The Joe Rogan Experience - September 05, 2016


Joe Rogan Experience #842 - Chris Kresser

Topics
health promotion in medicine advertising manipulation evolutionary programming cravings gut-brain connection leaky gut ideological arguments genetic conversion of omega-3 to EPA/DHA food system change mineral deficiency in soil and diet omega-3 conversion inefficiency mollusks nutrition dietary approaches for athletes lipoproteins and cholesterol particles weight loss and cholesterol medical education and research lag eat real food functional medicine effectiveness
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Chris Kresser
Mentioned
Michael Phelps Rich Roll Kefir Chris Charles Seifert Andy Dick Chicken Anthony Bourdain Tony Hinchcliffe Ian Spreadbury Rhonda Patrick Dennis McKenna Joel Wallach Paul Stamets Mark Sisson Trader Joe Sam Harris Ari Shafir Vitamin K2 Mark Hyman and 11 more
Joe Rogan Experience - Fight Companion - September 3, 2016 Joe Rogan Experience #843 - Tony Hinchcliffe

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 24 minutes

Words per minute

162.47

Word count

23,461

Sentence count

1,690

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

52

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 No.
00:00:01.000 Three, two, one.
00:00:05.000 I always wonder what you base your countdown on, Jamie.
00:00:08.000 You got two things going on.
00:00:10.000 Is it an accurate countdown, or you're just roughly guessing?
00:00:12.000 No.
00:00:13.000 It's like a five count because we have a connection to the thing and then a thing and a thing.
00:00:18.000 Okay.
00:00:19.000 Well, we're live.
00:00:20.000 Chris, what's up?
00:00:21.000 Good to be here.
00:00:22.000 Thanks for doing this, man.
00:00:23.000 My pleasure.
00:00:23.000 We were just talking about the term paleo.
00:00:27.000 I put up that we're going to talk about nutrition and diet and all that good stuff.
00:00:33.000 And then somebody went to your page and it says paleo and lifestyle expert. 0.99
00:00:38.000 As soon as you have that word paleo, people go, Oh, fuck. 1.00
00:00:42.000 Serious baggage. 1.00
00:00:44.000 It's true.
00:00:45.000 I mean, every day I think about, oh, I kind of wish I never would have used this word.
00:00:51.000 Yeah, well, Mark Sisson went with primal.
00:00:54.000 He uses that primal blueprint.
00:00:58.000 That's his sort of distinction of it.
00:01:01.000 I like that.
00:01:02.000 I mean, they're both just words is what it really comes down to.
00:01:06.000 I wrote a book that has the word paleo in it, and I thought about it even before I published the book.
00:01:12.000 I was thinking, you know, what I'm talking about is not really what people mean when they say paleo.
00:01:18.000 It's a lot more inclusive and a lot less dogmatic.
00:01:22.000 If I use this word, there's going to be pros and cons.
00:01:25.000 The pro is people recognize it.
00:01:28.000 It's one word that points at a whole way of thinking.
00:01:32.000 I could have called it the nutrient-dense ancestral nutrition book, but that's not too catchy.
00:01:40.000 There would have been like five people that read it.
00:01:45.000 But on the other hand, paleo has a ton of baggage, as you said.
00:01:49.000 People get a certain idea when they hear that word.
00:01:52.000 And for some, it's good.
00:01:53.000 For others, it's kind of neutral.
00:01:55.000 They don't know anything about it.
00:01:56.000 And then for still others, it's like instant turnoff and, you know, why should we be emulating our paleo ancestors' lifestyles?
00:02:04.000 They all died when they were 30. This is stupid. 1.00
00:02:06.000 Right. 1.00
00:02:06.000 You know, why should we do this? 1.00
00:02:08.000 So, it's a totally loaded term.
00:02:10.000 I 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.
00:02:18.000 Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
00:02:20.000 And also, there was the issue with the term paleolithic, like using the term paleo.
00:02:25.000 And then there were some articles written about the actual diet of the paleolithic people, where they ate everything they got a hold of.
00:02:32.000 And if they got grains, they ate a ton of grains.
00:02:34.000 Yeah.
00:02:34.000 Absolutely.
00:02:35.000 So, I mean, we know they weren't eating cheese doodles and drinking Biggulps, right?
00:02:39.000 So it's kind of easier to talk about paleo in terms of what it didn't include.
00:02:44.000 Right.
00:02:44.000 So 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.
00:02:57.000 I think the top six foods now are grain-based desserts, sugar-sweetened beverages, pizza, Chicken dishes, which are primarily fried chicken nuggets. 0.98
00:03:11.000 Forgetting the other two, but it's all crap. 0.96
00:03:13.000 That's the primary foods of America? 0.99
00:03:15.000 Those are the six primary foods of Americans. 0.94
00:03:18.000 It's just completely nutrient-depleted junk.
00:03:22.000 So we can all agree that our Paleolithic ancestors weren't eating those foods.
00:03:26.000 Yeah.
00:03:27.000 And then we know it's pretty clear that they were eating a lot of meat.
00:03:31.000 I'm sure we'll talk about that.
00:03:33.000 Meat 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.
00:03:42.000 So those are the two extremes, if we bracket it.
00:03:46.000 And then things like grains and legumes were more of a question mark.
00:03:50.000 Like, there's some recent evidence that shows that That legume consumption was probably pretty more common than we thought amongst our paleolithic ancestors.
00:03:59.000 They came later onto the scene, but if they were there, they probably ate them.
00:04:05.000 Is that based on geography, like where legumes are present?
00:04:08.000 Exactly.
00:04:08.000 And what other food sources were available.
00:04:11.000 It's pretty clear that they weren't the first option.
00:04:13.000 You 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.
00:04:21.000 Really?
00:04:22.000 Yeah.
00:04:22.000 Yeah, we have it backwards.
00:04:24.000 I mean, when you look at traditional hunter-gatherers and the way they eat animals, they go just like wild animals do.
00:04:29.000 When a wild animal kills another animal, it goes straight for the organs.
00:04:33.000 Right.
00:04:33.000 And that's because the organs are way more nutrient-dense than the muscle meats.
00:04:38.000 And so traditional peoples, they knew the same thing, even without having access to science and knowing even what a nutrient was.
00:04:45.000 They 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.
00:04:58.000 But did they eat the muscle meats at all?
00:04:59.000 I mean, it seems to me that...
00:05:00.000 They probably did.
00:05:01.000 They're probably hungry, right?
00:05:02.000 Yeah, they used every part of the animal.
00:05:04.000 But it was clear that the organs were the favored thing to eat.
00:05:10.000 And how do we know those?
00:05:12.000 Just anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers.
00:05:16.000 Contemporary hunter-gatherers, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
00:05:19.000 There aren't many extant hunter-gatherer groups that we can even study now because they've all been basically assimilated.
00:05:30.000 But, 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.
00:05:43.000 And 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.
00:05:55.000 They ate a much broader variety of plant species than we eat.
00:06:00.000 Across the world, most people eat four to eight plant species in their diet.
00:06:06.000 Traditional hunter-gatherer groups, it was over 100. Wow.
00:06:09.000 Just whatever was edible.
00:06:11.000 Huge diversity of plants.
00:06:13.000 And 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.
00:06:23.000 And again, they weren't eating the foods that we are now producing.
00:06:30.000 We're eating way more than we're eating anything else.
00:06:33.000 And when I say we, I mean just Americans or people living in the industrialized world in general.
00:06:38.000 And that's a problem because of this concept of a species-appropriate diet.
00:06:44.000 We know that all organisms evolve in a certain environment, and they're adapted to survive in that environment.
00:06:51.000 And 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.
00:07:03.000 Yeah 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...
00:07:25.000 When someone gets diagnosed with an illness, almost immediately there's a drug prescribed to treat the illness, but there's not, like, sort of...
00:07:37.000 Backing up of the process to find out, okay, how did you get to this position?
00:07:41.000 What is your diet like?
00:07:42.000 Are you getting enough sleep?
00:07:44.000 What kind of stress are you under?
00:07:46.000 Is your body exposed to toxins on a regular basis?
00:07:50.000 Do you work with paint?
00:07:52.000 You know what I mean?
00:07:52.000 Are you near something that's really bad for you to breathe?
00:07:56.000 Yeah, I mean, the analogy I like to use is you have a rock in your shoe and it's making your foot hurt.
00:08:01.000 You could take Advil, right?
00:08:03.000 And you'll probably feel less pain, but you could also just take your shoe off and dump out the rock.
00:08:11.000 That would be a better idea, right?
00:08:12.000 I think we can all agree on that.
00:08:14.000 And our medical system is the equivalent of taking Advil when you have that rock in your shoe.
00:08:20.000 If you have high blood pressure, you go to the doctor, you'll get a medication to lower it.
00:08:24.000 If you have high cholesterol, you'll be prescribed a statin.
00:08:27.000 And 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.
00:08:35.000 And the problem with that is, if you take the high blood pressure medication, it lowers your blood pressure, but then you have no libido.
00:08:45.000 And so, what's the solution there?
00:08:48.000 Another drug that increases your libido.
00:08:50.000 You get Viagra.
00:08:51.000 But then Viagra, you know, causes some other side effect.
00:08:54.000 And then you get prescribed another drug to deal with that side effect.
00:08:58.000 And then by the time you're 65 or 70, you're taking seven or eight medications.
00:09:02.000 And the statistics actually bear this out.
00:09:05.000 You know, most people at that age are taking...
00:09:08.000 Two handfuls of pills just to, you know, to be able to get by.
00:09:14.000 And that's really not the way that human beings evolved and are designed for.
00:09:20.000 It also becomes a problem because there's a lot of money being made on selling those things.
00:09:26.000 Absolutely.
00:09:26.000 And the pharmaceutical industry is this gigantic...
00:09:39.000 Absolutely.
00:09:41.000 And they realized a while back that the big money in drugs is not in treating sick people, it's in treating healthy people.
00:09:50.000 Because there are way more healthy people than there are sick people.
00:09:53.000 And 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.
00:10:04.000 So take statin drugs, for example.
00:10:07.000 You 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.
00:10:15.000 So, 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.
00:10:29.000 And that's where the real money is made.
00:10:32.000 Wow.
00:10:33.000 So people that don't have really health consequences of this.
00:10:38.000 Like if you have high cholesterol.
00:10:42.000 Now, high cholesterol is a lot of times associated with diet.
00:10:46.000 Yeah.
00:10:47.000 But...
00:10:48.000 The reality of cholesterol and cholesterol-rich diets and blood lipids is that it doesn't really move the needle, does it?
00:10:55.000 Yeah, it's so much more complex than that.
00:10:57.000 What is the cause?
00:10:58.000 If a person has high cholesterol, what are the potential causes?
00:11:01.000 So diet is definitely one.
00:11:03.000 Genetics or another.
00:11:04.000 Just certain genetic polymorphisms that make you more susceptible to having high cholesterol.
00:11:10.000 But there are a number of causes that are lesser known.
00:11:13.000 So poor thyroid function is one cause because thyroid hormones are required to clear LDL cholesterol from the circulation.
00:11:20.000 So 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.
00:11:30.000 And 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.
00:11:48.000 Disrupted gut microbiome and leaky gut, which I know you've talked about before on the show with other guests.
00:11:55.000 LDL is actually an antimicrobial substance, so the liver will make more LDL particles if there's endotoxins getting into the bloodstream from the gut.
00:12:07.000 Infections can raise cholesterol, LDL, and toxins can do that too.
00:12:13.000 So there's studies showing mercury toxicity, for example, can raise cholesterol.
00:12:17.000 So these are all the potential underlying causes of high cholesterol.
00:12:21.000 So 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.
00:12:29.000 And if their lipids normalize after that, great.
00:12:32.000 You know, we've done our work, and then they avoid taking...
00:12:36.000 A drug that they never needed to take in the first place.
00:12:39.000 If 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.
00:12:54.000 The absence or presence of other risk factors like high blood pressure and inflammation.
00:13:01.000 So it's really complex.
00:13:03.000 And 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.
00:13:11.000 And if you're lower than that, you don't.
00:13:14.000 I can't think of a good comparison right now, but it's ridiculously oversimplified.
00:13:19.000 And 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.
00:13:35.000 That has some sort of an effect on it as well, right?
00:13:38.000 Absolutely.
00:13:38.000 Cholesterol is a repair substance.
00:13:40.000 So 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.
00:13:52.000 Lifestyle choices definitely play a role.
00:13:57.000 I 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.
00:14:10.000 We don't really have healthcare, we have disease management.
00:14:13.000 That's a fundamental difference that we need to understand.
00:14:17.000 If 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.
00:14:29.000 I mean, that happens in trauma, accidents, and things like that.
00:14:33.000 But usually we progress along that spectrum.
00:14:36.000 And 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.
00:14:44.000 You know, we have these drugs that suppress symptoms.
00:14:46.000 We have pretty amazing trauma care.
00:14:49.000 Like, if I get hit by a bus, I want to go to the hospital, you know?
00:14:52.000 We'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. 0.70
00:14:59.000 Conventional 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.
00:15:08.000 And it's really bad at promoting health.
00:15:11.000 In fact, in most medical school textbooks, there's not even a definition of health.
00:15:15.000 It's just basically the absence of disease.
00:15:18.000 But I think we can do better than that.
00:15:21.000 Yeah, it just seems logical.
00:15:24.000 I 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,
00:15:39.000 but it's not common at all.
00:15:42.000 Not common at all.
00:15:43.000 It does seem common sense to me.
00:15:45.000 And I think part of the problem, I mean, you hinted at it before with Big Pharma.
00:15:50.000 It's like there's little incentive for Big Pharma to promote this kind of approach.
00:15:54.000 Why?
00:15:56.000 What's their interest in doing that?
00:15:57.000 I mean, it means less sales for them.
00:16:00.000 They're for-profit corporations that are publicly owned, and it's in their best interest of the shareholders to do things that...
00:16:09.000 Grow the company and grow the business, right?
00:16:11.000 Unlimited growth, really.
00:16:12.000 That's how it is.
00:16:13.000 That's how our system is.
00:16:16.000 That's a whole other discussion, but it's problematic when it comes to healthcare because...
00:16:25.000 The 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?
00:16:40.000 And then they do a whole bunch of testing.
00:16:43.000 They don't just test your blood pressure, they don't just test your cholesterol, they test your gut.
00:16:47.000 They test your HPA axis, which is what governs your whole stress response.
00:16:52.000 What is HPA? Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
00:16:56.000 So it's basically the connection between the brain and the adrenal glands, and it governs our stress response.
00:17:03.000 So there are ways that we can test it to see how you're being affected by stress.
00:17:08.000 So if you're...
00:17:10.000 Under a lot of stress, that's causing hormonal changes in your body.
00:17:13.000 It can affect every aspect of your health.
00:17:15.000 We can test for this.
00:17:16.000 So 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.
00:17:27.000 So take someone with full-fledged type 2 diabetes.
00:17:30.000 Depending 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.
00:17:41.000 To the insurance company, because insurance is paying for a lot of these procedures.
00:17:45.000 They develop, let's say, retinopathy.
00:17:47.000 Later, they go blind.
00:17:49.000 They require multiple operations and surgeries.
00:17:53.000 They're taking expensive drugs.
00:17:55.000 All of this stuff adds up.
00:17:57.000 But 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.
00:18:11.000 Yeah, 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.
00:18:19.000 So...
00:18:20.000 I 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.
00:18:28.000 They 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.
00:18:36.000 They 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.
00:18:45.000 I wonder if pharmaceutical companies are just going to buy up the insurance companies and use it as a write-off.
00:18:51.000 A cynical person might have that thought.
00:18:54.000 I might be cynical. 0.92
00:18:56.000 I 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.
00:19:07.000 Listen, what we've got to do is we've got to get in there early.
00:19:10.000 Stranger things have happened, Joe.
00:19:13.000 There's a lot of problems with this in terms of like doctors.
00:19:19.000 When 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.
00:19:30.000 So 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.
00:19:45.000 Yeah.
00:19:46.000 We have a giant issue also in getting people to be proactive, to actually do something.
00:19:52.000 How 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? 0.99
00:20:03.000 They're 100% intellectually aware of this, and they don't do a goddamn thing about it. 0.99
00:20:08.000 Yeah, you're right. 0.98
00:20:09.000 It's a systemic problem.
00:20:10.000 So if we break it down, you know, on the doctor care provider side and the patient side.
00:20:17.000 So 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...
00:20:28.000 As 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.
00:20:36.000 That's so crazy.
00:20:37.000 That'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.
00:20:48.000 And then you also mentioned the standard of care.
00:20:51.000 So they're legally required to take certain actions in certain circumstances.
00:20:56.000 And their medical license And their whole career could be at risk if they don't do that.
00:21:00.000 So 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.
00:21:15.000 I'm not being critical of individual doctors here.
00:21:18.000 I'm criticizing the whole system that we've created.
00:21:21.000 I 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.
00:21:36.000 And then the other problem is, you know, us as individuals, like the level of responsibility for our own health that we take.
00:21:45.000 And I think, you know, we all ultimately are responsible.
00:21:50.000 So let me just say that.
00:21:52.000 But it's also true that we're influenced by the system that we are part of.
00:21:57.000 And so...
00:21:58.000 You 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.
00:22:09.000 And so I've heard from many doctors, and there have actually been studies on this, that patients will go in...
00:22:17.000 We're good to go.
00:22:35.000 There are ads in magazines that are targeted towards consumers for drugs.
00:22:39.000 And the risk in doing this is exactly what we're talking about now.
00:22:43.000 You get someone who's seen a drug ad in a magazine, they're like, I need that drug.
00:22:47.000 They 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.
00:22:59.000 I did not know we were one of two countries in the whole world.
00:23:02.000 I thought New Zealand was a little more on the ball.
00:23:04.000 It's surprising in a way that New Zealand is the other one.
00:23:08.000 I'm disappointed in you, New Zealand. 1.00
00:23:08.000 You're as stupid as we are. 1.00
00:23:10.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:23:10.000 But yeah, that's a giant problem. 1.00
00:23:12.000 That advertising model...
00:23:14.000 Well, advertising is a giant problem, period, for people because we're so susceptible to influence.
00:23:20.000 And they've shown this with food in particular that, you know...
00:23:27.000 There's Big Pharma and there's Big Food. 0.99
00:23:30.000 Big Food, capital B, capital F, is this whole industrial food production system that is invested in selling us crap. 0.97
00:23:40.000 They study how to do this.
00:23:44.000 They have food scientists on staff that study the palatability and reward value of food.
00:23:48.000 This is technical stuff.
00:23:57.000 Mm-hmm.
00:24:00.000 They 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.
00:24:22.000 And so we are being manipulated.
00:24:24.000 And, you know, we have a responsibility to see that and to get beyond it.
00:24:28.000 I'm not saying, it's not a cop-out that, you know, people aren't responsible for their actions, but, you know, there's more to it.
00:24:36.000 We're in this environment where we're being consistently manipulated every day.
00:24:41.000 It is very sneaky, the Pringles things in particular.
00:24:44.000 Absolutely.
00:24:45.000 I mean, they're right.
00:24:46.000 How dare you put that out there?
00:24:47.000 Think 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.
00:24:57.000 What do you think you're going to eat more of?
00:24:59.000 I mean, it's just...
00:24:59.000 These are hardwired evolutionary mechanisms.
00:25:02.000 We're hardwired to seek out novelty, variety, because it would ensure in a...
00:25:09.000 Pre-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.
00:25:23.000 Usually different flavors means different kinds of nutrients.
00:25:27.000 So someone who had that kind of programming would be more likely to survive.
00:25:31.000 But 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,
00:25:51.000 it's a total unmitigated disaster. 0.89
00:25:54.000 Well, 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. 0.69
00:26:09.000 It's such a bizarre common place that you can just pull into any one of those things.
00:26:14.000 There's so many of them, and they're just overwhelmed with unhealthy choices.
00:26:18.000 All over the world, too, now. 1.00
00:26:20.000 We've exported our crap. 0.99
00:26:22.000 To all of these other countries in the world and, you know, pretty much any country. 0.98
00:26:26.000 I 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,
00:26:42.000 you know, just huts on every island.
00:26:44.000 But then you come up to this little hut and there'd be like a thing of Coca-Cola bottles, you know.
00:26:50.000 Crazy.
00:26:51.000 And we've managed to export this everywhere and it's just...
00:26:59.000 It's hard to go against evolutionary programming because it's unconscious.
00:27:06.000 It's below the cognitive center of our brain where we can rationally think about it.
00:27:13.000 You mentioned before people who are overweight but don't make healthy choices.
00:27:17.000 That's not because they don't intellectually understand that they need to make healthy choices.
00:27:22.000 It's that they're fighting against this deeply hardwired Programming that is totally incompatible with the modern food environment that we have.
00:27:32.000 And for whatever reason, some people are more successful at Getting past that than others.
00:27:39.000 Yeah, 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.
00:27:51.000 Yeah.
00:27:52.000 That's sort of a learned thing.
00:27:54.000 It's a learned thing.
00:27:55.000 You know, it's not a natural thing.
00:27:59.000 What's more natural is to see something that you crave and to eat it or drink it.
00:28:05.000 I mean, that is a natural animal human experience.
00:28:10.000 What'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.
00:28:20.000 I mean, that's...
00:28:22.000 And I don't think we even experience those cravings in the same way.
00:28:28.000 For 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...
00:28:39.000 Those bacteria we now know and yeast can produce chemicals that actually affect our brain chemistry.
00:28:46.000 So that someone who's got a disrupted gut microbiome might experience those cravings way more strongly than I do.
00:28:53.000 And 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.
00:29:04.000 And it's really hard to overcome that.
00:29:06.000 I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of the things I was going to bring up next.
00:29:08.000 The 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.
00:29:27.000 For me, Over the last few years, like say three years plus, I've really gotten into probiotics.
00:29:35.000 Got 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.
00:30:00.000 I'm very rarely sick.
00:30:02.000 And if I'm sick, even though I travel so much...
00:30:05.000 If I'm sick, it's for a very short amount of time.
00:30:07.000 And then I snap back pretty quickly.
00:30:09.000 And my desire for sugary foods is almost non-existent unless I'm drunk or I just want to indulge.
00:30:19.000 But I used to have this massive desire all the time to eat a sandwich or eat a bowl of pasta.
00:30:25.000 And now I look at it and I'm like, that's not even really food.
00:30:28.000 Right.
00:30:29.000 My mind has sort of reached a tipping point, and then also my gut biome, I believe, I mean, I'm just guessing, has changed.
00:30:38.000 Where if there's a piece of cake laying around, I don't look at that piece of cake and go, God, I've got to stuff that in my face.
00:30:44.000 I look at it and go, that is a lot of problems.
00:30:46.000 That's a lot of sugar. 0.99
00:30:48.000 That's a lot of not good for you. 0.99
00:30:50.000 It's going to give me some mouth pleasure, and then I'm going to feel fucking terrible in about an hour. 0.98
00:30:54.000 Right. 0.79
00:30:55.000 Yeah, no, I think that's all true, all supported by the research.
00:30:59.000 There's a lot of research now on the gut-brain axis, which recognizes the bi-directional connection between the gut and the brain.
00:31:06.000 So in other words, the health of our gut and our gut microbiome directly influences brain chemistry.
00:31:13.000 Likewise, our brain chemistry directly influences our gut.
00:31:17.000 So it can work in both directions.
00:31:19.000 Wow.
00:31:20.000 So if you're under severe stress, for example, I think most people recognize the phrases, butterflies in my stomach.
00:31:27.000 Before you go on stage and perform, you feel that.
00:31:31.000 I don't know if you experience that now, since you perform so much.
00:31:34.000 Do you still get that?
00:31:35.000 If 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.
00:31:41.000 Most of the time, it's a heightened sense of, you know, like, okay, here we go.
00:31:47.000 But when you're about to do something that's scary... 1.00
00:31:49.000 Shit, your pants, right? 1.00
00:31:50.000 There's another less refined example of the gut-brain connection. 1.00
00:31:56.000 It's been in our lexicon for a long time.
00:31:58.000 So I think, like, on a popular basis, most people are like, duh, yeah, I know my brain's connected to my gut.
00:32:04.000 But it's only been in the last, you know, 20, 30 years that the research has really come around to...
00:32:10.000 You know, clarifying what those relationships are.
00:32:13.000 So we know that changes in the gut microbiome can affect our brain chemistry.
00:32:19.000 And in fact, the The prevailing theory now of what actually causes depression is called the inflammatory cytokine model of depression.
00:32:28.000 And so it's not this thing where your serotonin levels are different and that's why you're depressed.
00:32:35.000 It'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.
00:32:51.000 So 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.
00:33:01.000 So, this is where the direction of science has been heading.
00:33:06.000 And 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.
00:33:19.000 And 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.
00:33:39.000 So you may not just be dealing with your own cravings when you're craving sugar.
00:33:44.000 You're dealing with the cravings of those pathogenic bacteria.
00:33:47.000 We know there are examples in nature Of bacteria and microorganisms changing the behavior of their host in order to propagate their own survival.
00:33:58.000 So I'm probably going to butcher it.
00:34:00.000 I don't remember the exact species, but it's a parasite that gets into a particular insect.
00:34:08.000 It's an aquatic worm.
00:34:09.000 There's that.
00:34:10.000 And 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.
00:34:16.000 By the ultimate host that that parasite wants to get into.
00:34:20.000 And 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.
00:34:34.000 Oh, 100%.
00:34:35.000 I mean, it is a very bizarre distinction that we want to think.
00:34:38.000 We're people.
00:34:38.000 We're not animals.
00:34:39.000 We're people.
00:34:40.000 We're special.
00:34:41.000 We've evolved beyond being animals.
00:34:43.000 Well, it's cute.
00:34:44.000 I 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.
00:34:51.000 But we're just a heightened state of animal life.
00:34:54.000 Absolutely.
00:34:55.000 At the end of the day, we're subject to the same influences, right?
00:34:58.000 I think so.
00:34:59.000 And I think it causes a lot of harm to see ourselves as separate.
00:35:02.000 I think you're right.
00:35:03.000 The term leaky gut, what does that mean?
00:35:06.000 When people hear leaky gut, they've heard it a bunch of times.
00:35:09.000 It's something that gets talked about a lot when people deal with, you know, in quote-unquote gut health or probiotics.
00:35:17.000 Like, what does leaky gut mean?
00:35:20.000 So this is an interesting example of what happens in research over time.
00:35:28.000 So 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.
00:35:36.000 It was really the province of alternative medicine providers and quacks. 1.00
00:35:41.000 And 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.
00:35:52.000 It will be actually talked about with the term intestinal permeability.
00:35:57.000 And so what this means is...
00:36:02.000 It'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.
00:36:14.000 Really?
00:36:14.000 It's weird to think of that way, but...
00:36:17.000 If you have a tube that's going all the way through your body, then anything that's inside that tube is not actually inside your body.
00:36:25.000 Whoa.
00:36:26.000 Yeah.
00:36:28.000 And so the tube's job is to decide what gets inside of the body and what stays out.
00:36:34.000 Because anything that doesn't get absorbed just gets eliminated as waste without ever getting into your body.
00:36:40.000 And we couldn't survive if we didn't have this ability to discern friend from foe.
00:36:46.000 It's supposed to let nutrients that we need in, but keep toxins and other wastes out, right?
00:36:52.000 So that's one of the fundamental purposes of the gut barrier, of the gut, is to be a barrier, basically.
00:37:00.000 Hence, diarrhea, when you're not well.
00:37:02.000 Exactly.
00:37:03.000 Your body's like, let's go!
00:37:04.000 Everybody out!
00:37:05.000 Everybody out right away!
00:37:07.000 So the gut is primarily a barrier.
00:37:11.000 It's a barrier system.
00:37:12.000 And when that's working well, it opens and closes appropriately.
00:37:16.000 And so, you know, oh, nutrient?
00:37:18.000 Okay, open, let that in.
00:37:19.000 You know, toxin, waste, closed, don't let that in.
00:37:23.000 And so everyone's gut is permeable in an appropriate way, right, when it's working well.
00:37:30.000 Because if it wasn't permeable, we would die.
00:37:33.000 We wouldn't be able to absorb nutrients.
00:37:36.000 But 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.
00:37:49.000 You basically have an inability to keep out stuff that's not supposed to get into your body.
00:37:57.000 Some examples would be large protein molecules.
00:38:01.000 Typically, 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.
00:38:13.000 But 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.
00:38:26.000 And that's why we develop food allergies or food intolerances.
00:38:30.000 Another thing that gets through the gut that shouldn't is called endotoxin.
00:38:33.000 So 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.
00:38:48.000 They shouldn't be in there in the first place.
00:38:50.000 And all of this basically creates a systemic inflammatory response.
00:38:55.000 So 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.
00:39:09.000 And 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,
00:39:26.000 which 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.
00:39:34.000 All of these are inflammatory conditions.
00:39:36.000 So 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.
00:39:47.000 Now, when we say inflammation, that's another term that people hear a lot, but I don't think they necessarily understand.
00:39:52.000 It's along the lines of leaky gut.
00:39:54.000 So, like, you did an awesome job clearing the leaky gut thing up.
00:39:57.000 And for me, too, it solidified it.
00:40:00.000 But inflammation.
00:40:01.000 Why is inflammation caused by sugars?
00:40:05.000 Why is it caused by simple sugars and corn syrup and things along those lines, too much simple carbohydrates?
00:40:12.000 What is causing that?
00:40:14.000 So there was this great paper published a few years ago by a professor from New Zealand, actually.
00:40:21.000 Ian Spreadbury, I think is his name.
00:40:25.000 Forgive me if I'm not getting that right, Ian.
00:40:28.000 But he distinguished between two different types of carbohydrates.
00:40:33.000 Acellular and cellular.
00:40:34.000 Acellular meaning lacking cell membrane.
00:40:37.000 And 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.
00:40:50.000 Broken down in the processing.
00:40:52.000 So you have white flour, for example.
00:40:55.000 You 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.
00:41:08.000 And what that means is with cellular carbohydrates, our body has to really work to break those down.
00:41:15.000 And the actual glucose, the carbohydrate itself, is relatively inaccessible because we have to work so hard to digest it and get at it.
00:41:24.000 If you think of an analogy like a nut, like a whole walnut, You know, you have to do a lot to get to that.
00:41:33.000 So 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.
00:41:41.000 Whereas 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.
00:41:51.000 So 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.
00:42:04.000 And 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.
00:42:29.000 And that imbalance then creates an inflammatory gut microbiota.
00:42:34.000 And 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.
00:42:43.000 So, you know, 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut.
00:42:48.000 He 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. 0.70
00:42:56.000 That's fascinating that people have these ancient sayings like, follow your heart.
00:43:00.000 And then we found out fairly recently, within the last few decades, that the heart is filled with neurons.
00:43:07.000 And that there might actually be some sort of memory or thinking, quote unquote, going on.
00:43:13.000 In your heart.
00:43:15.000 And then having a sense of purpose is associated with greater longevity and better health, which is also following your heart.
00:43:21.000 Yeah.
00:43:21.000 They're very strange sort of sentiments that turned out to be...
00:43:26.000 You think of them as just sort of old...
00:43:30.000 We're good to go.
00:43:48.000 Validate or clarify ancient wisdom that's been around for a long time.
00:43:53.000 And I think they both have a place.
00:43:55.000 And I personally think it's fascinating to learn what the mechanisms are that explain that wisdom and those sayings. 0.98
00:44:02.000 But I think we can sometimes be too quick to dismiss that wisdom as being silly or stupid or non-scientific. 0.99
00:44:12.000 Right. 0.99
00:44:13.000 Yeah, I definitely think...
00:44:14.000 Well, I think it's very important that we...
00:44:18.000 Today, in this day, have the tools to use science to sort of explain unequivocally why these things are factors and why these things exist.
00:44:27.000 And that we've proven in these studies, these are peer-reviewed.
00:44:30.000 Here we go.
00:44:31.000 Here's the studies.
00:44:32.000 It showed that, oh yeah, well there's neurons in the heart.
00:44:35.000 Oh yeah, well that makes sense that you think that way.
00:44:37.000 Oh, there's biome.
00:44:38.000 There's actually like organisms.
00:44:40.000 And I think the way you described it is great, that there's like an alien living inside you that wants sugar.
00:44:46.000 Because it really kind of is that.
00:44:47.000 There's organisms in our body.
00:44:49.000 I heard it explained once, and I never forgot it, that there's more E. coli living inside your gut than there have ever been people ever.
00:44:57.000 Right.
00:44:58.000 Yeah, and there are more microorganisms in our gut than there are stars in the universe, I think.
00:45:04.000 What?
00:45:04.000 How's that possible?
00:45:06.000 Okay, that's where I step in.
00:45:08.000 How's that possible?
00:45:10.000 How does it make any sense?
00:45:11.000 The universe is infinite.
00:45:13.000 Right.
00:45:13.000 Well, there is that.
00:45:14.000 I mean, I think that was the early conception.
00:45:16.000 They're not, they maybe haven't read about the multiverse theories.
00:45:20.000 Yeah, because like someone who's like enormous, like Ralphie Mae, he has more cells, right?
00:45:25.000 Right.
00:45:25.000 So he's a bigger universe?
00:45:27.000 Like, how's that work?
00:45:28.000 Well, what you said about science is really true.
00:45:31.000 I mean, I love science.
00:45:33.000 I spend most of my days interacting with science in some way.
00:45:38.000 And I think it's worth pointing out that there are some real problems with the way science is conducted today.
00:45:45.000 And I think we run the risk of...
00:45:49.000 Of 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.
00:45:59.000 Well, 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.
00:46:17.000 The file drawer phenomenon, they call that.
00:46:19.000 Yeah, explain that.
00:46:22.000 Well, so two-thirds of medical research is funded by Big Pharma, and that makes, yeah, two-thirds.
00:46:29.000 So, you know, this is just human nature.
00:46:33.000 Upton Sinclair said it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
00:46:40.000 It's one of my favorite great quotes because it explains a lot, right?
00:46:45.000 And 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,
00:47:03.000 you're less likely to get your next project funded.
00:47:09.000 You're a human being.
00:47:10.000 You want to have a job.
00:47:11.000 You want your work to be funded.
00:47:13.000 I mean, it's really easy to understand, right?
00:47:16.000 It's not like these are bad people who are all in conspiracy to push drugs on us.
00:47:23.000 I think most researchers are good people and trying to do the right thing.
00:47:27.000 But 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.
00:47:34.000 And it's really hard, you know, just don't bite the hand that feeds you.
00:47:37.000 It's just, it's a time, you know, age-old saying, and there's a lot to that.
00:47:46.000 Up 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.
00:47:56.000 So 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.
00:48:12.000 They wouldn't actually be published in a journal.
00:48:14.000 And there's been a movement to change that to where, you know, if a study is conducted, it needs to be registered.
00:48:21.000 And 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.
00:48:30.000 It'd be nice if that was retroactive.
00:48:32.000 Right.
00:48:33.000 But then there are other problems, like fraud.
00:48:36.000 So there was a pretty big study published in JAMA a little while back by Journal of American Medical Association, a very prominent, prestigious journal.
00:48:47.000 And it was a guy named Charles Seifert.
00:48:50.000 And he basically looked at the FDA monitoring of drug trials.
00:48:58.000 So 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,
00:49:16.000 and there's no fraud going on.
00:49:18.000 So 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.
00:49:36.000 So let me give you a few examples.
00:49:38.000 Like in one case, A researcher changed patient data to hide that the patient had pre-existing kidney and liver problems.
00:49:46.000 And they gave this guy chemotherapy treatment and he died.
00:49:50.000 And the researcher ended up spending six years in jail.
00:49:54.000 And that was never mentioned in the study that was based on that trial data that was later published.
00:50:00.000 So that's one example.
00:50:02.000 Why did they do that?
00:50:04.000 What was the motivation?
00:50:07.000 The motivation is to get the drug approved.
00:50:11.000 Why would they hide the fact that this guy...
00:50:13.000 The FDA doesn't require pharmaceutical companies to publish that data.
00:50:21.000 Because 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.
00:50:40.000 Maybe I'm getting it wrong.
00:50:42.000 He had pre-existing liver disease?
00:50:45.000 Liver and kidney issues and cancer.
00:50:48.000 And the researcher falsified his data and covered up that this was known when he was given this chemotherapy drug.
00:51:00.000 But why would they do that?
00:51:02.000 I just don't understand why they would cover up the fact that a guy was already sick.
00:51:06.000 Like, wouldn't you think that they would be the opposite?
00:51:09.000 Let me use another example, because I think this will help show what's happening here.
00:51:14.000 So 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,
00:51:29.000 Americans, also Chinese people.
00:51:32.000 And, you know, so they do it at different centers.
00:51:34.000 And so there was a trial for an anticoagulant drug.
00:51:40.000 They found that this Chinese center had falsified a whole bunch of patient data and changed the results.
00:51:46.000 And if they took that Chinese center's data out of the equation, the drug would have failed.
00:51:51.000 It wouldn't have been more effective than placebo.
00:51:55.000 But 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.
00:52:06.000 And even studies that were being published 18 months later still included that data in the original data set.
00:52:12.000 So the FDA busted them.
00:52:14.000 It 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.
00:52:25.000 Wow.
00:52:27.000 There'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.
00:52:39.000 So there are a lot of...
00:52:41.000 And then the whole peer review process.
00:52:43.000 You mentioned peer review, too.
00:52:45.000 There was a pretty big study where...
00:52:51.000 A paper was submitted to BMJ, British Medical Journal, another big medical journal, with eight major errors.
00:52:57.000 And not a single one of the 221 scientists that were asked to review the paper caught all of the errors.
00:53:03.000 And only 30% recommended rejecting the paper.
00:53:07.000 And 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.
00:53:17.000 And the ones who were warned didn't get any more of the errors than the scientists that weren't warned in advance.
00:53:23.000 They broke them up into two groups.
00:53:24.000 Is that just a lack of time to do the research and, I mean, people being overwhelmed by a workload?
00:53:29.000 I think that's probably part of it.
00:53:32.000 But it's not really an excuse.
00:53:33.000 I don't know.
00:53:34.000 I 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.
00:53:47.000 But 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.
00:53:55.000 And you may have heard about this.
00:53:57.000 It 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.
00:54:09.000 Replicating findings is really important in the scientific method too.
00:54:13.000 Like 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.
00:54:25.000 It's independent of you.
00:54:27.000 And in a shocking number of studies, this never happens.
00:54:30.000 And 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.
00:54:39.000 And they were only able to do that in 35% of cases.
00:54:44.000 Another 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,
00:55:00.000 and 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.
00:55:08.000 Less than one quarter of them, they were able to replicate the results.
00:55:11.000 So 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.
00:55:22.000 And whole fields of scientific research are spawned on a study that was never confirmed or validated.
00:55:29.000 So it's like a house of cards built on a foundation of falsehood.
00:55:34.000 So, you know, science is great.
00:55:37.000 We need to keep improving science, but there's a lot of problems with the way that studies are performed right now.
00:55:42.000 And it's both, you know, conflicts of interest that are based on money, and it's just also human error.
00:55:50.000 And 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?
00:55:56.000 Yeah, money.
00:55:56.000 Money, basically.
00:55:58.000 I was just talking to some researchers about this and they said, look, nobody wants to be the second person to discover something.
00:56:08.000 It's just not as cool.
00:56:09.000 I mean, it's not as prestigious for your career.
00:56:12.000 So going around replicating other people's studies is not as exciting as doing your own original study.
00:56:18.000 Your cover band.
00:56:18.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:56:19.000 Your cover band.
00:56:20.000 And it's hard to get funding to replicate studies.
00:56:23.000 Whereas 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.
00:56:33.000 Yeah.
00:56:34.000 That's one of the big problems.
00:56:36.000 And another one is just how long studies are done for, like omega-3 fats.
00:56:44.000 We've all heard about that these are good for us and fish oil and all of that.
00:56:50.000 When you look at studies, most of those studies are really short term.
00:56:54.000 And back in the 70s or 80s, some longer term studies that were like 8 or 10 years were done that found really different results.
00:57:02.000 And 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.
00:57:10.000 For omega-3s?
00:57:11.000 Yeah.
00:57:12.000 Really?
00:57:12.000 We can come back to that in a second.
00:57:14.000 Yeah, please do.
00:57:15.000 The point is, something that happens in two weeks is not necessarily what's going to happen over four years.
00:57:21.000 But 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.
00:57:30.000 To isolate all of the variables and make sure that patients are...
00:57:34.000 Not changing too many different things and are just doing the intervention and to do everything that needs to be done is incredibly expensive.
00:57:41.000 And 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.
00:57:49.000 That is also, I think, an issue with some anecdotal reports that people have about changing their diet.
00:57:55.000 There's a lot of people that change their diet, and short-term, they feel fantastic, and they start having all these benefits.
00:58:01.000 But then over the course of maybe three, four, five years or so, they start having real issues.
00:58:06.000 And they don't necessarily tie that to the diet, because they remember feeling so much better when they first switched to it.
00:58:14.000 So they don't think that what's happening three or four years later could be the cause of their problems.
00:58:19.000 I see this all the time with vegetarian and vegan diets.
00:58:22.000 That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.
00:58:24.000 In 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, 0.70
00:58:44.000 those 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?
00:58:53.000 So automatically over that, you're going to see some long-term benefits.
00:58:57.000 But 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,
00:59:12.000 leads 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.
00:59:31.000 Yeah.
00:59:31.000 Yeah, I mean, we talked about this before, but humans are animals.
00:59:36.000 We're omnivores.
00:59:38.000 Wait a minute.
00:59:39.000 I saw a video on YouTube.
00:59:41.000 There's a guy that says there's no way that we are herbivores.
00:59:44.000 And then if we are... 0.99
00:59:45.000 Some fucking wacky dude was saying, if you're really an omnivore, you should be able to eat a squirrel, just grab it and eat it raw. 0.99
00:59:54.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:59:55.000 No.
00:59:55.000 The most bizarre...
00:59:58.000 There's some strange arguments out there.
00:59:59.000 Arguments, yeah.
01:00:00.000 Like, we shouldn't drink milk because, you know, we're the only animal in nature that drinks the milk of another animal.
01:00:10.000 Yeah, well, we're the only animal in nature that uses iPhones, too.
01:00:13.000 I have a whole bit about that.
01:00:14.000 It's hilarious you said that.
01:00:15.000 Yeah, what else do only people do?
01:00:17.000 Fly planes, make movies, call each other on the phone and tell each other how awesome milk is?
01:00:22.000 It's a ridiculous argument, but...
01:00:25.000 So, yeah, getting back to... 0.92
01:00:27.000 They're ideological arguments, more than scientific...
01:00:30.000 Absolutely.
01:00:31.000 It doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
01:00:33.000 But with a vegetarian or vegan diet, so there's lots of different ways to look at this.
01:00:38.000 So, starting with an evolutionary perspective, which I was getting at...
01:00:42.000 Omnivores are opportunistic.
01:00:44.000 They will eat whatever is available, and they'll eat the most nutrient-dense foods that are available if they have a choice.
01:00:50.000 And that's just, again, that's survival.
01:00:52.000 You 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.
01:01:01.000 That's basic evolutionary theory.
01:01:04.000 So...
01:01:06.000 If 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.
01:01:20.000 So that should tell you something right there.
01:01:22.000 And 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.
01:01:32.000 There are a lot of anthropologists who now believe that eating meat was essentially what made us human.
01:01:38.000 You 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.
01:01:52.000 Number 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.
01:02:04.000 So 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.
01:02:16.000 So they have to eat a boatload of stuff and just sit there and chew on the plants all day to get enough nutrients.
01:02:22.000 And 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,
01:02:39.000 which allowed us to develop bigger brains and become human and have this conversation where we're talking about vegetarian and vegan diets.
01:02:49.000 Yeah, it is kind of interesting.
01:02:51.000 And 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.
01:03:05.000 And environmental debates, which is also moral, right?
01:03:08.000 We can talk about that, too.
01:03:10.000 Which is what influences people to become vegetarians and vegans.
01:03:14.000 Right.
01:03:14.000 Which I totally respect.
01:03:15.000 I understand what they're saying.
01:03:17.000 The real problem is when they distort the reality of the scientific findings of the human animal and diet.
01:03:24.000 And that's an issue with a lot of people that are vegetarians and vegans.
01:03:27.000 That go on about how healthy they feel and about how awesome, but they're not doing blood lipid profiles.
01:03:33.000 And when they do, like Sam Harris, who is, for ethical reasons, has tried a vegan diet, and his health is suffering.
01:03:41.000 He's having real issues with his blood lipids.
01:03:44.000 What can someone do?
01:03:46.000 If 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?
01:03:57.000 What steps need to be taking place?
01:03:59.000 This is obviously not saying that you shouldn't follow a vegan diet or shouldn't follow a vegetarian diet.
01:04:04.000 You should do whatever you want to do.
01:04:05.000 There's got to be some ways to mitigate some of the health consequences, right?
01:04:09.000 Yeah, there are.
01:04:10.000 And I believe that.
01:04:10.000 I agree with you that people should be free to make their own choices.
01:04:14.000 I've never pushed a particular diet.
01:04:16.000 People sometimes ask me, how do you convince someone to go paleo?
01:04:19.000 I say, I don't.
01:04:22.000 I don't spend my time doing that.
01:04:23.000 If someone wants my advice and asks me, I'll give it to them.
01:04:27.000 But I'm not going around proselytizing for a particular way of eating.
01:04:31.000 So yeah, let's break this down.
01:04:33.000 We talked about the evolutionary...
01:04:35.000 You know, argument for eating animal products.
01:04:37.000 And there's a scientific argument, which now is what we're talking about.
01:04:42.000 The issue with...
01:04:43.000 And we should even kind of distinguish between vegetarian and vegan diets because they're actually quite different.
01:04:49.000 And I think it is possible for some people to be healthy with a vegetarian, you know, diet.
01:04:56.000 I think it's a lot less likely with a vegan diet.
01:05:00.000 And I guess I would say it this way.
01:05:03.000 If 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.
01:05:15.000 And at least in my experience, there are very few that actually do it right.
01:05:21.000 When it's done right, I think it's possible for some people to be healthy and thrive.
01:05:25.000 And that's obvious because there are people like Rich Roll, who's like out there.
01:05:30.000 He's a vegan triathlete who's out there, you know, doing centuries and killing it.
01:05:34.000 Yeah, ultra marathons.
01:05:35.000 Yeah, he is just an amazing athlete and he's vegan.
01:05:39.000 And so, you know, you can't...
01:05:42.000 We're good to go.
01:06:11.000 There are genetic differences that determine how well we convert precursor nutrients into the nutrients that we actually need.
01:06:19.000 Let me give three examples to make this more real.
01:06:22.000 One 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.
01:06:32.000 Primarily, you get them by eating fish.
01:06:34.000 There are no sources of those in a plant-based diet, except for algae.
01:06:41.000 And algae is not that bioavailable, right?
01:06:44.000 No, and how many people do you know that eat algae?
01:06:47.000 I don't know very many.
01:06:49.000 Well, you can.
01:06:49.000 You can.
01:06:50.000 There's that famous green supplementation stuff.
01:06:53.000 Yeah, okay, you can use it as a supplement, but very few people are eating it.
01:06:57.000 But there is something called alpha-linolenic acid, which is in walnuts and flaxseed.
01:07:02.000 That's an omega-3 plant fat.
01:07:04.000 And humans, in theory, can convert some of that plant-based omega-3 into this long-chain EPA and DHA that we need.
01:07:13.000 But here's the thing, only about 5-10% of that gets converted into EPA and even less to DHA, like 2-5%.
01:07:20.000 So 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.
01:07:30.000 And that's if everything is going well.
01:07:32.000 Because 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.
01:07:42.000 It'll be even less.
01:07:44.000 And ironically, many of those nutrients are nutrients that are not well represented in a vegan or vegetarian diet.
01:07:50.000 So that's one example.
01:07:52.000 Another would be vitamin K2, which is a different form of vitamin K that's recently been discovered.
01:07:58.000 And it's really important for cardiovascular and bone health.
01:08:02.000 It 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.
01:08:15.000 So, 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.
01:08:28.000 It's of strong taste.
01:08:30.000 Not very many people are eating it here.
01:08:32.000 Kefir and sauerkraut and kimchi have K2 in it.
01:08:37.000 Did I say kefir?
01:08:38.000 I've been saying kefir my whole life.
01:08:40.000 I've never heard it said.
01:08:41.000 That's how they say it, where Kefir is from.
01:08:44.000 But every other person I've ever met says Kiefer, so don't worry about it.
01:08:48.000 Kefir.
01:08:49.000 I'm saying Kefir from now on. 1.00
01:08:50.000 Ari Shafir.
01:08:52.000 You'll be in the select few.
01:08:54.000 I'd love to be in the select few.
01:08:56.000 I feel good about it already.
01:08:59.000 Yes, you can feel superior now.
01:09:01.000 Can I stop you real quick?
01:09:02.000 Just 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.
01:09:13.000 What can vegans take in order to sort of...
01:09:17.000 I recommend that vegans take microalgae because it has preformed DHA in it.
01:09:22.000 So you bypass that whole conversion issue.
01:09:26.000 If they do take microalgae, is that sufficient, or how much difference is that than eating fish?
01:09:32.000 Well, 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.
01:09:43.000 And the other disadvantage is you have to take a boatload of algae supplements.
01:09:47.000 What's a boatload?
01:09:48.000 Give me a...
01:09:50.000 No, I think so.
01:09:52.000 Different 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.
01:10:04.000 That's not bad.
01:10:06.000 That could be done.
01:10:07.000 It's absolutely possible.
01:10:09.000 But that would be a good way to be healthy with the vegan diet.
01:10:12.000 That would be one way to address the shortcoming of lack of DHA on the vegan diet.
01:10:18.000 There are other shortcomings, other nutrients like B12, which are...
01:10:22.000 That's an issue.
01:10:23.000 That's a big issue, and vegans need to be supplementing with that. 0.68
01:10:27.000 There'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,
01:10:44.000 which is only found in animal products or supplements.
01:10:48.000 So a B12 supplement would be really important as well.
01:10:50.000 And what's the source of a B12 supplement?
01:10:55.000 It's synthetic?
01:10:56.000 It'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.
01:11:10.000 Cyanocobalamin is a synthetic form, and then the other ones are natural forms of B12 that you would encounter in food.
01:11:17.000 So people can supplement with any of those.
01:11:20.000 The natural forms are better to supplement with because they're more bioavailable.
01:11:25.000 But definitely if a vegan, I would recommend supplementing with B12 because there aren't any sources of it in the diet.
01:11:32.000 And studies have shown that 68% of vegetarians are deficient in B12. 83% of vegans are versus just 5% of omnivores.
01:11:41.000 Wow.
01:11:42.000 So it's a big difference.
01:11:43.000 We're not, you know...
01:11:44.000 And that's a factor in many different issues, right?
01:11:47.000 It's a factor in the production of muscle.
01:11:50.000 Yeah.
01:11:50.000 Production of all red blood cells depends on B12 and folate.
01:11:54.000 And so, I mean, that's pretty fundamental, right?
01:11:57.000 And then the myelin sheath requires B12, and this is why B12 deficiency can mimic the signs of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.
01:12:05.000 In 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.
01:12:16.000 And 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.
01:12:27.000 So it's a really important nutrient.
01:12:30.000 Now, how can vegans be assured that the B12 that they're buying does not have animal products?
01:12:38.000 Or do they have B12 when you buy in a supplement firm?
01:12:41.000 Not typically.
01:12:41.000 It's usually synthetic?
01:12:43.000 Yeah.
01:12:43.000 I'm not the best person to ask about that because I'm not a vegan myself.
01:12:48.000 I was a macrobiotic vegan at one point.
01:12:50.000 What does that mean?
01:12:51.000 What's the difference?
01:12:51.000 That's deep.
01:12:52.000 You went deep.
01:12:53.000 Macrobiotic vegan.
01:12:54.000 It's like a vegan of macrames.
01:12:56.000 I mean, macrobiotics is a whole other system of way of looking at food.
01:13:01.000 It's a Japanese approach.
01:13:05.000 And, you know, The whole reason I came to do what I'm doing now is I got really, really sick in my 20s.
01:13:12.000 I almost died, and I spent about 10 years just trying to get back to health.
01:13:17.000 And what did you get sick from?
01:13:18.000 I was in Indonesia.
01:13:21.000 I 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,
01:13:36.000 delirious, didn't remember really anything for three days.
01:13:40.000 Luckily, 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.
01:13:49.000 But 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.
01:13:58.000 And it took me basically 10 years to recover my health.
01:14:01.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:14:02.000 10 years!
01:14:03.000 Ten years?
01:14:03.000 Ten years.
01:14:04.000 It was like the lost decade.
01:14:06.000 Now, was it ten years because you approached it incorrectly and you could do it better now?
01:14:11.000 Or was it just such a devastating round of disease that...
01:14:15.000 I think a little of both.
01:14:16.000 I mean, so I'm 42 now and I was 25 when this first happened and we didn't know...
01:14:22.000 Anything about the gut and the microbiome compared to what we know now.
01:14:26.000 Like, there was very little awareness on these topics at that point.
01:14:29.000 Yeah, just in 15 years or 20 years.
01:14:32.000 It's crazy.
01:14:33.000 So, 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. 0.95
01:14:43.000 We've got to get rid of them.
01:14:44.000 This is how you do it.
01:14:45.000 And, you know, and I think the antibiotics could have been worse.
01:14:50.000 The treatment was probably worse than the disease for me after the number of courses of antibiotics that I took.
01:14:56.000 So 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.
01:15:08.000 I've been there, done that.
01:15:10.000 And so I'm completely sympathetic.
01:15:13.000 And I'm also a long-time meditator and Buddhist, so I understand the ethical argument very well.
01:15:20.000 Many of my friends don't eat meat.
01:15:21.000 I'm sympathetic.
01:15:23.000 I care about the environment.
01:15:25.000 I'm sympathetic to that argument.
01:15:26.000 I'm certainly not...
01:15:28.000 I'm coming to this from a place of, I think, a pretty balanced viewpoint.
01:15:35.000 And...
01:15:39.000 The 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,
01:15:56.000 ethical, and environmental choices that I was making that I felt good about.
01:16:03.000 Sam has brought up mollusks.
01:16:05.000 He 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,
01:16:24.000 that they lack pain sensors, they lack the fundamental things that make us distinguish the difference between animal and plant life.
01:16:32.000 And that people might want to consider the consumption of mollusks the same way they consider it, you know, like people eat mushrooms.
01:16:41.000 Mushrooms, which are in a vegan diet or healthy, are closer to an animal than they are to a plant.
01:16:47.000 They 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.
01:16:59.000 This 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.
01:17:12.000 Not 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.
01:17:26.000 And it causes some animals to starve to death.
01:17:29.000 Yeah, that's some level of awareness.
01:17:31.000 I 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?
01:17:44.000 What should we be prioritizing in that situation if we are...
01:17:57.000 Correct.
01:18:00.000 Yeah, very important.
01:18:21.000 We're good to go.
01:18:30.000 Is 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.
01:18:42.000 People don't like to look at that because it's inconvenient.
01:18:43.000 But 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...
01:18:52.000 Things that they grow.
01:18:53.000 You'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.
01:19:01.000 And in fact, more animals get chewed up to create a pound of grain.
01:19:07.000 Like more animals, more insects.
01:19:10.000 I mean, when insects are animals, by the way, there are a life form.
01:19:15.000 And more different things get chewed up in creating that.
01:19:20.000 Than 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.
01:19:29.000 And the nutrient density is far superior to a pound of grains.
01:19:33.000 Yeah.
01:19:33.000 Or even an equivalent amount of weight of grains.
01:19:36.000 But you don't hear that argument.
01:19:37.000 You hear the opposite argument, where a cow consumes so much grass, it needs so much land to graze.
01:19:43.000 And that argument, unfortunately, has actually been distorted.
01:19:45.000 I had some guys on from The documentary Cowspiracy, which I don't think they were intentionally trying to deceive.
01:19:53.000 I think they're really good guys and they think they're making a really good point.
01:19:58.000 But 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.
01:20:05.000 No, we can talk about that, too.
01:20:07.000 But the ethical argument is really interesting, too, for all of these reasons.
01:20:13.000 But then you think about the method of death, right?
01:20:16.000 So 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.
01:20:31.000 I can hear the vegans going crazy right now.
01:20:32.000 This is jumbo shrimp.
01:20:33.000 This is military intelligence.
01:20:35.000 Versus, 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.
01:20:49.000 That's an arguably worse way for an animal to die, right?
01:20:53.000 Or even any of your rancher friends know what it's like.
01:20:57.000 They've found one of their animals that's been killed by a predator.
01:21:00.000 And if you go on YouTube and watch a hyena kill an animal, the animal will still be alive while it's getting disemboweled.
01:21:07.000 That's not a very nice way to die.
01:21:09.000 Right, and that's what wolves will do, and that's a giant issue.
01:21:13.000 The difference between the way a predator kills something and the way a person does.
01:21:17.000 But, 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.
01:21:26.000 I guarantee you these are not ethically sourced, ethically and humanely raised chickens.
01:21:31.000 They're just not.
01:21:32.000 And 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...
01:21:43.000 In my opinion, a bigger issue.
01:21:45.000 Absolutely.
01:21:45.000 And 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.
01:21:53.000 We both care about how food is produced.
01:21:56.000 We care about, you know, I don't eat factory-farm meat.
01:22:00.000 I don't eat factory-farm vegetables.
01:22:01.000 You know, like, I try to eat meat that's from local, I buy it from a local farmer.
01:22:07.000 I'm lucky that where I live that that's accessible.
01:22:10.000 I buy produce from the farmer's market.
01:22:13.000 We grow a lot of produce in our backyard.
01:22:17.000 It's this whole food system that needs to change, both in terms of conventional agriculture and the monocropping of wheat and corn and soybeans.
01:22:27.000 And plant foods, but also the mass production conventional animal operations need to change as well.
01:22:38.000 So I'm not arguing for that.
01:22:40.000 I think that's absolutely a losing argument.
01:22:45.000 But there is a lot of land, two thirds of the surface land in the world is not suitable for crop production.
01:22:53.000 But it is suitable for raising animals.
01:22:55.000 And 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...
01:23:10.000 We can utilize the available land in a much smarter way to produce nutrient-dense foods.
01:23:17.000 We need to consider the whole cycle.
01:23:20.000 We 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.
01:23:26.000 But 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.
01:23:37.000 And 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.
01:23:45.000 And the way we've been doing that in conventional agriculture is with chemicals.
01:23:50.000 And those chemical fertilizers, they do kind of make a deposit in some way, but they also make the soil less able to sequester carbon.
01:23:59.000 They cause all kinds of problems with runoff and toxicity in water and local watershed systems.
01:24:06.000 And 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.
01:24:15.000 And so that's that cycle of life where the animal inputs go into the soil.
01:24:20.000 Those inputs, you know, the urine adds water to the soil.
01:24:24.000 The poop adds microorganisms that help the soil sequester carbon.
01:24:28.000 So that studies have shown that Pasture-raised animals are either net neutral in terms of carbon output or they actually even help sequester carbon.
01:24:38.000 So you could even argue that raising animals and eating animals is necessary for the benefit of our soils and our ecosystems in general.
01:24:47.000 Yeah, 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,
01:25:04.000 the soil is going to become nutritionally deficient.
01:25:08.000 And then the people who eat the plants that come out of that soil are going to get nutritionally deficient plants, minerally deficient in particular.
01:25:16.000 That it's a giant issue with United States farmlands.
01:25:20.000 There's a book that's received a lot of criticism, but it brings up some interesting points.
01:25:24.000 It's called Dead Doctors Don't Lie.
01:25:26.000 It's this guy, Dr. Joel Wallach.
01:25:28.000 A lot of the things that he said have been rightly criticized.
01:25:33.000 But 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.
01:25:48.000 And so That's where they started adding nitrogen from the Haber method into soil, and it helps, and you can grow crops.
01:25:57.000 But 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,
01:26:13.000 you're getting a way healthier plant.
01:26:16.000 And when you're consuming it, you're getting a far more nutrient-dense plant.
01:26:20.000 Right.
01:26:21.000 Not to mention the environmental implications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
01:26:25.000 I know a guy who got bone cancer because he grew up next to a golf course. 0.60
01:26:31.000 And the pesticides and all the shit that they would pump onto the golf course to keep the weeds from growing got into the well system. 1.00
01:26:37.000 And a bunch of people in his community, like a huge amount, got cancer. 0.96
01:26:42.000 Right.
01:26:42.000 I want to go back to something you were saying about vegans and vegetarians and how to kind of optimize if you're doing that diet.
01:26:50.000 So two things that I wanted to address.
01:26:53.000 One was you asked about mollusks.
01:26:55.000 Yes.
01:26:55.000 And 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.
01:27:06.000 Interesting.
01:27:06.000 And that's because of what we talked about earlier.
01:27:09.000 Muscle meats...
01:27:10.000 Organ meats and shellfish are the two most nutrient-dense classes of foods.
01:27:17.000 I'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.
01:27:32.000 I wish I had the thing to just lay it out and show you.
01:27:36.000 In 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.
01:27:46.000 It's always beef liver, chicken liver, clams, oysters, etc.
01:27:51.000 And 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.
01:28:05.000 Organs get tossed out a lot.
01:28:07.000 It's a real problem in the hunting world where when people gut an animal, they leave the gut pile.
01:28:14.000 And there's even a gutless method that a lot of people use when they take on a big game animal, like an elk or something like that.
01:28:22.000 They leave it behind.
01:28:24.000 They leave the heart.
01:28:24.000 They leave the liver.
01:28:25.000 But 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.
01:28:35.000 Who gets the liver.
01:28:35.000 Isn't that fascinating?
01:28:36.000 Yeah, there are other animals that that's true with.
01:28:38.000 And I think that was true in hunter-gatherer societies as well.
01:28:41.000 And someone was trying to say to me, well, livers process toxins.
01:28:45.000 Don't you think they'd be filled with toxins?
01:28:46.000 That's a common misconception.
01:28:48.000 The liver processes them, but the fat stores them.
01:28:51.000 So, 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.
01:29:03.000 Grass-fed butter, grass-fed milk.
01:29:06.000 If you eat lard or tallow or anything like that, it should come from pasture-raised animals because the fat is where toxins are stored.
01:29:12.000 The liver processes them.
01:29:15.000 So 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,
01:29:30.000 like processed wheat and bleached flour and things like that.
01:29:35.000 Pesticides, chemicals, antibiotic residue.
01:29:38.000 Right.
01:29:39.000 So 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.
01:29:52.000 So it's less healthy than actually eating the liver of that animal.
01:29:56.000 Yeah, it may be.
01:29:58.000 I 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.
01:30:16.000 Also, the omega-3s and 6s are different, right?
01:30:19.000 The ratio...
01:30:20.000 Omega-6 is the same, but omega-3 is three or four times higher in pasture-raised animals.
01:30:26.000 Why is omega-6 the same?
01:30:28.000 It's a good question.
01:30:29.000 It 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.
01:30:42.000 The 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.
01:30:50.000 I 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.
01:31:00.000 We started to talk about it with EPA and DHA. Vitamin K1 is what's converted into K2. Cows are experts at doing that.
01:31:09.000 They're really good at it.
01:31:11.000 Humans, not so much.
01:31:12.000 So when we eat the animal, the animal's basically done the work for us.
01:31:15.000 We get the preformed final nutrient that we need rather than having to do those steps ourselves.
01:31:22.000 Sorry to interrupt you, but is this a function of the adaptation of people developing while eating these animals?
01:31:27.000 I think so.
01:31:28.000 Yeah.
01:31:29.000 Beta carotene's another example.
01:31:30.000 That's a precursor to...
01:31:32.000 Active vitamin A or retinol.
01:31:34.000 And beta carotenes have some benefits in our bodies, but retinol is the real thing, you know, what we need more than anything.
01:31:41.000 And that conversion is as low as 3% to 5% in some people.
01:31:45.000 And in fact, there are some who don't make the conversion at all.
01:31:48.000 And those are the people who turn orange after a carrot juice fast.
01:31:52.000 Have you ever seen anyone with like the orange palms?
01:31:55.000 Andy Dick.
01:31:55.000 It happens.
01:31:56.000 My friend Andy used to drink so much carrot juice that the inside of his hands and his skin would turn orange.
01:32:01.000 Yeah, so he probably wasn't good at converting beta-carotene into retinol because we should be able to do that, but some people can't.
01:32:08.000 But isn't it just the mass quantities?
01:32:10.000 Yeah, I mean, it could be that too.
01:32:12.000 But retinol is only really present in organ meats and pasture-raised fats.
01:32:19.000 It'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.
01:32:32.000 And as you pointed out, organ meats have really fallen out of favor in the U.S. And this is only recent.
01:32:37.000 I bet you our grandparents ate a lot more organ meats than we eat.
01:32:42.000 Still in many parts of the world, they still eat organ meats more than we do.
01:32:47.000 Liver and onions is a very famous dish.
01:32:50.000 Yeah, beef heart.
01:32:51.000 And 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.
01:33:01.000 And 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.
01:33:13.000 Now, what would be the difference in terms of the nutritional density of mollusks versus organ meat?
01:33:19.000 So 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
01:33:49.000 trying to understand the difference between the Right.
01:34:21.000 Right.
01:34:35.000 And 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.
01:34:46.000 So there's some form of communication and exchange here.
01:34:49.000 Yeah, that's intelligence right there.
01:34:51.000 I mean, Paul Stamets has done amazing work on fungus in general.
01:34:57.000 Yeah, I would say that that's a really good option.
01:35:00.000 I mean, when you look at nutrients, like specific nutrients, it goes back and forth between liver and, you know, organ meats and shellfish.
01:35:08.000 And some nutrients, organ meats are higher, like vitamin A or iron.
01:35:14.000 And other nutrients, shellfish are generally higher, like with zinc or copper.
01:35:19.000 But certainly, even...
01:35:23.000 Shellfish 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.
01:35:32.000 And so if a vegan was willing to eat mollusks, I would say that that would be a great idea.
01:35:37.000 And the benefit there is you don't need to eat a lot.
01:35:41.000 Like three ounces, a single serving, can meet your copper requirement for the entire week.
01:35:47.000 Oh, wow.
01:35:48.000 Just one time.
01:35:49.000 So like oysters?
01:35:49.000 Yeah, oysters.
01:35:51.000 And same with iron, I think.
01:35:53.000 If I'm going off the top of my head, iron and zinc can nearly meet your entire weekly requirement.
01:35:58.000 So it's not like you have to eat a ton of these things.
01:36:01.000 You have a serving of clams once a week, and you have a serving of oysters once a week.
01:36:06.000 You 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.
01:36:23.000 And they're typically low on the toxicity.
01:36:39.000 Is there any benefit to eating them cooked versus raw, one way or the other?
01:36:44.000 Well, you know, there is the chance of disease in, you know, eating raw oysters.
01:36:50.000 I think it's pretty minimal compared to some other risks, but it is there, and cooking, you know, mitigates that, definitely.
01:36:58.000 I think...
01:37:00.000 In general, cooking makes the nutrients in meat and animal products more bioavailable rather than less.
01:37:07.000 In vegetables, it depends on the vegetable and the method of cooking, but it's more of a mixed bag.
01:37:15.000 But in meats, it generally improves the bioavailability.
01:37:19.000 So 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.
01:37:29.000 But these things really don't suffer.
01:37:32.000 Yeah, 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.
01:37:40.000 And it might sound like this is nitpicky, but it's not.
01:37:44.000 We're talking about actual lives, and then you have to start evaluating...
01:37:49.000 Is 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?
01:38:02.000 It's a real question.
01:38:04.000 And then you have insecticides, and you have the amount of insects that get killed when you're processing crops.
01:38:13.000 There's just no getting around.
01:38:15.000 If you're buying anything that is from large-scale agriculture, you're involved in the death of some sort of animals or insects.
01:38:23.000 And 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.
01:38:36.000 To me, I'm not so sure about that as an argument.
01:38:38.000 It's a sketchy argument.
01:38:39.000 Yeah, because it's almost like willful ignorance that these animals are being killed and the production of these plants that I'm eating.
01:38:48.000 I mean, I see the argument, but I'm not sure I buy it.
01:38:52.000 I do as well, and I see the willful ignorance argument up until the point where it gets explained to you.
01:38:57.000 So 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.
01:39:03.000 It'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.
01:39:10.000 They do not move.
01:39:12.000 So in the face of danger, they have this instinct to freeze.
01:39:16.000 So 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.
01:39:23.000 Falling in the headlights.
01:39:24.000 Yeah, you could stomp on the ground next to them.
01:39:26.000 They don't move.
01:39:27.000 They sit around.
01:39:28.000 They wait for their mother to return.
01:39:29.000 It's really interesting.
01:39:30.000 And they get chewed up by combines.
01:39:32.000 It's really, I mean, because these animals bed in these fields all the time.
01:39:36.000 And 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,
01:39:54.000 like whether we see ourselves as part of the ecosystem and the food cycle or as separate from it, right?
01:40:00.000 Do you think about like Native American?
01:40:02.000 Or 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.
01:40:17.000 Should they not eat, you know, milk and butter and those animal foods because of a moral or ethical argument against that?
01:40:28.000 It 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.
01:40:44.000 In defense of vegans, I never hear that argument, honestly.
01:40:47.000 I think I hear the argument that in America today, you have the choice.
01:40:52.000 And in westernized countries, you have the choice.
01:40:54.000 And so that you can choose to contribute less to suffering, which I think ideologically makes a lot of sense.
01:41:01.000 The 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.
01:41:12.000 It's just not the case.
01:41:14.000 Especially when you talk about insects.
01:41:16.000 Right.
01:41:16.000 I mean, there's no way.
01:41:18.000 And insects, at least in my mind, are more complex and more complicated than mollusks.
01:41:26.000 Yeah.
01:41:27.000 I mean, certainly, if you look at some of the studies on insect behavior, I think that would be borne out.
01:41:35.000 Yeah, but we have these weird hierarchies.
01:41:37.000 We love bees. 0.67
01:41:38.000 Bees are super important.
01:41:39.000 Well, bees are another species that gets totally decimated by factory farming.
01:41:45.000 Pesticides.
01:41:45.000 Yeah, the pesticides are really, really harmful for the bees.
01:41:50.000 Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
01:41:52.000 I think there is—you can say we have this—because we have that privilege, we have the imperative not to cause more suffering.
01:41:58.000 But 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.
01:42:09.000 They're less removed from— The basic cycle of life.
01:42:13.000 And 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.
01:42:30.000 And it's why they survived.
01:42:31.000 Absolutely.
01:42:32.000 I 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.
01:42:48.000 But 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,
01:43:11.000 better than the average person.
01:43:14.000 Then you see someone who goes on a vegan diet and falls apart within a couple of months.
01:43:18.000 And this is the person who does not have the genes to make those, you know, their poor converter. 0.84
01:43:24.000 And they also probably had pre-existing nutrient deficiencies, which made them less able to make those conversions.
01:43:30.000 And 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.
01:43:42.000 So it can't be problematic.
01:43:45.000 Well, look, we don't all respond the same way to the same choices.
01:43:48.000 Yeah, of course.
01:43:50.000 The difference in the way human beings respond to various foods can obviously be exhibited really quickly and easily with allergies, food allergies.
01:43:59.000 Absolutely.
01:43:59.000 We all know someone who has, like my friend Brian, his mother, if she eats a Brazil nut, she's dead.
01:44:08.000 She will just die.
01:44:10.000 Anaphylaxis.
01:44:11.000 Yeah, I can chew those things all day and nothing happens other than I get bored with them.
01:44:15.000 Yeah, especially if she has to pay 600 bucks for an EpiPen. 1.00
01:44:18.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:44:19.000 There's a lot of different things that show the biodiversity of just human beings.
01:44:24.000 When we come from different parts of the world, our ancestors came from different parts of the world.
01:44:28.000 They developed and evolved under different diets.
01:44:32.000 That's where I think paleo has maybe been less successful as a concept than it could have been otherwise.
01:44:43.000 I really believe there's no one-size-fits-all approach to diet or life in general.
01:44:49.000 But 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.
01:45:04.000 And then you take someone like Michael Phelps, who's super athlete training, you know, burning calories every day.
01:45:11.000 It's clear to me that they're going to need a completely different dietary approach.
01:45:16.000 Even if we talk about within a certain template or, you know, choice of foods, they're...
01:45:21.000 Michael Phelps is going to need a lot more carbohydrate.
01:45:23.000 He's going to need a lot higher calorie intake in general.
01:45:26.000 He's going to need more nutrients.
01:45:28.000 He's going to need to be eating more regularly.
01:45:31.000 Intermittent fasting is not going to work for him, probably.
01:45:34.000 But it's amazing to me how often that is completely left out of the equation.
01:45:39.000 When there's discussion of diets, you see...
01:45:42.000 Everyone should be on a low-fat diet.
01:45:44.000 Then the next craze is low-carb.
01:45:47.000 Carbs are toxic.
01:45:48.000 We shouldn't eat carbs.
01:45:49.000 And then everyone should be on paleo and never touch another grain or legume or dairy product for the rest of their life. 1.00
01:45:56.000 That's just stupid. 1.00
01:45:57.000 That's not the way it works. 1.00
01:45:59.000 Yeah, 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.
01:46:07.000 When 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.
01:46:16.000 Yeah, I read this thing about him eating like several pizzas at night and you look at him and he's shredded.
01:46:21.000 He does zero body fat.
01:46:23.000 Obviously, his body's doing something with that.
01:46:25.000 It's kind of important.
01:46:27.000 I 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.
01:46:39.000 Your body is less likely to be healthy when you're not doing much with it, period.
01:46:46.000 Absolutely.
01:46:49.000 I think that can work both ways.
01:46:51.000 On the one hand, Phelps would probably be better off choosing a different calorie source than pizzas.
01:46:58.000 You know, arguably.
01:46:59.000 I don't know.
01:47:01.000 So he can get away with a lot more than most people can.
01:47:03.000 Who are we, though, to say that he should be doing anything differently when he's the most successful swimmer?
01:47:08.000 Isn't he like the most successful Olympian of all time?
01:47:10.000 I think, yeah.
01:47:10.000 I don't think anyone's won any more gold medals, so what the heck do I know?
01:47:14.000 Keep on doing whatever you're doing.
01:47:15.000 It's working.
01:47:17.000 No, but I think genes play a role.
01:47:19.000 For sure.
01:47:20.000 Coming back to people like Michael or Rich, I think Rich could probably eat a lot of different diets and still be phenomenal.
01:47:32.000 I'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.
01:47:43.000 Right.
01:47:44.000 And eating really nutrient-dense vegetables constantly and only that primarily.
01:47:49.000 And, you know, obviously he had a massive benefit from changing from the standard American diet that you outlined to this vegan diet.
01:47:56.000 Right.
01:47:57.000 Makes you wonder what he, you know, what might have happened if he had done, switched to like a paleo diet.
01:48:02.000 Oh, don't say that to him right now. 0.99
01:48:04.000 Shut up! 1.00
01:48:06.000 Nobody wants to hear that, right? 0.99
01:48:07.000 It'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.
01:48:18.000 You just say, that is not an option, I am a vegan, and this is what I do.
01:48:22.000 That's fine.
01:48:22.000 Like I said, I'm not invested in changing anyone's mind about that.
01:48:27.000 Nor should you be.
01:48:28.000 Yeah.
01:48:28.000 I want to go back to two things.
01:48:29.000 One thing I want to go back to was your talk about, talking about fish oil, like the long term negative aspects of consuming fish oil.
01:48:38.000 Like what were those?
01:48:39.000 Yeah.
01:48:40.000 So 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.
01:48:48.000 So early research, you know, they looked at traditional Inuit people and said, wow, these people don't really have heart disease.
01:48:54.000 What is it about their diet that could explain this?
01:48:58.000 Wow, they eat mostly seal blubber, and they have enormous intake of omega-3 fats.
01:49:04.000 So...
01:49:06.000 It could be omega-3 fats.
01:49:07.000 And 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.
01:49:18.000 In other words, people who eat more fish have fewer heart attacks and die of cardiovascular disease, much less.
01:49:23.000 Okay, so pretty promising so far.
01:49:25.000 So then it's like, okay, why don't we then give people fish oil supplements?
01:49:31.000 And so they give people fish oil supplements.
01:49:33.000 They 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.
01:49:43.000 But then...
01:49:45.000 Over 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.
01:50:03.000 And so there are a few important principles here.
01:50:06.000 Number 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, 0.99
01:50:23.000 who don't live in the Arctic and don't have their diet or lifestyle.
01:50:29.000 And didn't evolve up there.
01:50:30.000 Didn't evolve up there.
01:50:31.000 And 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.
01:50:45.000 So that illustrates the problem with saying, oh, this works for the Inuit, so it should work for us. 0.91
01:50:51.000 It doesn't actually work that way, and now we know why.
01:50:53.000 It's because of the genetics.
01:50:56.000 The second...
01:50:58.000 Folly, and this happens all the time, and it's kind of a uniquely American thing, is like, oh, a little bit is good?
01:51:04.000 Well, a lot must be even better.
01:51:07.000 That's me.
01:51:08.000 That's me.
01:51:08.000 I'm American.
01:51:09.000 That's what I do.
01:51:11.000 As he stirs his bulletproof coffee over there.
01:51:14.000 Yeah.
01:51:16.000 So, yeah, I think what is becoming more clear is that eating fish is good.
01:51:23.000 Taking really high doses of fish oil for a long period of time may not be.
01:51:27.000 Now what were the negative health benefits, or negative health effects rather?
01:51:31.000 Well, an increase in cardiovascular disease risk in some cases, an increase in some inflammatory markers.
01:51:37.000 The thing to understand about omega-3 fats is they're very fragile.
01:51:42.000 So 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.
01:51:56.000 That's a brief description without going into the science.
01:52:00.000 And so saturated fats, because they are saturated with Hydrogen atoms are not susceptible to oxidative damage, and they're relatively stable.
01:52:11.000 They 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.
01:52:22.000 Whereas polyunsaturated fats are lacking in hydrogen atoms.
01:52:27.000 They become more susceptible to oxidative stress.
01:52:29.000 And the most unsaturated fats are the long-chain omega-3 fats.
01:52:35.000 This is why you don't cook.
01:52:38.000 You never hear anyone saying that you should cook with fish oil.
01:52:41.000 If you cook with it, you'll damage the fat, so it'll become rancid and oxidized.
01:52:46.000 This 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.
01:52:54.000 And 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.
01:53:10.000 So what I advise my patients is just eat fish.
01:53:15.000 And 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,
01:53:31.000 maybe like a teaspoon a day, rather than going for like 20 grams or 15 grams a day of fish oil.
01:53:39.000 So the real issue is in the oxidative stress.
01:53:44.000 So the potential of something being rancid sort of mitigates or diminishes all the positive effects from it.
01:53:53.000 But if you can be assured that there was no rancid quality to it?
01:53:58.000 Well, no, because it can become damaged in your body.
01:54:01.000 So there's two types of damage.
01:54:03.000 It can be damaged by heat or light outside of your body.
01:54:06.000 That's less of an issue because storage, you know, people know this.
01:54:10.000 The producers of these oils know it.
01:54:12.000 So they store them in opaque bottles.
01:54:15.000 And when you get the fish oil, you're instructed to put it in the refrigerator and preserve it.
01:54:19.000 But inside of your body, the fats can become oxidized too.
01:54:23.000 And historically, when you look at traditional diets, you see that the majority of fat comes from saturated or monounsaturated fat.
01:54:32.000 And 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.
01:54:42.000 Olive oil has some.
01:54:46.000 Avocados has some polyunsaturated fats, omega-6s.
01:54:50.000 But 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.
01:55:04.000 So that's the issue.
01:55:06.000 And that's also actually why industrialized seed oils are bad for us.
01:55:11.000 You 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.
01:55:28.000 Wow, that is really important information.
01:55:32.000 You know, it's also interesting, you're bringing up cod liver oil, like that's more like sort of ancient knowledge.
01:55:37.000 That's old school too.
01:55:39.000 Grandma and grandpa.
01:55:40.000 Yeah, I mean people would have you take a tablespoon of cod liver oil.
01:55:44.000 It's for your health.
01:55:45.000 But they were right.
01:55:46.000 We talked about retinol, vitamin A, the active form of vitamin A, and how it's not found in very many foods.
01:55:51.000 Just organ meats and pasture-raised fats.
01:55:55.000 And cod liver oil is from liver.
01:55:59.000 It's from cod livers.
01:56:00.000 And the oil is very high in vitamin A. It's also high in vitamin D, which a lot of people are deficient in.
01:56:05.000 And it has EPA and DHA. So again, this is traditional wisdom.
01:56:10.000 Our ancestors knew.
01:56:12.000 They may not have scientifically understood what the benefit was, but they knew through trial and error.
01:56:17.000 That is really interesting.
01:56:19.000 Here's another thing that I wanted to bring up that we talked about earlier.
01:56:22.000 The misconception that saturated fats and cholesterol are bad for you.
01:56:31.000 This is something that you hear vegans...
01:56:40.000 Yeah, unfortunately, they're not current with the science.
01:56:45.000 I mean, even the U.S. dietary guidelines now have no restriction on dietary cholesterol.
01:56:50.000 So, the most recent version of dietary guidelines, if you look at them, there's no restriction on dietary cholesterol.
01:56:57.000 So the vegans are aligning themselves with science that's decades old at this point.
01:57:01.000 And they're out of step even with the conventional, totally vanilla mainstream dietary guidelines.
01:57:07.000 I don't think they care.
01:57:09.000 I think it's an ideological thing.
01:57:11.000 I think this is something that they have.
01:57:13.000 They have their bullet points.
01:57:14.000 Right.
01:57:14.000 And saturated fats, bad.
01:57:16.000 Yeah.
01:57:16.000 And they go to saturated fats, consumption of animal products, bad.
01:57:20.000 Cholesterol, bad.
01:57:21.000 So this is based on an old understanding of how heart disease develops, which is kind of the pipe analogy, we can call it.
01:57:28.000 Break it down for us, Chris.
01:57:30.000 Saturated fat and cholesterol are like gunk that clog up your pipes, right?
01:57:34.000 That's kind of how we all were taught.
01:57:36.000 We all conceive of it.
01:57:37.000 So 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,
01:57:58.000 no oxygen.
01:57:59.000 Heart attack.
01:58:01.000 Or plaque forms and then the plaque ruptures and it blocks the artery and blood can't get to the heart and you have a heart attack.
01:58:09.000 So that's kind of the dominant idea.
01:58:11.000 And it turns out it's not actually true.
01:58:14.000 For one thing...
01:58:16.000 There was actually just a study published that reviewed all of the randomized clinical trials that looked at substituting polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat.
01:58:26.000 So 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.
01:58:35.000 Vegans.
01:58:36.000 Yeah, this was at a time where saturated fat was seen as harmful.
01:58:39.000 And they probably gave them margarine and some of that other stuff.
01:58:43.000 Remember when that was supposed to be good for you?
01:58:45.000 Isn't that amazing?
01:58:45.000 I can't believe it's not butter, right?
01:58:47.000 God, that stuff's so terrible for you.
01:58:49.000 It's hard to find it now.
01:58:50.000 And so they reviewed 10 studies, and they found that only one supported this notion.
01:58:56.000 One of 10 supported this notion that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat was good for you.
01:59:02.000 And even that study was flawed because...
01:59:05.000 A 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.
01:59:22.000 Was that intentional?
01:59:23.000 No, it was a poorly designed study.
01:59:27.000 I don't know.
01:59:28.000 I 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.
01:59:37.000 So the early studies suggested that if you ate more saturated fat and cholesterol, the cholesterol level of your blood would go up.
01:59:45.000 And they used that as a way of...
01:59:47.000 And then everyone knew that high cholesterol in your blood causes heart attacks.
01:59:51.000 So if A plus B... And B plus C equals C, then A equals C, right?
02:00:00.000 But that turned out to not actually be true on two counts.
02:00:03.000 Number 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.
02:00:15.000 Like, let's forget about the mechanism.
02:00:17.000 Let's just see if people who eat more fat and cholesterol actually have more heart attacks.
02:00:21.000 When they did those studies, No difference.
02:00:25.000 People who eat more fat and more cholesterol did not have more heart attacks than people who ate less.
02:00:30.000 So that was a huge problem.
02:00:32.000 And 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.
02:00:43.000 70% 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.
02:00:53.000 And how do you count for the other 30?
02:00:54.000 They're called hyper-responders, and that may be genetic.
02:00:59.000 So they may have a certain ApoE genotype that predisposes them to be more susceptible to the effects of dietary cholesterol.
02:01:07.000 They may be hyper-absorbers of dietary cholesterol, so they actually absorb more through their gut than a typical person.
02:01:13.000 But 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.
02:01:25.000 So 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.
02:01:37.000 So it wasn't thought to be clinically significant.
02:01:39.000 Is it possible that, like what we were talking about before, long-term studies would reveal more?
02:01:45.000 Because we were talking about certain nutrients, when you eliminate them from the diet, it takes a long time to find the effect.
02:01:52.000 Or 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?
02:02:01.000 Yeah, I think long-term studies could certainly reveal different effects.
02:02:06.000 I 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?
02:02:17.000 You know what I mean?
02:02:19.000 Let's say someone switches to a nutrient-dense, low-carb diet from a standard American diet.
02:02:26.000 And let's say every single thing about their health improves.
02:02:29.000 They lose weight.
02:02:32.000 Their insulin levels decrease.
02:02:34.000 Their blood sugar levels go down.
02:02:35.000 Their blood pressure levels go down.
02:02:37.000 Their inflammatory markers go down.
02:02:39.000 By the way, this is not a theoretical thing.
02:02:41.000 This is something I see every day in my practice.
02:02:44.000 But their total cholesterol goes up.
02:02:47.000 Is that a bad thing?
02:02:49.000 Is that a good thing?
02:02:50.000 Should they go back to the standard American diet that they were eating? 0.73
02:02:54.000 I'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?
02:03:00.000 Yeah, so this is a really big oversimplification.
02:03:05.000 And it was created, I think, by the drug companies to make it seem very simple.
02:03:10.000 Good cholesterol, good.
02:03:12.000 Bad cholesterol, bad.
02:03:13.000 Our drug lowers your bad cholesterol, good.
02:03:15.000 That's how simple they want it to be.
02:03:18.000 It's not actually that simple.
02:03:20.000 So-called bad cholesterol actually has some important roles that it plays.
02:03:25.000 It wasn't actually just there to give us heart attacks, contrary to what that model would assume.
02:03:33.000 What's even more wrong about referring to cholesterol is we're not actually...
02:03:41.000 What's important is not really how much cholesterol we have.
02:03:46.000 What's important is the lipoproteins.
02:03:48.000 So let me see.
02:03:49.000 If I can use an analogy here.
02:03:51.000 So 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.
02:04:06.000 Lipoproteins also carry fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D and triglycerides and other things that our body actually needs.
02:04:13.000 So 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.
02:04:22.000 So for years it was thought that the amount of cholesterol inside the lipoproteins was the big issue.
02:04:30.000 And 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.
02:04:36.000 They're essentially measuring the passengers in the cars, like how much cholesterol is inside of those particles.
02:04:42.000 And that was thought to be the driving factor for risk for heart disease.
02:04:47.000 We now know That it's not really the cholesterol inside of the particles that makes the difference.
02:04:52.000 It's how many particles you have.
02:04:55.000 So 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?
02:05:07.000 And 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.
02:05:18.000 So it's literally like volume?
02:05:20.000 It's a gradient-driven process.
02:05:22.000 So if you have a high number of particles in the luminal space of the artery, they will try to diffuse across the lumen.
02:05:31.000 So is it an issue with overeating?
02:05:34.000 No.
02:05:34.000 So what we're talking about here is the number of particles.
02:05:39.000 And all of the things that I talked about earlier that raise cholesterol, what I was actually referring to is things that raise LDL particles.
02:05:47.000 I just didn't want to go into all of this nuance at the risk of confusing people.
02:05:52.000 But LDL versus HDL. Yeah, so you have LDL particles and you have HDL particles.
02:05:58.000 LDL stands for low-density lipoprotein, HDL for high-density lipoprotein.
02:06:02.000 And traditionally, LDL particles have been viewed as bad.
02:06:06.000 That's the bad cholesterol. 0.66
02:06:08.000 And HDL particles have been viewed as good.
02:06:11.000 And there's definitely something to that.
02:06:14.000 The single most important risk marker from a...
02:06:19.000 From a blood lipid standpoint, or the two most, would be LDL particle number and another lipoprotein called lipoprotein little a.
02:06:30.000 So 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.
02:06:47.000 And that's what increases the risk of heart disease.
02:06:49.000 So the name of the game is to keep your LDL particle number down.
02:06:56.000 And when we talk about the things that increase it, you know, going back to early in the interview, genetics do play a role.
02:07:03.000 Diet definitely plays a role.
02:07:04.000 But then also things like thyroid function, infections, inflammation, and leaky gut.
02:07:12.000 It's not happening in isolation.
02:07:15.000 Once 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.
02:07:25.000 And I have many patients, often guys who come to me, their only complaint is that they have high cholesterol.
02:07:33.000 Now, I don't know if they really are 100% healthy and that's their only complaint.
02:07:39.000 We test their LDL particle number.
02:07:40.000 It's high.
02:07:41.000 They say they have no gut issues.
02:07:43.000 They have no fatigue, no other health problems at all.
02:07:47.000 But then I test their gut and I do all these testing and we find issues.
02:07:50.000 We address those issues and their LDL particle drops by 30, 40, even 50% sometimes.
02:07:57.000 Wow.
02:07:58.000 Which is more than you would expect from a statin.
02:08:02.000 Yeah.
02:08:03.000 So this, again, this is another one of those things.
02:08:06.000 It's way more nuanced than it's made out to be.
02:08:09.000 And 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.
02:08:28.000 My friend Anthony Bourdain was taking statins because he used to eat a lot.
02:08:34.000 He still eats a lot.
02:08:35.000 And he was developing high blood pressure and all the issues that we're just outlining.
02:08:43.000 He started training every day doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
02:08:46.000 Got really obsessed with it.
02:08:47.000 No longer has to take statins.
02:08:49.000 Changed his cholesterol profile, which is really kind of fascinating.
02:08:55.000 I'm sure he's eating healthier, but to me that's a very strange thing.
02:09:01.000 What is happening that's causing his cholesterol to drop because of exercise?
02:09:06.000 At 58 years old.
02:09:08.000 Did he lose weight?
02:09:08.000 Lost a lot of weight.
02:09:09.000 Lost 30 pounds.
02:09:10.000 The 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.
02:09:22.000 Why is it a contributing factor?
02:09:24.000 It's just there's a whole constellation of metabolic changes that happens when we become overweight that include insulin resistance and leptin resistance.
02:09:33.000 All the gut issues you outlined.
02:09:34.000 All the gut issues, inflammation.
02:09:36.000 And this creates like a milieu that leads to dyslipidemia, which is this...
02:09:43.000 So, each particle, so we talked about this, the cars on the road, a car can only hold so much, so many passengers, right?
02:09:52.000 And 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.
02:10:11.000 So if you have a lot of triglyceride, a lot of fat in your liver, the liver will make more LDL particles.
02:10:18.000 Because it needs more particles to carry the amount of cholesterol that needs to get around the body.
02:10:23.000 So that's actually what's happening.
02:10:24.000 That 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.
02:10:33.000 And when you lose weight, the converse happens.
02:10:36.000 You need fewer particles to transport the same amount of cholesterol.
02:10:40.000 So your LDL particle will go down.
02:10:42.000 Your insulin and leptin sensitivity will improve your...
02:10:48.000 Gut may improve also and your blood pressure will typically go down because the heart doesn't need to work as hard to pump as much blood.
02:10:56.000 Makes sense.
02:10:59.000 The terminology of bad cholesterol versus good cholesterol is kind of problematic, isn't it?
02:11:05.000 Because doesn't LDL play some sort of beneficial roles?
02:11:09.000 Like, you don't want to eliminate LDL. No.
02:11:12.000 I mean, some have argued that it should be zero, but I don't think that that makes much sense biologically.
02:11:18.000 One role that it plays is it's antimicrobial.
02:11:21.000 LDL 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.
02:11:33.000 And that's one reason why chronic infections increase LDL particle number, because the body's attempting to deal with that infection and the toxins.
02:11:42.000 As I mentioned as well, the LDL particles are like a taxi service that carry nutrients to different parts of the body.
02:11:49.000 Fat-soluble vitamins and fats like triglycerides and antioxidants too that we need to function properly.
02:11:55.000 So I think it's a question of balance.
02:11:58.000 We want to keep our LDL particle in a range that contributes to health and doesn't increase our risk substantially for heart disease.
02:12:07.000 Yeah, 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.
02:12:18.000 Oh, I just need to take a pill.
02:12:19.000 And 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.
02:12:31.000 It's a really bad system.
02:12:34.000 It's a really bad system.
02:12:35.000 And 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.
02:12:54.000 And, 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,
02:13:09.000 many, many, many, many hours I've been paying attention to it.
02:13:13.000 It's incredibly complex.
02:13:15.000 It's so complex.
02:13:16.000 I mean, it's like any other pursuit, I think.
02:13:18.000 The more you know, the less you know.
02:13:21.000 You 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.
02:13:32.000 Yeah, 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.
02:13:45.000 Yeah, I love that.
02:13:46.000 That's exactly how I feel about this.
02:13:49.000 At the same time, I think our knowledge is advancing, and we are in a different place even just 10 years ago than we were 10 years ago.
02:13:57.000 Yes.
02:13:57.000 We understand things.
02:13:59.000 But maybe some doctors know, right?
02:14:01.000 There's a lot of people that would talk to their doctor, and a doctor would go, oh, that's nonsense.
02:14:05.000 Right.
02:14:05.000 Oh, well, these guys are these so-called experts.
02:14:09.000 Right.
02:14:09.000 They'll go on about it.
02:14:10.000 I mean, here's the interesting thing about that.
02:14:12.000 Number one is that...
02:14:16.000 There's a real lag time between what's in the scientific literature that anyone can access now.
02:14:24.000 The 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.
02:14:34.000 And 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.
02:14:50.000 But 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.
02:15:01.000 Because 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.
02:15:10.000 I mean, that started in the 50s.
02:15:12.000 And 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.
02:15:27.000 That was 30 years after this whole campaign started.
02:15:31.000 And unfortunately, I think it's going to take another couple of decades.
02:15:35.000 Hopefully it will go faster this time.
02:15:37.000 And then there are some signs that it is going faster.
02:15:40.000 But the average primary care provider, they're seeing patients 30, 40 hours a week.
02:15:46.000 They have families.
02:15:48.000 They have other, you know, their own health to consider.
02:15:51.000 They're not going home at night and reading scientific literature.
02:15:54.000 They are...
02:15:59.000 We're good to go.
02:16:09.000 And they're based on studies that were done 50 or, you know, 40 or 50 years ago.
02:16:14.000 So 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.
02:16:30.000 It's based often on research that's decades old.
02:16:33.000 This stuff takes so long to process.
02:16:36.000 People 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.
02:16:42.000 If 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.
02:16:53.000 I need to know what's going on with my overall blood lipids, my health, my nutrient density.
02:17:01.000 What is the average person?
02:17:03.000 Yeah, so I think the first, the very first thing is to, I can sum up in three words, eat real food.
02:17:10.000 And, you know, you can talk about paleo, primal, paleo template.
02:17:14.000 Okay, that's, you know, I would argue that that's a step above.
02:17:18.000 But just eating real food, like avoiding things that come in a bag or a box, You know, butter comes in a box.
02:17:24.000 Let's not get too hung up on that.
02:17:25.000 But you know what I mean when I say that, right?
02:17:28.000 Actual foods.
02:17:29.000 Actual real food.
02:17:30.000 Vegetables that come out of the ground.
02:17:32.000 Vegetables that come out of the ground and fruits and nuts and seeds and some, even, you know, some tubers of sweet potatoes.
02:17:38.000 I 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.
02:17:45.000 And the skins are actually The skins are good for you.
02:17:47.000 And eat some good pasture-raised, organic, if possible, animal products and wild-caught fish, if you can do that.
02:17:56.000 And I really think that that would solve like 80% of people's problems.
02:18:02.000 If 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.
02:18:13.000 But 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.
02:18:26.000 And there are several training organizations out there.
02:18:30.000 Institute for Functional Medicine has been around the longest and is pretty well known.
02:18:35.000 I have Kresser Institute, which just started.
02:18:39.000 We have 200 doctors and other healthcare professionals in the program now.
02:18:44.000 And you can go to these websites and look for practitioners that practice functional medicine.
02:18:51.000 Unfortunately, it's not yet at the level where there's one on every corner, like a yoga studio.
02:18:58.000 But it's changing fast.
02:19:00.000 For 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,
02:19:16.000 which is a very prestigious medical institution.
02:19:19.000 And they already have a six month wait list and it's just, it's blowing up.
02:19:23.000 So I think the tide is turning and pretty soon a lot of people will be seeing functional medicine practitioners.
02:19:30.000 Um, 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.
02:19:46.000 So look at your blood sugar, your lipids, your metabolic function, your vitamin D, your B12 levels.
02:19:52.000 Take all that information and then create like a customized individual plan for you based on all of your lab test results.
02:20:03.000 We're good to go.
02:20:06.000 We're good to go.
02:20:20.000 And 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.
02:20:29.000 But 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.
02:20:43.000 And 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.
02:21:02.000 I don't crash like I used to I feel like overall my health is better.
02:21:08.000 I talked about my Increase over the last few years of probiotics made a giant benefit.
02:21:15.000 It's made a huge impact in terms of my ability to recover from illnesses, my ability to avoid illnesses.
02:21:21.000 And I have little kids.
02:21:22.000 So my kids are in school.
02:21:24.000 I travel.
02:21:25.000 Which is like the airplanes are just like disease vector labs.
02:21:27.000 You 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
02:21:57.000 function of your health and your immune system and your gut biome and how it translates into your actual personality.
02:22:06.000 That's a huge point.
02:22:08.000 I'm really glad you brought that up.
02:22:10.000 And it does that in a couple of different ways.
02:22:12.000 One is just the actual chemical influence that we talked about.
02:22:16.000 Your gut bacteria, how it influences your brain chemistry and can affect your mood.
02:22:21.000 But the other, I think, is more Related to just how you experience your life when you feel good versus when you feel crappy.
02:22:32.000 Like 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.
02:22:46.000 I mean, it's a dramatic difference.
02:22:50.000 One of the downsides of how adaptable we are as human beings is we can get used to some pretty heavy stuff.
02:22:59.000 A lot of people, I think, are sick, or at least they're not well.
02:23:04.000 They're not really healthy.
02:23:06.000 There's a kind of normalization of that that happens in our culture.
02:23:12.000 It's just common.
02:23:14.000 People are taking more than one drug.
02:23:19.000 They don't feel well.
02:23:21.000 They're not sleeping well.
02:23:25.000 That's common, but I don't think it's normal.
02:23:27.000 There's a really important difference between what's common and what's normal.
02:23:31.000 I think that's an awesome point.
02:23:32.000 And I think this has been a great conversation.
02:23:34.000 I really, really thank you for coming in here.
02:23:36.000 And thanks for your awesome website.
02:23:38.000 There's so much data and so much information there.
02:23:41.000 ChrisKresser.com for people that are interested.
02:23:44.000 There's a ton of articles up there.
02:23:46.000 And if they want to follow any of your other work, where can you direct them?
02:23:50.000 Yeah, ChrisCresser.com is the main place.
02:23:53.000 I have a podcast called Revolution Health Radio on iTunes.
02:23:56.000 And then for any clinicians that are interested in learning more about this approach is CresserInstitute.com.
02:24:02.000 Thank you, Chris.
02:24:03.000 Appreciate it, man.
02:24:04.000 This was awesome.
02:24:04.000 We're going to do this again.
02:24:05.000 Love to.
02:24:06.000 Take it in, folks.
02:24:08.000 We will be back tomorrow.
02:24:10.000 Who's here tomorrow?
02:24:13.000 What's that?
02:24:14.000 Tony Hinchcliffe!
02:24:15.000 The Golden Pony! 1.00
02:24:16.000 Unhealthy, cigarette-smoking little fuck. 1.00
02:24:19.000 He'll be here tomorrow. 1.00
02:24:20.000 See ya!
02:24:20.000 Bye!
02:24:20.000 Love you guys!
02:24:23.000 That was great.