In this episode, Chris and Jamie talk about the term "Paleo" and why it's a loaded term with a lot of baggage. They discuss the history of paleo, the pros and cons of the term, and what it really means to be a paleo. Chris: Jamie: "I think we need to get past the baggage associated with the term paleo and start looking at it as an idea and a way of thinking" Why did our Paleolithic ancestors eat so much meat and vegetables? What was their diet like, and why did they eat it? What are the differences between paleo vs. traditional hunter gatherers and modern hunter-gatherers? Is there any evidence that paleo diets are similar to our ancestors'? Is it possible that our ancestors were more carnivorous than we think? If so, what was the difference between their diet and modern diets? Why were they so different from our ancestors' and what was their favorite foods? How did they like to eat meat and legumes? And how did they get into legumes and wild fruits and vegetables in the first place? We'll talk about it all in this episode. . If you like the show, please leave us a review and tell us what you think of it in the comments section below! Cheers, Cheers! Timestamps: 5:00:00 - What's your favorite thing your ancestors were eating? 6:30 - What was your favorite food? 7:40 - How much meat did your ancestors ate? 8:15 - Why did your paleolithic ancestors were carnivorous? 9: what was your ancestors eat? 11:00- What did you eat for dinner? 14:00 15:30- What is your favorite meat? 16:30 17:20 - What did your ancestral diet look like? 18:40- What would you eat in a Paleoolithic diet? 19:00 Is there a paleolithic diet like your first meal? 21:00 What are you would like to see in the future? 22: What do you think about paleo? 23:00 Do you want to eat more meat and veg? 26:00 Should we eat more vegetables and grains? 27:00 Does your ancestors like legumes in the modern day? 29:00 -- What are your favorite foods from your ancestors?
00:02:10.000I think we just need to get past it as, you know, an idea or a term and look at what it's really pointing at and evaluate it on that basis.
00:02:18.000Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
00:02:20.000And also, there was the issue with the term paleolithic, like using the term paleo.
00:02:25.000And then there were some articles written about the actual diet of the paleolithic people, where they ate everything they got a hold of.
00:02:32.000And if they got grains, they ate a ton of grains.
00:02:44.000So it didn't include processed and refined, you know, bread, flour, cookies, muffins, all kinds of packaged foods that comprise a large percentage of the American diet.
00:02:57.000I think the top six foods now are grain-based desserts, sugar-sweetened beverages, pizza, Chicken dishes, which are primarily fried chicken nuggets.
00:03:11.000Forgetting the other two, but it's all crap.
00:03:33.000Meat and fish, wild fruits and vegetables, not the domesticated varieties that we're eating today, but wild fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and some starchy plants.
00:03:42.000So those are the two extremes, if we bracket it.
00:03:46.000And then things like grains and legumes were more of a question mark.
00:03:50.000Like, there's some recent evidence that shows that That legume consumption was probably pretty more common than we thought amongst our paleolithic ancestors.
00:03:59.000They came later onto the scene, but if they were there, they probably ate them.
00:04:05.000Is that based on geography, like where legumes are present?
00:04:08.000And what other food sources were available.
00:04:11.000It's pretty clear that they weren't the first option.
00:04:13.000You know, if they were able to slaughter an animal, they would have done that and eaten the organs and the brain and probably thrown the muscle meat to the dogs.
00:04:33.000And that's because the organs are way more nutrient-dense than the muscle meats.
00:04:38.000And so traditional peoples, they knew the same thing, even without having access to science and knowing even what a nutrient was.
00:04:45.000They just, over generations, figured out that eating the liver And the kidneys and the spleen and the brain was going to give them more energy, make them feel better, make them more fertile than eating the muscle meats.
00:04:58.000But did they eat the muscle meats at all?
00:05:12.000Just anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers.
00:05:16.000Contemporary hunter-gatherers, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
00:05:19.000There aren't many extant hunter-gatherer groups that we can even study now because they've all been basically assimilated.
00:05:30.000But, you know, like the Hadza Hunter gathers in Africa, and there are some groups that are still living a lifestyle that's relatively close to what they were living for the last 10,000 years, and we can learn a lot by studying those groups.
00:05:43.000And that's a pretty common theme in all of these traditional peoples, is they focus on eating the organ meats, Second would be probably meat and other animal products in terms of nutrient density.
00:05:55.000They ate a much broader variety of plant species than we eat.
00:06:00.000Across the world, most people eat four to eight plant species in their diet.
00:06:06.000Traditional hunter-gatherer groups, it was over 100. Wow.
00:06:13.000And that, of course, increased the nutrient density, increased the fiber that they were eating, which we now know feeds your beneficial gut bacteria, which has all kinds of benefits for health.
00:06:23.000And again, they weren't eating the foods that we are now producing.
00:06:30.000We're eating way more than we're eating anything else.
00:06:33.000And when I say we, I mean just Americans or people living in the industrialized world in general.
00:06:38.000And that's a problem because of this concept of a species-appropriate diet.
00:06:44.000We know that all organisms evolve in a certain environment, and they're adapted to survive in that environment.
00:06:51.000And when their diet or lifestyle gets too far from what they evolved for, This mismatch occurs and that mismatch is really responsible for all modern disease.
00:07:03.000Yeah that is something that I thought was really interesting about reading Some of your work and some of your articles that you had it sort of narrowed down to, I believe, the eight different factors that contribute to ill health that are a lot of times ignored when diseases are...
00:07:25.000When someone gets diagnosed with an illness, almost immediately there's a drug prescribed to treat the illness, but there's not, like, sort of...
00:07:37.000Backing up of the process to find out, okay, how did you get to this position?
00:08:14.000And our medical system is the equivalent of taking Advil when you have that rock in your shoe.
00:08:20.000If you have high blood pressure, you go to the doctor, you'll get a medication to lower it.
00:08:24.000If you have high cholesterol, you'll be prescribed a statin.
00:08:27.000And those can be effective at bringing those numbers down, but there's rarely any investigation into what's causing that symptom in the first place.
00:08:35.000And the problem with that is, if you take the high blood pressure medication, it lowers your blood pressure, but then you have no libido.
00:09:41.000And they realized a while back that the big money in drugs is not in treating sick people, it's in treating healthy people.
00:09:50.000Because there are way more healthy people than there are sick people.
00:09:53.000And so once you get done with making drugs to treat diseases, you need to start making drugs to give to people who are fundamentally healthy, but maybe have like some one lab marker that's out of range.
00:10:07.000You know, there's only a certain number of people that have already had heart attacks and are in danger of, you know, high risk of having another heart attack.
00:10:15.000So, for statin drug sales to grow, they need to expand beyond that population and start, you know, prescribing them to people who aren't necessarily at high risk for heart disease, but, you know, maybe have slightly high cholesterol.
00:10:29.000And that's where the real money is made.
00:11:04.000Just certain genetic polymorphisms that make you more susceptible to having high cholesterol.
00:11:10.000But there are a number of causes that are lesser known.
00:11:13.000So poor thyroid function is one cause because thyroid hormones are required to clear LDL cholesterol from the circulation.
00:11:20.000So if you have even suboptimal thyroid function, not full-on hypothyroidism, but just a little bit of a problem with thyroid, your cholesterol can be high.
00:11:30.000And in fact, back in the 80s or 70s, before statins became a bigger part of the treatment of high cholesterol, doctors used to use low dose of thyroid hormone to treat high cholesterol, so they knew this at one time.
00:11:48.000Disrupted gut microbiome and leaky gut, which I know you've talked about before on the show with other guests.
00:11:55.000LDL is actually an antimicrobial substance, so the liver will make more LDL particles if there's endotoxins getting into the bloodstream from the gut.
00:12:07.000Infections can raise cholesterol, LDL, and toxins can do that too.
00:12:13.000So there's studies showing mercury toxicity, for example, can raise cholesterol.
00:12:17.000So these are all the potential underlying causes of high cholesterol.
00:12:21.000So if someone comes to see me and they have that problem, I'm going to test for all of those things, and I'm going to address those first, and then we see what happens.
00:12:29.000And if their lipids normalize after that, great.
00:12:32.000You know, we've done our work, and then they avoid taking...
00:12:36.000A drug that they never needed to take in the first place.
00:12:39.000If we retest and their levels are still high, then we have a bigger conversation about what the actual risk is given their level, their age, their sex, their family history.
00:12:54.000The absence or presence of other risk factors like high blood pressure and inflammation.
00:13:03.000And this idea that there's just an arbitrary number for total cholesterol, and if you're higher than that, you need to take a statin.
00:13:11.000And if you're lower than that, you don't.
00:13:14.000I can't think of a good comparison right now, but it's ridiculously oversimplified.
00:13:19.000And it also has some effect on your amount of exercise and your overall amount of what you put your body through as far as stress, exercise, activity.
00:13:35.000That has some sort of an effect on it as well, right?
00:13:40.000So if there's any kind of damage, endothelial damage in the arteries, the lining of the arteries, cholesterol can be moved to that site to repair the damage.
00:13:52.000Lifestyle choices definitely play a role.
00:13:57.000I think getting back to the original point here, we need to be thinking more holistically about what causes disease and how to treat it instead of just using Band-Aid approaches that suppress symptoms.
00:14:10.000We don't really have healthcare, we have disease management.
00:14:13.000That's a fundamental difference that we need to understand.
00:14:17.000If you think of disease as a spectrum, where the far end is death and here is perfect health, Very rarely do people go from perfect health to, you know, straight to death.
00:14:29.000I mean, that happens in trauma, accidents, and things like that.
00:14:33.000But usually we progress along that spectrum.
00:14:36.000And our conventional medical system is designed to intervene at the far end of that spectrum, you know, when we're already kind of past the point of no return.
00:14:44.000You know, we have these drugs that suppress symptoms.
00:14:49.000Like, if I get hit by a bus, I want to go to the hospital, you know?
00:14:52.000We're starting to be able to restore sight to the blind and do these incredible things, but they're all at that far end of the spectrum.
00:14:59.000Conventional medicine is really lousy at preventing disease in the first place or treating it at this end of the spectrum when it's closer to health.
00:15:08.000And it's really bad at promoting health.
00:15:11.000In fact, in most medical school textbooks, there's not even a definition of health.
00:15:15.000It's just basically the absence of disease.
00:15:18.000But I think we can do better than that.
00:15:24.000I mean, it seems that that should be an approach that everyone should consider when you're looking at the broad spectrum of illnesses and diseases and injuries and all those different factors that are involved in making someone ill, that this is what you're saying seems so common sense,
00:16:16.000That's a whole other discussion, but it's problematic when it comes to healthcare because...
00:16:25.000The way it really should work is if you go into your doctor and you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, your doctor sits down and asks you a whole bunch of questions about what you're eating, how you're living, are you sleeping, are you exercising, are you taking care of yourself, are you managing your stress?
00:16:40.000And then they do a whole bunch of testing.
00:16:43.000They don't just test your blood pressure, they don't just test your cholesterol, they test your gut.
00:16:47.000They test your HPA axis, which is what governs your whole stress response.
00:16:52.000What is HPA? Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
00:16:56.000So it's basically the connection between the brain and the adrenal glands, and it governs our stress response.
00:17:03.000So there are ways that we can test it to see how you're being affected by stress.
00:17:16.000So they would do a lot of testing up front, which would be more expensive initially, but down the line it would save thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.
00:17:27.000So take someone with full-fledged type 2 diabetes.
00:17:30.000Depending on the estimate, That I've seen, it can cost anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000 to $400,000 to care for that patient over their lifetime.
00:17:41.000To the insurance company, because insurance is paying for a lot of these procedures.
00:17:57.000But let's say we could have spent $1,500 right off the bat before they even developed type 2 diabetes to identify what was happening and catch it before it happened and intervene then.
00:18:11.000Yeah, you spend a little bit more up front, but you end up saving tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the patient.
00:18:20.000I think eventually the insurance companies are going to realize this because they're also for-profit businesses and they're interested ultimately in things that can save money.
00:18:28.000They just don't yet see functional medicine, which is what we're talking about right here, as something that could potentially save them a lot of money.
00:18:36.000They see it as something that they have to spend money on because the testing is more expensive up front, but they're not looking at the long-term game.
00:18:45.000I wonder if pharmaceutical companies are just going to buy up the insurance companies and use it as a write-off.
00:18:51.000A cynical person might have that thought.
00:18:56.000I mean, if I was a pharmaceutical company, I saw the writing on the wall, like, hey, people are having way more access to information about health than ever before, and they're going to start to make these healthy choices, and we're kind of fucked guys.
00:19:07.000Listen, what we've got to do is we've got to get in there early.
00:19:13.000There's a lot of problems with this in terms of like doctors.
00:19:19.000When you're a doctor, you have a line of patients waiting to get into your office and you have standard model of treatment that you've been sort of practicing for a long time.
00:19:30.000So to deviate from this path and to say, hey, you know, this whole rock in the shoe analogy that you brought up, which is brilliant, it's a perfect way to describe it, this all makes sense and it's logical and everything like that, but, you know, hey, insurance is not going to cover all these different tests.
00:19:46.000We have a giant issue also in getting people to be proactive, to actually do something.
00:19:52.000How many people do we know, I know a bunch, that are fat, that talk about being fat, that have poor diets, that drink too much and eat too much sugar and are constantly eating crap and not exercising?
00:20:03.000They're 100% intellectually aware of this, and they don't do a goddamn thing about it.
00:20:10.000So if we break it down, you know, on the doctor care provider side and the patient side.
00:20:17.000So the care provider side, I mean, they're as much victims as we are, as patients are, too, to this whole system that's been set up because...
00:20:28.000As you pointed out, the way the system works, most doctors who are working in an HMO type of setting have like 7 to 10 minutes to spend with a patient.
00:20:37.000That's not enough time to have the kind of conversation that you need to have even to get beyond saying hello and writing a prescription, which is basically what happens in most of those encounters.
00:20:48.000And then you also mentioned the standard of care.
00:20:51.000So they're legally required to take certain actions in certain circumstances.
00:20:56.000And their medical license And their whole career could be at risk if they don't do that.
00:21:00.000So even if they question for example prescribing statins to a patient who has a total cholesterol of 240 but no other risk factors, if they don't do that Then they could actually lose their job.
00:21:15.000I'm not being critical of individual doctors here.
00:21:18.000I'm criticizing the whole system that we've created.
00:21:21.000I know many doctors, I train doctors, and I know many doctors, and I can say that most of them are aware that the way that we're doing things is not working, and they want to change it as much as anybody else, but they feel constrained by the system.
00:21:36.000And then the other problem is, you know, us as individuals, like the level of responsibility for our own health that we take.
00:21:45.000And I think, you know, we all ultimately are responsible.
00:21:58.000You know, you get this whole culture which is basically oriented around disease management and suppressing symptoms with drugs, and that's what patients come to expect.
00:22:09.000And so I've heard from many doctors, and there have actually been studies on this, that patients will go in...
00:22:35.000There are ads in magazines that are targeted towards consumers for drugs.
00:22:39.000And the risk in doing this is exactly what we're talking about now.
00:22:43.000You get someone who's seen a drug ad in a magazine, they're like, I need that drug.
00:22:47.000They go into the doctor, they ask for it, the doctor knows it's not right for them, but the patient's not going to be satisfied unless they get that prescription, so the doctor caves and gives them that prescription.
00:22:59.000I did not know we were one of two countries in the whole world.
00:23:02.000I thought New Zealand was a little more on the ball.
00:23:04.000It's surprising in a way that New Zealand is the other one.
00:24:00.000They will win that bet because they have scientists on staff that have engineered that food to make sure that you do eat more than just one because they study things like mouthfeel and all of the different things that go into stimulating the reward centers in our brain to make us eat more than we should.
00:24:47.000Think about, like, if you had a plate and you have a baked potato with no salt or butter on one plate, and then you've got another plate and it's potato, it's Pringles.
00:24:57.000What do you think you're going to eat more of?
00:24:59.000These are hardwired evolutionary mechanisms.
00:25:02.000We're hardwired to seek out novelty, variety, because it would ensure in a...
00:25:09.000Pre-industrial food environment, that kind of hardwiring would actually be a selective advantage, meaning it would help us survive in a paleolithic type of environment because we would seek out foods that had a variety of flavors.
00:25:23.000Usually different flavors means different kinds of nutrients.
00:25:27.000So someone who had that kind of programming would be more likely to survive.
00:25:31.000But when you take that evolutionary programming that was designed when we were living in a paleolithic type of environment and you transfer that into this modern environment that we live in where you've got a 7-Eleven on every corner with Doritos and Big Gulps and candy and all this stuff,
00:25:54.000Well, that environment, the environment of like a 7-Eleven, where you go in there and there's just zero healthy choices, and all of it is sugar, drinks, and these fucked up snacks that have no nutrients in them.
00:26:09.000It's such a bizarre common place that you can just pull into any one of those things.
00:26:14.000There's so many of them, and they're just overwhelmed with unhealthy choices.
00:26:22.000To all of these other countries in the world and, you know, pretty much any country.
00:26:26.000I mean, in my 20s, I traveled all over the world surfing and I was shocked at, you know, I'd be in this really remote place in Indonesia and I'd see like a Coca-Cola barge going by from island to island in this little archipelago where there was nothing,
00:26:51.000And we've managed to export this everywhere and it's just...
00:26:59.000It's hard to go against evolutionary programming because it's unconscious.
00:27:06.000It's below the cognitive center of our brain where we can rationally think about it.
00:27:13.000You mentioned before people who are overweight but don't make healthy choices.
00:27:17.000That's not because they don't intellectually understand that they need to make healthy choices.
00:27:22.000It's that they're fighting against this deeply hardwired Programming that is totally incompatible with the modern food environment that we have.
00:27:32.000And for whatever reason, some people are more successful at Getting past that than others.
00:27:39.000Yeah, about being able to detach, intellectually detach from the instincts where you know for a fact that all these things are definitely bad for you, even though there's a compelling desire to take them in, you have this ability to step back.
00:27:59.000What's more natural is to see something that you crave and to eat it or drink it.
00:28:05.000I mean, that is a natural animal human experience.
00:28:10.000What's less natural is to see that, feel it, and then have a thought that says, no, this is actually not going to be good for me, and so I'm going to make a different choice.
00:28:22.000And I don't think we even experience those cravings in the same way.
00:28:28.000For example, if someone has a really screwed up gut and they've got a lot of bad bacteria or they have fungal overgrowth or something going on in there...
00:28:39.000Those bacteria we now know and yeast can produce chemicals that actually affect our brain chemistry.
00:28:46.000So that someone who's got a disrupted gut microbiome might experience those cravings way more strongly than I do.
00:28:53.000And so it's harder for them to intervene and stop that because it's almost like they have an alien presence in their body that is craving these foods.
00:29:04.000And it's really hard to overcome that.
00:29:06.000I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of the things I was going to bring up next.
00:29:08.000The idea that your gut biome actually controls your cravings and controls your desires for things and also when you cure that up or when you heal it and you start taking in healthy probiotics, your desires for different foods sort of emerge.
00:29:27.000For me, Over the last few years, like say three years plus, I've really gotten into probiotics.
00:29:35.000Got really heavily into drinking kombucha on a daily basis and then I started eating a lot of kimchi and a lot of fermented cabbage and then it became kefir and a lot of other different things and now I take an Onnit Total Gut Health package with every food that I eat every time I eat something And I think that really concentrating on probiotics has boosted my immune system.
00:31:35.000If something's really important, like I'm going to do a comedy special that I'm going to film or something like that, I get a little nervous.
00:31:41.000Most of the time, it's a heightened sense of, you know, like, okay, here we go.
00:31:47.000But when you're about to do something that's scary...
00:31:50.000There's another less refined example of the gut-brain connection.
00:31:56.000It's been in our lexicon for a long time.
00:31:58.000So I think, like, on a popular basis, most people are like, duh, yeah, I know my brain's connected to my gut.
00:32:04.000But it's only been in the last, you know, 20, 30 years that the research has really come around to...
00:32:10.000You know, clarifying what those relationships are.
00:32:13.000So we know that changes in the gut microbiome can affect our brain chemistry.
00:32:19.000And in fact, the The prevailing theory now of what actually causes depression is called the inflammatory cytokine model of depression.
00:32:28.000And so it's not this thing where your serotonin levels are different and that's why you're depressed.
00:32:35.000It's that you have inflammation primarily in the gut and the inflammatory cytokines travel from your gut through the bloodstream up into your They cross the blood-brain barrier and they suppress the activity in the frontal cortex, which basically causes the symptoms of depression.
00:32:51.000So this is totally mainstream, not fringe science, where they recognize that depression may be caused and anxiety may be caused by inflammation in the gut.
00:33:01.000So, this is where the direction of science has been heading.
00:33:06.000And then, you know, it stands to reason that if you take probiotics, you eat fermented foods, you eat fermentable fibers that grow, help feed the beneficial bacteria that are already in your gut, you can influence that brain chemistry.
00:33:19.000And so, not only change your mood, you know, potentially heal depression and anxiety, and then even, you know, cognitive behavioral disorders, ADHD and things like that, But you could also profoundly change the cravings of food that you have because pathogenic bacteria feed on sugar.
00:33:39.000So you may not just be dealing with your own cravings when you're craving sugar.
00:33:44.000You're dealing with the cravings of those pathogenic bacteria.
00:33:47.000We know there are examples in nature Of bacteria and microorganisms changing the behavior of their host in order to propagate their own survival.
00:34:10.000And there's a land one that causes it to crawl up to the top of a blade of grass where it can then be eaten.
00:34:16.000By the ultimate host that that parasite wants to get into.
00:34:20.000And I'm not remembering the exact species, but biologists know that microorganisms can change our behavior, and we like to think that we're not animals, but we're subject to these same influences.
00:34:44.000I mean, it's nice to think, and it's nice to separate ourselves because we're conscious and we're aware of our actions, and those are all absolutely correct.
00:34:51.000But we're just a heightened state of animal life.
00:35:20.000So this is an interesting example of what happens in research over time.
00:35:28.000So 20 or 30 years ago, if you were at a medical conference and you used the term leaky gut, you would have been laughed out of the room.
00:35:36.000It was really the province of alternative medicine providers and quacks.
00:35:41.000And yet today, if you go search on PubMed, the major clearinghouse of medical studies, you can find thousands and thousands of articles on leaky gut.
00:35:52.000It will be actually talked about with the term intestinal permeability.
00:36:02.000It's kind of interesting to think about this, but your intestine is basically a hollow tube that goes from your mouth to your anus, and anything inside the intestine is technically outside of the body.
00:37:19.000You know, toxin, waste, closed, don't let that in.
00:37:23.000And so everyone's gut is permeable in an appropriate way, right, when it's working well.
00:37:30.000Because if it wasn't permeable, we would die.
00:37:33.000We wouldn't be able to absorb nutrients.
00:37:36.000But the other side of that spectrum is if it stops being permeable at the right times and starts letting things in that shouldn't be in there in the first place, that's what's called leaky gut.
00:37:49.000You basically have an inability to keep out stuff that's not supposed to get into your body.
00:37:57.000Some examples would be large protein molecules.
00:38:01.000Typically, we digest protein into small peptides That our immune system doesn't recognize as foreign invaders and is able to use to grow muscle and do all the things that protein helps us to do.
00:38:13.000But if large protein molecules that have not been properly digested sneak into the bloodstream, our body sees those things as foreign presence and creates antibodies to attack them.
00:38:26.000And that's why we develop food allergies or food intolerances.
00:38:30.000Another thing that gets through the gut that shouldn't is called endotoxin.
00:38:33.000So these are toxins produced by certain species of bacteria, things like lipopolysaccharide, and they can get through the gut barrier and then our body produces antibodies to them and attacks them as if they're foreign invaders, which they are in that case.
00:38:48.000They shouldn't be in there in the first place.
00:38:50.000And all of this basically creates a systemic inflammatory response.
00:38:55.000So whether it's food antigens that are getting in there that shouldn't be, or whether it's bacterial endotoxins that are getting in there that shouldn't be, leaky gut leads to this chronic low-grade inflammation.
00:39:09.000And basically all modern diseases that kill us, like diabetes, heart disease, even some of the ones we've already talked about, depression doesn't necessarily kill us, but all of the mental and behavioral diseases, Autoimmune disease,
00:39:26.000which now infects one in four women and one in six men, which is crazy, given that they don't really exist in traditional hunter-gatherer societies.
00:39:34.000All of these are inflammatory conditions.
00:39:36.000So something that contributes to inflammation is going to significantly increase our risk of acquiring one of these diseases and then eventually dying from one of them.
00:39:47.000Now, when we say inflammation, that's another term that people hear a lot, but I don't think they necessarily understand.
00:40:34.000Acellular meaning lacking cell membrane.
00:40:37.000And acellular carbs are carbs that have been heavily processed where they're natural cells that would be found in a plant, in a whole plant, like a start, like a sweet potato or, you know, a potato or something like that, have been processed.
00:40:55.000You know, originally came from a whole wheat plant that had its cells intact, but then it's been the seed or the kernel of the whole wheat has been removed and you just have the starch with no cells anymore.
00:41:08.000And what that means is with cellular carbohydrates, our body has to really work to break those down.
00:41:15.000And the actual glucose, the carbohydrate itself, is relatively inaccessible because we have to work so hard to digest it and get at it.
00:41:24.000If you think of an analogy like a nut, like a whole walnut, You know, you have to do a lot to get to that.
00:41:33.000So it's going to be hard to overeat those in a kind of traditional setting because there's so much work involved in getting at it.
00:41:41.000Whereas if you have a bag of walnuts from Trader Joe's that have already been shelled and they're just sitting there salted, you can just pound a whole bunch of those.
00:41:51.000So with this acellular carbohydrate, It's basically the equivalent of removing the shells from the nuts and just making those carbohydrates super accessible, not only to us, but to the bacteria in our gut.
00:42:04.000And so his argument was that When we eat a lot of processed and refined sugars that are highly accessible to us and also to our gut bacteria, we basically create an imbalance in the gut where you have a proliferation of bad pathogenic bacteria that thrive on sugar and a reduction of good bacteria that we need to be healthy.
00:42:29.000And that imbalance then creates an inflammatory gut microbiota.
00:42:34.000And as I described before, those inflammatory cytokines that are produced in the gut, they can travel out from the gut and affect the whole body systemically.
00:42:43.000So, you know, 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut.
00:42:48.000He didn't know, you know, he didn't have any of this modern science that we have now that shows that this is true, but it turns out that he was right.
00:42:56.000That's fascinating that people have these ancient sayings like, follow your heart.
00:43:00.000And then we found out fairly recently, within the last few decades, that the heart is filled with neurons.
00:43:07.000And that there might actually be some sort of memory or thinking, quote unquote, going on.
00:44:14.000Well, I think it's very important that we...
00:44:18.000Today, in this day, have the tools to use science to sort of explain unequivocally why these things are factors and why these things exist.
00:44:27.000And that we've proven in these studies, these are peer-reviewed.
00:45:49.000Of worshipping the randomized clinical trial at the expense of other kinds of knowledge that can be just as important or more important in certain ways.
00:45:59.000Well, one of the things that you brought up that I think is very important is who is funding some of these trials on pharmaceutical drugs and the efficacy of them and how they profit off of it and how many studies are sort of thrown out that don't fit the narrative.
00:46:17.000The file drawer phenomenon, they call that.
00:46:22.000Well, so two-thirds of medical research is funded by Big Pharma, and that makes, yeah, two-thirds.
00:46:29.000So, you know, this is just human nature.
00:46:33.000Upton Sinclair said it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
00:46:40.000It's one of my favorite great quotes because it explains a lot, right?
00:46:45.000And so you can look at it just in terms of basic human nature, like if you're a researcher, you're being funded by a pharmaceutical company, you know, even if it's not conscious, there's a subconscious thing there where you know that if your results are negative and don't support the drug,
00:47:03.000you're less likely to get your next project funded.
00:47:13.000I mean, it's really easy to understand, right?
00:47:16.000It's not like these are bad people who are all in conspiracy to push drugs on us.
00:47:23.000I think most researchers are good people and trying to do the right thing.
00:47:27.000But it's the way that the system is set up that's the problem, where they need to depend on pharmaceutical companies for their funding.
00:47:34.000And it's really hard, you know, just don't bite the hand that feeds you.
00:47:37.000It's just, it's a time, you know, age-old saying, and there's a lot to that.
00:47:46.000Up until recently, I think there have been some recent changes here, but researchers were not required or pharmaceutical companies were not required to publish negative results.
00:47:56.000So if they did a drug trial and the results didn't support the drug, it turned out that placebo was more effective or their drug had side effects that made it not usable, those studies just basically go into the file drawer.
00:48:12.000They wouldn't actually be published in a journal.
00:48:14.000And there's been a movement to change that to where, you know, if a study is conducted, it needs to be registered.
00:48:21.000And then no matter what the results are, they need to be published so that people have a chance to see not just the positive results that support the drug trials, but the ones that didn't.
00:48:33.000But then there are other problems, like fraud.
00:48:36.000So there was a pretty big study published in JAMA a little while back by Journal of American Medical Association, a very prominent, prestigious journal.
00:48:47.000And it was a guy named Charles Seifert.
00:48:50.000And he basically looked at the FDA monitoring of drug trials.
00:48:58.000So the FDA's One of their jobs is to make sure that the trials being done to determine whether medication is effective are done the way they should be, and that there's no falsification of patient data, and that their health is being protected adequately,
00:49:18.000So what he found was that in a shocking number of cases where there was fraud, where the FDA actually did identify fraud and it was serious enough that they took action, in 96% of cases, the action that they took was not reported in any scientific journal.
00:50:07.000The motivation is to get the drug approved.
00:50:11.000Why would they hide the fact that this guy...
00:50:13.000The FDA doesn't require pharmaceutical companies to publish that data.
00:50:21.000Because they say, in their language, and according to Seifert in this paper, it's essentially more important to the FDA to protect the commercial interests of these companies than it is to protect public health, even though this is an agency that is ostensibly there to protect public health.
00:51:02.000I just don't understand why they would cover up the fact that a guy was already sick.
00:51:06.000Like, wouldn't you think that they would be the opposite?
00:51:09.000Let me use another example, because I think this will help show what's happening here.
00:51:14.000So there was a Chinese You know, most drug trials, they take place at different sites, so they have multiple, you know, locations that are testing so that they can get data on different populations, you know, not just in white, you know,
00:51:32.000And, you know, so they do it at different centers.
00:51:34.000And so there was a trial for an anticoagulant drug.
00:51:40.000They found that this Chinese center had falsified a whole bunch of patient data and changed the results.
00:51:46.000And if they took that Chinese center's data out of the equation, the drug would have failed.
00:51:51.000It wouldn't have been more effective than placebo.
00:51:55.000But even though the FDA busted this group in China, The study that was published on that drug still included that data from the study in China.
00:52:06.000And even studies that were being published 18 months later still included that data in the original data set.
00:52:14.000It was clear that they had falsified the data, and yet that data is still being included in the studies that doctors are relying on all over the world to make decisions about whether to prescribe these drugs.
00:52:27.000There's fraud happening, whether it's from financial interests or just human error that's not actually being reported and translating into clinical decisions that doctors are making.
00:52:51.000A paper was submitted to BMJ, British Medical Journal, another big medical journal, with eight major errors.
00:52:57.000And not a single one of the 221 scientists that were asked to review the paper caught all of the errors.
00:53:03.000And only 30% recommended rejecting the paper.
00:53:07.000And this was even more problematic because half of those scientists were warned in advance, we're going to give you a paper that has a lot of errors.
00:53:17.000And the ones who were warned didn't get any more of the errors than the scientists that weren't warned in advance.
00:53:34.000I mean, it's a problem with peer review because it is a big part of the scientific method to have the results validated by somebody else or to review the work and make sure that it's sound.
00:53:47.000But what this paper indicated is that a lot of findings that we take to be true and valid might not actually be true and valid.
00:53:57.000It actually made the news There was a recent, the Open Science Collaboration did a review of a hundred psychology studies and that had never been replicated.
00:54:09.000Replicating findings is really important in the scientific method too.
00:54:13.000Like if you design a study and you do it and you find a certain result, in science it's not really considered to be valid unless I do it and confirm your results, you know, or someone else does.
00:54:27.000And in a shocking number of studies, this never happens.
00:54:30.000And so this group went back and looked at 100 psychology studies and tried to replicate them using the almost identical conditions from the original studies.
00:54:39.000And they were only able to do that in 35% of cases.
00:54:44.000Another group looked at pre-cancer clinical studies and found they could only replicate 11% of those It's a well-known saying in the pharmaceutical world that more than half of the drug trials can't be replicated,
00:55:00.000and a group of researchers from Bayer, from a pharmaceutical company, tried to do that in 2011. They took a bunch of trials and tried to replicate them.
00:55:08.000Less than one quarter of them, they were able to replicate the results.
00:55:11.000So what this means is a study can be done, it's never validated, and then a whole bunch of other studies are done that refer to that study.
00:55:22.000And whole fields of scientific research are spawned on a study that was never confirmed or validated.
00:55:29.000So it's like a house of cards built on a foundation of falsehood.
00:55:37.000We need to keep improving science, but there's a lot of problems with the way that studies are performed right now.
00:55:42.000And it's both, you know, conflicts of interest that are based on money, and it's just also human error.
00:55:50.000And is it also just the overwhelming number of studies that are being done and how many people would have to be there to validate all these different things?
00:56:20.000And it's hard to get funding to replicate studies.
00:56:23.000Whereas if you have an original finding, especially one that's tied to potential therapeutic use in a drug that can be made out of that, that's where the real money and interest is.
00:56:36.000And another one is just how long studies are done for, like omega-3 fats.
00:56:44.000We've all heard about that these are good for us and fish oil and all of that.
00:56:50.000When you look at studies, most of those studies are really short term.
00:56:54.000And back in the 70s or 80s, some longer term studies that were like 8 or 10 years were done that found really different results.
00:57:02.000And what they showed is that early on the results were one way, but the longer the study went on, the results started to go back in the other direction.
00:57:15.000The point is, something that happens in two weeks is not necessarily what's going to happen over four years.
00:57:21.000But the problem is, the typical studies only last for two or three weeks, especially if they're a randomized trial, because they're enormously expensive.
00:57:30.000To isolate all of the variables and make sure that patients are...
00:57:34.000Not changing too many different things and are just doing the intervention and to do everything that needs to be done is incredibly expensive.
00:57:41.000And so we have a whole bunch of research findings that are based on two-week periods that aren't applicable to how we live our life.
00:57:49.000That is also, I think, an issue with some anecdotal reports that people have about changing their diet.
00:57:55.000There's a lot of people that change their diet, and short-term, they feel fantastic, and they start having all these benefits.
00:58:01.000But then over the course of maybe three, four, five years or so, they start having real issues.
00:58:06.000And they don't necessarily tie that to the diet, because they remember feeling so much better when they first switched to it.
00:58:14.000So they don't think that what's happening three or four years later could be the cause of their problems.
00:58:19.000I see this all the time with vegetarian and vegan diets.
00:58:22.000That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.
00:58:24.000In terms of that, because most people who switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet, you're going to see some instant benefits because of the fact that you have much more nutrient-dense foods, you're eating a lot of vegetables, you're changing your diet in a lot of ways towards a positive away from what you were talking about,
00:58:44.000those primary foods that Americans tend to eat, all the processed sugar, all the just nonsense and Chicken tenders and all that crap that people eat, which is just so goddamn common, right?
00:58:53.000So automatically over that, you're going to see some long-term benefits.
00:58:57.000But one of the things that I've been reading is about people that have found that over the long term, the lack, and this is contrary to what a lot of people think, lack of saturated fat and cholesterol, dietary cholesterol and saturated fat,
00:59:12.000leads to hormonal imbalances, Leads to your body having a harder time producing sex hormones and all these different issues with your health where your body almost starts robbing itself to make up for the nutritional deficiencies of your diet.
01:00:52.000You know, an animal that is able to utilize the nutrients that are available in its environment to its maximal advantage is going to survive compared to one that doesn't.
01:01:06.000If you study traditional peoples, as far as I know, still, there's never been a traditional group that has ever been identified that voluntarily followed a vegan or even vegetarian diet that I know of.
01:01:20.000So that should tell you something right there.
01:01:22.000And ironically, the fact that you and I are even having this conversation, this wouldn't even be happening if humans had not It's eaten meat, basically.
01:01:32.000There are a lot of anthropologists who now believe that eating meat was essentially what made us human.
01:01:38.000You know, we came down out of the trees and we developed the development of tools that could crack bones to give us access to the marrow, which is super nutrient dense, or to slice meat, which allowed us to be able to digest the meat more quickly.
01:01:52.000Number one, and then two, the development of fire, which allowed us to cook meat, and cooking makes the nutrients and meat more bioavailable, allowed us to spend less time foraging for food.
01:02:04.000So most large primates, like gorillas or chimpanzees, spend over 80% of their day foraging for food because most of the foods they eat are really not nutrient-dense.
01:02:16.000So they have to eat a boatload of stuff and just sit there and chew on the plants all day to get enough nutrients.
01:02:22.000And so this evolutionary theory is that we learn to extract and harvest much more nutrient-dense foods from animals, fats, and other nutrients in the meats and organ meats, and we could then spend a lot less of our time going around getting food,
01:02:39.000which allowed us to develop bigger brains and become human and have this conversation where we're talking about vegetarian and vegan diets.
01:02:51.000And it's also important to differentiate the difference between what you're saying is essentially the science behind the development of the human animal versus the moral and ethical debates that lead people to become— And environmental.
01:03:05.000And environmental debates, which is also moral, right?
01:03:46.000If they want to follow that diet, what is imperative as far as healthy fats, as far as making sure that your body doesn't have, you're not taking in too many simple carbohydrates?
01:05:03.000If you're vegan and you're eating a vegan diet, you need to have a perfect vegan diet to be healthy and you need to know what you're doing in terms of supplementation and how to meet the nutrient needs that aren't being met through diet.
01:05:15.000And at least in my experience, there are very few that actually do it right.
01:05:21.000When it's done right, I think it's possible for some people to be healthy and thrive.
01:05:25.000And that's obvious because there are people like Rich Roll, who's like out there.
01:05:30.000He's a vegan triathlete who's out there, you know, doing centuries and killing it.
01:06:11.000There are genetic differences that determine how well we convert precursor nutrients into the nutrients that we actually need.
01:06:19.000Let me give three examples to make this more real.
01:06:22.000One is EPA and DHA. These are these long-chain omega-3 fats that we've heard so much about that are crucial for brain function, cardiovascular function, etc.
01:06:32.000Primarily, you get them by eating fish.
01:06:34.000There are no sources of those in a plant-based diet, except for algae.
01:06:41.000And algae is not that bioavailable, right?
01:06:44.000No, and how many people do you know that eat algae?
01:07:04.000And humans, in theory, can convert some of that plant-based omega-3 into this long-chain EPA and DHA that we need.
01:07:13.000But here's the thing, only about 5-10% of that gets converted into EPA and even less to DHA, like 2-5%.
01:07:20.000So you have to be chugging tablespoons of flax oil in order to get as much EPA or DHA that you would get from eating just a little bit of fish.
01:07:30.000And that's if everything is going well.
01:07:32.000Because if you have deficiency of any nutrients that are involved in the enzymatic conversion of those plant-based fats into the long-chain fats, then you won't make those conversions at that optimal rate.
01:07:52.000Another would be vitamin K2, which is a different form of vitamin K that's recently been discovered.
01:07:58.000And it's really important for cardiovascular and bone health.
01:08:02.000It basically makes sure that calcium gets in our bones and our teeth and our hard tissues where it belongs and keeps it out of the soft tissues like our arteries where calcium would make our arteries hard and increase the risk of a heart attack.
01:08:15.000So, K2 is only really in animal foods with the exception of some fermented foods like natto, which is a Japanese fermented soybean product that most people cannot stand.
01:09:02.000Just because I want to get a little bit onto this track of what you were describing about fish oil and the conversion and the difference between flaxseed oil.
01:09:13.000What can vegans take in order to sort of...
01:09:17.000I recommend that vegans take microalgae because it has preformed DHA in it.
01:09:22.000So you bypass that whole conversion issue.
01:09:26.000If they do take microalgae, is that sufficient, or how much difference is that than eating fish?
01:09:32.000Well, it's quite different, because fish have a lot of other nutrients aside from EPA and DHA. They have protein, they have selenium, they have a lot of other bioavailable nutrients.
01:09:43.000And the other disadvantage is you have to take a boatload of algae supplements.
01:09:52.000Different products have different amounts, but I think you'd have to take six to nine capsules a day of the average algae supplement in order to meet your DHA needs.
01:10:23.000That's a big issue, and vegans need to be supplementing with that.
01:10:27.000There's a myth out there that there are some plant sources of B12, like seaweed and spirulina and nutritional yeast, but those actually contain kind of phony forms of B12 that can block the absorption of true B12,
01:10:44.000which is only found in animal products or supplements.
01:10:48.000So a B12 supplement would be really important as well.
01:10:50.000And what's the source of a B12 supplement?
01:10:56.000It's synthetic, I think, but there's three forms of B12. There's hydroxycobalamin and methylcobalamin, or four forms that you can supplement with, cyanocobalamin and adenosylcobalamin.
01:11:10.000Cyanocobalamin is a synthetic form, and then the other ones are natural forms of B12 that you would encounter in food.
01:11:17.000So people can supplement with any of those.
01:11:20.000The natural forms are better to supplement with because they're more bioavailable.
01:11:25.000But definitely if a vegan, I would recommend supplementing with B12 because there aren't any sources of it in the diet.
01:11:32.000And studies have shown that 68% of vegetarians are deficient in B12. 83% of vegans are versus just 5% of omnivores.
01:11:50.000Production of all red blood cells depends on B12 and folate.
01:11:54.000And so, I mean, that's pretty fundamental, right?
01:11:57.000And then the myelin sheath requires B12, and this is why B12 deficiency can mimic the signs of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.
01:12:05.000In people who are aging, B12 deficiency happens in elderly people not because they're on a vegan diet, but because they have low stomach acid and they don't absorb the B12 as well as we do when we're younger.
01:12:16.000And so a lot of people who are elderly who have symptoms of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, they can sometimes be misdiagnosed with these conditions when they're actually just B12 deficient.
01:13:21.000I mentioned earlier I traveled around the world, and I was surfing, and I got the classic tropical illness, like amoebic dysentery, giardia, and blastocystis hominis, so two parasites and an amoeba, and was just, you know, Coming out of both ends,
01:13:36.000delirious, didn't remember really anything for three days.
01:13:40.000Luckily, there was one other Australian guy in the village that I was in who had some antibiotics in his medical kit that kind of brought me back from the brink.
01:13:49.000But between the parasites and then the multiple rounds of antibiotics I had to take to get rid of the parasites after that, it just wreaked havoc on my gut.
01:13:58.000And it took me basically 10 years to recover my health.
01:14:33.000So, you know, I took way more antibiotics than I would have done in retrospect because that's what the doctors were prescribing and saying, look, you've got these parasites.
01:14:45.000And, you know, and I think the antibiotics could have been worse.
01:14:50.000The treatment was probably worse than the disease for me after the number of courses of antibiotics that I took.
01:14:56.000So along that path, I tried just about every special diet you could possibly imagine, including becoming a vegetarian and a vegan and then a macrobiotic vegan and then raw food vegan.
01:15:39.000The issues, for me, the reason why I eventually brought animal products back into my diet was that it became clear that I needed to do that for my own health, and I was able to reach a level of understanding about the moral,
01:15:56.000ethical, and environmental choices that I was making that I felt good about.
01:16:05.000He was saying that one option that vegans might want to consider is mollusks, and that mollusks, mollusks, mollusks, what a weird word, clams, mussels, things along those lines, are so primitive that the argument can be made that although they have movement where they open and close,
01:16:24.000that they lack pain sensors, they lack the fundamental things that make us distinguish the difference between animal and plant life.
01:16:32.000And that people might want to consider the consumption of mollusks the same way they consider it, you know, like people eat mushrooms.
01:16:41.000Mushrooms, which are in a vegan diet or healthy, are closer to an animal than they are to a plant.
01:16:47.000They actually take in oxygen, they breathe out carbon dioxide, and fundamentally they resemble living organisms that we consider like animals more than they consider plants, more than they resemble plants.
01:16:59.000This is a really good point, and the lines start to get blurry, because we know that some plants, for example, when they recognize that they're being eaten by a caterpillar, they secrete toxins to protect themselves.
01:17:12.000Not just recognize that they're being eaten, but they've played recordings of a caterpillar eating a plant next to a plant, and it's changed the actual taste of the leaves to the point where animals find them disgusting.
01:17:26.000And it causes some animals to starve to death.
01:17:31.000I mean, you may not call that intelligence or sentience, but what's the difference there between a mollusk, for example, who, like you described, lacks pain sensors?
01:17:44.000What should we be prioritizing in that situation if we are...
01:18:30.000Is superior, ethically or morally, than, you know, a method of food production that kills many small animals in order to, you know, and won't feed as many people from a nutrient density perspective.
01:18:42.000People don't like to look at that because it's inconvenient.
01:18:43.000But I have friends that, I have a good buddy of mine who has a farm in Iowa, and he says when they run the combines over corn and grain and, you know, when they chop down all the different...
01:18:53.000You'll see vultures and crows and all these things circling the fields because there's all sorts of animals that get chewed up in that process.
01:19:01.000And in fact, more animals get chewed up to create a pound of grain.
01:19:10.000I mean, when insects are animals, by the way, there are a life form.
01:19:15.000And more different things get chewed up in creating that.
01:19:20.000Than would be if you got a pound of meat, because as you said, one cow could, you know, a lot of people consume it over the course of a year.
01:19:29.000And the nutrient density is far superior to a pound of grains.
01:19:37.000You hear the opposite argument, where a cow consumes so much grass, it needs so much land to graze.
01:19:43.000And that argument, unfortunately, has actually been distorted.
01:19:45.000I had some guys on from The documentary Cowspiracy, which I don't think they were intentionally trying to deceive.
01:19:53.000I think they're really good guys and they think they're making a really good point.
01:19:58.000But when you talk to ranchers and you get the actual number of how much acreage it takes to feed a cow, it's not as much as they thought it was.
01:20:07.000But the ethical argument is really interesting, too, for all of these reasons.
01:20:13.000But then you think about the method of death, right?
01:20:16.000So let's take, like, a humane slaughterhouse where there's a lot of care and consideration that goes into how the animal's last moments are and how they actually slaughter the animal so that it's painless and quick.
01:20:31.000I can hear the vegans going crazy right now.
01:20:35.000Versus, let's see, this combine that goes through the field decapitates the mother vole and her babies in the nest die of starvation because their mother is not able to provide food for them.
01:20:49.000That's an arguably worse way for an animal to die, right?
01:20:53.000Or even any of your rancher friends know what it's like.
01:20:57.000They've found one of their animals that's been killed by a predator.
01:21:00.000And if you go on YouTube and watch a hyena kill an animal, the animal will still be alive while it's getting disemboweled.
01:21:09.000Right, and that's what wolves will do, and that's a giant issue.
01:21:13.000The difference between the way a predator kills something and the way a person does.
01:21:17.000But, on the other hand, of course, it's impossible to deny the real issues with factory farming and the inhumane methods that are so common when you're buying these chicken nuggets.
01:21:26.000I guarantee you these are not ethically sourced, ethically and humanely raised chickens.
01:21:32.000And when you're driving down the highway and you see those trucks that are stuffed full of chickens and the chickens, literally their little faces are poking out of the side of the truck, that is...
01:21:45.000And this is, I mean, interestingly enough, this is something where I think I have more in common with vegans than I do with, like, the average person.
01:21:53.000We both care about how food is produced.
01:21:56.000We care about, you know, I don't eat factory-farm meat.
01:22:01.000You know, like, I try to eat meat that's from local, I buy it from a local farmer.
01:22:07.000I'm lucky that where I live that that's accessible.
01:22:10.000I buy produce from the farmer's market.
01:22:13.000We grow a lot of produce in our backyard.
01:22:17.000It's this whole food system that needs to change, both in terms of conventional agriculture and the monocropping of wheat and corn and soybeans.
01:22:27.000And plant foods, but also the mass production conventional animal operations need to change as well.
01:22:40.000I think that's absolutely a losing argument.
01:22:45.000But there is a lot of land, two thirds of the surface land in the world is not suitable for crop production.
01:22:53.000But it is suitable for raising animals.
01:22:55.000And if those animals are raised in a sustainable way, I think it is possible to feed the world with maybe not the amount of animal products that the average American is eating now, but...
01:23:10.000We can utilize the available land in a much smarter way to produce nutrient-dense foods.
01:23:20.000We like to remove ourselves from the cycle of life and from nature, saying we're not animals, we're humans, we're separate from it.
01:23:26.000But when you consider that whole cycle, and when you consider the soil, for example, if you think of it as a bank account, when you plant You're withdrawing from that bank account.
01:23:37.000And if you want the soil to be healthy and continue to be able to support life, you need to put input, you need to make a deposit back in that bank account.
01:23:45.000And the way we've been doing that in conventional agriculture is with chemicals.
01:23:50.000And those chemical fertilizers, they do kind of make a deposit in some way, but they also make the soil less able to sequester carbon.
01:23:59.000They cause all kinds of problems with runoff and toxicity in water and local watershed systems.
01:24:06.000And any organic farmer will tell you that the best way to add those inputs back in is the poop of animals along with their blood and their bone.
01:24:15.000And so that's that cycle of life where the animal inputs go into the soil.
01:24:20.000Those inputs, you know, the urine adds water to the soil.
01:24:24.000The poop adds microorganisms that help the soil sequester carbon.
01:24:28.000So that studies have shown that Pasture-raised animals are either net neutral in terms of carbon output or they actually even help sequester carbon.
01:24:38.000So you could even argue that raising animals and eating animals is necessary for the benefit of our soils and our ecosystems in general.
01:24:47.000Yeah, so if someone has a large, you know, 20-acre plot of land and they're using it to grow alfalfa or something that people eat or soybeans or something along those lines, if they're not in some way contributing some sort of animal product to that soil,
01:25:04.000the soil is going to become nutritionally deficient.
01:25:08.000And then the people who eat the plants that come out of that soil are going to get nutritionally deficient plants, minerally deficient in particular.
01:25:16.000That it's a giant issue with United States farmlands.
01:25:20.000There's a book that's received a lot of criticism, but it brings up some interesting points.
01:25:28.000A lot of the things that he said have been rightly criticized.
01:25:33.000But what's interesting about what he's saying is when he's talking about minerally deficient plants and soil and that the United States is known, you know, when they've done studies on farmlands in, you know, the 1930s and 40s that there is an issue with mineral deficiency.
01:25:48.000And so That's where they started adding nitrogen from the Haber method into soil, and it helps, and you can grow crops.
01:25:57.000But the difference between the food that you're getting that is grown with chemical fertilizers that address some of the issues, like you're talking about, versus the traditional method of compost and manure and animal products,
01:26:55.000And I've actually argued that a vegetarian diet with shellfish and organ meats would be better than a paleo diet with no shellfish and organ meats.
01:27:10.000Organ meats and shellfish are the two most nutrient-dense classes of foods.
01:27:17.000I've just been finishing the curriculum for my clinician training program where I'm going through systematically every nutrient and I'm looking at, in nutrition data, what the highest food sources of those nutrients are.
01:27:32.000I wish I had the thing to just lay it out and show you.
01:27:36.000In almost every case, it's an organ meat or a shellfish that's the highest source of that, whether you're talking about B12 or iron or copper or zinc or folate.
01:27:46.000It's always beef liver, chicken liver, clams, oysters, etc.
01:27:51.000And so if someone was a vegetarian, A vegetarian who's willing to fudge a little bit and eat just organ meats and shellfish, I think that would be a healthier approach than someone who's just eating lean muscle meat.
01:28:25.000But I saw this documentary on wolves and what was really fascinating was one of the ways that they distinguish who the alpha is in the wolf pack is the alpha wolf is the one who eats the liver.
01:28:48.000The liver processes them, but the fat stores them.
01:28:51.000So, if you're concerned about toxins in food, you should make sure that you're eating, you know, pasture-raised organic fats, like butter and cream and things, if you eat dairy products, animal fats.
01:29:15.000So when you're eating anything that comes from an animal that's been fed grain, you're dealing with an animal that has The same sort of inflammation issues that a person has from processing things that it's not naturally supposed to process,
01:29:30.000like processed wheat and bleached flour and things like that.
01:29:39.000So when you're taking in those animal products that we traditionally do, whether it's butter or milk or dairy or cheese or things along those lines, when you're taking in those from an animal that's eating grain, you are actually getting the fats.
01:29:52.000So it's less healthy than actually eating the liver of that animal.
01:29:58.000I mean, the liver is more nutrient-dense anyways, but pasture-raised animal fats have a lot more nutrients than conventionally raised fats because the animals are eating grass, and grass is way more nutrient-dense than the grains that conventional animals are fed.
01:30:16.000Also, the omega-3s and 6s are different, right?
01:30:29.000It used to be, you know, the kind of consensus was that omega-6s would be higher and omega-3s would be lower, but it actually looks like omega-6 is constant and omega-3 is higher.
01:30:42.000The omega-3 is higher because the grass probably has more alpha-linolenic acid, which is the plant-based form that then the animal does the conversion.
01:30:50.000I mean, that's the thing that's really interesting to consider here, too, is humans are really inefficient at making these conversions of these less active nutrients to the more active ones.
01:31:00.000We started to talk about it with EPA and DHA. Vitamin K1 is what's converted into K2. Cows are experts at doing that.
01:32:12.000But retinol is only really present in organ meats and pasture-raised fats.
01:32:19.000It's not even really in muscle meats like lean ground beef or boneless chicken breasts or So in order to get retinol, we need to consume these pasture-raised fats or we need to consume organ meats.
01:32:32.000And as you pointed out, organ meats have really fallen out of favor in the U.S. And this is only recent.
01:32:37.000I bet you our grandparents ate a lot more organ meats than we eat.
01:32:42.000Still in many parts of the world, they still eat organ meats more than we do.
01:32:47.000Liver and onions is a very famous dish.
01:32:51.000And so you'll see like within the paleo primal kind of world, the organ meats are making a comeback because we understand now what the nutrient density of these foods is.
01:33:01.000And there's less now, even in the mainstream world, there's less of a solid argument that can be made about these having cholesterol or, you know, high levels of saturated fat that would prevent us from eating them.
01:33:13.000Now, what would be the difference in terms of the nutritional density of mollusks versus organ meat?
01:33:19.000So if you had a vegetarian or a vegan who's on the fence, and you made these arguments that are very rational and logical, and you said, look, mollusks are essentially a very Very primitive form of life that doesn't feel pain and you could argue that there's more evidence that some plants feel pain and plants also have some very intense level of communication where there's a really interesting edition of Radiolab recently where they went into this where they sort of are
01:33:49.000trying to understand the difference between the Right.
01:34:35.000And then somehow or another they're actually even sharing resources where if they find or they're allotting resources to certain plants that are more deficient or they're trying to channel resources to them.
01:34:46.000So there's some form of communication and exchange here.
01:34:49.000Yeah, that's intelligence right there.
01:34:51.000I mean, Paul Stamets has done amazing work on fungus in general.
01:34:57.000Yeah, I would say that that's a really good option.
01:35:00.000I mean, when you look at nutrients, like specific nutrients, it goes back and forth between liver and, you know, organ meats and shellfish.
01:35:08.000And some nutrients, organ meats are higher, like vitamin A or iron.
01:35:14.000And other nutrients, shellfish are generally higher, like with zinc or copper.
01:35:23.000Shellfish are higher in almost all of the key nutrients that we need than a lot of the plant-based food alternatives that they would be choosing from.
01:35:32.000And so if a vegan was willing to eat mollusks, I would say that that would be a great idea.
01:35:37.000And the benefit there is you don't need to eat a lot.
01:35:41.000Like three ounces, a single serving, can meet your copper requirement for the entire week.
01:35:53.000If I'm going off the top of my head, iron and zinc can nearly meet your entire weekly requirement.
01:35:58.000So it's not like you have to eat a ton of these things.
01:36:01.000You have a serving of clams once a week, and you have a serving of oysters once a week.
01:36:06.000You know, on top of getting as much nutrient density as you can, that's B12, that's iron, that's zinc, that's copper, EPA and DHA, the long chain omega-3 fats are in these molluscs as well.
01:36:23.000And they're typically low on the toxicity.
01:36:39.000Is there any benefit to eating them cooked versus raw, one way or the other?
01:36:44.000Well, you know, there is the chance of disease in, you know, eating raw oysters.
01:36:50.000I think it's pretty minimal compared to some other risks, but it is there, and cooking, you know, mitigates that, definitely.
01:37:00.000In general, cooking makes the nutrients in meat and animal products more bioavailable rather than less.
01:37:07.000In vegetables, it depends on the vegetable and the method of cooking, but it's more of a mixed bag.
01:37:15.000But in meats, it generally improves the bioavailability.
01:37:19.000So it really is, in a lot of ways, an ideological issue where it's sort of framed that, you know, you don't want to contribute to suffering.
01:37:32.000Yeah, but even there, as we talked about, you're going to contribute to suffering and potentially more if you're looking on the scale of individual lives.
01:37:40.000And it might sound like this is nitpicky, but it's not.
01:37:44.000We're talking about actual lives, and then you have to start evaluating...
01:37:49.000Is a cow more sentient or the life of a cow worth more than the life of a rabbit or a vole or the kind of animals that are being killed in the production of these plant foods?
01:38:15.000If you're buying anything that is from large-scale agriculture, you're involved in the death of some sort of animals or insects.
01:38:23.000And I know the argument is, like, there's an argument about intentionality and whether, you know, like, if I intended to kill this animal to eat it, it's different than if you didn't intend to eat it.
01:38:36.000To me, I'm not so sure about that as an argument.
01:38:39.000Yeah, because it's almost like willful ignorance that these animals are being killed and the production of these plants that I'm eating.
01:38:48.000I mean, I see the argument, but I'm not sure I buy it.
01:38:52.000I do as well, and I see the willful ignorance argument up until the point where it gets explained to you.
01:38:57.000So as soon as someone explains to you, like you've just done, about the combines and how they're chewing up all these animals, and by the way, fawns, too.
01:39:03.000It's a huge issue with deers, because if you've ever seen a baby deer out in the wild, it's one of the weirdest things about them when they're very young.
01:39:12.000So in the face of danger, they have this instinct to freeze.
01:39:16.000So you can literally go up to a fawn, and they'll be tucked up on the ground, and they're healthy, completely healthy, and you can Walk right next to them.
01:39:32.000It's really, I mean, because these animals bed in these fields all the time.
01:39:36.000And if something happens to the mother, Especially if she gets attacked by a coyote or something along those lines and then the the babies just get chewed up by the by the combines Yeah, there's another interesting question here too, which is more around like privilege and Again,
01:39:54.000like whether we see ourselves as part of the ecosystem and the food cycle or as separate from it, right?
01:40:00.000Do you think about like Native American?
01:40:02.000Or traditional hunter-gatherer, or even contemporary people living in, let's say, in Afghanistan, and all they have is a goat, you know, or a poor family in India who has access to a backyard cow.
01:40:17.000Should they not eat, you know, milk and butter and those animal foods because of a moral or ethical argument against that?
01:40:28.000It seems like an argument coming from a tremendous place of privilege for us to say that the choices that they make are somehow wrong or immoral because we can afford to make decisions.
01:40:44.000In defense of vegans, I never hear that argument, honestly.
01:40:47.000I think I hear the argument that in America today, you have the choice.
01:40:52.000And in westernized countries, you have the choice.
01:40:54.000And so that you can choose to contribute less to suffering, which I think ideologically makes a lot of sense.
01:41:01.000The problem is when you deal with the reality of it that you've sort of described about large-scale agriculture, you're not I mean, you're not immune to the suffering of animals and the death.
01:41:52.000I think there is—you can say we have this—because we have that privilege, we have the imperative not to cause more suffering.
01:41:58.000But I think what I get out of looking at those cultures is it's more clear to me how intertwined with nature and the natural food systems that humans are in those circumstances.
01:42:09.000They're less removed from— The basic cycle of life.
01:42:13.000And it seems natural for the Maasai pastoralist people to drink the blood of the cows and drink the milk and eat the meat because that's inexorably intertwined to their culture and their way of life.
01:42:32.000I think this is a really nuanced, complex topic, and there's a lot more to it than typically shows up in internet debates that just go back and forth.
01:42:48.000But at the end of the day, from what I've seen as a clinician working with a lot of patients, a lot of ex-vegans, a lot of ex-vegetarians, is that Some people can pull it off for a relatively long period of time, and I think this is because they have the genes and pre-existing nutrient status that allows them to make those conversions of the less active nutrients to the more active forms,
01:43:14.000Then you see someone who goes on a vegan diet and falls apart within a couple of months.
01:43:18.000And this is the person who does not have the genes to make those, you know, their poor converter.
01:43:24.000And they also probably had pre-existing nutrient deficiencies, which made them less able to make those conversions.
01:43:30.000And so this kind of solves the question of, or addresses the question, you hear some people say, well, why does that person, that person does a vegan diet and he's pretty healthy, you know, like your rich role.
01:43:50.000The difference in the way human beings respond to various foods can obviously be exhibited really quickly and easily with allergies, food allergies.
01:44:19.000There's a lot of different things that show the biodiversity of just human beings.
01:44:24.000When we come from different parts of the world, our ancestors came from different parts of the world.
01:44:28.000They developed and evolved under different diets.
01:44:32.000That's where I think paleo has maybe been less successful as a concept than it could have been otherwise.
01:44:43.000I really believe there's no one-size-fits-all approach to diet or life in general.
01:44:49.000But if you take two different people, for example, a person who's primarily sedentary, works in an office, 60 pounds overweight, pre-diabetic, You know, not doing really any physical activity.
01:45:04.000And then you take someone like Michael Phelps, who's super athlete training, you know, burning calories every day.
01:45:11.000It's clear to me that they're going to need a completely different dietary approach.
01:45:16.000Even if we talk about within a certain template or, you know, choice of foods, they're...
01:45:21.000Michael Phelps is going to need a lot more carbohydrate.
01:45:23.000He's going to need a lot higher calorie intake in general.
01:45:59.000Yeah, really important when you're talking about people like ultramarathon runners or people like Michael Phelps that are just burning off massive amounts of calories.
01:46:07.000When you think about how much energy is involved in those sprints that he's doing across the pool and the training for those, which is just unbelievably grueling.
01:46:16.000Yeah, I read this thing about him eating like several pizzas at night and you look at him and he's shredded.
01:46:27.000I think that is very important also when you're talking about sedentary lifestyles contributing to diseases and factors like high blood pressure and clogging of the arteries.
01:46:39.000Your body is less likely to be healthy when you're not doing much with it, period.
01:47:20.000Coming back to people like Michael or Rich, I think Rich could probably eat a lot of different diets and still be phenomenal.
01:47:32.000I've had Rich on the podcast before and he sort of explained his transition to being a vegan and it came from being really unhealthy and eating a terrible piss-poor diet to Eating super healthy.
01:48:07.000It's one of those things that there's an ideological wall that cannot be crossed, and so no one even wants to look at the possibility of it being physically beneficial.
01:48:18.000You just say, that is not an option, I am a vegan, and this is what I do.
01:48:40.000So early on, I mean, the history is kind of important to see how, because it illustrates a number of principles that we've been talking about.
01:48:48.000So early research, you know, they looked at traditional Inuit people and said, wow, these people don't really have heart disease.
01:48:54.000What is it about their diet that could explain this?
01:48:58.000Wow, they eat mostly seal blubber, and they have enormous intake of omega-3 fats.
01:49:07.000And then they start doing research and they find that there is an inverse association between omega-3 fat consumption, like in seafood, and cardiovascular disease risk.
01:49:18.000In other words, people who eat more fish have fewer heart attacks and die of cardiovascular disease, much less.
01:49:25.000So then it's like, okay, why don't we then give people fish oil supplements?
01:49:31.000And so they give people fish oil supplements.
01:49:33.000They do some research on that that's short term and find that, yes, there do appear to be some benefits from fish oil supplementation short term.
01:49:45.000Over a longer period of time and meta-analysis of longer-term studies, they find that the benefits of fish oil have probably been significantly overstated and that, in fact, in some cases, high doses of fish oil for an extended period of time actually appear to cause harm.
01:50:03.000And so there are a few important principles here.
01:50:06.000Number one is The folly of looking at one super isolated, unusual population, like the traditional Inuit, who live in a really marginalized environment, and looking at their diet and then extrapolating that to us,
01:50:23.000who don't live in the Arctic and don't have their diet or lifestyle.
01:50:31.000And interestingly enough, some recent studies have found that the Inuit have certain genetic adaptations that allow them to thrive on very high doses of omega-3, which we don't have.
01:50:45.000So that illustrates the problem with saying, oh, this works for the Inuit, so it should work for us.
01:50:51.000It doesn't actually work that way, and now we know why.
01:51:16.000So, yeah, I think what is becoming more clear is that eating fish is good.
01:51:23.000Taking really high doses of fish oil for a long period of time may not be.
01:51:27.000Now what were the negative health benefits, or negative health effects rather?
01:51:31.000Well, an increase in cardiovascular disease risk in some cases, an increase in some inflammatory markers.
01:51:37.000The thing to understand about omega-3 fats is they're very fragile.
01:51:42.000So fats have different levels of susceptibility to something called oxidative damage, which means And they combine with oxygen and the fat becomes damaged and rancid and then can be harmful.
01:51:56.000That's a brief description without going into the science.
01:52:00.000And so saturated fats, because they are saturated with Hydrogen atoms are not susceptible to oxidative damage, and they're relatively stable.
01:52:11.000They can tolerate the application of temperature, like when you cook with it, or light, you know, so if they're stored in a clear jar, they're not going to decompose and become rancid.
01:52:22.000Whereas polyunsaturated fats are lacking in hydrogen atoms.
01:52:27.000They become more susceptible to oxidative stress.
01:52:29.000And the most unsaturated fats are the long-chain omega-3 fats.
01:52:38.000You never hear anyone saying that you should cook with fish oil.
01:52:41.000If you cook with it, you'll damage the fat, so it'll become rancid and oxidized.
01:52:46.000This is why fish oil is stored in opaque bottles to protect it from light, because if light hits it, it will oxidize and become rancid.
01:52:54.000And the suspicion is that if we We take these high doses of unsaturated fat, we actually increase the risk of oxidative stress, which can cause inflammation, which in turn is the root of all chronic disease.
01:53:10.000So what I advise my patients is just eat fish.
01:53:15.000And if for some reason you can't eat fish or won't eat fish, then taking some fish oil, I prefer cod liver oil because it has vitamins A and D in addition to EPA and DHA. But at a relatively low dose, a moderate dose,
01:53:31.000maybe like a teaspoon a day, rather than going for like 20 grams or 15 grams a day of fish oil.
01:53:39.000So the real issue is in the oxidative stress.
01:53:44.000So the potential of something being rancid sort of mitigates or diminishes all the positive effects from it.
01:53:53.000But if you can be assured that there was no rancid quality to it?
01:53:58.000Well, no, because it can become damaged in your body.
01:54:15.000And when you get the fish oil, you're instructed to put it in the refrigerator and preserve it.
01:54:19.000But inside of your body, the fats can become oxidized too.
01:54:23.000And historically, when you look at traditional diets, you see that the majority of fat comes from saturated or monounsaturated fat.
01:54:32.000And there's only a small amount of fat that's polyunsaturated that they would get from eating nuts or seeds, which are pretty high in polyunsaturated fats, olives, olives.
01:54:46.000Avocados has some polyunsaturated fats, omega-6s.
01:54:50.000But there wasn't really an opportunity for them to be getting really high doses of polyunsaturated fat that you would get from taking multiple fish oil capsules in a day.
01:55:06.000And that's also actually why industrialized seed oils are bad for us.
01:55:11.000You know, things like corn oil, soybean oil, sunflower and safflower oil, like all the stuff that's in chips and crackers and cookies and restaurant foods primarily, is that when those oils get heated, they become rancid and those rancid oils can be harmful.
01:55:28.000Wow, that is really important information.
01:55:32.000You know, it's also interesting, you're bringing up cod liver oil, like that's more like sort of ancient knowledge.
01:57:37.000So you eat a burger and egg yolks and that just gradually will build up as gunk in your arteries and eventually those arteries clog and the occlusion of the arteries is what causes a heart attack because blood can't get through to the heart and it causes an ischemic event,
01:58:16.000There was actually just a study published that reviewed all of the randomized clinical trials that looked at substituting polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat.
01:58:26.000So they took away people's butter and gave them corn oil and soybean oil, which I don't know how they found the people that were willing to take that trade.
01:58:50.000And so they reviewed 10 studies, and they found that only one supported this notion.
01:58:56.000One of 10 supported this notion that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat was good for you.
01:59:02.000And even that study was flawed because...
01:59:05.000A much higher percentage of people in the control group were smokers and had some other characteristics that would have made them more susceptible to having heart disease, independent of whatever was going on with their diet.
01:59:28.000I mean, I guess it depends on whether you think those researchers were trying to get a particular outcome or whether you think it was just poor design.
01:59:37.000So the early studies suggested that if you ate more saturated fat and cholesterol, the cholesterol level of your blood would go up.
01:59:47.000And then everyone knew that high cholesterol in your blood causes heart attacks.
01:59:51.000So if A plus B... And B plus C equals C, then A equals C, right?
02:00:00.000But that turned out to not actually be true on two counts.
02:00:03.000Number one, when they just looked at the direct relationship between saturated fat intake and cholesterol intake and heart disease, just taking blood cholesterol completely out of the equation.
02:00:15.000Like, let's forget about the mechanism.
02:00:17.000Let's just see if people who eat more fat and cholesterol actually have more heart attacks.
02:00:21.000When they did those studies, No difference.
02:00:25.000People who eat more fat and more cholesterol did not have more heart attacks than people who ate less.
02:00:32.000And then more recent studies have found that on average saturated, certainly dietary cholesterol intake has nothing to do with serum cholesterol levels for the vast, for the majority of people.
02:00:43.00070% of patients won't see any change in their diet, in their blood cholesterol levels By changing their dietary cholesterol levels, one way or the other.
02:00:53.000And how do you count for the other 30?
02:00:54.000They're called hyper-responders, and that may be genetic.
02:00:59.000So they may have a certain ApoE genotype that predisposes them to be more susceptible to the effects of dietary cholesterol.
02:01:07.000They may be hyper-absorbers of dietary cholesterol, so they actually absorb more through their gut than a typical person.
02:01:13.000But even those hyper-responders, they found that both their total cholesterol went up, but that was because both their good and bad cholesterol went up at the same time.
02:01:25.000So the effects were seen as being not clinically relevant, because although you saw an increase in the total, it was driven by Good going up as well as the bad going up a little bit.
02:01:37.000So it wasn't thought to be clinically significant.
02:01:39.000Is it possible that, like what we were talking about before, long-term studies would reveal more?
02:01:45.000Because we were talking about certain nutrients, when you eliminate them from the diet, it takes a long time to find the effect.
02:01:52.000Or what we were talking about with fish oil, that maybe if a long-term study showed increase in dietary cholesterol, you could see negative effects?
02:02:01.000Yeah, I think long-term studies could certainly reveal different effects.
02:02:06.000I think the biggest question here is, should we be looking at blood cholesterol levels as the sole arbiter of whether something is good or bad for us?
02:02:50.000Should they go back to the standard American diet that they were eating?
02:02:54.000I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can you explain what is the difference between bad cholesterol and good cholesterol to the people that are listening to this?
02:03:00.000Yeah, so this is a really big oversimplification.
02:03:05.000And it was created, I think, by the drug companies to make it seem very simple.
02:03:51.000So imagine your bloodstream is like a highway and the cars on the highway are the lipoproteins and the passengers in the car are the cholesterol that the lipoproteins carry around the body.
02:04:06.000Lipoproteins also carry fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D and triglycerides and other things that our body actually needs.
02:04:13.000So they're like a taxi service that carries cholesterol and fats and other nutrients all around the body and takes them to the cells where they're actually used.
02:04:22.000So for years it was thought that the amount of cholesterol inside the lipoproteins was the big issue.
02:04:30.000And that's what's measured when you go and you get a lipid panel and you get your total cholesterol, your LDL, and your HCL cholesterol.
02:04:36.000They're essentially measuring the passengers in the cars, like how much cholesterol is inside of those particles.
02:04:42.000And that was thought to be the driving factor for risk for heart disease.
02:04:47.000We now know That it's not really the cholesterol inside of the particles that makes the difference.
02:04:55.000So to come back to this analogy, if you have a highway and you've got a whole bunch of cars on the highway, it's more likely that one is going to go off the road and crash, right?
02:05:07.000And they'll crash into the artery, the endothelial wall of the artery, and they'll damage the artery, and that's what initiates this whole process of plaque formation that eventually leads to heart disease.
02:05:34.000So what we're talking about here is the number of particles.
02:05:39.000And all of the things that I talked about earlier that raise cholesterol, what I was actually referring to is things that raise LDL particles.
02:05:47.000I just didn't want to go into all of this nuance at the risk of confusing people.
02:05:52.000But LDL versus HDL. Yeah, so you have LDL particles and you have HDL particles.
02:05:58.000LDL stands for low-density lipoprotein, HDL for high-density lipoprotein.
02:06:02.000And traditionally, LDL particles have been viewed as bad.
02:06:08.000And HDL particles have been viewed as good.
02:06:11.000And there's definitely something to that.
02:06:14.000The single most important risk marker from a...
02:06:19.000From a blood lipid standpoint, or the two most, would be LDL particle number and another lipoprotein called lipoprotein little a.
02:06:30.000So coming back to our analogy, if you have a whole lot of LDL particles or a whole lot of cars on the road, there's more of a chance that one of them is going to damage the artery, and then that whole process of plaque formation is going to Is going to occur.
02:06:47.000And that's what increases the risk of heart disease.
02:06:49.000So the name of the game is to keep your LDL particle number down.
02:06:56.000And when we talk about the things that increase it, you know, going back to early in the interview, genetics do play a role.
02:07:15.000Once again, we have to look at our whole health, our diet, how we sleep, how we live, whether we have infections or inflammation or gut stuff going on.
02:07:25.000And I have many patients, often guys who come to me, their only complaint is that they have high cholesterol.
02:07:33.000Now, I don't know if they really are 100% healthy and that's their only complaint.
02:08:03.000So this, again, this is another one of those things.
02:08:06.000It's way more nuanced than it's made out to be.
02:08:09.000And it is true that LDL particles play an important role in how heart disease develops, but this dominant The paradigm notion that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol are the main things that influence our LDL particle number is false.
02:08:28.000My friend Anthony Bourdain was taking statins because he used to eat a lot.
02:09:10.000The fastest way you can normalize your cholesterol profile and really your LDL particle number, which is even more important, and your blood pressure is weight loss.
02:09:24.000It's just there's a whole constellation of metabolic changes that happens when we become overweight that include insulin resistance and leptin resistance.
02:09:36.000And this creates like a milieu that leads to dyslipidemia, which is this...
02:09:43.000So, each particle, so we talked about this, the cars on the road, a car can only hold so much, so many passengers, right?
02:09:52.000And if you have a lot of fats, the fats will take up all the space in the cars and you will need more cars to carry a given amount of cholesterol around the body because we need cholesterol for sex hormone production and other things that you mentioned earlier in the show.
02:10:11.000So if you have a lot of triglyceride, a lot of fat in your liver, the liver will make more LDL particles.
02:10:18.000Because it needs more particles to carry the amount of cholesterol that needs to get around the body.
02:10:24.000That might have been too much detail, but that's why when you're overweight and you have more fat, you actually have a higher LDL particle number.
02:10:33.000And when you lose weight, the converse happens.
02:10:36.000You need fewer particles to transport the same amount of cholesterol.
02:10:59.000The terminology of bad cholesterol versus good cholesterol is kind of problematic, isn't it?
02:11:05.000Because doesn't LDL play some sort of beneficial roles?
02:11:09.000Like, you don't want to eliminate LDL. No.
02:11:12.000I mean, some have argued that it should be zero, but I don't think that that makes much sense biologically.
02:11:18.000One role that it plays is it's antimicrobial.
02:11:21.000LDL particles are antimicrobial, so that if toxins do get into the bloodstream, like lipopolysaccharide, for example, LDL particles will be manufactured to deal with that.
02:11:33.000And that's one reason why chronic infections increase LDL particle number, because the body's attempting to deal with that infection and the toxins.
02:11:42.000As I mentioned as well, the LDL particles are like a taxi service that carry nutrients to different parts of the body.
02:11:49.000Fat-soluble vitamins and fats like triglycerides and antioxidants too that we need to function properly.
02:11:55.000So I think it's a question of balance.
02:11:58.000We want to keep our LDL particle in a range that contributes to health and doesn't increase our risk substantially for heart disease.
02:12:07.000Yeah, it's one of those things that it's so oversimplified in the way people describe them that it sort of leads people to think, well, I just need to take a statin.
02:12:19.000And this is the way it's being described to people that have these issues by doctors and these very brief seven-minute meetings that they're having with their doctors before the next person in line gets in.
02:12:35.000And look, we're having this conversation, and I'm a person who obviously, I didn't go to school for this, and I'm trying to take all this stuff in over a period of years of reading and watching documentaries and talking to people like you and Dr. Rhonda Patrick.
02:12:54.000And, you know, so many different people, Rob Wolf and so many different people that are experts in nutrition and the way the body processes nutrients, and I'm still baffled by a massive amount of it, given the many,
02:13:09.000many, many, many, many hours I've been paying attention to it.
02:13:21.000You realize that you could spend your lifetime learning about this and you would still have many lifetimes to go before you felt like you really could master it.
02:13:32.000Yeah, I think Dennis McKenna had a great way of describing learning something and realizing how little you learn, that when the bonfire of understanding increases, it illuminates the surface layer of ignorance greater.
02:14:16.000There's a real lag time between what's in the scientific literature that anyone can access now.
02:14:24.000The average person doesn't have access to the full text, but anyone can go to PubMed.gov and pull up abstracts from the hundreds of thousands of scientific studies that are published.
02:14:34.000And you will see, if you do that, if you're inclined to do that, You know, the vast majority of recent research suggests that dietary saturated fat and dietary cholesterol are not major risk factors for heart disease.
02:14:50.000But the time it will take for that knowledge to percolate down to the average primary care provider is not Weeks, or months, or even years, it's probably decades.
02:15:01.000Because that's how long it took for the idea that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol were bad for us to get hammered into our heads.
02:15:12.000And it didn't really sink in, I don't think, until the 80s or the 90s, you know, with the boneless chicken, skinless chicken breast, and the bagels with no butter, cream cheese, and the, you know, like, that was my generation, like that, you know, pasta and carb loading and that whole thing.
02:15:27.000That was 30 years after this whole campaign started.
02:15:31.000And unfortunately, I think it's going to take another couple of decades.
02:15:35.000Hopefully it will go faster this time.
02:15:37.000And then there are some signs that it is going faster.
02:15:40.000But the average primary care provider, they're seeing patients 30, 40 hours a week.
02:16:09.000And they're based on studies that were done 50 or, you know, 40 or 50 years ago.
02:16:14.000So this is a huge problem in medical education is that the current research, you know, the public policy and the standard of care is not based on the most recent research and the peer-reviewed evidence that we have available to us now.
02:16:30.000It's based often on research that's decades old.
02:16:36.000People have these podcasts and they go over them three or four times and start taking notes and just try to make these changes in their life.
02:16:42.000If you wanted to give someone advice as to what is the best way to proceed, if someone's listening to this podcast and they say, okay, obviously I really need to know what's going on in my gut.
02:16:53.000I need to know what's going on with my overall blood lipids, my health, my nutrient density.
02:17:30.000Vegetables that come out of the ground.
02:17:32.000Vegetables that come out of the ground and fruits and nuts and seeds and some, even, you know, some tubers of sweet potatoes.
02:17:38.000I think white potatoes get a bad rap and they're fine for most people as long as they're not, you know, fried in crappy oil.
02:17:45.000And the skins are actually The skins are good for you.
02:17:47.000And eat some good pasture-raised, organic, if possible, animal products and wild-caught fish, if you can do that.
02:17:56.000And I really think that that would solve like 80% of people's problems.
02:18:02.000If you're already doing that or you've already got that down and you're still having additional issues, this is where functional medicine comes in, which we've kind of touched on at various points along the way.
02:18:13.000But this is a relatively new and fast-growing branch of medicine that is focused on addressing the underlying cause of illness, you know, taking the pebble out of the shoe instead of just suppressing symptoms.
02:18:26.000And there are several training organizations out there.
02:18:30.000Institute for Functional Medicine has been around the longest and is pretty well known.
02:18:35.000I have Kresser Institute, which just started.
02:18:39.000We have 200 doctors and other healthcare professionals in the program now.
02:18:44.000And you can go to these websites and look for practitioners that practice functional medicine.
02:18:51.000Unfortunately, it's not yet at the level where there's one on every corner, like a yoga studio.
02:19:00.000For example, Mark Hyman, who's a nine-time, number one New York Times bestselling author, doctor, health expert, he recently was tapped to start the Center for Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic,
02:19:16.000which is a very prestigious medical institution.
02:19:19.000And they already have a six month wait list and it's just, it's blowing up.
02:19:23.000So I think the tide is turning and pretty soon a lot of people will be seeing functional medicine practitioners.
02:19:30.000Um, but these are the practitioners that are likely to be knowledgeable about how to properly test your gut, how to assess your HPA axis, your stress tolerance and, and, um, Resilience, how to look at your functional, your blood chemistry panel.
02:19:46.000So look at your blood sugar, your lipids, your metabolic function, your vitamin D, your B12 levels.
02:19:52.000Take all that information and then create like a customized individual plan for you based on all of your lab test results.
02:20:20.000And it also can be more expensive because there's a lot of lab work that's done up front to try to figure out what's causing the problems.
02:20:29.000But I would argue that it's less expensive over the long term because when you address the root of the problem, the treatment is going to be way more effective and it's going to be way longer lasting.
02:20:43.000And I think I can say from my own personal experience from someone who's changed their diet and Eliminated almost all sugar in terms of like added sugar very very little do I take in a daily basis I've eliminated almost all simple carbs My energy levels are so much better.
02:21:02.000I don't crash like I used to I feel like overall my health is better.
02:21:08.000I talked about my Increase over the last few years of probiotics made a giant benefit.
02:21:15.000It's made a huge impact in terms of my ability to recover from illnesses, my ability to avoid illnesses.
02:21:25.000Which is like the airplanes are just like disease vector labs.
02:21:27.000You know, but I survived them so much better than a lot of my peers who don't take care of themselves the same way It just it makes a big difference in that overall quality of life difference is so significant and it has such an impact on your productivity on your energy levels your happiness because you're not constantly fighting diseases and illnesses and that is another thing that people I think ignore or maybe you are Not really Aware of is the
02:21:57.000function of your health and your immune system and your gut biome and how it translates into your actual personality.
02:22:10.000And it does that in a couple of different ways.
02:22:12.000One is just the actual chemical influence that we talked about.
02:22:16.000Your gut bacteria, how it influences your brain chemistry and can affect your mood.
02:22:21.000But the other, I think, is more Related to just how you experience your life when you feel good versus when you feel crappy.
02:22:32.000Like you pointed out, your productivity increases, you're just happier, you have more time to be effective, and you're probably able to be more present with your kids if you're in a relationship with your partner.