What a family welcome to episode 94 of the genius life.
That's right. Ladies and gents. We now have intro music. It
only took us 94
episodes to get there. But we're a legitimate podcast you guys and that track that you just heard was created by my good friend. Mr. Aaron tap Aaron tap is a very talented singer songwriter. He's a music producer and he graciously has hooked us up.
So we got some beautiful funky new intro music. We have some outdoor music and yeah, big things are coming to the genius life you guys I got some personal updates to share with you guys. I'm actually moving from West Hollywood to Santa Monica as the west side of Los Angeles for the first time. I've always when I lived in La I've always lived in weho as it's called, but I'm excited to venture West. I found a space that I think is going to be a lot more.
Do Civ to doing more video content and I've got a dedicated room that I'm going to devote to the podcast. So maybe creating a podcast studio in my house. So look forward to upgraded audio better quality audio a lot more video content that I'm going to be putting up on my Instagram page and my YouTube channel youtube.com slash Max luthier, I'm super super excited and of
course your
support through all this really is going to help in a big way.
To support the Genies live. All you got to do is continue to spread the word about it. Make sure that you're subscribed to this podcast and pick up my new book, which is also called the Genius Life coming out everywhere on March 17th. You can pre-order it at amazon.com. You can pre-order it at Barnes & Noble. You can go to genius life book.com and preorder it and register for special bonuses, like the genius life guide to restaurants and supermarkets or assigned a book plate for the first 1000 people who pre-order
Pre-ordering my new book, you are essentially guaranteeing that I am going to get to continue to bring you life changing episode after life-changing episode week after week. And this episode is no different. I am very thrilled to welcome back to the show my good friend. Dr. Paul saladino. Dr. Saladino is a board certified in Internal Medicine physician. He's one of the most vocal Advocates of the carnivore diet and he's also the author of the brand new book the carnivore code over the course of the next hour and a half. That's right. As one of the most this is one of the longest episode.
So as we've actually taped to date on the genius life, we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of why dr. Saladino recommends for some of his patients and all meat diet. We don't agree on everything but I think that that's a good thing. Actually. I'm very open to challenging my assumptions in my beliefs as you should be and I always learn something new when I sit down and get the opportunity to talk to. Dr. Saladino. He's a brilliant guy very dedicated to his mission of helping people and improve their symptoms from inflammatory conditions autoimmune.
Is and you know, even though the title of this podcast episode was Max debates a carnivore. It's a it's this going to be the friendliest debate that you're ever going to witness. So I'm excited for you to listen to it. And yeah, let me know you think before we dive in and give a shout-out to the sponsor of this episode of the show. This episode is brought to you by my good friends at for Sig Matic who make a line of medicinal and fused medicinal mushroom infused coffees and elixirs. I
I happen to be a big fan of their lion's mane infused coffee, which actors all Dino would not consume because of course coffee comes from a plant, but I enjoy coffee. I've started to integrate coffee back into my life. I am consuming what I would consider to be the minimum effective dose most mornings. Although I'll take a day off here and there and usually I will consume the coffee in a pre-workout setting but what I really like about 4 Sig Mattox lion's mane coffee is that I find anecdotally that the lion's mane
Has a synergistic effect with the coffee giving me a focused Buzz without Jitters which can sometimes accompany caffeine consumption, especially when you consume that caffeine or that coffee rather on an empty stomach. If you'd like to give for signetics lion's mane coffee a try. All you got to do is go over to for Sigma to.com slash Max or use promo code Max and you will get to save a whopping 15 percent off of everything in their online store. Now, we're just seconds away from getting to this chat with dr. Saladino as I
Mentioned I am pumped but before I do I want to give a shout-out to Shannon Shifty who wrote a review on iTunes she wrote. I absolutely love listening to this podcast always learning for Max. I feel like I am personally having a conversation with him Max and his guests really take on some deep content but presents it in a way that the average people like me can understand love it while Shawn and I'm so thrilled that you are picking up what I'm putting down on the genius life. You know what we're all about here. It's we're making we're about taking knowledge and making it actionable.
Approachable and achievable. So with that I am pumped for you to get to know. Dr. Saladino. If you haven't heard in previous previously on my podcast or if you have this is going to be a really enlightening and enlivening sequel to the conversation that we had previously. So without further Ado here we go. We're rolling. What's up, dude? How's it going man? Good to see you. I'm excited to have round two with you man. Let's do it. The carnivore code is your new book. I'm so
excited. It's
It's been a labor of love
a labor of love but you've like kind of exploded I feel like in the health and nutrition space even since we met like you've really been on a
tear. It's been a fun journey. I had some ideas that have resonated with people. It's been really fun to connect with people like you and others in the space and share ideas and refine my ideas and have them challenged that's forced me to look deeper and deeper and out of all that has come the
book. Yeah, you do a bunch of debates to I love
it. My friend. Tommy would was like you just like fighting people and I was like, yeah, I do it. I feel like when you have ideas that are as
I don't know where to use here as radical perhaps or as controversial as those that I would Advance it's my responsibility to support them. Hell. Yeah, it's my responsibility to back them up and to say to people hate these ideas are different than what we've been thinking. Here's why I think they're right. What do you guys think? You know Chris Master John Lane Norton what whoever wants to come on, you know, David Sinclair, whatever. How do you want my podcast to kind of like, let's share ideas. Where do you think my ideas are lacking? How do we make them better? Am I off my rocker order?
These have some Merit for most people that they can benefit from because it's fun to have radical ideas. But are they worth hanging out
with? Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that I love about you is that you're so science-based, you know, it's a if anybody was like qualified to go into the research and really get into the studies and read them thoroughly and understand them. I think it's you
I try are you saying that I'm a nutrition
expert? I think I would it's so funny. I mean we started the guys before we started rolling Paul and I were talking about the
The recent James Wilkes Chris Kresser debate on Joe Rogan and you know we could talk about that a little bit. I'm sure but I think that the whole thing about being an expert is relative because they're experts in like different, you know aspects of nutrition. Obviously, it's a huge and complicated field and you know just using expert as a as a source. I mean that's like an appeal to Authority fallacy and I just don't I don't buy it and
You know, the other thing about the word expert is that to me it conveys somebody who's been sort of like who stopped learning, you know, like I think the true experts that the more they understand the less. They realize they know and it's the health detectives out of the that are the real experts, you know, so that's why I appreciate what you bring to the field and that's why I appreciate what Chris, you know has brought to the field for many many years before that debate. And yeah, so yes in a nutshell. Yeah, I would call you a nutrition
expert. Well, thanks, man. I was saying it kind of tongue and cheek.
Choking so I'm glad we clarified that for people but yeah, I thought that that critique of James Wilkes of Chris Crocker was ridiculous. And I think the UN on The Doctors TV show recently and I may have been on briefly before you or after you but at the same time I was on the doctors cool and they went to town on me. They criticized the the lawyer sat up there and said, how are you qualified to be doing this and I just kind of at that point I realized I was in Hollywood and it was like it was like the Jerry Springer of TV shows but in my mind afterwards I thought man there are so
So many people I mean I have an MD right but that doesn't really make me qualified. It means that maybe I've had some training and I've done a lot of years of graduate work and read studies and been challenged by other Physicians to think critically, but after that show on the doctors what I thought was there are so many people who don't even have who don't have an MD who have contributed so much you rob wolf, you know, there's tons of people without doctoral degrees for making great strides. Dave Feldman is an engineer. Like how are any of us call if I'd it's just based on our curiosity and scientific rigor. It doesn't have to do with the degree. Yeah, and and that
I think that appeal to Authority is so false. Anytime anybody uses that whether it's James Wilkes or people in the doctors. I just kind of roll my eyes and go fine. Stay with the consensus. Yeah, listen to the people that you've been listening to for the last 30 years and you'll always get what you've always received right even though I wasn't present. It's so frustrating.
Yeah, and it's those people credentials that have I mean for the most part overseeing the Public Health crisis, you know, so I just think it's a it doesn't make any sense to to blindly follow people just because they have like certain credentials after their name. I
I know plenty of people that are brilliantly intuitive about nutrition and who I would listen to, you know far sooner than people, you know certain people with certain credentials. And yeah, I've been really lucky in that people have referred to me as you know, all you know experts on all different, you know in all different fields. I've gotten you know nutrition expert which I shudder, you know at the term because you know, I know that there's a little sort of Niche area where I know a lot about nutrition, but I wouldn't say that I know everything about nutrition, you know, can I
Mi have I become a walking meta-analysis about the role of nutrition in dementia prevention and I could speak to that topic very eloquently. Yeah. Sure. Do I know as much about micro nutrition, you know, for example is Chris Master John or about you know, what we're going to talk about on the podcast like, you know, anthropology the anthropology of meat consumption at things like that as you know, but you know, I think that you can have these like little sort of domains and own them without having gone through the through the system and you know not
Not everybody can do that. Not everybody can necessarily go and teach themselves in a way that's rigorous and and you know have that sort of dedication and how that sort of passion but I do think it's
possible and we need new ideas. And what's so funny is that as humans? I think we all realize we need new ideas, but when new ideas come out, we just say that's wrong. Yeah, right and that's why it's fun to be in that space and challenge people and say hey, I have no ideas. What do you guys think but even within medicine it's so ironic you're going
Medical school it's like it's cliche for them to tell you 50% of what you're learning today is wrong. Right but the converse of that is that when you bring up a new idea in medicine, you are universally vilified, right? So we're told half of what we learn in medical schools wrong. And then when you try and suggest something new people go crazy on you like the doctors for instance. There was Travis's on the stage waving his arms. Like I just there are so many study. You know, I was it's just crazy like people don't accept new ideas with an open mind. It's good to be critical, but we need new ideas because we don't have it all figured out.
Out and so we're all a part of that and I think everyone can contribute to that regardless of their credential.
Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean that's why it takes 17 years on average for was discovered in science to be put into day-to-day clinical practice, right? There's just this resistance to new ideas as you as you said, and I don't think it helps anybody
doesn't it doesn't serve anyone because people are still getting sick, right and there has to be some measure of prudence around our be harming people, but I think that we have to find the balance and push things forward and
People new therapies because we know and this is what's been. So interesting for me about my journey with the carnivore diet is we know that most of the mainstream therapies are not reversing disease. We know that we're not treating the root cause Western medicine really hasn't woken up to that fact yet and we know that most of the medications we use have side effects some of them help sometimes I'll admit that and they often all have bad side effects. There are very few Therapies in medicine that actually correct the root cause and their lot of people are still suffering for it, whether it's dementia the stuff you're interested in neurodegeneration cognitive disorders.
You nazies is interesting to me nutritional deficiencies, whatever. There's a lot of people still suffering. We need new ideas. We're not done.
Yeah, totally. So for those may be listening who are not familiar with your work haven't listened to the you know, the previous episode that you were on. What is the carnivore diet and why is it something that you've become so passionate about
so hopefully people will go back and listen to that one because we did
a good one. We did a good job was the
first one was really really excellent. So I hope you guys will all listen to that one. So the carnivore diet is I'll preface it with this. The carnivore diet is something that I heard about.
About two years ago, and I thought it was crazy. Right? So everyone listening to this that is having that reaction. I will normalize that invalidate you all right. It's okay to think that a carnivore diet is crazy. What a carnivore diet is is an all-animal diet no plants whenever I'm telling people about this it takes two or three questions to really clarify that way. You don't need any plants. Will do you bread. No, I don't eat breakfast. Do you eat fruit? No, I don't need any place. That's right. Do you drink coffee? No, I don't. Do you drink alcohol? That's a whole separate story. I don't do that either right, but it's
An entirely animal-based diet and it's a pretty radical idea right? You hear this it hits you in the face like a water balloon or like just a very shocking cold day in December. Maybe not in Los Angeles, but in Nebraska, you're just like whoa, that is bracing idea. How could we possibly not eat plants? And that was the way I reacted to it. When I first heard about it right plants have become a part of our culture there a part of many cultures perhaps every culture their part of every culture admittedly and we see them all the time.
Go in the grocery store and the majority the grocery store is plants or things that are made from plants. There's a small thing in the back with some fish and some meat but maybe 5% of the grocery store is milk and eggs and meat and fish. So the majority of our lives are surrounded by plants, especially when we're consuming them in most of us have grown up eating plants and the narrative has always been eat your vegetables, right? And so there's a lot of conditioning that has already been done on us that plants are good for us, and we need plans and so when I come around
Around and say hey, maybe we don't eat plants. Let's ask. The question are plants good for us. Do we need them and is me bad for us or probably three of the central questions around a carnivore diet and they're all super interesting and they all have lots of rabbit holes. We can go down and too much for anyone podcast, but it's a pretty radical thing to say to people I don't eat plants not fruit not vegetables not grains not beans not coffee. Nothing. I don't need any plants and it was born out of a continued issue with medical problems for me. So
I had eczema. It was persistent throughout medical schools throughout residency at times so bad that I had to get IV antibiotics for it because I had impetigo at the time I was doing a lot of jujitsu I would get on my knees and it would get super infected or I would get on my back so badly that it was really frustrating right at one time in residency. I had so much EX. I'm on my lower back, but it was like a eczema tramp stamp. It was just horrible quo, right? So it's just in a sweeping and it's on my clothes and I'm like what is going on here? This is just persistent and it wasn't that during those times. I wasn't iterating.
My diet and thinking what could be causing this and I just I just hadn't found the answer. I hadn't found an answer that worked for me. And what I was doing for so long was an organic paleo diet kind of the middle of the road diet that I think is a great diet for the majority people and certainly many times better than a standard American diet and I just began to be more and more distinct or more and more intentional about the things that I was eating on that organic Paleolithic diet for people that are not familiar with paleo diet. I was excluding already grains beans.
Dairy from my diet but had occasional nuts and seeds and vegetables that were all friend familiar with and then meet and it I didn't have early for my X-Men what's going on? There's probably still something that I'm reacting to that's one of the things that I have grown to believe very strongly throughout my medical training both as a PA in cardiology and then medical school and residency is that food is a huge trigger. Right food is a huge lever It's Not the Only Lover but it's the biggest lever. And so the first thing I think about for myself my family my clients.
When something isn't going well, is there a food thing going on? And this is what I hope Western medicine will realize in the near future is that there is this huge lever that they're not pulling that elimination diets regardless of how we construct them if we construct them intentionally and with forethought can be so powerful. They don't cost anything and and even the fact that an elimination diets work suggests that there's an immunologic reaction to food Beyond anaphylactic injury, right people are familiar with peanut allergy or you know other allergies that are ige mediated that
Someone's throat to swell up requiring epinephrine kind of like a bee sting type of thing. But there's subclinical there are really appears to be subclinical immunologic reaction to food. And that is a very big Meyer. That's a big bog that Western medicine has not even begun to look into yet. So I was iterating around those ideas in my mind and thinking what foods are triggering me and I thought okay, I'm going to take out oxalates. I'm gonna take out histamines. I'm going to take out lectins. I'm going to take out salicylates and before I knew it there wasn't a whole lot of plant food.
Left and things started to get better and it wasn't until I went full carnivore and I just started eating animal foods and we can talk about what I eat that things finally got better, but other things happened as well that we're really surprising my mood got better and I didn't expect it to be that because I didn't feel depressed or anxious. I just felt more positive and I had more mental Clarity whether I was doing it in a ketogenic side or not on a ketogenic side people might say well, how can you do a carnivore diet non ketogenic at times I was using honey to kind of experiment with the macronutrient.
Those and the overall biochemistry, but regardless of whether I was doing a kid genic diet or non-comedogenic that my mental Clarity was better and my overall mood is better and the X-Men got better within the first few weeks. I thought okay, there's something to this is like this is really cool. But that little voice in the back of my head is saying but don't you need XYZ phytonutrients polyphenol that added a and what I had done on myself was just create this Elimination Diet. I just kept taking things out and eventually I got to all animal products and since then for about a year-and-a-half little more than that. I've been eating just animal products.
So I've had a few experiments with plants we can talk about that as well if you'd like, but then then I really do love in the literature and I thought what is going on here? Why did this help? How is it useful for other people? Is it just me? Is it applicable to other people? What are the plant toxins here? Can I really get everything that I need from animal Foods? What am I missing my missing fiber? Am I missing polyphenols? What am I missing? And that's been sort of the sort of Deep dive that I've done over the last year and a half. I love it. But so
aren't I mean elimination diets meant to be temporary though. I mean couldn't you said like I'm gonna you know,
Reintegrate, so let's say cauliflower or like, you know, you know just like a vegetable here and there to see like to really get to the root cause and figure out what it is what that one thing was I was causing these these flare-ups
for you you certainly could and elimination diets can be very powerful from that framework. And I think that the carnivore diet is getting more and more acceptance these days as a very powerful type of Elimination Diet and I'm I'm happy that it's used in that frame for me it became more of a lifestyle when I learned about
Those foods like cauliflower, right so we can take cauliflower for instance. And what I learned about the Brassica vegetables was surprising and when you're adding something back in you'd want to do it because it has benefit you might like it or it has benefit. Right? And I mean mashed cauliflower is pretty good, but it's not to die for right for me. It's not I'm not missing mashed cauliflower. So my enjoyment of mashed cauliflower is not going to outweigh, you know, anything else is not like I'm really craving mashed cauliflower. But if we talk about the Brassica
Suppose for instance. This is kind of a microcosm of plant toxin discussion. What you realize is that all of these plants from all the crucifer is right to this is broccoli cauliflower kale cabbage charred brussels sprouts. They're all from this ancestral mustard plant and they all have this defense system and there are different ways to look at the defense system. And this will kind of segue into Zeno hormesis in a moment. But and it's the glucosinolates, right and there are these this family of compounds that is common across all these plants.
The glucosinolates but glucosinolates are kind of inner right and the glucosinolates would be things like glucoraphanin people haven't really heard of glue carafe and then let's say listen to a lot of Rhonda Patrick, but that's a glucosinolate and there are other glucosinolates their sulfur-containing compounds that are in the plant. And as far as we know there they don't really do a whole lot except they're kind of like a booby trap waiting to be sprung They don't serve a lot of roles in the plant there because this molecule and then when the plan is chewed whether it's cauliflower or broccoli or kale or cabbage or collards this in
Called myrosinase combines with the glucosinolate and you get an ISO thiocyanate the isothiocyanate that most people will be familiar with the sulforaphane but there are multiple other isothiocyanates Allah isothiocyanate, etcetera. And in cabbage for instance there, you know, 10 to 15 of these different isothiocyanates cauliflower is going to have more as well. And what's interesting for me is that this is a very this I saw this very clearly like this is a plant booby trap, right? I love the movie Goonies. This is data walking on the log normal that scene and he walks on the log and his shoes pop up and he squirted
It's oil on the log. Right? It's a
booby trap one of my favorite. Yeah scenes in the whole movie right
which we trap and this is this is kind of a Sinister booby-trap the plants are doing and they're springing the booby trap when an animal or a human decides to go chewing on the broccoli cauliflower Etc. Right and then you get this isothiocyanate. Well, how was I supposed isocyanate toxic the sulforaphane for instance is a pro-oxidant and this is coming to the Forefront now I think for the last 20 to 30 years we've been told about antioxidants.
Students in plants and most of us are realizing David Sinclair wrote this in his recent book lifespan and I was talking to him on my podcast. I mean the science really says they're not antioxidants right there Pro oxidants which can trigger an endogenous antioxidant response in the human body. So it's been misunderstood, but the Nuance here is important because it tells you what the plant is doing. The plant is putting a pro-oxidant molecule out there to affect the organism that's eating it negatively. Right and we can talk about how the organism responds to that and the concept of zero or me.
Us whether we believe that but so far nothing is a pro-oxidant molecule. That's very clear. There's lots of good evidence in human and animal models that so for a fan oxidizes membranes of cells creating things like for H&E acrolein basically creating lipid peroxides because it's pro-oxidant and oxidation and reduction can be kind of confusing for people. It's just a movement of electrons and when we pull an electron off a molecule becomes a free radical and there are many compounds in our body like glutathione and enzymatic systems like superoxide dismutase or catalase.
Seek to kind of match up unpaired electrons or remove that process of a single unpaired electrons floating around creating increased chemical reactivity or free radical reactions and these oxidation / oxidation reactions because lipid peroxides can be damaging they can damage other things in our bodies. It's kind of like an irascible child or I don't know like a little it's just a little a little thing in our body. It runs around banging into things like a pinball and it damages things in our body and so the bodies glutathione and other molecules will quench that but
This is common in other plants as well. Like this kind of booby. Trap system is also present in things like cassava this route that's eaten in South America. And in that case, it's linum are Inland dimerise and hydrocyanic acid and I'm Aaron is kind of an inert compound an American Ace is the enzyme only when you combine it do you get hydrocyanic acid most you can see that a molecule called hydrocyanic acid. Probably not a good thing. It's couples acid and Cyanide and so so the way that people have to detoxify that.
Is by leaving out to dry so all the hydrocyanic acid evaporates so they can actually eat the cassava because it'll kill you if you eat it and our ancestors have kind of been doing the same thing with plants like crucifiers throughout our Evolution. We can ferment them and what happens when you ferment the crucifer all the glucosinolates get to grade it. So cabbage becomes sauerkraut kimchi, the glucosinolates are degraded. So now it's less toxic to humans. We can also degrade my roast and Ice by cooking it, but there are bacterial myrosinase has
In our gut that can still take the glucosinolates and turn them into isothiocyanates. So even cooking cauliflower and broccoli could still create some of these compounds and then sort of the the last piece of this equation and a lot of people are probably thinking this now is but aren't those compounds good for us. And this is one of the more contrarian ideas that I've Advanced I would say, they're not and here's why this is the concept of Zeno hormesis and I talked a little bit to David Sinclair about this in my podcast when he was on and we shared our different ideas.
Plants are full of molecules. Their plants are like little pharmaceutical factories plants are like a little mini CVS, they're full of drugs and we know these drugs can be beneficial for us in certain situations aspirin from willow bark right is a salicylate. There are many drugs that can be beneficial for plants many chemo. Therapeutic molecules are derived from plants. There's benefits for cannabinoids in certain things, but what has happened with our conceptualization of plant molecules is we've sort of forgotten that a molecule is a molecule a pharmaceutical Pharmaceutical
local weather a plan made it or Pfizer made it now when I get a drug from Pfizer, I know that it has side effects and it comes with the package insert. That is a mile long. Right? Whether it's a CTP inhibitor or the trials will pulled or whether it's you know, a cox-2 inhibitor all of the you know, they've been pulled off the market because the side effects are so bad or a beta blocker whatever they can have beneficial effects in human body in certain context, but they always have side effects because they're kind of foreign to our body. Right and I talked about this in the book is the concept of disparate operating systems when
Introduce molecules into our body that are from a different operating system that are not like a vitamin or a mineral or a or an enzyme that our body uses. They might do something somewhere, but they're probably gonna do something somewhere else too. And my concern is that with the plant molecules. We've ignored the somewhere else. This is kind of the collateral damage and I think there are situations where the benefit outweighs the harm but most of the time I think it doesn't right and that's what I think we're ignoring is this other place where the molecules circulate and do other stuff in the human body and I'll illustrate that was so far off a nun.
Moment but we forgotten that plan molecules are medicines. They're all medicines. And so when were eating plants were taking a lot of molecular signals into our bodies and we're taking a lot of medicines into our bodies and the question is do we need that and is it a net benefit? And those are the questions that I don't think we know and I'm seeking to answer those questions or at least pose them right, but it's pretty clear these molecules do have side effects, which is not told about them very often in the book. I talk about Resveratrol and curcumin and there's very good evidence that these molecules have pretty significant side effects. Do they have
If it's sure Resveratrol can activate the sirtuin genes, but it also seems to decrease antigen precursors and decrease DHEA and act as a phytoestrogen and has been shown to worsen a lot of outcomes in clinical trials. So you gets like quid pro quo, right? It's like you get a benefit but you can decide if I were used to this right ibuprofen sure. You're going to inhibit possible and synthesis your pain on your elbow is going to get better. But if you take too much you're going to affect the afferent arteriole in your kidney and you're going to get kidney damage or you're going to affect your stomach because you can't produce mucus and
You're gonna get damaged. We forgot this about plants, right? We forgot this and so my suggestion is we need to really weigh risk and benefit with plant molecules. Is this a molecule that I want to take in a lot of is it benefiting me or is the harm going to be, you know, not worth it, right and so in the book, I kind of Advance the further hypothesis that plants have probably been survival Foods. We've always probably eaten some amount of them, but I suspect that they were fallback Foods when we couldn't hunt animals and we can talk about the anthropology stuff. It's quite fascinating.
But in that situation, I think we would have detoxified them as much as we could either by fermentation or cooking when we had fire or other methods of or we just eat them and say hey I need this calorie today. I'm going to be fine until I get an animal and the risk is worth the benefit which is a killer benefit. But this equation around you know Hermes is it forgets the side effects, right? So with sulforaphane we know this molecule can do damaging things in our bodies. It can interfere with the absorption of iodine to level of thyroid. There's some suggestion that it could perhaps trigger.
In autoimmune thyroid conditions, although that date has not been fully established, but it certainly is very clearly competing with iodine at the level of the thyroid and people will know this intuitively from the pictures of large men and the large necks of men and women throughout the world with endemic goiter which is hypertrophy of the thyroid in regions of the world where they eat foods that are great for genic quite unique foods contain isothiocyanates. These are the guy Trojans meaning forming goiter and they don't have enough iodine, right? So in a setting of iodine,
Mission see we know this is competing with iodine is something we want. Who knows can we handle it maybe and then we know they also damaged membranes, right? So they if before our body detoxifies them and activates the Nrf2 system in the liver, they can damage membranes and create oxidative stress and they are shown to break DNA and cell culture. So there's this large series of sort of cell culture studies from the 80s and 90s that have never been repeated and nobody really talks about but Bruce Ames references in a famous paper and then you kind of dig in you find this large paper 954 substances that are tested and
Culture do they do they damaged DNA right do they cause double-stranded breaks in DNA chromosome or breaks in human cell culture. It's called class to Genesis and many of these isothiocyanates too many of these plant molecules do but there's so many we haven't even tested them. All right, so and I'm not saying that it's exclusively playing molecules. We know there are molecules from meat that can do it as well. Like the cooking molecules from me heterocyclic amines polycyclic
aromatic. I was totally gonna ask about that because I mean, you know, we're talking about we're doing a risk-benefit analysis when you
You cook meat you're creating compounds that are dangerous as well. Right? Right, right. Yeah, but yeah, I mean just going back to sulforaphane for example, so these are cell culture studies a lot of the benefits of these plant comments. I think come from there the metabolites that are created when the bacteria in our gut consume them for example, and so I don't know how much like how much actual sulforaphane are, you know is reaching the cells like your brain cells. For example, by the time you ingest it, isn't it? Hasn't it already and it gets metabolized. Hasn't it?
Ready stimulated that pathway and I mean I haven't there been, you know ample studies to show benefit from that.
Well, yes and we can talk about that as well. Right? So what you're referring to is the Nrf2 pathway in the increase glutathione from that and that seems to me to be a redundant effect, right? I think they want me to look over time. There's not good evidence from what I've seen that that's actually a net benefit right that the assertion there is that we're getting more glutathione or we're getting more antioxidant protection from our body making glutathione through
Nrf2 system, but there's a really fascinating series of studies where they take out all fruits and vegetables and they don't see any change in inflammatory markers. They don't see any change in oxidative stress markers and they don't see any changes in markers of DNA damage. So you're going wait a minute that doesn't add up right like and this isn't even them taking out fruits of vegetables doing a carnivore diet. This is them doing fruits and vegetables with like bread and pasta and you know things that most of us would say are probably not that great for humans in general. This is somebody eating like meat and like white bread, right and
Studies and they don't see a change in inflammatory markers or DNA damage. So you think wait a minute that and there's multiple studies that show this and there's one particularly striking study where the oxidative stress markers get better with the removal
of plans. Yeah with the removal of plants and vegetables. Yeah with a movable not just like wheat and corn products and things like that
know, they remove all fruits and vegetables and and they've done them side by side where they actually compare them, right? They have 1 group and there between four and six weeks. One of them is 11 weeks long, and it's not even
That they remove them they compared it to a group that's eating them too. So one group is eating 600 grams of fruits and vegetables a day, which is like a little less than a pound and a half and this is not it's not like weenie vegetables, right? This is not like withered whatever right? This is like carrots and spinach and Jerusalem artichoke and broccoli and apples and pears the reading a pound and a half of that per day. They'll group has none and at the end you see no difference in oxidative stress markers and we go. Oh really like and so that's quite interesting. Right and this flies in the face of the
Demonology we see which I think has been so misleading for people. That's why the Interventional studies really struck me and I thought wow is there is there a single study that I can see this Interventional where I give somebody a fruit right? This would be the simple study here Max. I'm going to give you a half a pound of cauliflower mash every day for the next week. And we're going to check inflammatory markers are going to check HSC RP F twice a prostate. We're going to check oxidative stress markers a hydroxy to deoxy guanosine left peroxides, and we're going to check beginning and ending surely. We're going to see a
If it at the end and at least in what's paralleled in these studies, we don't see a benefit. It's like, oh man, maybe we've got this equation kind of wrong. And in the book what I suggest is that I think we do because I think that most of us can get enough glutathione and antioxidant production or I even say optimal just by living what I call a radical life, right? It's exercise right you before this you were like, I'm going to exercise this afternoon, right? You're going to go exercise this afternoon. You're going to generate free radicals. And those are going to trigger Nrf2 in the same way that sulforaphane does
And maybe later today. I'll go sit in a sauna or I'll jump in a cold River or I'll send an ice bath, right that's going to do the same thing or it's not really sunny today in Los Angeles. But if I were going to go out in the sun it could do the same thing. Right? So there's lots of environmental hormetic that were exposed to and my fear is that that model of environmental hormesis has been incorrectly applied the Zeno hormesis to molecular hormesis because we've forgotten about the side effects. So the argument that I would make or the suggestion hypothesis is
Why are we using plant compounds when we can get it all by living? Well, and the plant compounds give us side effects, right? Not everybody's going to be sensitive to cauliflower. But for some people I think it could contribute to thyroid issues. I think it could contribute to excess oxidation. And for a lot of people it certainly is going to trigger gut issues at some granular level. We don't have the research to really dig down and show the logic activation. But the other theory is that many of these plant Foods could be triggering the immune system at that subclinical level that we talked about, right?
So from the standpoint of epidemiology, what do you think it is? It's all like just healthy user bias by people who eat more vegetables tend to do other things in their Lifestyles and then in their diets that are good for them.
I think it's exactly that. Are you familiar with the UK Shopper study? I'm not I can show this one to you. It's really cool. So I think that's exactly what it is. And there are studies that actually support that thesis of mine. So the UK Shopper study is a really fascinating one where there was in Britain and they looked at vegetarians and they look at the standard mortality ratio.
The death rate right and it's lower than general population. And this is generally the stat that we see over and over and over vegetarian diets lower death rate, right then it's someone really cool. They compared the vegetarians and non-vegetarians who did healthy behaviors. Hmm, right? This is what should always be done. I think in all of these epidemiology studies is to have a standardization group where you say. Hey, how often do you work out? Yeah. How often do you go in the sun? How much time do you spend with family? How much time do you do meaningful things in your life?
Between the two of them. So this is omnivores meat eaters vegetarians same death rates same death rates, and there are multiple studies that have kind of replicated that finding that that it's probably not the absence of meat that is causing this or the increased consumption of vegetables. It's probably the healthy behaviors and this isn't to say that food doesn't affect longevity or health. It's that in the epidemiology what we're probably seeing over and over and over is the behaviors rather than
Would I think epidemiology of analogies really bad at sorting out which foods are causing an effect? It's like the nth degree of complication right? It's chaotic. We can't say I mean this is like the absurdity of the studies that come out whether like, oh, you know you eat three more eggs per day and you're you know, it's equivalent. It's the same risk of smoking a cigarette, right? It just doesn't make any sense. We can't use that's the wrong tool to use in the situation. But I think epidemiology is good to generate hypotheses and then we can go back and look and say yeah looks like the behavior was maybe the
Thing and I don't think anybody argues the behaviors are important and we've seen that over and
over when you expect them to see though, like the the Omnivore's live longer or have better health outcomes because they're eating more
meat maybe but they're all eating plants to right. So the vegetarians reading plants the omnivores eating plants. The ultimate study would be Interventional study where it's like a carnivore group and I mean just just for the sake I'm not saying everyone needs to be a carnivore, but just for the sake of clarity of experimentation, like what does a diet without vegetables do we would really see it but
Might think that yeah. Yeah, so okay and going back to meet I mean talking about Xena hormesis like and and just the you know, the cost benefit analysis of all these different foods. Like are you eating meat exclusively and it's like raw state or do you cook it? I cook it you look at ya. Like okay. So when you cook it, I mean talk about some of the compounds that we create that are not necessarily good for us,
right? So this is an emerging field and there is another paper. I recently saw we don't have great data here most of its
Anal and sort of theoretical but it's unclear whether there's a couple of things here that we can go into so there are two major classes of compounds that are formed when we cook meat there heterocyclic amines polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. And again, those are big families and not talking about specific molecules, but polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons generally having when we smoked me, right? So I've kind of recommended. Hey, you may not want to smoke your meat all the time, like maybe sell the trigger or don't get don't get the trigger girl, right and the header.
Like a means are formed when we cook anything really when we cook bread. We can get acrylamide we can get Advanced glycation end products. We can also get heterocyclic amines. And when we cook meat we can get a heterocyclic amines. And the question is do those heterocyclic amines actually create problems. We don't know right it's possible. I think it's totally possible to question is do we have an ability to deal with it? We have to beat something right and I think just like with broccoli on sulforaphane. We have the ability to deal with it. The question is what are we choosing to do? Right because we have if we have a choice between plant Foods.
Eggs and meat we can eat the meat raw, but for most of us that's not really a great option both for food safety and taste and palatability and probably digestibility. So we're going to eat these two things. Where do we get the most nutrients and our body probably has the ability to deal with both of those. I don't think we know what the deal is with heterocyclic amines fully but they're even present in things like coffee coffee has a heterocyclic amine called haramein, which is may or may not be actually dangerous for humans. Who knows but it's just a deep Rabbit Hole to know which ones are actually the worst how many ever formed
And the kind of work around there is don't cook your meat on a grill right don't burn it. You can do low temperature cooking you can do roasting or you can do water bath cooking. I'm not a huge fan of see because of all the plastic but there are other ways to do there are certainly ways to heat meat without creating as many heterocyclic amines, right you can stew you can steam there's like these steam convection ovens. People say well that doesn't taste good. And you said well like you have your cake and eat it too like we have to cook our food somehow. So there are that's the work around there for me is that
That I definitely cook in a pan, but I'll cook low temperature and I don't burn my meat. I don't cook in oil. Right? So the meat just goes on the pan. I use a stainless steel pan, and I'm cooking it low temperature almost like there's a grill out now called the sender that is liked. It's like a fancy George form and it has these two plates that come down and can heat it at very low heat so it's not going to create as many heterocyclic amines at the surface and it just slowly warms the meat and then if you want the Seer you can it's kind of like that give and take but yeah, you're right basically when we cook anything as opposed to steaming.
If we cook anything a dry hot temperature these compounds are formed and how do we mitigate that but you're absolutely
right, but it seems like we're kind of dancing. It seems like you're willing to dance around the fact that you know, when we cook meat and I'm just playing devil's advocate here, by the way, because you know, I mean my listeners know I'm a huge fan of meat and all the health benefits that come from eating properly raised meat but it seems like you're a little bit dancing around the fact that like we create these potentially unhealthy carpet compounds with meat but you're not willing to do so for that potentially, you know unhealthy
Is that are found in plant
Foods the difference is that the plant Foods they're already there right at the plans has plant defense chemical and there's more of them. I would say, I mean it's hard to argue the absolute amount. If you look at meat it's not in meat right? It's that we cook it right when we cook plants. We're going to add the same things to Plants Plus the Fant plant defense chemicals. The juxtaposition that I'm drawing is that animals run away from their attackers right plants just make chemicals to hit their attacker in the face or in the mouth or the stomach or the brain or ever when they eat.
So animals use Locomotion as a defense or tasks or teeth or antlers plants make chemicals. And then on top of those plant chemicals, we can add more chemicals when we cook. There's like two separate types of toxins, right? There's cooking things and there's intrinsic things and the animal foods are much better. I would argue from the intrinsic perspective. And so yes, then I would say at the cooking level heating of anything is going to cause an issue in there are ways to mitigate it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah
reasonable. Yes, I think a lot of people
Are concerned in you have a background in cardiology will you know some of the some of the big concerns that I think people would have against eating more meat would be the risk of heart disease would be the risk of cancer and the risk of constipation. That's
not a hard problem, but we can talk about all of it.
Yeah. I mean like when you cut plants that don't do you need the fiber? I know it's a big it's a big topic for you. But yeah the whole fiber thing. I mean we need to eat plants it, you know bulks up stool makes it easier to go to the bathroom. Doesn't it? Isn't that like one of the one of
Benefits and then you know the that's what that sort. That's the that's the area where I'm I could use a little bit of clarity. Yeah, but heart disease thing the cancer thing, you know, I think that's not a big concern for me based on the science that I've read. But you know just for anybody who might be concerned about either of those three things looks like about yeah. I know that they're big topics, but maybe just sort of like a
try. Yeah. No, I'll talk about poop. So if you look at the evidence, if you look at the scientific literature, all right, which is probably the best thing we have other than
Inch 11. It's the experiential evidence I would offer is that as a year-and-a-half strict carnivore? Very strict carnivore for me. I mean, I've had a few days where I've introduced carbohydrates as an experiment, but I poop every morning without a problem right beautiful. I'll send you a photo nice, right so XP and there are many carnivores experientially who find significant improvements in gas bloating constipation probably because the removal of fiber is quite healing for people and there's some great evidence now, that's just anecdotal right? We don't have a case study published, but we could but there are published case studies and there's actual
As clinical trials showing the same thing. So the one of the most famous ones is in the world General gastroenterology from 2012. It's called stopping or reducing dietary fiber relieves the symptoms of idiopathic constipation. I may have paraphrase the title a little bit people will find it. It's pretty interesting study of about 60 people divided into three groups one group fiber as usual one group reduced Fiber One group is zero fiber all of them have idiopathic constipation, which means they have constipation. We don't know the problem, right? We can't fix it. And which group does the best the group with?
The zero fiber a hundred percent of people completely resolve their symptoms of gas bloating and constipation with zero fiber. So that's randomized clinical trial. It's showing I mean in this is repeated over and over in literature. Now that even in epidemiology, there's really no association between fiber and constipation or Fiber and diverticulosis, which is kind of the corollary to constipation we can talk about that. So it's a pretty tricky thing that sort out. We all think fiber makes us poop, but having a bigger stick,
All is not the same as being not constipated people who have conservation will know this generally what happens when we eat more fiber we are constipated is we have bigger more painful stools that are harder to pass because they're bigger poops. Right that is not the solution to constipation constipation is straining pain bleeding use of laxatives. And if you look at the literature with a clearly shows is that fiber does not improve those metrics does not improve pain bleeding use of laxatives or straining with stool. It will increase to a
Frequency and to a volume but these do not make a solution of constipation. Right? It just means more painful stool and I've experienced this too. So I've done three experiments. I think our last year and a half or even reintroduced one starch to see more for athletics. Will it affect glycogen stores? That's a whole nother thing. I don't think it really does but will I feel differently and you know clearly, I mean, it's probably too personal people here, but you're still gets bigger, right? You still poop it gets bigger because you have lots of fiber.
But the same thing happens if people can't speak to get bigger stools. There are already hard to pass you get more straining more bleeding and more pain. So fiber is really not necessary to have a spoop. That's a real great fallacy to Urban
myth, but does it help with like motility, you know, does it help like does does eating it? All me Diet like, you know, the I forget what the colloquial saying is, but just like kind of jam up the future if I know it, doesn't it?
Okay, no motility has to do with the sort of intrinsic nervous system of the got called the Mayan Tarik plexus and the migrating.
Are complex and that's probably more of an autoimmune injury that happens to the MMC the migrating more complex and cases of things like well, maybe I mean, it's all hypothetical now. We don't really know what's going on with sibo. It's question whether it's dysbiosis and loss of diversity, but there appears to be a motility thing but conservation is probably a motility thing in some sense, but that's the overall nervous system in the gut that's being regulated and fiber is not stimulating that fiber is going in it's being digested by some bacteria not others and some people it's causing the overgrowth of bad bacteria or causing gas and
A lot of people who have overgrowth of methane producing organisms the fiber appears to worsen things significantly, right? Because you give them more they produce more methane methane appears to be a paralytic in our gut so the MMC the migrating Motor complex, the - Eric Alexis gets kind of destroyed or at least paralyzed so worsens a lot of people and that's probably why these people with idiopathic constipation got so much better. Stop feeding them with methane producers or something. But yeah, generally what I mean pretty much substantially throughout the carnivore Community the removal of 5 or
Gas bloating constipation almost across the board. I did a talk at Quito con last year. There were about 200 people in the room. And I said how many will try the carnivore diet maybe 75% of the hands go up how many people had an improvement and their GI symptoms. It's about seventy four point. Nine percent go up on people got worse one person in the room, you know, so like only one person in the room it gets worse out of everybody. It's like we're sounding Lee improved so it's kind of a people are worried about that, but it doesn't seem to be borne out in the literature or clinically from what I've seen at
all do you worry about the the
the microbial consequences on the microbiota and I large
intestine. I don't I don't well then, you know, I could be in both the small and the large intestine that the microbiome is happening. But if you really look at that literature to it's quite fascinating and before the podcast we were talking about how I'm going to have crisscrossed on my podcast. He's a big advocate for fiber and kind of maybe discuss some of the data with him. But what I discovered in that data was that there are interventions studies with fiber showing it doesn't affect Alpha diversity. So when people are talking about the microbiome, right? It's a broad term. We talking big sweeping terms.
As we don't really know how to talk about this, you know, a hundred trillion bacteria in our gut there's greg- anaerobes. There's facultative aerobes and anaerobes and basically what we know about the microbiome is that as a broad statement more diversity is probably better probably right unless you have a diversity of bad guys, like gram-negative aerobic organisms proteobacteria. They can look diverse but it can still be a bunch of Bad actors. We know kind of which families of bacteria are
Bad actors proteobacteria, you don't want to see a lot of proteobacteria these things like klebsiella clostridia. Well, not equestrian per se but klebsiella some other gram negative organisms like that, but can be dangerous. Right? And so when we see those we think it's out of order, but if you don't have a lot of proteobacteria generally more diversity is a good thing. And so when people are saying you need fiber for the microbiome, the next statement is usually you need fiber for a diverse microbiome, but the only evidence their
Being is again observational studies comparing the diversity of rural African children to in Burkina Faso. I believe 2p2 Urban Italian youth in forget what town is in Italy so they say, oh, well, you can see it right there's urbanity or you know, and and in this it's just the same mistake. We've always been making with epidemiology all they eat more fiber in these places that are more rural. Yeah, they eat more fiber, but they also do many other things right? They are contact with dirt and water and they're out in the sun.
Or they're exercising. They have so many different things that could be affecting the diversity when we follow up on that if we talk about diversity per se and we add fiber there are studies where we give people fiber the alpha diversity doesn't change no change at all. And there's a really cool study from Harvard. And I think this is not what they intended it to show but it showed like actually did a study with the carnivore diet at Harvard and was a week long and they had one group that was plant-based one group there was carnivore and it wasn't necessarily the best way to construct a carnivore diet. It was probably a lot of lunch meats and
Things like this that you wouldn't necessarily include the might even had nitrates, but they can show populations in the gut shifting. Right? And there's no change in Alpha diversity in the carnivore group. There's actually an increase in beta diversity, which is a different ecological measure that has to do with how different the bacteria are from where they were before but the alpha diversity doesn't change at all when they remove fiber and there are studies on ketogenic diets, which are usually pretty low fire. Although I suppose you could construct a ketogenic diet with a moderate amount of fiber that show no change in Alpha diversity. So
I have not seen any evidence Interventional evidence that adding fiber or taking it away changes the alpha diversity anecdotally. There are many carnivore self experimenters myself included that have done things like you biome or one jannetty that CAT5 85 to 95 95th percentile in terms of diversity in our gut so it might actually be working on the reverse. This is another sort of wild Urban myth that we need fiber for diversity and it's often parroted and I've never seen it substantiated and I keep wanting to have one of another expert on my podcast.
Has to kind of debate this in a friendly way with the say. Hey, what are you using to show this because I've never seen Interventional data to report and it's been I've seen it time and time again in the people that I work with and other people in the community that it doesn't seem to happen,
but doesn't it make sense that what you feed would breed and by eating only one thing I mean you're cultivating hypothetically at least the bacteria that are gonna be able to break down
meat, right? And is that a bad thing?
I mean, I don't know but I mean, I think what
Yeah, well, I don't
know why not just the back to the breakdown me right? It's the bacteria that break down. There's a meat is more complex than I think we're imagining. Right so meat is multiple types of protein. It's collagenous tissue its muscle tissue. There's organs, right? So it's it's you're cultivating microbes that break down protein. Yes. And is that a bad thing? We don't know. Is it a good thing? It could be right? Well, they do
those. I mean not to I mean go down the tml rabbit hole, but because I know that TM.
It was not you know, I'm not that convinced that it's a it's something that we need to be concerned about, you know, in terms of a more diverse dietary pattern, but in mice that were bred and fed, exclusively carnitine, for example, they were they you know, there was a microbiome that developed that you know, it was basically selected for bacteria that that can metabolize carnitine. And so they have this overexpression of carnitine metabolizing bacteria and those bacteria
dated this surgeon tmao and I could be you know, I haven't read that study a long time. But that's just my what I recall from reading that study that you know, if you're feeding the bacteria only one thing they're going to get better and metabolizing it and then you get you know problems potentially like this overexpression of tmao producing bacteria, right?
That's kind of predicated on the fact that we believe tmao is dangerous or are you using I'm not sure what using to illustrates what happens with tmao is you there are bacteria in the gut that can take either choline or carnitine and make TMA so try
No, I mean and then I believe that the liver uses an enzyme fmo. Three to make tmao. Yeah, right to there's TMA and Tim TMA in the gut and then you can make tmao in the body right? It's not that bacteria are making tmao per se and the tmao rabbit holes deep one because there's preformed tmao and things like fish which have never been associated with any problems. And I think the tmao research is very deeply flawed and I've not seen any Interventional studies with tmao to show it and there was a recent study that came out suggesting very strongly. That was probably
First causality that we were seeing with tmao where what we know is that fmo 3 that makes TMA and tmao in the liver is under the control of insulin. And so people who are insulin resistant could are probably making more tmao right now. I'm unconvinced of the hypothetical mechanisms of tmao as directly toxic in humans and in animal models, there are some animal models where it shows benefit in terms of diastolic heart hiper Dino diastolic hypertension and other cardiovascular.
As for
tmao I think like so many things were getting confused here and seeing tmao as a surrogate marker for insulin resistance in humans. And so in epidemiology studies, it looks like it's bad because most people have high tmao have insulin resistance in the carnivores. I work with I do not see high tmao across the board and then you stretch of the imagination. It's really fascinating. I've been checking out recently on Cleveland are lava probably checked it in 30 or 40 people and some people are reasonably high and some people are rock bottom and they're all pretty much eating.
We meet so there's something else going on here with tmao. And I don't think we know for sure. I have almost checked it as an academic measure, but it's not I don't I'm not convinced. The tmao is directly toxic. Your point is well-taken though what we eat will select for the bacteria that metabolize that and my counter point would be that's probably not a bad thing. Right because most of us are eating lots of carbohydrates, not me, but and so you're going to have lots of carbohydrate metabolizing bacteria in your gut. That's fine and you don't need a lot of protein back.
No protein digesting bacteria. Now we talked about the diversity kind of implicit in the same as well. If you have only protein digesting bacteria are going to have a lower diversity and we talked about that's really not the case. You probably have lots of microbes that are diverse that are metabolizing protein. And then that's kind of the corollary to this discussion is the short chain fatty acid discussion, which I'll address briefly for people. So the main short chain fatty acid or the one that people think about is butyrate, right? And these are in the: not so much in the small intestine. We need these short chain fatty acids to fuel the colonic epithelial cells.
Right, they actually go into the colonic epithelial cell and then enter a process and butyrate becomes beta-hydroxybutyrate right where we familiar with beta-hydroxybutyrate. So Ketone, that's a ketone that we make in our bodies, right? So it becomes a ketone. So if we're in ketosis we can use beta-hydroxybutyrate from the blood to fuel the colonic epithelial cells interesting. Yeah and other short chain fatty acids in the study from Harvard that look at the carnivore diet showed this when we use protein we make less butyrate and more ice butyrate.
And more propionate and more acetate and those can do the same thing. Those can also enter the cells and become beta-hydroxybutyrate and be used in similar ways. And so it's quite interesting and there's some good research suggests that butyrate also has signaling roles in the gut and the same receptors the butyrate touches. I see butyrate can activate them in the same way. So it's like well we kind of it looks like we have a limited understanding there's an interchangeable system here and the short chain fatty acid production butyrate goes down in some stuff at respect but not
entirely icbt rate goes up and then there's also a really cool study and cheetahs which shows that the Cheetahs can use collagen and they can ferment the collagen and make short chain fatty acids like butyrate so though, I don't love this comparison. You could think of collagen that would be connective tissue and animals that most people are now sort of excited about whether we're getting it from a tendon or a tendon in soup, or I eat a lot of trimmings of animals that have tendonitis or tendons on a steak like a New York or a collagen powder though.
I'm not sure those are completely equivalent not could be seen of seen as animal fiber right because that can be used in much of the same way in the gut and fermented and made into the short chain fatty acids that were talking about. So it looks like there's there's all these kind of mechanisms in back up there and the microbiome can shift, you know in different ways and it doesn't look like it's unhealthy one way or the other we have to be very careful because what happens a lot with the microbiome is they will say for instance with protein right? One of the criticisms of the Harvard study is that there's more bio producing
Eames or more bile tolerant organisms and they'll say well we see those organisms being higher in Crohn's and all sort of colitis. Therefore it's bad and I'm paraphrasing them. Maybe they haven't made such a strong statement, but that's what gets put out in the media is that you don't want things like rose Bay Area or biophilia was worth the you know, things like this. And again, it's kind of like we can make that distinction because they're high in ulcerative colitis and Crohn's doesn't mean it's going to cause those diseases right? It's kind of like tmao.
Because tmao is high in diabetes doesn't mean tmao causes diabetes. You can arrive at this place via multiple mechanisms. This is kind of like LDL and we can talk about that too. You know a high LDL. Maybe this is a great segue. You know, we get worried about a high LDL, but I think that what's happening with LDL and all Impact this in a moment. Is that a high LDL is often an indicator of another underlying problem just like tmao just like the bio tile by tile tolerant.
Seems in the gut it's not that that's causing the problem. It's that that goes up in certain situations which make it look like it's a problem. And this is what we're trying to sort out a medicine. We have to be so careful about and I think this is what we're going to continue to see over. The next decade in medicine is we're going to say we were wrong about that. We were wrong about that. We were wrong about that. We already have tmao other things like this. We're saying it's not causing it. It's an indicator, right? It happens, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen in a healthful way in a different situation context is everything that makes sense. Yeah.
Kind of rambling want to hear about LDL.
Yeah, let's hear about it. Well before moving before we go to LDL the meat cancer thing. So I've never suspected that red meat was, you know a causal player in cancer particularly colon cancer, but because we were talking about the colonic environment. I've always thought that you know, it's not the inclusion of meat that is perhaps less desirable from a colonic ecosystem standpoint, but the you know that we need vegetables to create butyrate for you know to prevent
You know to keep the motility to prevent, you know, you know colon cancer, whatever things like that so is that something that you would disagree with as well that we that we don't need vegetables for that purpose to prevent to prevent cancer.
No, we don't and if you look at it there those studies are pretty clear. The inclusion of fruit and vegetables has no change in the incidence of cancer. So the 99 and 2000 there were two studies done at in the New England Journal of Medicine that were published. The first study was a large Interventional trial of I think over 2,000 patients and they had increased fruits and vegetables.
The addition of fruits and vegetables and I think five or six years follow-up no change in colonic adenoma recurrence, right so fruits and vegetables do not prevent cancer fiber does not prevent cancer in any studies I've ever seen. That are not epidemiology, right? These are Interventional studies in a second study in the New England Journal of Medicine. They added a fiber supplement which is like a Serial supplement same thing no change in colonic adenoma recurrence. So we there's there's no good evidence that the Interventional evidence that the inclusion of fiber in the form of fruits and vegetables or
a wheat bran supplement has any change in the colonic environment for cancer? And so then the does that answer your question?
Yeah. Well and then I also wanted there's also an interesting link with fiber consumption in breast cancer doesn't fiber and you would know this better than I do but doesn't it help the body get rid of like excess estrogen things like
that. It does do that. But I would paint that in a negative light. There are studies called the I think it's the biocycle study where the increased by Court
Well, I think it was the more fiber women ate the more likely they were to have menstrual irregularities and ovulation. Hmm. So that's a double-edged sword right in some women who are prone to breast cancer. Perhaps getting rid of estrogen may be a good thing if the system is imbalance in other ways, but generally speaking from both most healthy women the body's good at that right? It's not that we need fiber to get rid of extra estrogen. And if you look at the literature the more fiber women eat the more likely they are to become infertile because it's pulling out estrogens. They need to have regular cycle so there
More likely to miss ovulation when they're eating more fiber. So I think it's a very specific situation like in women and breast cancer. Like if you have an estrogen responsive cancer, you may want less cancer. You may want less estrogen right but for most women, that's not a good thing, right you want the normal amount of estrogen and I would actually argue that's a very negative part of fibers equation that and it can do the same thing like many desperate into fiber is potentially disrupting our hormonal balance as
well. Wow
fascinating. Yeah. I can send you down to I think it's called the bye.
Cycle study that would love to check it out. Yeah, and so we were going to talk about meeting cancer talk about that. Yeah, this is on everybody's mind. Right and there are tons of studies in animals which show and again it's animal models, but that meat is not associated with cancer, right and in 2015 the iarc produced this report through the who so the International Association of research and cancer and the World Health Organization big report right says meet
This meat I think is to a carcinogen and processed meat was maybe was 2A and 2B for processed and unprocessed or unprocessed processed and unprocessed me respectively, but they were saying that it was a likely carcinogen right red meat even processed and unprocessed. And then in 2018 the reprisal that report came out or at least the analysis that report and you got to see how they did it. Right and there's a gentleman named David Clearfield who wrote a lot about this. He was on the panel and talked about it. But what they
Actually did in that study is they look at multiple studies and then made a consensus decision and there were over 400 studies but they only considered 14 all of which were epidemiology. Hmm. Okay, they threw out all the Interventional trials. They threw out all the Interventional trials in humans and animals, they throughout the majority epidemiology, right because certainly not all epidemiology trials show a link between meat and cancer in this is the problem with epidemiology for any epidemiology trial that I bring to the table or you bring to the table that says one thing we can
Find another one that's something else most of the time unless it's a very clear correlation cigarettes cancer. Pretty much across the board Associated, right? We're talking about meeting cancer. I can show you multiple epidemiology studies that show none of his Association and there's some that's true. Yeah, this is Jose. This is the healthy user bias or the unhealthy user bias. This is the problem of epidemiology. What do we do? Right. Usually what we do, unfortunately as we have a bunch of experts quote unquote who go to Switzerland.
Stay in a hotel for a week form committees make decisions and then come out with a consensus statement that says this is what we think the evidence is in this case. They consider 14 studies 8 of the 14 showed no association between meeting cancer in six of those there was an association, but in five of those six that Association was not statistically significant meaning that the confidence interval crossed one that when you actually do the statistics, you can't tell whether that association between meeting cancer is due to chance.
Or something that's real in one of the 14 studies. There was a significant association between meat and cancer. So one out of 14 and the decision says meat is a carcinogen why and if you look at that one study its by sing as I NG H, I'll find you the actual name of that one study the people who were where there was the most association between beating cancer with people with the most obese and the most likely to be diabetic. Well that makes sense obesity and diabetes and insulin resistance are known risk factors for cancer as well. So
It's kind of like that's what the who decision was based on that's crazy, but nobody knows the backstory, right and then recently there was this whole hubbub about the annals of internal medicine study that from the nutria Rex guidelines. And that study said hey when we did this created recommendation and we actually considered randomized clinical trials. We don't think there's any association between meeting cancer and everybody's up in arms and James Wilkes. It's pissed about it and saying that this guy has industry funding which is neither here nor there. Who knows right? But so there have been decisions on both sides, but ultimately,
For me, we have to look at the Interventional studies and the Interventional studies generally do not show that meat causes cancer. Like if you look at and most of them have been done in animals. I don't know if there's an eventual study in humans because it's long it takes longer to do right? It would be hard to do a study where we said to someone eat more red meat for the next three years and we're going to follow your colon cancer, right? Although they've done it with vegetables. And again, it didn't show any Improvement. Right? So what we then we're come over kind of stuck with is like well the animal models don't show
Oh it right. There is a study that I quote in the book where bacon was actually protective in a rat model of cancer, right? So they give a rat's bacon and they had less incidence of colon cancer and they're inducing colon cancer with an agent in the rat models, right and then the chicken and the beef did not increase the cancer but the bacon actually had less cancer. So the research I mean are people talking the study kind of tongue-in-cheek and say well they can prevent colon cancer, right? It's a rat model. So what we do, but there's there's evidence on both sides. It's just not clear and part of me thinks just like
Hold on a second. Right? Like if meat really cause colon cancer when we see that very clearly. Look if meat is as bad as everybody says it is a be like hey man, you know, like it's very clear Association, but there are epidemiology studies in China that say that the people who eat the most meet the men who eat the most meat have the lowest rate of heart disease and the women who eat the most meat have lowest rate of cancer and I think it might be an aggregate of breast cancer and colon cancer have to go back and look. Yeah. So this is the epidemiology is all over the place, right? This is the problem and then Interventional studies are not clear either. They certainly don't show a clear Association and then if
We look at the randomized clinical control trials one group of scientists says yes, another group says no and then David Clark Field has talked about this original iarc report and kind of remarked as a little bit of commentary that a lot of people on that committee were vegetarian and vegan. Well didn't have to disclose their bias. Right? So who's making the guidelines right? It's just it's a dizzying for anybody listening to it all but then we're left with is any purported or hypothesize mechanisms? Like okay. Let's just say we don't know how in the world are me.
Cancer like what about me would cause cancer. Well, the hypothetical things are heme iron and nitroso compounds are the big ones and we've actually talked a little bit of a Nitro compounds in nitrates and I was looking at this a little bit so I can talk more about this now heme iron is fascinating heme iron gets vilified, but in fact heme iron is super important for life iron is iron right iron is an element in the periodic table has two forms ferric and ferrous feather whether it has a plus 3 or a plus 2 oxidation state and that iron atom right is complex within the
porphyrin Ring of a hemoglobin molecule. It's called a Metallo porphyrin iron. So what we have in our gut is an actual transporter system to pull in the whole porphyrin ring with the iron. That's how we absorbing iron. Right and then non-heme iron is just an iron atom. It's just a piece of iron like you would get an iron shaving and you're going to eat that that's what you know, it's not complex anything. It's non-heme iron, right?
And that's the type of iron that's found in like vegetables vegetables non-heme
iron and heme iron is found primarily in like animal products in read me right? It's an animal product. It's not even exclusively red meat.
Read me more mainly and so it's a porphyrin ring. So people have seen a porphyrin ring. It's a large structure. It's kind of beautiful as a flower of Molotov carbons that surround this molecule. That's what we that's that's what's in the middle of our hemoglobin right is a porphyrin ring. And that's what we're actually absorbing the part of the hemoglobin from animals, right? That's how we get the heme iron hemoglobin, right and the heme is complex two different proteins calling it hemoglobin right this globe and proteins. There's Alpha and beta units of the globins that makes hemoglobin, but what is absorbing
The heme and then we'll break it down and make him for ourselves. But we absorb the heme molecule and so people want to say that the heme iron is dangerous. And I think that this is incorrect, right because iron is iron, right and whether we absorb it or not is what's most important and we know we need iron to make blood cells to make glutathione the dangers with heme iron are that it's more absorbable and there are some people on the planet who can absorb too much of it, right?
The ferritin can go too high. It's a rare polymorphism in genes for iron Transporters. Right? It's called hemochromatosis or variants of hemochromatosis of different severities, but when we know that when we accumulate too much iron, and there are a variety of things that can have this happen even Beyond hemochromatosis thalassemias other side are aplastic. Anemia is can do this that they can accumulate iron and it can become redox reactive irons generally stored on transferrin and ferritin. Ferritin is in a Cell. That's where iron is stored in the bloodstream. It moves on.
Ants Ferran but if there's too much iron in the blood and it's moving around it can become a redox reactive element, but we need it. So it's like the Goldilocks amount right? We have to have so the problem with heme iron I think is not that it's toxic. It's a molecule. We need to absorb right? It's not a toxic molecule. But if you listen to the plant-based theorist, they would say heme iron is dangerous. Well heme iron is only dangerous when you get too much of it and it's mainly for people who have polymorphisms in Iron absorption and the best way generally speaking is phlebotomy. Not a not across the board, but generally speaking it's
To me and then you just get rid of it and it's probably people who lived or evolved in areas of the world or their ancestors did where there was not as much iron and they had to hold on to a really really carefully, you know, and so some people have that that genetic sort of predisposition you do phlebotomy and you're okay, but iron is iron whether we get it from Plants. We get it from animals people would say him' non-heme iron is safer. Well that doesn't make any sense because you're going to get anemic with non-heme iron and there are a lot of vegetarians who are anemic and I have these problems and that's been demonstrated. So iron is iron.
But in the gut I think people worry that he my earn could cause an nitroso compound so heme iron, I don't think is Toxic by itself. That's very clear. It's just a very highly absorbable form of iron, which is a great thing unless you have hemochromatosis and it's totally treatable right heme iron. They believe the hypothesis that it could cause endnote Rosso compounds. Now, this is kind of complicated, right? This is a nitrogen chemistry.
Well and I drove with my monsters for listeners who are unfamiliar with that term, it's basically when you consume Foods they can either become night.
Oxide in the body or they can become nitrosamines and they chose to means and correct me. If I'm wrong can be carcinogenic. They can induce insulin resistance. They're basically unhealthy. They're one of the reasons why you don't want to you know, if you're going to buy bacon for example by bacon with sodium nitrite in it because sodium nitrite in bacon is more likely to become one of these n nitroso compounds. This is
quite complex that you'll like this actually no, no, okay. So not there's actually new research with nitrates and nitrites suggesting. They may not be as bad as we thought.
Hmm. So this was the conversation that we had about combo because basically the nitrates and bacon are the same as the nitrates in beats, right? So nitrate and nitrite are no.2 and no.3 respectively. Okay, and people say, oh you don't want the nitrites or the nitrates. Well, it's an no.2 Orton no.3 and those type of a Nitro compounds don't seem to be as damaging to humans as the dimethylamine and nitroso compounds this gets kind of granular, right it does that end nitroso?
I'm just refers to a so you've got an no.2 or an no.3 or an n o and an N nitroso means that that that that and O is attached to a nitrogen somewhere or sulfur somewhere or something else. So it's attached to another molecule in the case of heme iron. You could have the iron attaching to the nitrogen and the oxygen and then that could form other and nitroso compounds. There's another thing called a Nitro seal ion, which is n o- right Nitric.
It is no without the - no choice will ion is n o- and then there's Nitro seal thiols which are sort of sulfur nitrogen oxygen. Right? And so what when I really dug into this what you find is that the end nitroso compounds that are formed from meat are not the nitroso compounds that are carcinogenic and animal models and this is all an animal models, right? It's all in animal models that they're extrapolating to humans and nitroso compounds that are that are carcinogenic are dimethylamine and Nitro compounds and those are not
Enter me meet forms Nitro cell ions and Nitro seal thile ions or bio Nitro cell ions. So those are different and Nitro compounds and those have not been shown to be damaging to an animal model. So it's this is a real Twist on it, right because when people say avoid the nitrates in the bacon, but they're saying drink your beet juice. It's like wait a minute. That's the exact same thing. That's really the exact same
thing interesting. So I thought I thought that when you consume nitrates in Beats, for example,
First of all, you are not consuming these Foods you're not you're not using high heat to you know to cook these Foods, right? So heat I was under the impression, you know was able to kind of steer the you know, the conversion of these nitrates into like night, you know, and I trust will compounds but then also there's the presence in vegetables of vitamin C which can prevent this
conversion. It's the acidity it's the acidity the acidity of the stomach environment is what makes the uh nitroso compounds. So even in beats you
NHL so compounds forming but again, it would be probably these Nitro cell ions and the Nitro cell thiols or the sulfur nitrogen compounds that aren't probably that harmful for us. It's the dimethylamine and nitroso compounds that are the heart that are really the ones that show it in animal models. I'll show you the paper. It's really
cool. But then where do we get I mean don't we need that? We need nitrates don't we want them for cardiovascular
health? Yeah, we can get them from all sorts of things. Right. I mean we need to make nitrogen over our body can use nitrogen and make these things in our body right? Like you can use nitrogen and make nitric oxide. There's Enos,
right?
Arginine and yeah, so we know acid.
Yeah, the nitrogen is from other molecules that were getting we can put an oxygen out of the make nitrate and nitrite. And so if you look at it there was this big hubbub about you know, nitrites and stomach cancer, but the most recent again, it's admitted DVD as the ology but it doesn't doesn't really show it anymore again, we don't really know but it's I think it's because of this the the devil's in the details here with the nitrates. Yeah, and it's quite complicated but heme iron.
Non-toxic heme iron may make some that don't appear to be toxic and in fact nitrates and nitrites can become nitric oxide, right? So it's like well, that's a probably a good thing. Right and we know that's a good thing. That's why people do the beet root powder if you think that's beneficial but there's other Nuance here on these dimethylamine and I trust will Compound on those are the ones that cause the colon cancer, but those don't occur from me.
Wow, super interesting. Yeah. It's like a whole switch
it on its head and James Wilkes.
No that level of
detail no. No, I'm that isn't it? That is an impressive level of detail. Do you go into all the stuff in your book?
I do. Well I think in the nitrates I might have talked about that in the book, but I definitely all the other stuff that I'm talking about. Now I talk
about in the book. Yeah. I love it. I mean we're almost out of time. But before we before we wrap up, I mean like I was gonna ask you before we started rolling. What's your morning routine?
Like I also want to talk to about evolutionary stuff now we gotta talk about anthropology. Oh man.
I mean we could keep going we can keep going.
I'll tell you my morning routine, then we'll talk about anthropology.
Real quickly because that's facing we got to tell that that'll be a good bow tie on the whole thing. Okay. All right, let's do it. So my morning routine, so I've been I didn't listen to a lot of stuff recently about this kind of stuff and I think that the first hour of the morning is when everything happens for me, it's how I set the tone for my day. So when this into J Shetty and you know, I think he's got some great stuff and I all
copied I'm probably know it's right. That's it. That's the allegation anyway ways of doing waged against him. Yeah. I'm not I don't follow him another Fender so
Basically, I don't look at my phone right so I get up I have my perfect poop. Well, here's what I do first. I get up and I sleep in a room that's dark with like chili powder on my bed and air filter and I use earplugs in a mask was a super dark room and it's cold right and and then I get up and I have a little bit of salt and water Spring Water. I have a perfect poop. Nice. Okay, and then I don't look at my phone.
I think we're going to we might need photos. We don't need photos. This shell will put it in the show notes.
And then I and then I meditate right and I'll qualify that I'll make my judgment of Myself by saying I'm still working at it. I'm kind of in the beginning stages of meditation for me and I've become a beginner multiple times because I've kind of done it and gone away from it. Don't go away from it and then coming back into it. I'm in the stage where it's just tons and tons of thoughts watching over me. So try to meditate for 20 or 30 minutes and then I do a short morning workout where I've got an x 3 bar which is like a banded workout system. I've got a pull-up bar. I've got an iron neck, which I love.
And I have a handstand wall in my apartment. It's like a blank wall that I can do handstands and things like that on then I got a hip circle from Mark Bell and I got a punching bag and so in like with an iron neck and iron neck, is this incredible. It's really cool to get Halo. It's like a plastic Halo that you put on your head and you tie it to a door with like a bungee cord and you pull back then you turn your head. It has like a a device on it that creates tension as you turn your head so you can isolate the muscles of your neck and traps the I really like it.
Um probably would need it more if I were doing more Jiu-Jitsu and stuff now but I like it for surfing getting tossed in the waves and just feels good to have a strong neck in general. I totally I think as a carnivore it's very brand compatible because that's what animals go for we all are gonna try and eat my neck, right? Yeah. So yeah, the weak part is the next that's my that's pretty much my morning routine and then maybe 45 minutes or an hour after I get up. I'll start looking at the phone and then man everything is confusing right? I'm looking at Instagram and getting thrown over here by this thought and
and trying to check email. The other thing that I'll do is when I start working I try and chunk my day into productive time and I don't like to interrupt that with email or messages and stuff. So I'll try and have three to five hours of just productive time and then come up for air and do messages and emails and things like that. I don't I'm not always perfect about but that's kind of
how I roll. Hmm. I like it. What about like workouts?
I love I love body weight stuff. So I like I mean, I like some basic movements like hinging
Lifting squat I have the X 3 for that which is amazing. People can look that up. If you're not familiar. Yeah. Yeah, I should hook up with when they're pretty cool. So I do some deadlifting. I do some squats. I like the body weight stuff. I'll do some movement stuff kind of like Ido portal style. Yeah, which is like bending and bridging and I'll do the inversions which I like a lot
and do you feel like you kind of like touched on this like briefly earlier, but do you feel like you're I mean constantly and just like a glycogen depleted State like how does know?
Does being on an Ami diet affect your like your
exercise from this is really fascinating. So I talked about this with Chris Master John in the second debate that we did friendly debate really appreciate Chris. So I think it's actually the complete reverse and their studies to show that there's a faster study the faster study people can look up finian bollock. I don't know 2005 they actually compared keto adapted Ultra endurance athletes to carbohydrate using utilizing and they showed the same rate of glycogen utilization and replenishment after exercise. So the
The keto adapted athletes they were average six to eight months of chemo medication had the same amount of glycogen the same utilization of the same replenishment when they went back to eating ketogenic Foods. So Chris and I talked about this. I think that we know we can do gluconeogenesis, right you can use protein you can use the glycerol backbone of fats to do gluconeogenesis. We can make glycogen without carbohydrates. It's not a requirement not in the liver, right but in the muscle and because the absence of glycogen in the liver is what causes us to be an academic state so there if we get enough protein and I think the protein
Odds are probably increased on a carnivore diet or a ketogenic diet. They're probably increased which is what most people Miss on occasion and I think a low protein because they chase ketones I don't care about that. I'm looking for fats protein macros and I'm doing a lot of protein. I'm probably doing close to 200 grams of protein a day. I'm about a hundred and seventy pounds and then I'm doing probably an equivalent amount of fat right now. So about one to one factor protein 170 to 200 of both per day and I think that when we're doing that as long as I'm getting adequate calories and I'm giving myself a little surplus of protein I can make a making glycogen and I
Even my muscles are full of glycogen. And when I've done the carbohydrate reintroduction experiments, I noticed no improvement. Right and it's so long ago that I tradition to record. I don't really remember. I don't have set metrics because it's just not how I'm choosing to use my focus right now, but I could go to objective measures right now, but subjectively I didn't measure I didn't appreciate any decline in strength endurance or anything else went over to ketogenic diet. I have friends that are kind of experimented with this and anecdotally experience the same thing that if they're getting enough protein and enough calories. They have no strength.
Decline on a ketogenic diet now. We're not talking deep ketosis four-to-one therapeutic antiepileptic talking one-to-one fat to protein with protein for me. That's about 200 grams a day and a lot of
salt so very high protein ketogenic diet,
which is almost a paradise almost an oxymoron, right? If I check my ketones they'll probably be between 0.5 and 1 most of the time right? So low-level. Ketosis is where I'm at and that's I think that's been great for me so it but it is it is ketogenic right? Like I am
King some ketones probably low level I have to measure in real time to see if I eat, you know, a hundred grams of protein. Is that going to completely move me out of ketosis doesn't bother me, right? And then I think the very quickly I'll go back into it after that and I believe that in that state the research shows and there's good research also with intense exercise showing there's no decline on a kidding diet once your key to adapted. So I think that what's fascinating about human body is once we get used to this we will put as much glycogen in there and we have the same amount super interesting. Yeah, and it's just about getting
eating enough protein enough calories. And so I did a podcast with Stan efforting, you know, Stan no vertical diet. Anyway, he trains thorbjorn. Hafthor bjornsen and Brian Shaw these strong men right kind of the extreme thing and I said to him, I don't think it's ever happened. But my hypothesis is that you could get a ketogenic strongman. You could get a carnivore strong man, and I think they would be better because I think they'd have more endurance because that's the other thing they found in the faster studies that you do so much more fat oxidation. Meaning that my endurance is going to be so much better in terms of not needing to refuel.
Because I'm going to Fat oxidized way more than somebody's carbohydrate adapted way more and they've seen this in endurance athletes. Right? It means that I can access fat immediately use it preferentially so I'm probably going to be better theoretically like burning fat which maybe would mean that easier to maintain a body composition. Yeah, not a strictly and then an exercise I have access to the deep. Well, right whether it's Jiu-Jitsu or long surfing sessions. I have access to the Deep Well of fast sores much more easily because I'm fat oxidizing and I have five the same glycogen. I know I have tons of creatine.
Teen because I have tons of muscle meat right then, you know, theoretically I should have the same power output the same explosiveness because ultimately like what are carbohydrates doing. They're giving you a glycogen is all about the
glycogen stores Well, yeah, if you have the same amount of glycogen. Yeah, but you can't I mean as far as I understand it, you can't be you can't like be as powerful in those explosive lifts high intensity, you know interval training for example without glycogen in the muscle. So you need you need glycogen in them. You do you want your glycogen stores
to be full? Yeah to be fully. Yes, which is why people
Fast experience a decline in performance,
right? So how long would it take then for you to become adapted to a point where you can derive appreciable amount of glycogen from your
protein. I think that we don't know exactly but I think that
study you sided with volek what the six months six months. I think it
probably happens a little faster, but surely there is a key to adaptation period yeah, and people experience this so if people want to do a ketogenic diet, there's going to be a decline in performance for the first. I'm just coming back of the envelope three.
Four weeks right and then most people start to see a return to normal and then maybe get even a little better again. This is anecdotal and you know anecdotal, you know recall, but that seems to be the time frame that we're working
with super interesting. Yeah. All right. Well, let's shift gears to the the anthropology and then yeah, I mean, this is a cool story.
It's a really cool story and thanks for letting me tell it so at the beginning of the book I tell the story and I think that I wish I'd been an anthropologist when I was in college. I studied chemistry and biology but where we've come from
Fascinating and so this is this for me was probably the coolest part of the book. So I was showing you before we started the podcast that picture of the human brain size, right? And even before we were humans, we were primates and our primate ancestors are probably chimps and bonobos and we can look at chimp Evolution going back 60 million years Etc the size of a chimp or a bonobo brain is about 350 CCS 300 milliliters and it's the same size, right? They chimpanzees primate our primate ancestors he at least
From what we see today it primarily vegetables occasionally eating meat when it's available and many are herbivores will do this. Actually, they will eat meat in the sitting of absence of plants or if it's available. And so but what we see is that the size of the primate brain was essentially constant for 30 million years, right what you get and this is this is the kind of narrative that I put on top of this in the book. Is that what you get eating plants is the same brain size right you maintain your brain size 30 million years eating plants, right? There's probably not enough nutrients not enough calories.
Missing nutrients anyway that decide for whatever reason sizes the primate brain doesn't grow at all six million years ago. There's a change in the African Rift Valley East African Rift Valley Rises up becomes more Savannah from forest it all the our primate ancestors. This is kind of story that were there are kind of forced to move out in the grassland and they become Australopithecus 4 million years ago now pictures of Australopithecus looks kind of like a chimp something between a chimp and human not fully human. Not fully upright right? Not fully.
Lee articulated shoulder hands and feet not the same as ours doesn't look like a human at all kind of in between and that's the Lucy fossil. If you've heard seen that fossil you can see kind of the Reconstruction of Lucy's face. The the skull looks different. It looks kind of like something between like Planet of the Apes kind of thing and Lucy's brain was a little bigger, right and what we were looking at before so we're looking at a number of things here people can't see but I can send you these if you want to put them in the show notes these Graphics. So the first thing we're looking at is the size of the human brain. And again now, we're at four million years. It's gone up a little bit since
Pansies, but not increase the whole lot and correlating to that. There was another study. I showed you looking at strontium deposits or ratios between strontium calcium and barium in the teeth of these people because the teeth are preserved right? We can look at Lucy's teeth and look at the strontium ratios. Look at the strontium the calcium ratio look at the barium to strontium ratio and what we can see in the stable isotope studies. There are an indication of what the animals eating because those ratios just to give it high level those ratios reflect trophic level and we can look at
We can compare the ratios of those Isotopes in known grazing herbivorous animals and known carnivorous animals what we see is that about 4 million years ago Lucy's teeth Australopithecus somewhere in the middle, right somewhere the middle not at the carnivore not at a full herbivore somewhere in the middle like this kind of story right? Come on move out of the Savannah eating some plants like your primate ancestors and maybe getting some scavenged kill eventually, you know getting some animals and then about 2 million years ago something amazing happens. And this is the point in the graph that I really
Drawing your attention to an inflection happens in the size of the human brain and we can tell this by looking at the cranial Vault size of
fossils. Yeah, you see this basically like super linear trajectory of the human brain up until about yeah two million years or so and then I'm just kind of describing a graph for listeners and then it takes this like there's just like rapid upshot where it just becomes like exponential and that's what at about 2 million years
ago. So many years ago. It's logarithmic right? And that's when we imagine we see Homo habilis, right? So Australopithecus has become Homo habilis, but
There's another species that we talked about that was similar to Australopithecus that was around at the same time that kind of had the same strong team ratios. And then if we compare Homo habilis teeth and the strontium and barium calcium ratios to Australopithecus ratios. What we see is a realtor now or shifted we look a lot more like a carnival we're eating more meat suddenly and there is evidence from that point two million years ago that we started using a shoelace.
Tools these are bifacial tools number collecting like arrowheads when you were a kid and actually into looks like a big Arrow Head. It's probably about the size of your hand and it's carved on both sides Like a Knife right? It's like a primitive knife that you might hold the stone knife. Right and there are cut marks on Bones from animals at the thighs or we would be cutting meat away from the bones at this point for the first time. There are evidence that we were hunting based on those Shuli until the appearance of the issue lien tool the appearance of cut marks on animals and the appearance of
mass animal grave sites where it appears that our ancestors heard it animals into a sort of a backed like a dead end and then killed them all or throw them off a cliff and sort of chorus like a coordinated hunting efforts. So the the hypothesis here are the thesis becomes all of those three things occurred at the same time and our teeth show that we're eating more animals. Probably the most compelling hypothesis here is that eating animals made us human eating animals was the trigger eating animals was the shit.
EFT between primate brain size and human brain size which then rapidly increases over the next 2 million years to an Apex of 1500 CC 15,000 years ago. So we went from 500 CC 2 million years ago to 1500 CC. So I'm 30 million years. We didn't gain it all and then into million years we gained a thousand CC be tripled in size which is not easy evolutionarily because the brain is very energetically expensive and there's so many I tell the whole story in the book. We talk about the expense of tissue hypothesis in the gut the idea that in exchange for the brain we had to get
A smaller gut and all of this came together because we could eat more nutrient dense food. You can't have a smaller gut if you're still eating plants. We look at the god of primates. It's big its voluminous. They have to ferment things. They chew 60 pounds of food a day that requires a big a big coal and especially to do all the secondary fermentation to make all the short chain. Fatty acids may prove big boobs. Yeah, they poop all
day, right they're eating all day. They're pooping all day.
He all day pooping all day. So we had a shift in the gut as our brains were growing and it all happened because we started eating
We see the Australian tools. We see hunting and we see the changes in the ratios and the teeth corroborating all of this and then the brain just grows grows grows. And then the corollary questions are what about fire? And what about the competing hypotheses that we were eating lots of tubers and this is kind of the last thing I'll say and then we'll wrap it up. So from the fossil record, it appears that humans didn't have fire more than a million years ago that may push back to a million point five, but we don't know.
I did a podcast with Bill Von hippel who's pretty knowledgeable on this really cool guy. He's a psychologist thinks a lot about anthropology wrote a book called The Social leap, but what bill was saying is that we the first evidence we have a fire. The oldest ashes are about a million years old. So we can't say that humans were cooking. It wasn't cooking the did that as far as we know and the other thing is Richard wrangham at Harvard is as written a book called Catching Fire that was about fire cooking Foods. He's called us to sin of oars and saying that we read
Our tubers and this was the main thing the problem is that there's a big difference between 2.5 or 2 million and 1 million years ago as a big million year Gap there and people the corollary hypothesis from Richard wrangham is that it was tubers and starches that allowed our brain to grow and this isn't as compelling to me for a number of reasons. The first is that starches don't really have unique nutrients like animal foods do animal foods have iron and carnosine and carnitine and DHA and EPA in omega-3. He's in a million more things. Right? Well, yeah B12 like these can create a brain right here. Look at what a brain is made out of it's made.
Out of many of those things right a brain is really not made out of sweet potatoes look like there's not a whole lot of DHA or EPA or a lot of amino acids or B12 in a sweet potato, right? Like it's calories,
but I guess they argue that the brain is a massive glucose consumer. And so like the, you know, the starch perhaps provided sugar for the brain
Perhaps Perhaps, but as I talked about with Chris when were in ketosis that goes way down right? So normally the brain consumes about a hundred twenty grams of glucose per day and when ketosis about 25% of that so and we can make it through gluconeogenesis, so
We know that our ancestors could have done just like I'm doing right now eating steak fueling the brain just fine. I mean,
yeah, you're here you're talking to me. I'm raising her alive reasonably coherent don't see brain-dead reasonably coherent, but what's so cool is this
came up in the conversation with Chris as well. There's something called the amylase Gene duplication and I'll try and tell the story. It's a little bit convoluted, but bear with me everybody so around the time of Homo habilis two million years ago. There was no homo sapiens Homo sapiens didn't come on the scene till about 500,000 years ago. And then what appears to
Happened is that are Homo Sapien ancestors left Africa 80,000 years ago, but when they left Africa 80,000 years ago, they encountered other humans and there's only anathoth and denisovans Neanderthals in northern Europe denisovans in Asia. So there were other humans that had come from Africa and that's what we what is believed to have happened. Is that Homo habilis some Homo habilis individuals left after a cup of for Homo sapiens, right? So they left Africa 500,000 years ago six hundred thousand years ago who knows became neanderthals and denisovans and the reason this is valuable information. Is that if
Look across Homo sapiens. We all have the amylase Gene duplication. We all have this salivary amylase Gene duplication, which is an adaptation to eating starch. Right? So some have hypothesized. Well, we we clearly were all we were all eating starch and I think that at some point in our Evolution we probably will eating we were eating some amount of starch probably do a necessity that may have been one of the reasons that we left Africa, right? We hunted all the megafauna to Extinction or forced to eat starch we get a salivary amylase duplication. Amylase is an enzyme in the saliva that breaks down.
Starts a little bit and makes it a little more digested. We can utilize a few of the more calories before it hits our stomach. Right? So it's clearly we were eating starch when we left Africa 80,000 years ago. We don't know how long before that. It showed up. What's fascinating is that neanderthals and denisovans don't have this polymorphism. So that means Homo habilis didn't have this polymorphism whenever they left 500,000 who knows somewhere in that somewhere in the undefined region between 80,000 and 1.8 million years ago Homo habilis leaves neanderthals and denisovans don't have it.
Were probably that's for me a great strong argument that we were not eating starch right? Not only do we not have fire until a million years ago, but there's a stretch in there, you know between a million and 500 thousand years. We might have had fire. We might have been any starch. But if that was when the Homo habilis left Africa, then you know, they probably would have had the amylase Gene duplication if we had been eating starch or not. So this is what's so fascinating to me the fact that neanderthals denisovans don't have a malicious applications mean that means to me that eating starch is a very recent adaptation in humans and that for the
Majority of our Evolution we were not getting starch and it's starches and not the reason our brains grew that it's animals, right? That makes
sense. Yeah, you're saying that the brain was already kind of complete in terms of its in terms of its maximal sighs. Yeah. I don't know which our ancestors began eating grains. I saw on the graph there was a little bit of a downturn. Yeah in terms of brain volume about I want to say it's that was it a thousand years
ago. I think it's I think it's
a more we start out a thousand years
ago. It's more recent than that. It's I think it's actually if you look at it's only in the last fifteen thousand years, which correlates with
15,000. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and that's the Neolithic
Revolution. So I talked about that in the book as well Jared Diamond has called this the worst mistake in human history. So this is the cult of the seed agrarianism pastoralism and the fact that when we stopped hunting animals and went back to grains, you know, we had no sense of how to balance a diet and all we knew was that we could just get calories and or nutrition suddenly went kind of down the tubes. It's one of my
father's is for it. Well, that was the first the first Agricultural Revolution, right?
Yeah, a lot has changed a lot changed then and a lot has changed since
then. Yes it has and certainly I think that we can construct diets out of plans that are better than what would have been done then but that that's a good sort of mirror to the hunting of animals cause our brains to grow and when we went back to just eating grains, we kind of just started to shrink. Yeah, and then there's a fascinating study I talk about in the book all I'll say this and then I'll we can wrap it up. So I don't know.
Exactly year, but they've done studies looking at B12 levels in brain size. Are you familiar with this one? No, I bet you've seen it. So the people that have the highest level of B12 of the biggest brains and you can correlate B12 level in brain size. Right? And so that kind of speaks to this whole vegan omnivore carnivore thing. Like, where do we get B12? Well, we're only going to get B-12 from animals, you know, all of James Wilkes crazy arguments aside people can listen to my previous podcast about that if they want to hear about that, but
But B12 is an animals throughout our Evolution and so bigger brain B12. We need these bonds have a bigger brain and the people who have the smaller amounts of B12 look like they have smaller brains. So whether it's a brain shrinking over someone's life or someone coming, you know being sort of in a family with low B12 that's chronically depleted of animal Foods. Who knows but what's crazy is that there's unpublished data from that study and I'm trying to get ahold of this researcher so bad so that I can recruit in the book. They stratified by vegans and omnivores, right?
And the largest vegan brain was smaller than the smallest omnivore Brave. Oh wow, and it's no surprise right that the omnivores and much higher B12 levels in the vegans have lower B12 levels and so vegan brains are
smaller. I want to see that study. Yeah, I wonder if I mean the what role B12 plays in brain volume prenatally. I mean, I'm sure a bit a huge role, but I wonder if that's you know, do they was it just like a cross-sectional study where they looked at like
Ball and they did like a B12 like, you know, serum Drink side. Wow. Yeah think is
a serum B12 levels and brain size. I can pull it up. But yeah,
well, yeah pretty cool stuff. I haven't seen that a super interesting. Yeah, every time I hang out with you man. I leave wanting to go eat a steak. You make me want to eat more meat we could do that. Yeah, I could do that. I'm super down. Yeah. Yeah because I'm actually I'm actually pretty hungry. Well do this was fun. This has been an hour and a half. This is one of the longest episode of my show which I'm you know, happy to do and it's always
I'm talking to you. So thanks for me on brother. Yeah, thanks for coming up from San Diego. When is the the book going to be available for my
listeners? So the book is going to be out on February the 11th, Tony 20, whenever this podcast comes out people can pre-order it at the carnivore code book.com. But I think we're going to release it right about the time. The book comes out. It'll be available Amazon. There will be an audio book and you can find everything about me at carnivore MD.com and you can look for the podcast.
I'm gonna do with Max's yeah can't wait on my podcast which is fundamental Health
yeah awesome show yeah so this podcast is going to be up so the book will have just come out yesterday cool congrats thanks man threatened book launch exciting stuff alright Paul were at the last question which is what does it mean to you to live a genius life
man I think it's just I'll go back to this so one of the things that I liked about James Wilkes time on Rogan yesterday was
he said I'm a seeker of truth and that's cool and so I'm going to go with that like
II like truth, you know, and I feel like that's that's kind of my Y and we all have bias but truth is fun, you know truth is interesting and so for me living a genius life is about trying as best we can understand truth in all aspects of our lives in terms of relationships in terms of science in terms of health in terms of just how we live our lives. Like what is what is the Bedrock? What is the truth? There's a quote from your book about this like there's one singular truth
and
Oh, yeah, it's from its from well. It was a novel first, but it became a movie Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Yeah. Truth is singular its versions are mistruths, right? Yeah. I love that quote Yeah, so glad you reference that. Wow.
So yeah. So I like that I like that like the singular truth like as much as we can to seek that for me is really what I would think of as like a genius
life. I love it cool. I could have said it better myself. Thanks again for being on the show my pleasure to all you guys out there in Prague.
Castle and thank you so much for listening spread the word about what we're doing here at the genius. Laughs I would really appreciate that and pick up holes new book. I will catch you on the next episode, please.
