34:21.000Yeah, they're all grass-fed, grass-finished animals from New Zealand, and we're actually working really hard to develop a regenerative chain in the U.S. Really?
01:35:39.000Because I think there's some evidence, or at least, I think there's a little bit of evidence, at least in diabetics, and then personally I've experienced better sleep when I finish eating dinner earlier.
01:35:49.000Melatonin and insulin do have a little bit of a contradictory effect.
01:35:53.000You know, if you eat late at night, is the insulin spike going to affect your body's ability to release melatonin from the hypothalamus and actually initiate sleep?
01:36:01.000It's like, are you supposed to be eating right before you go to sleep?
01:36:31.000And I'll just go out probably three or four times a day and do pull-ups, do some kettlebell swings, hit the punching bag for 10 or 15 minutes multiple times.
01:36:40.000If I do multiple, if I do like a big exercise, it could be any time.
01:36:43.000You have some cotton stuck on your thumb there.
01:39:02.0002017, they did a study where they strapped heart rate monitors on 200 or so, 198 different Hadza men and women, and tracked them to see what their cardiovascular fitness was.
01:39:27.000It's kind of that low-level activity throughout the day.
01:39:29.000It just feels good for your brain, too.
01:39:31.000And I'll be at home working, writing, or answering emails or something, and I don't want to do that for three hours.
01:39:36.000I want to do it for 45 minutes or an hour, get up, do some pull-ups, go outside, breathe some air, go see the natural world, go outside barefoot, and move around.
01:39:44.000This is something that I want to discuss, too.
01:39:47.000Cardiovascular disease and heart attacks, the difference between the rate of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks today versus, like, the early 1900s.
01:40:11.000Because we were eating more saturated fat in 1900. We were eating way more saturated fat in 1800 or 1840. And the only oils we used were animal fats, which are not entirely saturated.
01:40:23.000They're about half mono and half saturated.
01:40:25.000Half mono and saturated, half saturated.
01:40:27.000With a very small amount of polyunsaturated.
01:40:29.000So to say that it's saturated fat driving this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
01:40:33.000Again, this is just correlation, but there's not even a correlation there.
01:40:38.000The correlation is with vegetable oil.
01:40:40.000And if you get into this research, it's complex, but it's pretty darn striking.
01:40:45.000If you look at linoleic acid, and you look at the molecule, it's polyunsaturated.
01:40:52.000And polyunsaturation means it has double bonds between the carbons.
01:40:55.000And those double bonds can be oxidized.
01:40:57.000Remember we talked about oxidation earlier and this formation of lipid peroxides?
01:41:01.000Well, those molecules, polyunsaturated fats and even monounsaturated fat, any unsaturation point in a carbon skeleton molecule like a long-chain fatty acid is going to make it susceptible to oxidation.
01:41:13.000And then lipid peroxides, which are lipids that have had an electron stolen from that double bond, Then those are more susceptible, those are more reactive with other lipids, and they create these lipid peroxide reactions.
01:41:24.000And then you're getting oxidative stress from the lipids.
01:41:27.000And if you look at, we should back up for a moment.
01:41:30.000This goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
01:41:32.000One of the reasons saturated fat has been thought of as bad for so long is because it raises LDL. But if LDL is not de novo causing atherosclerosis, then we have a whole different equation.
01:41:47.000Well, let's get into that because this is one of the big questions that I got when I told people I was going to eat an animal-only diet for a month.
01:41:53.000They're like, what about your cholesterol?
01:41:56.000What are you going to do about your...
01:41:59.000And I try to tell them that dietary cholesterol does not raise cholesterol in your blood lipids and they just glaze over and they're like, well, you know, you're taking in a lot of cholesterol.
01:42:08.000And it's just most people don't have the time to research this or to get into the weeds and to try to shift their perception about what cholesterol is.
01:42:19.000About the benefits of cholesterol, the necessity of cholesterol for the human diet, for production of hormones.
01:42:30.000So LDL is low density lipoprotein and it's formed from VLDL after it becomes IDL, which is intermediate density lipoprotein.
01:42:37.000So when you eat fat in your diet, it is generally in triglyceride form, which is packaged into molecules called chylomicrons, which move from the intestines to the liver.
01:42:48.000In the liver, cholesterol, which is actually a steroid backbone molecule, is packaged with triglycerides into a VLDL, a very low density lipoprotein particle.
01:42:59.000It moves triglycerides and cholesterol around the body because they're nutrients, because they're essential for human life, because like you said, hormones are made from a cholesterol backbone.
01:43:12.000And if you did not have cholesterol, you would be very sick and die.
01:43:15.000There's a genetic condition called Smith-Lemley-Opitz syndrome, which is a mutation in one of the enzymes that makes cholesterol.
01:43:33.000They're extremely susceptible to infections and they have a lot of problems with sleep and diabetes and other issues because they don't make cholesterol.
01:43:39.000They have extremely low LDL because they can't make cholesterol in the liver and probably in peripheral tissues either.
01:43:46.000And so the way we treat these kids is with egg yolks.
01:43:48.000We just give them tons and tons of dietary cholesterol in hopes that that will be We're good to go.
01:44:11.000That kills us within our body, that at the same time defends us from infection.
01:44:17.000So there are good studies in animal models that show that if you knock out the LDL receptor in mice and rats, the levels of LDL in the blood drop a lot.
01:44:28.000And those mice and rats are protected against infections.
01:44:32.000So they can infuse bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, into those rats, and the higher levels of LDL are protective in those studies.
01:44:39.000And the same thing has been true in human.
01:44:40.000You can look for this correlation, so this is epidemiology.
01:44:43.000At some point, we should definitely talk about why epidemiology can be so misleading.
01:44:47.000But higher levels of cholesterol are correlated with lower admission to the hospital for infectious complications.
01:44:52.000And we definitely see in animal models, and essentially with humans, with the Smith-Lemley-Opitz genetic model, That lower levels of cholesterol predispose to infection because LDL, lower levels of serum cholesterol, meaning low-density lip protein, predispose to infection because that low-density lip protein particle is part of the immune system.
01:45:09.000And so is HDL. So HDL is high-density lip protein.
01:45:13.000It leaves the liver as kind of an empty bus.
01:45:15.000LDL leaves the liver as VLDL, a full bus, drops off people along the way, becomes a less full bus.
01:45:21.000VLDL becomes LDL. HDL is an empty bus.
01:45:24.000It goes along the body picking things up and then returning to the liver.
01:45:27.000But HDL and LDL both have roles in the immune system.
01:45:30.000So why do we think that a molecule, a lipoprotein particle that serves an indispensable role in human biochemistry or at least human physiology is killing us?
01:46:12.000I think it's an incomplete hypothesis.
01:46:14.000And so they would say, if you have more LDL, It's just gonna kind of leak into your arterial wall because it naturally gets taken up, and as more LDL ends up in your artery wall, you get more atherosclerosis and more plaque.
01:46:53.000They're giving people surveys, and they're either following them moving forward, prospective, or they're looking back at what they've done in the past, a retrospective study.
01:47:01.000And so epidemiology can generate correlations, but we cannot draw causative inference from that data.
01:47:08.000We can have a correlation, which we then test with an interventional study.
01:47:13.000LDL is kind of tough to test with an interventional study, but there's some really cool stuff here that starts to break it down.
01:47:20.000If you look at overall cohorts of people, so if you look at the Framingham study, for instance, and you look at LDL on the x-axis and incidence of cardiovascular disease on the y-axis, I actually have two graphs of this that I'll show you that'll make it really helpful to break it down.
01:47:39.000So if you look at those two, and you don't do anything to, this is in the lipids and CVD folder, Jamie.
01:47:50.000So, if you look at this, this is the basic data from Framingham, okay?
01:47:55.000This is correlation, this is epidemiology.
01:47:58.000Increasing risk of cardiovascular disease on the y-axis, LDL on the x-axis, okay?
01:48:04.000So, it's things like this that make people say, oh yeah, LDL, it's probably causing atherosclerosis, which is the formation of plaque within the arterial wall.
01:48:16.000CACLDLHDL. So this is the exact same data stratified by a third variable.
01:48:25.000And this is what is never considered with LDL, in my opinion.
01:48:29.000The lipid hypothesis is flawed because it's incomplete.
01:48:32.000It misses the third variable or fourth variable.
01:48:35.000In this stratification, we've looked at HDL. We've looked at the, quote, good cholesterol, which we really don't know a whole lot about, probably an immune participant.
01:48:44.000But HDL levels do correlate with metabolic health, synonymous with insulin resistance.
01:48:50.000So what can we say about these people?
01:48:52.000This is the exact same data that I split into four lines here.
01:48:55.000Those with the lowest level of HDL are the most metabolically unhealthy.
01:48:59.000These are the most obese, the most likely to have diabetes, the most likely to have insulin resistance.
01:49:06.000You can see they have a pretty good risk Relative risk of cardiovascular disease as LDL increases.
01:49:13.000Look at the people who are most insulin sensitive.
01:49:15.000There's essentially no correlation, or the correlation is massively different between people with a high HDL, good metabolic health, and LDL increasing.
01:49:44.000And we see that over and over and over.
01:49:46.000But what if you just have high LDL and low HDL? Then you probably have diabetes, and in that case you have, then you're in trouble.
01:49:54.000So the issue is not LDL, it's low HDL. Well, the issue, low HDL is reflective of an underlying pathology, which is metabolic dysfunction and or insulin resistance.
01:50:04.000The issue is insulin resistance metabolic dysfunction.
01:50:07.000So we're using HDL level as a proxy for metabolic health here.
01:51:13.000That's too simplistic because I think there's context here.
01:51:16.000And the context is that I don't believe there's sufficient evidence to say that high LDL in somebody that's metabolically healthy is the same as high LDL in somebody that's metabolically unhealthy.
01:52:16.000And so we see this over and over in humans that fasting raises LDL, fasting raises uric acid, but fasting, people who fast, people who do ketogenic diets, they don't get gout.
01:52:26.000They don't get atherosclerosis in quite the same way, or at least that's the hypothesis.
01:52:30.000Certainly bears don't, and we observe it.
01:52:31.000It seems strange that fasting would raise LDL. It does until you think about LDL as a nutrient carrier.
01:52:40.000So Dave is developing something called a lipid energy model, and I want to give him all credit for this.
01:52:45.000I've actually got a set of slides that will probably make it clear when I talk about it.
01:52:48.000But Dave's hypothesis is that if you are burning mostly fat as energy, and even somebody that eats some carbohydrates can be burning mostly fat as energy, You are going to be moving more LDL in your blood to move that fat around.
01:53:02.000And we certainly know that interventions can do that.
01:53:17.000And so you kind of scratch your head there, at least I did, and looked at this and thought, Are you telling me that in something that would happen routinely for humans, fasting like we talked about, intermittent fasting, unsuccessful hunts, that's killing us in a way?
01:53:51.000But the whole idea of what LDL is doing in the human body, I think, has been misconstrued and misunderstood.
01:53:57.000Again, the lipid hypothesis would say the more LDL, the more atherosclerosis.
01:54:02.000Well, if that's the case, and it's kind of tied into that model, is the notion that LDL must cause atherosclerosis de novo, or in and of itself.
01:54:12.000Because if more LDL equals atherosclerosis, then LDL is causing atherosclerosis.
01:54:16.000I don't think anyone who subscribes to the lipid energy model is going to debate that.
01:54:20.000But if LDL causes atherosclerosis de novo, why don't we get atherosclerosis in veins?
01:54:26.000Why do we only get atherosclerosis in arteries?
01:54:29.000There's the same amount of LDL throughout our body.
01:54:31.000Veins and arteries are a contiguous system.
01:54:33.000And so why are we developing plaque in arteries but not veins?
01:54:37.000We never see plaque in veins unless they are transplanted into the arterial system.
01:54:43.000So there's clearly more things going on.
01:54:45.000And in the case of arteries versus veins, the prevailing hypothesis is that it's endothelial damage.
01:54:50.000So the inside of a blood vessel is the endothelium.
01:54:54.000And something has to damage the endothelium for this to happen, it seems.
01:54:58.000And higher pressure systems, the arteries, seem to damage the endothelium and this network of glycoproteins on the surface of the endothelium called the glycocalyx.
01:55:09.000But for LDL to cause atherosclerosis in and of itself, it just doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to work.
01:55:15.000And studies like that with Framingham make me think, there's a third variable.
01:55:19.000So if you look at the general population, sure, you might see a correlation between LDL and cardiovascular disease, but if you look at it a little more precisely or a little more carefully, you start to separate out those who are metabolically healthy, which granted is the minority,
01:55:35.000from those who are metabolically unwell.
01:55:37.000If the majority of people in our society are metabolically unwell, of course it looks like there's a correlation.
01:55:41.000But what about this group over here, you and me, who are metabolically healthy, if our LDL goes up, is that gonna cause atherosclerosis?
01:55:49.000I think the evidence for that is paltry at best and is not there.
01:55:53.000And I think that we are eating a diet that we believe to be ancestrally consistent.
01:56:30.000So the LDL has been above 300. For 300 milligrams per deciliter, which is essentially a density measure, for all two years that I have done a carnivore diet.
01:56:41.000Before that, I don't have familial hypercholesterolemia, though.
01:56:44.000But my LDL is as high as people with homozygous...
01:56:48.000What is it that you say you don't have?
01:58:33.000And they go, oh, you gotta change that.
01:58:34.000Whatever you did that cured your diabetes, caused all this weight loss, that's bad for you because your LDL has gone high because we have this myopic LDL-centric perspective that excludes the contextual variables.
01:59:11.000And if you look at it, there is evidence, there is correlational evidence that shows the lower the LDL, The lower the incidence of heart disease, but it misses the context.
01:59:21.000And if you start to put in the contextual variables, the model breaks down.
01:59:24.000And so I think it's just, it's been parroted over and over and over.
01:59:27.000And the prevailing thinking is just, this is what it is, this is what it is.
01:59:30.000But there certainly are cardiologists.
01:59:31.000I've had three or four cardiologists on my podcast that don't subscribe to this model.
01:59:37.000A lot of my friends and colleagues in the medical world are skeptical of this model.
01:59:41.000So I'll finish my story because I talked about my super high LDL. Before we get to that, these doctors that don't prescribe to that model, it seems to me that if you're going to step outside the mainstream, it's kind of a precarious route.
01:59:52.000And would they be hesitant to do so if you're dealing with non-metabolically healthy people?
01:59:59.000So would they make the distinction like, hey, I'm looking at you, Paul, you look very fit, you're lean, you exercise, you look great.
02:00:09.000Your LDL is high, your HDL is high, but all the other biomarkers are excellent.
02:00:14.000Or would they look at a guy who's fat, who doesn't have a good diet, who's not metabolically healthy, but who also has high LDL? Would they treat them differently?
02:00:24.000Because these cardiologists are savvy enough to understand context.
02:00:28.000So if you go to a cardiologist and they don't check fasting insulin or hemoglobin A1C or put a continuous glucose monitor on you, they're missing the context.
02:00:39.000And so these are just laboratory markers that give you a sense of your metabolic health.
02:00:43.000And so absolutely, these colleagues of mine would treat those people completely differently because it's context, right?
02:00:49.000The way that I've talked about it in the past is just this analogy.
02:00:52.000If you have dry wood for the winter in your garage, it's not just going to spark a fire, right?
02:01:59.000I think it moves in and out of the endothelium into the subendothelial space freely.
02:02:05.000And there's something about, there's potentially something about the LDL moving into that subendothelial space getting retained in that subendothelial space.
02:02:11.000So if you were to take a blood vessel and cut it, you know, lengthwise and look down at like a tube, there's multiple layers.
02:02:23.000The innermost layer, if the blood's in here, the innermost layer is the endothelium.
02:02:26.000And below that is the intima and then the submucosal layer and the adventitia.
02:02:31.000And just below the endothelium are immune cells called macrophages.
02:02:35.000And what appears to happen with atherosclerosis is that the LDL particles get retained in there for some reason, and the macrophages kind of pick them up.
02:02:46.000And so they kind of eat these LDL particles, potentially as, you know, they're trying to take care of something that could be problematic, and then they become foam cells.
02:02:54.000They get full of more and more lipid, and that's the beginning of a fatty streak.
02:02:56.000And again, this is very high-level basic stuff.
02:03:00.000But there's something going on, I think, at the level of that subentima, that subendothelial space, that these macrophages are not responding properly to LDL, or the LDL looks damaged.
02:03:12.000And so now you start to get into ideas of oxidized LDL versus native LDL. And what causes LDL to oxidize?
02:03:18.000Well, there's good evidence that excess linoleic acid in the diet might be doing it.
02:03:22.000Excess oxidative stress might be doing it.
02:03:24.000Or, at the level of the macrophage, when you have metabolic dysfunction, it's broadly disordered insulin signaling.
02:03:30.000Is there a correlation between arterial plaque increase and increase in vegetable oils?
02:03:40.000Yeah, well, I mean, there's a correlation.
02:03:44.000So what you're saying about LDL and HDL, is this something that you've ever debated with a cardiologist that follows the mainstream ideas of what is good or bad about HDL and HDL or LDL? There's a family doc who's going to come on my podcast soon that I'm planning to debate about it.
02:04:44.000All LDLs not created equal, and even mainstream lipidologists.
02:04:48.000So I recently heard a podcast between two folks who are pretty prominent in the lipid community, and even they were admitting, and they're proponents, I believe they are proponents, I don't want to put words in their mouth, of the lipid hypothesis.
02:05:00.000And even they were admitting that the quality of the LDL particle matters.
02:05:05.000And as soon as you introduce quality of the LDL particle, you introduce that third variable.
02:05:09.000And what determines the quality of the LDL particle?
02:05:13.000It's our overall metabolic health as humans.
02:05:16.000And we should not be looking at lab markers or metrics in isolation as humans.
02:05:22.000I know that cardiologists are intelligent and well-meaning, but I fear that within the medical establishment, we're just myopically looking at LDL. And I worked in cardiology for four years as a physician assistant before I went back to medical school and did my residency and all this stuff.
02:05:35.000So we're very LDL-centric, and it's becoming more and more ensconced.
02:05:41.000It's just all about lowering ApoB, which essentially means lowering LDL. And I just don't think that's the right thing for people.
02:05:47.000If someone is not willing to make dietary lifestyle change, yes, you probably should lower ApoB.
02:05:52.000But if we are telling people the full truth, in my opinion, it is, hey, your lifestyle is causing this.
02:06:01.000Now, the problem there is that the mainstream medical establishment is so hung up on the fact that saturated fat raises LDL that they can't possibly recommend the animal foods that people should be eating.
02:06:32.000So they don't even know what to tell people.
02:06:33.000In the Minnesota coronary experiment, they were randomized.
02:06:36.000It's a randomized interventional trial.
02:06:39.000And it's a blinded trial where they had one group that was higher saturated fat and one group that was higher polyunsaturated fat.
02:06:44.000And the polyunsaturated fat diet clearly did worse, clearly did worse.
02:06:47.000More heart disease, more death, more cancer.
02:06:50.000That's the other thing about polyunsaturated fat is there are a lot of signals for increased cancer.
02:06:54.000The Citi Diet Heart showed exactly the same thing.
02:06:58.000More polyunsaturated fat, more death, more cardiovascular disease, more cancer.
02:07:03.000So there's some interventional studies that are pretty hard to ignore, just putting them head to head, and yet, because we are so myopic, because we are so focused on LDL, and we don't think about context or metabolic health, how could a physician recommend TALLO? Well, just breaking down all the shit that you've said in this podcast is giving people a headache right now.
02:07:23.000I guarantee you they're listening to this, and most folks who would just say...
02:07:27.000To me, if I said, I'm eating only meat, well, what about your cholesterol?
02:07:33.000They really don't know any of this stuff.
02:07:35.000So they have a tiny piece of information in their head, cholesterol equals bad.
02:07:40.000You put that in there, heart attacks, heart disease, you're going to die.
02:08:18.000It's not a perfect test, but it's a pretty darn good test.
02:08:21.000So Dave and his colleagues are doing a study where they're going to do CTA, which is CT coronary angiogram, and I'm going to try and be a part of that study as well.
02:08:52.000They develop atherosclerosis within the first few years of their life.
02:08:56.000And they have LDL levels that are equivalent to mine.
02:08:59.000Now, I've had an LDL above 300 for more than two years.
02:09:03.000I also have a family history of early heart disease and of primary relative.
02:09:06.000My dad had a heart attack when he was 43. So I'm 43. My dad had a heart attack when he was 43. So I have risk factors for coronary artery disease.
02:09:28.000He was texting me, all excited I was coming on the podcast today, and he's such an amazing guy, and he meant so well for his patients, but I just don't think that mainstream medicine thought about this contextual stuff.
02:09:39.000He's not, but he did wear a CGM, and I think he's going to try and move his diet in the right direction when he sees what his postprandial after eating blood sugars are.
02:09:49.000It's getting better and better, but I saw a part of his dietary recall from the folks at NutriSense, which is the company that does the CGM, And it was, he was eating grass-fed meat, he takes the desiccated organ supplements, and he's eating some white rice, and I think he had like some banana bread.
02:10:04.000And the thing I keep trying to get him to stop is eating glucerna, or vegetable oil.
02:10:09.000Because he's eating these weight loss shakes that have soybean oil in them.
02:10:13.000And, you know, he hasn't shared with me his CGM and I want to be respectful.
02:10:18.000And if he will share with me his continuous glucose monitoring, we can look at his metabolic health.
02:10:23.000Because I'm not going to order blood work for my dad.
02:10:24.000But I can look at his continuous glucose monitor.
02:10:27.000Like, this is the kind of stuff that really tells you about your metabolic health.
02:10:30.000There's no way to lie with a continuous glucose monitor.
02:10:33.000And so I think that he has some room to improve, but it's slow.
02:10:39.000I think he was so proud when I wrote the book and just so excited that I was thinking this way.
02:10:43.000It was so interesting to have this traditionally trained father, this internist, read my book and go, whoa, that's kind of interesting, Paul.
02:10:51.000I mean, he's reading the chapter on lipids going, this isn't what I learned.
02:10:54.000Maybe there's more I should be thinking about.
02:10:57.000And I mean, one of the reasons, the whole reason I think about this stuff, Joe, is because I want people that I care about to be around and I want to be able to share that with other people so that they can experience their life better.
02:11:07.000What are you going to tell him about the diarrhea?
02:11:45.000So there's physiologic changes in the human gut that happen when you stop fiber abruptly.
02:11:53.000So we don't know entirely, but I think that the most compelling theory that I've heard or been able to come up with is it has to do with bile salts.
02:12:01.000And, you know, we talked about the bile earlier in the gallbladder and, you know, putting it on liver.
02:12:05.000So your bile is in your liver on your right upper quadrant.
02:12:08.000And when you eat meat or fat, your bile contracts.
02:12:15.000Bile is a combination of cholesterol, bile salts, bilirubin.
02:12:20.000And bile salts are supposed to be reabsorbed in your small intestine.
02:12:24.000So, you know, you have this stomach, a duodenum, a jejunum, an ileum, which is your small intestine.
02:12:28.000Then you have the ileocecal valve and the large intestine.
02:12:31.000The large intestine is like the colon, right?
02:12:33.000And the colon goes up and over and down.
02:12:36.000And so if bile acids end up in the colon, they are cathartic, meaning they will cause diarrhea.
02:12:43.000And so I think that for the majority of people, if they are going to do a transition from a fiber-full diet to a zero fiber or a lower fiber diet, you want to do it slowly.
02:12:52.000Because I think that in the small intestine, the small intestine needs to catch up and reabsorb these bile acids.
02:12:57.000If the bile acids move through the ileocecal valve into the colon, they'll cause diarrhea.
02:13:16.000You would want to go slowly on the fiber.
02:13:19.000So when I work with people and they get the diarrhea, I have them add back avocado or something with a little bit of fiber to help because the fiber will bind up the bile acids a little bit.
02:13:26.000But in your case, it sounded like what happened was something adjusted and it eventually stopped.
02:13:30.000And my suspicion is that the small intestine eventually catches up and says, hey, there's more bile acids.
02:13:56.000And so, again, that's why I think there's a lot of ways to do this.
02:14:01.000I don't think the only way to benefit from the things we're talking about is to go 100% carnivore.
02:14:06.000I think it's, you know, understand that meat and organs are critically important.
02:14:09.000Understand there's toxicity of plant foods on a spectrum.
02:14:12.000And if a little bit of fiber helps you get through that, do that, you know?
02:14:15.000And if a little bit of fiber doesn't bother you, don't do it.
02:14:17.000But for a lot of people, the complete elimination of fiber in their diet is really helpful.
02:14:22.000It's a really amazing thing how many people say less gas, less bloating, even less constipation when they remove fiber.
02:14:27.000So, but a little bit of fiber can go a long way in that sort of transitional disaster pants phase.
02:14:32.000The common perception of fiber is that it's essential, that it cleans out your body, and that to live without fiber you're going to get constipated, you're going to have all these problems.
02:14:50.000If you actually look at the medical literature, There's no evidence that fiber improves constipation.
02:14:56.000So fiber can give you bigger poops, but there's good meta-analysis.
02:15:00.000There's interventional studies that show that fiber doesn't relieve the other symptoms of constipation, which are pain, difficulty with passage, bleeding.
02:16:19.000So constipation is probably multifactorial.
02:16:23.000It probably has to do with dysbiosis, the overgrowth of the wrong type of organisms.
02:16:26.000I think it's potentially inflammatory in the gut, but in...
02:16:31.000This interventional study, it completely reversed it in these people.
02:16:34.000Well, when I was drinking kale shakes for a while, I was drinking kale shakes in the morning, and it had a similar effect to the carnivore diet in the first two weeks.
02:16:52.000Well, I think it was also, I was doing it with MCT oil, and I was adding fruits and all sorts of other stuff to the kale shakes, but I thought I was doing the right thing, and I was feeling pretty good while I was doing it, but absolutely not as good as I did when I went to the carnivore diet.
02:17:09.000I think I was getting this burst of carbohydrates and sugars and nutrients, and also I was thinking because The poop was coming out so easy and quickly.
02:19:01.000For, you know, to be a healthy person.
02:19:04.000My friend C.T. Fletcher, he is a power lifter and he had a terrible diet at one point in time and wound up having heart disease and it runs in his family and he had to get a heart transplant.
02:19:17.000Yeah and so now he has a heart transplant and he has a new heart and he's exercising again and he's gone completely plant-based and he thinks it's a good thing for his health and for his body and you know he used to be a guy who ate a lot of cheeseburgers and McDonald's shakes and stuff and just wasn't really eating that healthy and now just kind of completely changed his diet and I don't have the knowledge to tell him that that's not the way to make your heart healthy.
02:19:46.000What would you say to CT? I think that the first thing is I'm glad that he's making an intentional choice with his diet.
02:19:59.000If you are very careful about supplementation and you think about creatine and carnitine and choline and vitamin K2 and B12 and bioavailable proteins, I mean, you could sustain yourself on a vegan diet in my opinion.
02:20:42.000They might be able to do okay, given they were getting enough calories, enough protein, enough of these nutrients, and were supplementing with the right things.
02:20:49.000But I fear that a lot of vegans are going to think, canola oil, that's great, that's vegan, or soybean oil, that's great.
02:20:54.000Or they're going to eat these plant-based garbage burgers, which are full of this vegetable oil.
02:21:14.000And there are a lot of nutrients, like I mentioned earlier in the podcast, that are not found in plant foods that are only in animal foods.
02:22:30.000The mainstream medical establishment doesn't agree with this and I'm fully ready and I think this is gonna become my life's work.
02:22:36.000It's really exciting to be in this pace and say, hey, I think these ideas are wrong and they need to be refined and I think that more people will benefit if we refine these ideas.
02:23:11.000Yeah, I mean, it's a real concern, and when you bring it up, people go, oh, here you go again with all your bullshit propaganda, and it's been proven.
02:24:49.000I think that as humans, it's okay to be a part of the cycle of life and death, and we will all die, and we will all go back to the earth.
02:24:56.000At some point, these atoms that I am renting will return to the earth.
02:25:00.000And so I think that it's okay to take life respectfully in a hunted way.
02:25:04.000But if more people did this, and this is not necessarily scalable in 2020, but I think if more people did this, it's like a sacrament.
02:25:11.000And I don't mean that in any sacrilegious way, but it was just like, it was one of the most clarifying things I've ever done to remind me, be a good person.
02:26:47.000I looked at that animal when I squeezed that trigger off and watched it drop.
02:26:51.000And then when we were cutting it and hauling it out and eating the liver and eating the heart and cooking meat over the fire, immediately it all made sense to me.
02:27:01.000I was like, okay, this feels so much different than buying meat in a store.
02:27:05.000When I take a piece of elk meat, I shot an elk last week.
02:27:10.000In Utah, when I take a piece of elk meat two weeks ago and I put that on the Traeger, I season it and I put it there and I cook it and then I'm eating it and I'm feeding it to my family, I have a connection to that meat.
02:27:23.000I looked in the eyes of that elk when I released that arrow.
02:28:46.000It's hard to learn how to do it properly.
02:28:48.000It's really hard to learn how to do it with a bow.
02:28:50.000It requires a lot of physical exertion.
02:28:54.000There's a lot of workouts that I do all throughout the year, specifically my cardio workouts, that I'm doing so that I have endurance in the mountains.
02:29:02.000That's why I do it, because I've been exhausted trying to make it up a hill, especially my friend Cam Haynes, hunting with that fucking guy, just trying to follow him, just trying to walk behind him, forget about running.
02:29:12.000I'm doing it because I understand that come the moment of truth, you have to be at your best.
02:30:53.000How are you going to live your life in a different way?
02:30:55.000And so one of the things that's been so interesting for me recently is realizing that the carnivore diet and thinking about animal-based diets was just a stepping stone.
02:31:02.000It was kind of the entree to think about a broader concept about the way that we as humans have forgotten.
02:31:09.000That there's this broad amnesia, and I've thought about this and kind of called it the remembering, Just this idea that it's about more than the way we eat.
02:31:17.000It's about the way we live on the earth, being in nature and doing things like hunting and getting back to these roots.
02:31:23.000This, to me, is what gets me really excited that we're starting to think about the way our ancestors ate in an ancestrally consistent diet, but we also need to think about We're good to go.
02:32:54.000And there's a different spiritual connection to bow hunting, I think, because it is so difficult and it is so physical.
02:33:02.000It requires this being in the moment in a way that nothing else does because there's so many moving parts that you have to align correctly in order to execute.
02:33:41.000He would put you on an attention-based release.
02:33:43.000What people don't understand what we're talking about is it's hard in the moment of truth when you're anticipating the shot to not flinch or move.
02:33:52.000And with archery, it is so important that the shot goes off I'll say this for most people because there are a lot of people that are extremely good archers that don't do it this way, but they have practiced their way by pulling the trigger and consciously pulling the trigger,
02:34:42.000But for the most part, for most people, you're better off having a surprise release.
02:34:48.000You're better off taking the idea of the shot going off and you just go through the motions of getting it to go off, but you really have no idea when it's going to go off.
02:34:56.000But it's hard to do with the thumb thing.
02:35:08.000It's hard, but I love how everything kind of drops away.
02:35:11.000And I'll tell you, Joe, For people that haven't bow hunted, I've actually never killed an animal with a rifle, so I don't know if it's the same way.
02:36:40.000I probably had a second before he realized what I was, before he was going to bolt, and I released the arrow right at that moment.
02:36:48.000So it was intense, and it was super adrenaline-packed, because I knew I had to run, too.
02:36:53.000So there was all this, like, he's at the waterhole, I range him, he steps away from the waterhole, and then he looks up, and as he's looking up, I'm just drawn back.
02:37:04.000And I think I had a second or two before he was like, oh, that's a fucking person, man, dressed up like a tree.
02:37:11.000But it was so, it was so, it was a moment where if I hadn't prepared properly, I would have never been able to pull it off.
02:37:21.000If I wasn't physically in shape, I would have never been able to run there and have my heart rate drop down.
02:37:26.000If I wasn't confident enough in my shooting that I shot so many thousands and thousands and thousands of arrows, I wouldn't have been able to execute because it was a weird shot too.
02:37:48.000It's such a different experience than we get as humans.
02:37:50.000As soon as I think about the irony of 2020 or even the last century that we've put ourselves in digital worlds to work on computers indoors to make fake numbers in a bank account or green pieces of paper that allow us to go hike and do the things that we were doing in our whole life.
02:38:17.000I mean, whether it's the oxygen that you get from them or whether it's just a signal to your body that this is a natural way to exist, to be in wilderness, in nature.
02:38:51.000Like, I remember we came over this ridge, and there's a creek below us, and there's this beautiful green hill, and there's a mountain behind it, and I heard this bull elk on the hill above it screaming, brrrr!
02:39:02.000And I'm looking at this and I'm like, this is gorgeous.
02:39:17.000Just nature the way it was for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years before people ever even came here.
02:39:25.000I think that's what the remembering is about and that it's like there's something bigger than us.
02:39:29.000And I'm not religious, maybe a little spiritual in nature, but I've had those same experiences on a long run or just being in the wilderness.
02:39:38.000There's a connection that we have to this wild world that we evolved through that we don't, we're just, we're like neutered.
02:39:48.000When we're out here with the concrete and we're looking at buildings and it's, you know, the way we live and there's a lot of great benefits to living in cities and all that stuff.
02:39:55.000But there's something about it when you're in a car, you're just, you know, sitting at a desk, you're muted.
02:40:02.000You're muted and neutered, both those things.
02:40:04.000It's like you're not connected to the wild world.
02:40:24.000And I think that we're trying to become the best animal that we can be, the most ethical, kind, empathetic animal.
02:40:29.000But we still, I think that we would do well to consider the fact that if we discard everywhere we've come from, We may end up in a position that's pretty miserable for humans.
02:40:38.000If we discard wilderness, if we discard what I believe are the most ancestrally consistent foods, if we discard the patterns of human interaction, we're just going to go further down.
02:40:48.000My fear is that this is inevitable and that what we are going to become is some sort of a symbiotic thing where we're part...
02:41:02.000We're going to be more immersed in the electronic world than even we are now.
02:41:06.000And that this trend of becoming addicted to your phones and constantly online and all these different things that we all see with people, that this is just a step in this...
02:45:15.000This is crazy that you're giving advice.
02:45:18.000And then you start to look at people outside the norm like yourself...
02:45:21.000And you go, okay, this guy has spent so much time thinking about this stuff, maybe he's got some insight that other people have not acquired.
02:45:29.000We hope so, and that's why we have productive, respectful conversations, you know?
02:45:34.000And then people can decide, because ultimately it's just about everybody understanding what's going to benefit them the most.
02:45:39.000I wanted to, before we get going, I wanted to talk about the benefits of, when you talk about grass-fed, grass-finished meat, what is the nutritional benefit of that over, in terms of essential fatty acids and nutrient content,
02:48:42.000But this is the kind of stuff that's never been really looked at.
02:48:45.000So grass-feeding is not as much about the increased nutrient content.
02:48:50.000Grass-fed, grass-finished, or grain-finished, they're both nutrient-rich, but the grass-finished is going to have less of the bad stuff in the meat and less of the bad stuff in the fat, in my opinion.
02:48:59.000And it's also a thousand times more ethical and part of an ecosystem, which is the only way humans are going to persist on this planet.
02:49:05.000What about the essential fatty acid content of grass-fed, grass-finished beef?
02:49:56.000And you see the same thing in fish, too.
02:49:58.000I mean, certainly you can imagine there's going to be more carotenoids from the grass if the cow is finished on grass versus the grains, which are not going to be...
02:50:14.000And sometimes you'll see that with grass-fed fat.
02:50:15.000It's more orange because it has more carotenoids.
02:50:18.000But at a basic level, I mean, I do think there are probably nutritional differences, but there's not good literature to support it at this point.
02:50:24.000Well, there is literature to support it with wild game in terms of protein content.
02:51:35.000This is what we need to rebuild cells.
02:51:37.000This is what we need to rebuild tissue.
02:51:38.000It would be super interesting to do some studies on that.
02:51:40.000You know, to take the elk meat that you've hunted, to put it through like gas chromatography, mass spec, do some analyses and look at it compared to like grass-fed beef or something.
02:51:49.000See if it's like excess carnitine or maybe some more choline or carnosine or something.
02:51:53.000I'm sure there's something in there that makes it special.
02:51:57.000Well, acetylcholine is a nootropic and it's one of the ingredients in alpha brain.
02:52:02.000Is that the same thing as choline that you're talking about, or is there a different kind of choline?
02:52:06.000Choline is a precursor for acetylcholine.
02:52:08.000So acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter, and I think alpha brain has huperzine A, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, and that allows more acetylcholine in the synapse.
02:52:19.000So if you increase acetylcholine in the synapse, it can be a nootropic.
02:52:25.000But choline is a precursor for acetylcholine and phosphatidylcholine, which is the phospholipid that makes up all the cells of our body and the myelin sheath on neurons.
02:52:34.000And again, really, really, really hard to get an optimal amount of choline without eating animals.
02:52:41.000That's why there's been studies that have connected eating meat to brain function.
02:53:00.000Maybe straightforward scientifically, but a lot of the plant-based folks get their panties in the water about this one in a big way.
02:53:07.000So Jamie, in the folder nutrients, there's one called creatine-enhanced veggie.
02:53:13.000There have been interventional studies on vegans, and they give them 20 grams of creatine for five days, which is a loading dose, and they get smarter.
02:53:22.000And what are they using for the source of creatine?
02:53:26.000I think they're just giving them synthetic creatine.
02:55:06.000But I think if you're eating a pound of meat per day plus, you're probably not going to get a whole lot of performance benefits supplementing with creatine.
02:55:12.000But the gaining the water, though, I think was why people, like your muscles are getting larger because of that.
02:56:17.000And there's a lot of theories as to why this happened, but some of the most compelling, in my opinion, are around the advent of hunting in humans.
02:56:24.000And when you had Bill von Hippel on, so you can see here, this is millions of years on the x-axis and the size of the human brain on the y-axis.
02:56:34.000You have the primate ancestors, Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, fire, and then Neanderthals, and then Homo sapiens.
02:56:41.000So something really clearly, this is another Tony Hawk skate ramp, right?
02:56:48.000I think the most compelling ideas are right there that I labeled in the graph, that around two million years ago, we see the occurrence of stone tools, these bifacial tools, these Acheulean tools, and evidence for hunting, cut marks on animals, bones, and evidence for mass animal graves.
02:57:05.000I would postulate that humans becoming hunters, becoming hunters made us human.
02:57:12.000Steve Rinella is doing the happy dance right now because he's right.
02:57:17.000Hunting animals made us human by providing indispensable nutrients like creatine that were prime releasers or allowed our brains to grow in this special way.
02:58:15.000His brother Dennis makes a very compelling argument for it as well because his brother Dennis is a scientist and he goes deep into the actual physical changes to the brain and to synapses and to the body's ability to produce language that occur while under the influence of psilocybin.
02:58:36.000Well, it could be they were happening at the same time.
02:58:40.000I mean, this is also, they think that it might have made people better hunters because psilocybin, particularly in low doses, increases visual acuity and probably makes you more creative too.
02:58:53.000Makes you figure out how to hunt better and maybe responsible for the development of tools and other forms of creativity that benefited human beings to evolve and become better hunters.
02:59:58.000And so, you know, I hope that it's probably controversial, maybe not in 2020 for a mainstream physician to say I've used psilocybin, you know?
03:00:06.000It's now being used in trials for PTSD. John Hopkins, yeah.
03:00:09.000I mean, it's incredibly powerful, which actually gets to an important point that I should make about plants, which is that I don't want anyone to think that I'm against plants as medicine.
03:00:21.000I think there are many plant compounds that are very valuable for humans.
03:00:40.000More trials will happen with the FDA. But I was so curious.
03:00:45.000I knew they were doing studies at Hopkins and they were doing studies at NYU. And I thought, I almost felt irresponsible as a physician not knowing what this experience was like.
03:00:53.000I wanted to turn off the default mode network.
03:00:57.000I wanted to see what it was like without ego.
03:01:01.000So having had that experience, I don't doubt it.
03:01:02.000When I was at White Oak Pastures a couple weeks ago, I was walking through a pasture with cow pies and there were psilocybe cyanosis growing.
03:01:17.000If you watch primates, they do it to get bugs and grubs and all that.
03:01:21.000It makes sense they would try the mushrooms, and if they did try it and started tripping and found it to be incredibly euphoric and enjoyable, I would imagine they would consume it quite a bit.
03:01:30.000What Terence McKenna's research shows is that it corresponds with a climate change and a decreasing of the rainforest and it's rescinding into grasslands, and that that would also increase the number of ruminants and these cattle, these undulates that were leaving these piles of shit,
03:01:48.000and then these mushrooms would grow on them.