The Truth About The Carnivore Diet: Everything You Need To Know About Dangers, Benefits, Mistakes & Hacks For Eating Only Meat.

But still, what you're saying is, even if we can ferment and soak and sprout, which I think we should do, if we've got a choice between a ribeye steak or a plate of soaked and sprouted quinoa, fermented sourdough bread, a nice sweet potato, the latter would still be traditionally a plate full of survival food, even though we've rendered it digestible. You're saying why not just eat the meat? That's way easier. I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet, from sealfit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond, I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty, and brawn to deliver deliver you this podcast everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride. All right, this is it, and I'm excited. What you are about to hear is probably one of the most comprehensive podcasts I've ever recorded on the diets, and particularly the carnivorous diet, also known as the Carnivore diet. I don't know, is it carnivore? Is it carnivorous? Who knows? I think it's carnivore. But either way, my guest on today's show, Dr. Paul Saladino, I guarantee is going to blow your mind. Now, here's the deal. You're probably going to be asking about my final thoughts, which I get into towards the end of this episode. But I also want to comment going in without giving you too much bias as you listen in, what my takeaway thoughts are and my own dietary approach is after speaking with Paul comprehensively both during this show and after and before, and also delving into a lot of the research studies that he sent over to me along with his YouTube videos, all of which I'm going to put a ton of resources. I mean, you guys can take a deepest dive as you want into everything from curcumin to piperine to plant pepticides. If I can talk plant pesticides to fiber to ketones, everything that we talk about in this show, I've got a lot of research that's all going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Carnivore but anyways, after reviewing all of that, my approach, because even my kids were asking last night as I was eating a ribeye steak and they were eating a tuna melt on sourdough bread with a spinach salad that mom had made while watching dad eat something completely separately or separate, they asked me if this was the new diet. And I told them what I'll tell you. First of all, I think that everything should be practiced in moderation, including the consumption of meat and plant based foods. Yes, plant based foods have built in defense mechanisms. Yes, as you'll discover during this episode, plant based foods may not even be biologically or physiologically necessary. I'm still convinced though that because we've adopted those foods over thousands of years, they've become integrated into our culture as traditional staples built around things like enjoyment and sitting around the dinner table eating the foods that perhaps your Okinawan or Sardinian or Nicoyan or Northern European ancestors might have eaten, like fermented foods and salads and seeds and nut butters and all manner of things that are indeed plants with built in defense mechanisms. The idea of including these does provide for some enjoyment and some amount of tradition, including the cup of coffee in the morning and the glass of alcohol in the evening, which, which I will still continue to do. I enjoy it. But I do think that everything should be consumed in moderation. And furthermore, I think that there are some people that will benefit quite a bit from reducing all plant based foods, including beverages derived from plant based foods, for certain periods of time in the form of an elimination or an autoimmune based diet. In addition, the fact that even though we can survive solely on meat, and I think we can, especially meat eaten nose to tail as we get into in this interview, the plants that were developed over a period of time, survival foods, as Paul calls them during the show, have kind of been foods that have developed along with the agricultural revolution and the massive increase in the world's population or the earth's population as a whole. And as we talk of about during this interview, I'm also not convinced that based on that just eating meat is sustainable any longer. Like we've painted ourselves into the corner as a human race to rely upon plant foods to be able to feed the global population. And I think that an omnivorous diet for most folks allows that to happen. We also need to consider the fact I know many of you listening. You're athletes, right? And you're out there doing unnatural activities like big long Spartan races and daily CrossFit workouts and training for Ironman Man. Well, here's the news for you. If you're out doing something highly kind of unnatural from an ancestral standpoint, especially from a glycogen exhaustion exhaustion, a storage carbohydrate exhaustion standpoint, you may need to introduce some things that some would argue would be unnatural, like carbohydrate refeeds and the consumption of starches and some amount of sugars that would go over and above what you might get on a ketotic or a carnivorous diet, because that's the path you've chosen, right? If you're going to eat ancestrally, you may want to consider that you also have to live ancestrally and vice versa. So you have to, have to cheat, so to speak, sometimes if you're doing some of these unnatural activities and a couple of other things. First of all, we didn't get into the microbiome much. Paul sent over his own bacterial analysis of his gut, which was actually quite impressive. A wide amount of bacterial diversity, even though he's just eating meat nose to tail. Furthermore, in my own testing and my shift towards a strict carnivore diet for a period of weeks, I'm going to actually test my own microbiome before and after. I'll probably use either longevity or viome, and I will give you the results of that when I finish with that. In the meantime, though, I'm following kind of a bastardized version of a carnivore diet to eliminate a lot of the roughage and plant protective compounds that Paul and I discussed during this episode. So for me, what that looks like is I'm eating small amounts of root vegetables and tubers, usually pureed, mashed and kind of created to make them easier to digest without the skins, et cetera. I'm still making my wonderful homemade fermented yogurt. I'll actually release the recipe for that fermented yogurt that I make from coconut milk and an El Returi probiotic strain on my weekly roundup. If you go sign up for my newsletter@BenGreenfieldFitness.com, i'm pushing that out this Friday. Or if you're listening to this podcast at a later date, you could just go to my website and look up Ben Greenfield coconut yogurt recipe. I'm doing a little bit of raw organic honey, a few small berries like blueberries and blackberries, worked in, like I mentioned, a little bit of bitter and tannin rich beverages like green tea, organic coffee, some red wine. I am doing a little bit of nut butter and also some nutrient dense vegetable powders. I'm using some of my friend Dr. Thomas Cowan's vegetable powder. So I'm adding in a little bit of extra phytonutrients. Again, just for the spice, just for the taste, not necessarily because I'm convinced I need them. I just, I like to spice things up. And then because I feel that with a high amount of protein and meat consumption I could get a lot of MTOR activation, a lot of activation of anabolic pathways. I'm being very strict with the 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast. And as I mentioned during this podcast episode, I'm even consuming some of my friend Dr. Joseph Mercola's autophagy tea before my nightly fast, which is kind of a mix of things like Pau d' Arco and glycine powder, some chamomile, some carciton, some garcinia. And I did a whole Facebook post on my own bastardized version of the Carnivore diet and I will link to that in the show notes as well over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Carnivore I realized that was a boatload of my own thoughts, and I apologize if that creates bias for you to listen to this interview, but I also feel like I'd be remiss not to at least give you a takeaway of my own before you dive into the show. And again, I'm going to link to all of this stuff in the show notes. Well, hello everybody. As you know, if you've been tuning into any of my Instagram or Facebook, you know I have taken a keen interest of late in this thing called the Carnivore Diet. And I decided after lots of pondering and self experimentation with this whole Carnivore thing, I wanted to hunt down somebody who could actually speak intelligently on the topic. And I heard a debate between Lane Norton, the research scientist, and this functional medicine practitioner named Paul Saladino on my friend Mark Bell's podcast a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time I've ever really had my ears perk up when it comes to the Carnivore diet being anything other than just our ancestors ate meat, so eat meat. Maybe we aren't designed to eat vegetables and massive amounts of fiber, but it was presented in a highly scientific manner backed by research and it really got me thinking. It even got me thinking so much that over the past week I have begun to heavily shift my diet towards lots of grass fed grass Finished rib eye and wild caught salmon. And my own little bastardization of the carnivore diet that my guest on today's show may or may not comment on. That includes things like tubers and some berries and small amounts of alcohol in the evening with a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee in the morning and some herbs and spices. With my logic being I want to limit the heterocyclic compounds that might form when I'm charring my meat, etc. So I kind of had my own pathway. I went down on the carnivore diet. But after this week of experimentation, I thought, what the heck, I need to get this guy, Dr. Saladino on the show. So not only did he agree to come on the show, he got in his car. He's sitting right here at my kitchen table with me. And we punished an amazing dinner of ribeye steaks and salmon roe last night. We crushed an amazing workout this morning. We've been doing lots of cold pool and sauna and hot tub. And if you don't know anything about Paul, I'm going to link to his bio, his website, his very informative YouTube channel. On the show notes, which you can find@bengreenfieldfitness.com carnivore that's bengreenfieldfitness.com Carnivore but in a nutshell, he's a certified functional medicine practitioner. He's an MD he trained at the University of Arizona. He got his MD in 2015. He was a physician's assistant before that and practiced in cardiology. And he's actually completing his residency in psychiatry at University of Washington right now, which is very interesting because as we were discussing while releasing crap, tons of sweat last night in the sauna, he has found some pretty interesting connections between the gut and the brain and specifically how the brain responds to carnivore diet. He's also in the hunting down the best wave in the frigid waters of the Pacific Northwest. He's a fit guy, he's very well spoken and we have connected. You are about to take probably the deepest dive into the rigorous science of the carnivore diet that you ever have on today's show. So, Paul, welcome to the podcast. Man.

Ben, it's so good to be here. It's amazing to share this space with you in Spokane. We've got this snowy wonderland to play in and I survived that grueling workout with you this morning.

Did you enjoy that?

I was amazed.

A little wakey, wakey.

That was brutal.

So for those of you listening, we did a quick workout. We did a partner workout in my garage, which was at about 20 degrees. I commented that you got to pay a lot of money to go work out in a cryotherapy therapy chamber like, you know, at Burn Gym in New York City. And we instead have our own little 20 degrees cryotherapy chamber out there. We did a tabata sets on the bike and some, some 30, 20, 10 squat. What do we do? 30 squat, 20 push up, 10, swing, 5, pull up Amrap sprinkled with Tabatas for about 35 minutes, jumped in the cold pool, hopped in the hot tub, and as we were sitting there in the hot tub, you. What'd you ask me, Paul?

I said, ben, do you want to go eat some vegetables right now and. Or you want to go hunt down some animals? Yeah, let's go hunt down some animals.

I don't know, man. I want to. I would love to have a stock of broccoli right now and maybe a pink lady apple, something like that for my antioxidants and my post workout glycogen. Actually, we had that wonderful salmon roe.

We did.

Why do you like salmon roe so much? By the way? You brought like cans of cans of that.

I love salmon roe. So I've talked about this on my Instagram and my YouTube. One of the interesting things about humans is that we cannot make omega 3 fatty acids and we also can't make many omega 6 fatty acids, but we need omega 3 fatty acids. And this is probably something that many people are familiar with. But the cool thing about salmon roe is that the omega 3 fatty acids in salmon roe, which are primarily DHA, are in the phospholipid form, which has been shown at least in rodent models, to cross the blood brain barrier much more efficiently than triglyceride or ethyl ester forms of omega 3s which you'd find.

In most fish oil capsules, that's triglyceride or ethyl ester.

So the two sources that I'm aware of, phospholipids derived DHA are krill oil and salmon roe. And the other nice thing about salmon roe is that you are eating maybe a tablespoon to 2 tablespoons of salmon roe and getting a heck of a lot of DHA without any significant exposure to the metals because it's such a smaller amount of the actual fish product. So you kind of get the best of both worlds. You get omega 3 fatty acids in the phospholipids, crosses the blood brain barrier goes to your brain, does all the amazing things that Omega 3s do in the membranes and for mood, all these kinds of things. But you don't have the same amount of exposure to metals. One of the things I see clinically in my practice is that patients that try to do the right thing sometimes and eat a lot of wild salmon will end up with elevated levels of mercury in their blood. And certainly patients, clients that eat tuna end up with elevated levels of mercury. So this is just one of the things that we have to navigate as humans, is how we get the nutrients we need to function optimally while avoiding the toxins. So salmon roe is my preferred source of omega 3s, and it's just amazing.

So as long as you can stomach the texture of it. I know some people don't like the fish eggy kind of taste in their mouth. I absolutely dig it. And that or krill oil, if you wanted absolute bioavailability of the actual Omega 3s would be the superior root.

Yes.

Not that all fish oil isn't bioavailable. It's just that the krill or the salmon roe is even more bioavailable.

More bioavailable. And then you also. The interesting thing about salmon roe that intrigues me is this idea of getting something from a food versus getting something from a supplement. And I hope that more research is done about this in the future and we can talk about this with regard to liver and vitamin A in the future on the podcast, if you want. But what you find in the limited amount of research is that a lot of times getting things from foods is different than getting it from a supplement. And one of the concerns I have with fish oils in general is the oxidation. And, you know, when you're looking for a fish oil, you want to look for the certificate of analysis of that fish oil and look and see what levels of lipid peroxides are actually in that fish oil. So you imagine that. And I think what's been shown is that in fish eggs, there's very little oxidation of the oil because they're so much fresher and they're in the actual form in the fish egg. So it's like a fresher type of oil. It's like the freshest type of fish oil. There's no processing. In order to get into a fish oil pill, they have to do some processing. And some companies may be better than other companies at keeping that, you know, clean and not rancid and not oxidized. But a salmon egg is like, it's.

Fantastic on flaxseed crackers. I'm kidding. Actually, I, I had, that's what I had for breakfast this morning was wild caught salmon steaks that our friend, my chiropractic doc was over last night. They get the guys from Valenti Chiropractic shout out to them. Mike Valenti brought us over a fantastic couple of salmon steaks and I had your salmon roe on top of that and feel like a million bucks. But last night we had the grass fed grass finished so good. Ribeyes. I had those U.S. wellness meats rib eyes. And what struck me as quite interesting, and this was one of the very first conversations I had with you last night was I got out all the spices. So I had some black pepper and some sea salt. I had some cayenne pepper. I had a little bit of a rosemary thyme spice blend. And I was putting all that on top of the steaks. And you said, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold the pepper, hold the pepper on mine. I'm just going to do salt. So I kept yours separate from the rest of the steaks. Why the hell did you not want me to put pepper on your steak?

So this is a really interesting story and a great entry to the world of plants and plant pesticides and plant toxins, which people may not be aware of. One of the overarching messages that I'm interested in, the context of a carnivorous diet is this idea that plants are not really on the earth to serve humans or to feed humans and that they develop a lot of potentially toxic compounds to defend themselves from other animals that are eating them. And pepper is interesting. So pepper is from a peppercorn, which is the seed of a plant. And I think that sometimes we become divorced from that idea, like we don't actually remember, oh, pepper is a seed from a plant. If you look at seeds of plants, those are some of the most highly toxic places where these pesticides and toxins reside because they are, they are the plants reproductive parts. They are the most highly defended parts of the plants in the seeds. But in the pepper seeds, in the peppercorn, there's a compound called piperine and there's very strong evidence that piperine actually inhibits an enzyme, which is a mouthful. But all of the amazingly intelligent people listening to this podcast will surely appreciate this. It's a UDP glucuronosyl transferase, and it's an enzyme in the liver that adds a glucuronide moiety to compounds that the liver is trying to detoxify. So this is the process of glucuronidation, one of the phase two processes in the liver. In the liver we have phase one and phase two detoxification. And udp, glucuronosyltransferase is an enzyme that adds a glucuronide moiety to compounds that the liver is trying to detoxify in order to make them water soluble and excrete them. So piperine actually inhibits udp, glucuronosil transferase. And what's interesting to me about that is this is a compound that's in a plant seed that's actually working against our own intrinsic detoxification biochemistry. So anything that you might get in that meal, any other compounds that you might take in at that, that point are not going to be able to be glucuronidated or excreted in the same way from the piperine. This is relevant to this whole rabbit hole of curcumin. If people curcumin.

Well, you, you look at the, at the label of a lot of compounds that have curcumin, they have piperine for enhanced bioavailability.

Exactly.

As most labels say, that's a big thing in the supplement industry.

Yes, yes. And so what is going on there? And we will probably, we'll have to talk about curcumin and the, the value or non value of curcumin.

Feel free, we got time.

Yeah, but what's happening is the reason piperine is added to curcumin supplements is because that is how you get more levels of curcumin in your body. If you don't take piperine with your curcumin, your body doesn't absorb much curcumin to begin with and then it immediately detoxifies what is absorbed. This is sort of the pattern that you see with plant compounds in general is that our bodies don't use plant molecules for our intrinsic human biochemistry. And this is, I think, a misconception within the popular press.

I was going to say that's going to be confusing to a lot of people because polyphenols, antioxidants, resveratrol, all of these things that we're consuming plants to get. Well, there's of course the argument about the hormetic benefit which we can get into from those built in toxins in the plants, but supposedly they're quenching free radicals and, and assisting with mitochondrial biogenesis and all these different things that we say we eat plants for.

Right, right. So this is a common misconception for all the plant molecules that we take in, whether it's sulforaphane or resveratrol or curcumin, what our body does is it immediately recognizes it as foreign and detoxifies it. And they're all detoxified in various ways. Sulforaphane is detoxified differently than resveratrol. But our body immediately takes these compounds through phase one and phase two detoxification and excretes them them, sometimes in the urine, sometimes in the stool. But this is a real paradigm shift in the way that we're thinking, because I think that there's this subtle propaganda in the supplement industry that we are actually using these molecules directly in human biochemistry. But this is essentially like Max and PCs. Plant molecules don't get used in human biochemistry directly. They can, through a potentially hormetic effect, increase our endogenous glutathione, which is something that we can talk about, but they don't use. They're not inserted into our own biochemistry. So we don't actually use sulforaphane in any human biochemistry. We don't use resveratrol in any human biochemistry. We don't use curcumin in any biochemistry.

You could say they're being used to potentially activate certain pathways that we already have to produce our own antioxidants.

Yes. Which is primarily glutathione.

Okay.

And that. The interesting thing about this is that that mechanism is not unique to plant molecules. We see that happening with all sorts of things in our. In our lives, whether it's other stressors, which we can talk about, can also activate those mechanisms to increase glutathione. So one of the arguments.

Cold tobacco.

Exactly. Even things, ironically, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic amines.

From cooking meat.

From cooking meat can activate the same pathway in the liver, which begins with NRF2 activation, which can increase our endogenous glutathione. So this idea that one of the arguments proponents of plant eating make is that plants have unique compounds which are somehow valuable to humans in a singular way. And I would argue that that is not true. And we can delve into some examples of that as we move through. But these plant compounds are actually, in some ways, I would say they were redundant in their effect on glutathione. There are plenty of ways to increase glutathione to fully optimal and healthy levels without these plant molecules. And as we will see as we dive into this, these plant molecules, because they are essentially not our operating system, they Are not the same language that we are programmed in often end up having other detrimental effects in our bodies. They may have a hormetic effect by spurring nrf2, but then they often do other things which are detrimental to our bodies because our bodies don't recognize them.

Well, I want to hear you comment on that here in a little bit because they're often packaged with fiber. Of course, I know you have some very interesting views on fiber, which I want to get into. But basically what you're saying is that although plants could induce these plant compounds like piperine from black pepper or curcumin from turmeric, those could induce our own antioxidant pathways. Those could upregulate our own antioxidant pathways. The problem with that is that there may be other ways to upregulate those same antioxidant pathways without the potential for the accompanying toxins or potential damage we could get from all the other things that are carried into us along with the ingestion of that plant matter.

Yes, and I will also say that those plant molecules, while sometimes inducing NRF2 at the same time, simultaneously do other toxic things in our bodies. So curcumin and piperine are maybe not as good example as sulforaphane. So sulforaphane we know comes into the body.

Can I back up for just a second? Sulforaphane, for those of you listening in, that's, like, made popular by, say. I think Dr. Rhonda Patrick is probably one of the chief proponents of sulforaphane. I've certainly spoken of its benefits before. I have frozen broccoli seeds right here behind me in the freezer. We didn't talk about that. Sometimes get thrown into smoothies and also wind up in my shit, which I can comment on the quality of my shit in the past week, by the way. The complete lack of seeds, nuts, skins, all the things that used to show up in my shit. It is now just shit. That's all it is. Just beautiful, big, brown, beautiful turds. The first time in almost, I would say, in my life where there haven't been things in my poop. That's not to say maybe that doesn't reflect underlying leaky gut issues or something else happening in my gut that might be causing that to happen. But ultimately sulforaphane, back to that. That's this stuff that we get from broccoli, cruciferous vegetables. It's now being found in a lot of supplements, and it is considered to be a highly beneficial molecule as a precursor to these Glutathione pathways.

Exactly. And the whole. The sulforaphane pathway is so interesting, the story is so fascinating that we should go down that rabbit hole completely. But I'll just say briefly, as a prelude to that, that that molecule, while inducing NRF2, is also known to be a goitrogen, meaning that when it circulates in small amounts in our bodies, before we can detoxify it, it can compete with iodine absorption at the level of the thyroid and actually induce hypothyroidism. So this is an illustration of the concept that I'm suggesting here, that these plant molecules may have a hormetic effect on our bodies. Because our bodies are pretty amazing. We have figured out a way to take toxins and get stronger from them across a variety of exposures. But what we find with these plant molecules that are not part of our operating system is that in addition to doing these potentially beneficial hormetic effects, they also appear to have detrimental effects, this collateral damage that can happen with them. And so one of the theses that I think is useful to consider with regard to a carnivorous diet or a diet which excludes plants, is the idea that the things that these plant molecules are doing are not unique to the plant molecules, and we can optimize those systems without the potential toxic effects of these molecules.

Okay, so you could. You could simulate the benefits that you're getting from the plants by eating meat.

Yes. And basically living a healthy life. Right. Hot.

That's right. And engaging in other forms of hormesis. Sunlight, radiation, heat, cold, exercise, exercise, etc.

Yes. The things that we would have been doing evolutionarily. Right.

Moving on. Living by Chernobyl, as somebody was commenting on last night, which is actually rodents living near Chernobyl, Noble are actually displaying some amount of enhanced longevity. And so there's a potential hormetic effect there as well. And so the reason that I asked you that is because I think it's a great kind of starting off point for this podcast to allow people to begin thinking about some of the things that you've gotten me thinking about now in the past week. I have another question for you about something that. Something else that I think a lot of people hold dear in addition to their spices and their herbs and their plants, before we jump into a more broad definition of. Of the carnivore diet, because I want to definitely step back and give people the big picture overview here. But you also turned down a cup of amazing coffee this morning, and I'm very curious as to why that Is.

So this is an interesting thing, and it'll kind of wrap us back into the discussion of piperine and pepper in general. But coffee is felt to be beneficial because of a couple of polyphenolic compounds in coffee, specifically chlorogenic acid and caffeic acid. And this gets to, like, broader themes around plant molecules and kind of illustrates what I was mentioning yesterday or mentioning just a moment ago, this idea that I have concerns that plants are not on the Earth to feed humans. And generally, these molecules, if we look at them in terms of the way plants fit into ecosystems, have been evolved as protective mechanisms against animals. And we see that in rodents, we see that in other insects. And I think that we need to realize that that's probably happening in humans, too, that these molecules that we consider to be polyphenols are often evolved by the plants to be protective mechanisms, to be toxins, to be pesticides.

Right. Because plants can't run. They don't have fangs or hooves or horns.

Exactly. And their evolution has the same goal as ours, Right? To pass their DNA on. And so in the context of herbivorous animals and omnivorous animals and insects eating plants, if plants were just completely healthy for everyone to eat, then they would get wiped out immediately. Right. Plants don't exist on this Earth to feed humans or feed dinosaurs or elephants or giraffes or rodents or shrews. You know, plants need to have their own defense mechanisms. And so plant evolution has in some ways been hand in hand in parallel with other mammalian evolution and other rodent evolution. And the fact that there's this constant changing of plant pesticides, and then the animals have to evolve to potentially detoxify them. And so there's this gradual process of plant toxins, and then animals will eat them or not eat them, but that keeps the plants alive. And so, so chlorogenic acid and caffeic acid are actually some of these polyphenolic compounds that are felt to be helpful, but in certain assays have been found to be what's called classrogenic, which is very concerning because they've been found at doses that are present in coffee to actually break chromosomes. And this is consistent with what we see with other molecules, even like sulforaphane.

As in DNA damage.

DNA damage. And so, so if you just take a step back and you think about the idea that coffee is from a plant seed, it's a coffee cherry, and you're taking the seed of the coffee bean or the seed of the coffee cherry and roasting it again, that is the seed Of a plant that is the most highly defended part of the plant, theoretically, conceptually. And that is where the plant is going to put a lot of things that are going to discourage animals from eating it. And if you look in the natural world, very few animals eat those seeds, you know, or they have. They've eaten them for all of their evolution and they found ways to sort of work around that. But they may not always eat the seeds because they know that those are quite toxic. And in some situations they will, you know, potentially be very harmful to the animal if the animal eats the seeds. The goal of the fruit of an, of a plant is to be eaten by the animal and then be passed out right in the stool to fertilize the next generation of plants. That's what we're thinking.

Which is why when I am eating a diet higher in plants and I look at the toilet bowl, if I were ancestral man taking a shit out in the woods, those plants would actually, you know, all the quinoa in my crap would be getting used to make a new quinoa plant.

The quinoa would be so happy to be in your poop.

Right, right.

And that's. It's an interesting thing. So I hiked the Pacific Crest trail a number of years ago and I would see quinoa every day in my poop. I mean, those things do not get digested. And that, you know, looking at your poop is an interesting thing. We were joking about that this morning. You know, I think that if more humans looked at their poop, it sounds like a gross concept, but we would get a sense of like how many of these plant foods we are actually digesting versus not digesting. If you look at your stool when you're eating a meat based diet, or I should say a carnivorous diet, which I would advocate against. A fully meat based diet, I would advocate for eating nose to tail. But if you are eating a truly carnivorous diet, that is eating nose to tail, and you look at your stool, you know, it's basically this homogeneous mixture. It's not heterogeneous like a plant based thing would. A plant based stool would be with all sorts of undigested pieces of various things and pieces of an almond, which is not very digestible, or an undigested seed, or an undigested piece of quinoa. And so that's what the plant is trying to do, is to take its seed to get you to eat it and then to have it pass through you. And if you actually crunch the seed, they're Putting toxins in there to discourage you from doing that the next time, either by making it bitter or by sort of creating this aversion to eating the seed in your organism.

Now, couldn't we argue, though, that because the plant has these built in defense mechanisms, that maybe the dose is in the poison? If we were to eat too many of these, it could cause damage. But just like exercise in excess could cause endocrine disruption, or heat in excess could cause dehydration or cardiovascular damage, or cold in excess could cause you to pass out and die in the water, shallow water blackout or whatever, if you're eating smaller amounts of plants on a frequent basis and rotating them and varying them throughout the diet, that you would still get some of that hormetic effect and it could be beneficial without you getting a lot of the gut damage.

Well, this kind of goes back to the idea of hormesis versus the collateral damage from the plant molecules when they're in the separate operating system that, you know, I don't think that the hormesis is the potential benefit of the plants. But when you're eating things like caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid acid, they may activate this NRF2 pathway. But then the question is, like sulforaphane, that may also activate the NRF2 pathway, but then it gets absorbed and inhibits the absorption of iodine at the level of the thyroid. And then the caffeic acid and the chlorogenic acid, is it actually creating chromosomal breaks at the same time?

Is there evidence, Are there people walking around with hypothyroidism linked to sulforaphane injection?

Absolutely.

Really?

Yes, absolutely. You can. It's actually not incredibly difficult to make yourself hypothyroid by eating broccoli sprouts.

Really?

Yeah.

So would that be like throwing them into the smoothie three days a week? Are we talking about the people pushing the giant grocery shopping carts full of kale through whole foods?

It would probably depend on your baseline level of iodine consumption. Right. Because that's what it's doing. It's competing with iodine at the level of the thyroid. But I think maybe. Let's talk about sulforaphane a little bit, because people are probably interested in this. And I think that the example is it parallels many other things. So sulforaphane is a molecule that does not exist in a plant as sulforaphane. It exists as a molecule called glucoraphanin, which is a glucosinolate. So it's a precursor to sulforaphane and it's such an interesting story. So the way that sulforaphane gets produced is when glucoraphanin combines with myrosinase. And myrosinase is an enzyme that's also present in the plant. So it's a little bit like two components of an explosive mixture that, when they're only combined, become explosive or like superglue. You know, you take the two components and you combine them, and they become superglue. They become a different molecule. Well, there's this enzyme called myrosinase and this molecule called glucoraphanin. And when those are combined in a brassicate vegetable, you get sulforaphane. But sulforaphane doesn't exist in living brassicate plants because it is actually so oxidatively active, meaning that it's so oxidative, it's so active in oxidation reduction chemistry, that it would be toxic to the molecule. The molecule couldn't actually control that level of reactive oxygen species coming from the sulforaphane molecule in a brassica plant. So it's a defense mechanism. And the reason it's a defense mechanism is that when an animal chews broccoli, or when we cut broccoli on the counter, we are cutting open the cells of broccoli. And that allows glucoraphanin to combine with. With myrosinase to make sulforaphane. And so you can kind of reverse engineer it and say, oh, this is what's going on. This is one of the ways that brassica vegetables defend themselves is they have these two molecules which are okay in terms of oxidative, reductive chemistry on their own. Well, one of them is glucosinolates, which are not as oxidatively reactive as sulforaphane. But then this enzyme, erosinase, when it touches glucoraphanin, sulforaphane is made. So sulforaphane is not something that's present in native broccoli. And so when you are eating broccoli sprouts, you are eating, again, glucoraphanin and myrosinase. But they're raw, you haven't cooked them. And so you get the sulforaphane when you are chewing broccoli sprouts. And this, again, is an interesting parallel. If we look at seeds, those are the most highly defended parts of a plant. And then the next most highly defended part of a plant is a sprout, because the plant wants this part of this. This plant wants its DNA to continue. The plant Wants, wants the seed to germinate and it wants to discourage animals from eating the plant as much as possible. If an animal eats a seed, it's never going to germinate or go anywhere. If an animal eats any part of a broccoli sprout, it's not going to, you know, mature into a full plant. But if, if you have a brassica vegetable, whether it's a piece of, whether it's kale or any of these other varietals of a brassicate vegetable, brassicates or kale, collard greens, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower. We've, we've sort of hybridized all these and made these things. But, you know, ancestrally there was probably just one, one brassica plant. But once it's a full grown plant, an animal can come around and munch a leaf. It's not going to kill the plant. But if an animal eats any part of that sprout, that the plant is not going to grow at all. It's not very defensible. So the highest levels of glucoraphanin are found in broccoli sprouts and broccoli seeds. So this is an interesting parallel saying, oh, this is, you know, if we think about this intuitively, this is the plant defending its most vulnerable forms. It's defending its seed, it's depending its sprout. And this is what's so interesting about thinking about this way of eating plants is that it totally turns the whole notion on its head because people are saying, oh, eat broccoli seeds and eat broccoli sprouts because those are the most valuable part of the broccoli. Those are the most sulforaphane rich.

Maybe trying to isolate the most concentrated version could be a bad idea.

A very bad idea.

That's a very interesting thought pattern. Now, what about animals, though? Because there was that podcast I did with Fred Provenza, the author of the book book Nourishment, where we talked about how animals will self select their diet. And they almost have these built in nausea mechanisms where they'll go out and they've observed them in nature or out in the field chewing on the new sprouts and also the older plants and self selecting certain mixes of alfalfa or grain or oats and kind of knowing how much is enough and how much is too much. And they've even shown. We were talking about this last night and they give the animals anti nausea medication. They'll eat a whole bunch of the sprouts and the new plants and get too Many of these built in plant defense mechanisms, yet they're still eating plants. Why would humans be different than animals in terms of our evolutionary capability to be able to eat plants? Does it come down to the gut? Does it come down to carnivores versus herbivores? Can you explain that?

I would say, yeah, it's probably mostly the latter. And this gets into a little bit of the anthropological discussion that I think that one of the things that differentiates us, I mean, you know, ruminant animals are clearly herbivorous. Sheep are clearly herbivorous. The animals that Fred was talking about, that was a great podcast, were clearly herbivorous animals. And so I think there's this interesting concept that, you know, animals that eat plants have figured this out, and they. They do eat a little bit of this and a little bit of that, because if they just ate all of one plant, they would get sick. Because this is all the plants.

If they had a freezer full of broccoli sprouts year round, they would get really sick, right?

If, like he was saying, I think it was sheep eating the new buds of some plant. And so animals realize the same thing. Animals realize that plants are all toxic, that plants have these toxic chemicals. And because they're herbivores and they exclusively eat plants, they've sort of figured out like, okay, I can eat a little bit of this one, a little bit of this one, a little bit of this one. And that's been their evolutionary pathway, and through natural selection, they have evolved to do that in a sustainable way. One of the things that differentiates humans, and I would argue is so interesting about humans, is that that when we split off from chimpanzees, you know, Jared diamond wrote this book, the Third Chimpanzee, and apparently we are derived or most closely related to bonobos and chimpanzees. Our guts changed and we developed this large brain which requires a lot of energy, and we essentially became hunters at that point. And it was the, you know, I think everyone probably knows this story that we began eating meat and animals in greater quantities. And that seems to be a very key event in our evolution and our progression as homogeneous animals. Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, etc. Etc. And so what I would posit regarding a carnivorous diet is that we are actually facultative carnivores. The idea with being a facultative carnivore is that we can get all of the things that we need from meat. All the nutrients, all the vitamins, all the minerals in the most bioavailable forms without any of the toxins found in plants.

I want to talk about that. I want to talk about plant versus animals. But before we do, with that whole brain evolution and the gut becoming smaller and the brain becoming larger, Richard Rangan has this theory that it was the utilization and an emergence of the consumption of underground storage organs like tubers, for example, that resulted in our development of larger brains and smaller guts and not necessarily our shifts towards animal consumption. Have you looked into that at all or what are your thoughts on tubers and Richard Wrangham's ideas about. Right.

Tubers are interesting. If you look at a genus or genera of tubers, they are pretty toxic. Generally there are only a few which are actually consumable by humans in any large amount.

Don't make me too guilty about eating the sweet potato fries last night.

Well, you know, sweet potatoes are interesting. Sweet potatoes are a type of tuber that has been sort of hybridized and bred by humans to be less toxic. But if you look at ancestral tubers, for instance, they are quite toxic. And plants will not hesitate, you know, that's anthropomorphic, but plants will not hesitate to put oxalates and other toxins. We can talk about oxalates in the tubers as well. And if you look at ancestral tubers, you know, we, they don't look like sweet potatoes. They're not that big. You know, that doesn't make a lot of sense for the plant to put all that nutrient in the, in the root. They're much smaller and they're much more fibrous and less dense and less calorically valuable to humans. So I think that they're, I think that that's, you know, when we get into the realm of anthropology and human evolution, it's a lot of speculation. It's quite interesting, but I think that no one knows for sure. And I would argue that looking at human brains, we need a dha. This goes back to salmon roe. And I think that the counter argument to that is the way that we evolve as humans to be big brained is probably bone marrow and brains. You know, we probably ate bone marrow and we ate brains of other animals by being scavengers and getting smart enough to crack open the skull of an animal, which is not something that any other mammal or any other, you know, mobile animal can do that I'm aware of. And so it's mo. I would argue that, you know, there's no dha, there's actually no fatty acids in a tuber and so to make a brain, you need fatty acids in addition to macronutrients. Here we're kind of crossing the boundary between micronutrients and macronutrients. The macronutrients, of course, are protein, fat and carbohydrates. And I think there are, you know, we were talking about this at dinner last night. There are survival mechanisms in humans which search out macronutrients. In order to survive to tomorrow, you need macronutrients.

Yeah.

And. But in order to survive until six months from now, you need micronutrients. In order to pass on your DNA, you need micronutrients. And micronutrients are all the vitamins and minerals. So something like a tuber is pretty deficient in micronutrients, but it has some macronutrients. So a tuber might keep you a lot till tomorrow. A tuber is not going to provide you the micronutrients like an animal would, or a brain or a piece of bone marrow would.

It's interesting because a lot of these areas where starch consumption began to predominate as humans evolved and became more agricultural. You look at, I think, for example, like sub Saharan African or Southeast Asian, you see more copies of the Amy1 gene which allows them to pre digest this starch more readily. And it's possible that perhaps some humans are more capable of digesting starches, not that that might be the best food for them to choose. If animals were available, which I think is part of your argument, some people are equipped to handle them. The other interesting thing about Homo erectus is a lot of of the fossils that we find of Homo erectus, they're found near water, Right. Where there actually is all that bioavailable algae and DHA and marine food that probably contributed to the development of larger brains as well.

Or animals drinking the water that they can hunt.

That's true. Animals drinking the water, they could hunt that as well.

Hunting grounds.

Yeah. So ultimately it sounds to me like what you're saying is that even though, let's say that tubers were contributory to the development of a larger brain and a smaller gut, that doesn't mean that nowadays, if we have access to good nose to tail animals, DHA and other compounds, that we should continue a hefty consumption of tubers.

Yeah, that's one of the proponents. That's one of the key tenets of what I would argue, that animals do provide all of the nutrients that a human needs in the most highly bioavailable forms. That is a pretty, pretty staggering statement. When you think about it, you know, like.

Right.

It's like if you could make, you know, if you could make the ultimate multivitamin for a human, it would be an animal.

Right.

You know, so.

So if I were, like, stuck out, out in the wilderness and. And let's. Let's say I'm out hunting and I'm a crappy hunter and. And I can't get the animals that I need. That is a situation in which I would revert to what we see many of our ancestors doing. The consumption of tubers.

Exactly.

Berries, seeds, nuts, et cetera. But those would be almost survival food. I don't want to offend anybody, but, like, poor man's food. Survival foods that you'd turn to if the good animals weren't available.

That's exactly the case. And that we see that in indigenous cultures. So we talked a little bit about Villamar Stephenson, who lived with the Inuit. He's written a couple of books. The Fat of the Land is one. And there's a quote from that book. So he's an interesting Arctic explorer that people should look up. And he lived with the Inuit for a year. And one of the quotes from that book that he. He got from the Inuit was that, or one of the things that he stated in the book was that they shunned plant foods unless animal foods were not available, and they would only eat plant foods when they were not, quote, unquote, real foods available, meaning animal foods. So we see this in indigenous cultures that the idea that humans are actually so incredible that we can eat plants in survival situations, but that doesn't mean that they represent the optimal food for a human. And that's part of the argument.

I. I would say that it seems to me that many cultures, over time, as a part of their tradition. I just read a wonderful book that I actually recommend, 100 million years of food by author Stephen Lee. And he goes into all these ancestral traditions of figuring out how to make whatever quinoa by soaking and sprouting. Less likely to be coated in these saponins that might irritate the gut. Or my son this morning was making wine waffles, which. You're one of the first guests I've had at the house who wasn't like, ooh, waffles. And start salivating. He didn't seem to give a shit about the waffles, but he's got, you know, he used a slow, fermented sourdough to make those waffles. So some of the phytic acid and the glutens were digested. So humans, because we're intelligent and we have opposable thumbs and the big brains, we figured out how to render a lot of these plant foods more digestible. But still, what you're saying is, even if. If we can ferment and soak and sprout, which I think we should do, especially if we don't have access to animal foods, if we've got a choice between a rib eye steak or a plate of soaked and sprouted quinoa, fermented sourdough bread, a nice sweet potato, and maybe a smoothie made of broccoli sprouts and sulforaphane, the latter would still be traditionally a plate full of survival food, even though we've rendered it digestible. You're saying why not just eat the meat? That's way easier.

Yeah. Why not just eat the animals nose to tail?

Right.

And get.

I guess when I say meat that I should say eat the. Because meat. Would you. Would you define that as just the flesh?

Yeah. The ideas get conflated in the carnivore world a lot. And some people in carnivore just think about eating meat and drinking water. And I think that that's not a very ancestrally consistent or evolutionary, evolutionarily consistent way of eating animals. So I just want to make that distinction.

That.

Yeah. Yes, eating.

I think a perfect illustration of that. And this will get back to what I promised people, your definition of a carnivore diet and that broad overview of what a carnivore diet is. Explain to me what you sprinkled on your steak last night and why.

So, you know, if people are familiar with the carnivore world, like I was saying, they'll see that a lot of people just post pictures of them eating huge amounts of muscle meat. And if you look at the way that human biochemistry works and the way that our ancestors have always eaten animals, we've always eaten them nose to tail. And so one of the fascinating things about human biochemistry is that we need a balance of amino acids. And if you look at muscle meat, muscle meat is quite high in methionine, but it's very low in glycine. And glycine is one of the three amino acids in collagen. And collagen is found in connective tissue rather than muscle meat. So collagen is found in bones and tendons. And so I believe that evolutionarily, this is all quite elegant, the way that, that, the way that it all works in humans, that when we are eating tendons, in addition to muscle meat. We are getting the full complement of amino acids, and our biochemistry works in the best way possible. And we see this in indigenous cultures and we see this in other non westernized cultures. I mean, in Asian cultures, in like, pho soup, in pho, you can get tendon. That's a very foreign concept to Westerners, but throughout the world where animals are eaten, people always eat the tendon. They'll, you know, they'll cook it for a long amount of time, and it's actually quite delicious. And shark fins. Yeah, there's, there's. We eat collagenous tissue.

I don't endorse eating shark fins and turtles. Well, we'll get to sustainability here in a bit.

Yeah, we should definitely talk about it. But if you look at the way that our ancestors have eaten animals, they eat animals nose to tail. I mean, I was recently talking to someone who had been on safari in Africa, and she said that she got to go out with the bush people in Tanzania, and they, they were able to hunt a bush baby, which is a small monkey, and they ate the entire thing. They ate the bones, they ate the brain.

Indiana Jones, baby.

It's Indiana Jones. And it sounds gross to our western sensibilities, but evolutionarily, it's, it makes a lot of sense. You know, we are gonna eat the whole thing. We're not gonna waste anything. And if you look at an animal, which gets to my perspective on the best way to be a carnivore, there are different nutrients in different compartments of the animal, meaning that in the muscle meat, there's a specific set of nutrients. There's vitamin B6, there are some amino acids. There are. There's heme, iron. But there are other nutrients that are not in the muscle meat in things like liver. And that was one of the other things that I shared with you was liver jerky. So liver is quite a great source of folate, and there's not a whole lot of folate in muscle meat. So if you just eat muscle meat, people will get deficiencies. And I don't think of eating just muscle meat as really a carnivorous diet. That's just a meat diet. That's not a carnivorous diet. That's not an ancestrally consistent diet. But if you eat the muscle meat and you eat the liver and you eat the connective tissue, and you eat maybe some source of Omega 3, whether it's salmon roe or the brain of the animal, and you eat the, and you eat like, the bones or some sort of calcium source.

Nose to tail.

Nose to tail.

Yeah. As a matter of fact, my kids and I, we've got a group here from Spokane taking us out for three days to track and hunt animals. But a big part of that class is butchering nose to tail, so that's amazing. We'll be down hunting before that in May in Kona, and very similar to when I bow hunt down there. And many times that the guides who you're with, and this always happens to me, they almost get annoyed with you because you spend such a. Such a long time field dressing. Because I want the liver, I want the kidneys. If I shoot the wild sheep, I want to chop its testicles off. I want the whole animal. And even hunters. In many cases, I've found the folks I've hunted with are a little bit lazy in that you quarter the animal and you just put all the innards into a giant black trash bag and walk away.

Exactly. Or you leave them there.

Leave it for the coyotes or the wolves or whatever who will gladly eat it.

And they're probably like, oh, this is dessert.

There's even the idea that the Native Americans would in many cases, prize those meats or those organs and give the meat, the flesh, to the dogs. And my first exposure to the carnivore diet. And one of the reasons that I was disenchanted with the carnivore diet initially was, well, shout out to our friends Mark Bell, who had a fantastic podcast that was like, early in the days of the carnivore diet. A couple years ago, I was doing a podcast with him and he mentioned that he was doing the carnivore diet. And we went over his house and he's like, yeah, just buy a ton of meat from Costco and eat rib eye steaks breakfast, lunch and dinner. And to me, that was a complete disconnect. Already being familiar with glycine and the importance of organ meats. And I love Mark Bell, by the way. I'm not shoving him under the bus. And I think that's a lot of people, people's impression of the carnivore diet. Right. Rib eye steak, breakfast, lunch and dinner. And even on the Joe Rogan podcast, I called out the carnivore diet as being a lazy diet. And I did it for two reasons. Number one, because prior to some of my discussions with you and me, beginning to look into a properly done carnivore diet, which actually isn't a lazy diet, like, you have to go your way salmon roe and eat the whole animal. Animal, and learn how to do sweet breads and liver and brain and organ meats.

Exactly.

My initial impression was, dude, ribeye steaks, breakfast, lunch and dinner as an elimination diet. That's kind of like an easy way out versus studying up what's going on in your body and figuring out ways to get these other nutrients. But my other impression of it was, why would you just eat the flesh of an animal and leave the rest behind?

It's almost disrespectful.

Yeah, and disrespectful and not sustainable to a certain extent. But there are also some things that I looked into was thyroid and the general notion that carbohydrates, especially in the form of starches or sugars, in some sense can be important for the conversion of T4 to T3. How would someone like an Inuit or an ancestral carnivore diet or a modern carnivore diet tackle the issue of carbohydrate availability for thyroids when we're talking about eating nose to tail?

Dr. You know, it's interesting. I know you talked about this with Thomas DeLauer on that recent podcast as well. And what I have seen clinically is that I'm not completely convinced of that concept. I. If people looked at my Instagram and they look at my YouTube, I've extensively tested myself. I mean, I think. I really appreciate your point that that's kind of connected with what I'm saying here, that I think that in order to eat as a carnivore, it's the opposite of lazy. You really have to understand where all of your nutrients are coming from. And it becomes almost. Almost a nutrition class for people who are doing a carnivorous diet.

Unless you intuitively, let's say you're our ancestors and you kill an animal and you worked your ass off for three days, not that animal. I mean, your thought pattern is, I'm gonna eat this whole fucking thing.

The whole thing. And the whole thing tastes good. Right. The liver is delicious.

It could be rendered delicious. I've had some gamey animals. You gotta soak the liver and lemon for 24 hours. And there's a use of plant foods for you, right? Like. Like using the acidic medium of lemon to make a liver taste better, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

But you know, what I've seen in myself and my clients is that the T4 to T3 conversion is not really affected that radically or negatively on a ketotic diet. On a ketogenic diet. And I think what we're basically talking about here is ketogenic. We're getting into the sort of. The Blurry ground between a carnivorous diet and a ketogenic diet. And what I've seen is that my T3 was totally within normal. My T4 to T3 ratio was totally normal. And I've seen that in many of my clients on a carbon diet. What you talked about with Thomas DeLauer was also that even in people in which the T3 might be low, it seems to be a little low, but the basal metabolic rate doesn't change. And so this might be one of the adaptations to ketosis that we haven't fully figured out. And, you know, I think one of the interesting things, Ben, is that you can imagine our ancestors might have eaten carbohydrates from time to time. You know, they might have had berries in the spring. And I think that that's an evolutionary thing. That's, you know, people might freak out and be like, oh, that's not carnivore.

But. But I looked into this a little bit, and a lot of traditional cultures would actually eat the thyroid glands.

Yeah.

I mean, that. To me, that's a very simple answer. It's like, eat the thyroid glands and you're good to go. And granted, if you're eating the flesh of the animal, you're also getting some of the storage glycogen as well.

Yes, exactly. And I mean, that's. I mean, that's essentially what armor thyroid is. Right. I mean, in some ways, you're going to get a little T3 that way.

Right. You could theoretically engage in better living through science and supplement a carnivorous diet if you didn't have good access to organ meats with things like desiccated liver capsules or a thyroid glandular supplement or things of that nature.

Yeah. When you're doing thyroid, you have to be a little careful and obviously work with your physician. And thyroid can be a powerful thing. And I think this goes back to the idea that a lot of our ancestral wisdom has been lost, and it's kind of tragic. And I love that you're sort of taking your boys hunting and teaching these things and exposing them to these things. And I wish more of our young would get exposed to those things and that we hadn't lost all of those. That knowledge. But I think that this is totally interesting that, you know, we can imagine that as indigenous cultures, these were probably not very foreign concepts. And we knew that when we killed an animal, the first thing you did was eat the liver raw and you shared it with everyone in the tribe because those are the micronutrients that are most valuable. And the next thing you did was this. You cut the thyroid up and you gave everybody a little piece, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah. So plant foods, there are a lot of nutrients that are often championed as nutrients that you can only get from plants. I mean, the same could be said of meat. Like, we say you need your heme iron from meat or your vitamin B12 from meat. But people say things like vitamin C from plant foods, for example. Is that true? Do you need to eat plants or fruits to get your vitamin C?

No, you don't. And I think that that's an interesting concept, and this is sort of part of the thesis that I propound or I put forward for a carnivorous diet, is that there are no nutrients in plants that. That humans cannot get from animals. And vitamin C would probably be the only one that I can think of that maybe you can think of others that people would say, oh, you can only get that from plants. And that's not true. If you look at liver, there's actually quite a good amount of vitamin C in liver and there's a good amount in brain as well. And if you look at the Inuit, there's a good amount in the whale blob or skin. And so.

So again, eat nose to tail.

If you eat nose to tail, you'll get plenty of vitamin C. Carotenoids. Well, that's retinol, right?

Yeah.

So caroten. So beta carotene is the precursor to retinol form of vitamin A, and retinol is found in huge concentrations in the liver. Liver. Are you talking about flavonoids? Yeah, so, yeah, so the carotenoids, the beta carotene is not a molecule that humans use. We use enzymes like bcmo, for instance. People can have single nucleotide polymorphisms in BCMO which inhibit or decrease the efficiency with which they convert a beta carotene, which is the plant precursor to vitamin A, into the retinol form of vitamin A, which is what we use in our bodies. But if you look at animals, and this is sort of what I was saying earlier, animals provide. Provide all the nutrients a human needs in the most highly bioavailable forms. And I would say heme iron is a great example of that. Retinol form of vitamin A is a good example of that.

Flavonoids, like quercetin, for example, that's a very popular supplement now.

Right, right. So now we're getting into the realm of, like, all the individual polyphenolic compounds in plants. So quercetin, Quercetin doesn't directly participate in human biochemistry and it gets into, like, the weeds of, like, how has it been studied and do we know if it's really valuable? Quercetin is actually a phytoestrogen, so it has some estrogenic properties. And again, it gets into this idea that I was suggesting at the beginning that these are different operating systems. These are plant molecules versus human molecules. This is Mac versus PC. And it's pretty tricky to dig out and really tease out the code of these and see is this molecule potentially beneficial. But the pattern that we see emerging is that none of them have unique benefits. And so the thing I would caution people with quercetin is quercetin can actually inhibit some of the enzymes, enzymes in the human body, especially some of the enzymes in the folate cycle, and that it is an estrogenic compound and so it can affect estrogen metabolism in the human body. The question is, is that good? I don't know. Probably not. I don't know that that's necessarily a beneficial thing. And we might want to be cautious about taking it in super, super huge doses, which is so.

So what you're saying is you can't get any flavonoids from meat, but you may not need them?

I don't think you need flavonoids. Flavonoids are another example of a polyphenolic compound that are found in plants and they've sort of been passed on to us as a beneficial thing in the same idea. The same paradigm of polyphenols are good for you because they are antioxidants. We talked about that a little earlier. The fact that they don't directly act as antioxidants if they are beneficial and maybe because of a hormetic effect through the liver and production of endogenous glutathione, however, they often have these other sort of unintended collateral damage effects in the body. And if you look, there is some evidence that flavonoids can be dangerous for people.

Who's very interesting. I know I'll get some kickback on the flavonoid piece and some people are going to question that. I would love if you've got the research on that. And by the way, you guys, Paul is going to send me lots of research studies and many YouTube videos. He's done with deeper dives into some of the topics that we might be going over too quickly for you. So you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Carnivore that's where the show notes Are. What about fiber? Because I don't think there's much fiber in meat. And I, I know people are gonna, are gonna ask that. It's probably one of their first questions.

Yeah, yeah. The fiber thing is fascinating. And I would, I would refer people to the debate I did with Lane Norton regarding fiber.

But I want people to hear it here.

Let's hear it here.

I mean, go, go listen to that podcast because it's good. But I want people to walk away from this podcast not feeling like they gotta go do too many other shows aside from some of your YouTube videos.

If people want to really dive into fiber, let's talk about it.

So let's.

Fiber is a.

Because I haven't eaten any for a week.

That's amazing, right? And you're still pooping. Isn't that.

Somebody commented on my Instagram channel. What about your big ass salad? Not only am I pooping, but my pooping is fantastic.

Right?

Once a day, one giant dump and no seeds or nuts or anything like that.

And potentially what I've seen clinically is that people have less bloating and constipation. We'll talk about it.

That's the other thing I used to get bloating and constipation because big ass salad for lunch, about 1pm every day. By 4pm I could either go take a shit or have gas the rest of the night. I haven't had that for a week.

It's not good for your social life or your wife? No, it's annoying. It's super annoying. It's super annoying. So fiber is a fairy tale. And the fairytale got started with a gentleman as a physician named Burkitt who was went to Tanzania and he went to Tanzania and he was thinking about the incidence of diverticulosis in the westernized population. And what he noted was that Tanzanians or the Africans did not have nearly the same incidence of diverticulosis that westernized humans had. And he committed an error that is often committed by our current society by looking at indigenous peoples and saying they don't have diverticulosis and they are eating a heck of a lot of. Of fiber. Therefore, fiber must be protective against diverticulosis. He saw them taking very large dumps and he actually recorded the size of the dumps and they were eating a huge amount of fiber and they did not have diverticulosis. Now, for those people listening who may not be familiar with the concept of diverticulosis, it is the protrusion of the submucosal layer of the colon, through the muscularis mucosa of the colon into a diverticulum, which is a blind path pouch. And this happens on both the right side and the left side of the colon and actually results in things like constipation and bloating. Well, it can, but generally it can also result in lower GI bleeding, which can be fatal because blood vessels in the diverticuli can bleed and cause problems. And then diverticulosis leads to diverticulitis, which is when those blind pouches become occluded and they form a pocket of pus or infection, kind of like appendicitis. So the appendix is a blind pouch, and the appendix is a vestigial structure, Potentially vestigial. It has a lot of lymphoid tissue in it, but it's also a blind pouch, and it is analogous to these diverticuli, which happen throughout the colon. Right. And so Burkitt went to Africa, and he says, I've got it figured out. It is the large amount of fiber that you're eating that is protective against diverticulosis. Except that is not what we see in common clinical studies at all. In fact, we see the opposite. So there have been a couple of studies that have been done with colonoscopy and surveys of people regarding how much fiber they are eating. And what we find is that by quartile, the people who are eating the most fiber have, wait for it, the most diverticulosis. And so this doesn't.

Does that qualify insoluble versus soluble fiber? Does it matter the type of fiber?

I have to look at the study to see how they broke it down, but I think it's. It's both.

Okay.

Yeah. And I can give you the link.

I was curious because, you know, like. Like an insoluble fiber found in, say, like, an. An apple. It seems to me as though it could be digested differently than. Than, say, what I believe would be the soluble fiber found in lots of roughage and things like that.

Oh, I think you've got those mixed up. So insoluble fiber is like. Yeah, insoluble fiber is roughage. Soluble fiber is like the pectin in an apple.

Damn it. I had a 50. 50 chance.

All right, so, yeah, so we can break it down. You can further stratify based on soluble and insoluble. But what we see in this study is that the more fiber someone's eating, the more diverticulosis they have. So that's like. Oh, man. That really argues strongly against this hypothesis. That Burkitt had. And then if you do more studies, you'll see that the reverse is also true. Constipation and low fiber diets are actually not associated with diverticulosis. So this really starts to fly in the face. If people delve into the literature regarding, regarding fiber and constipation, fiber and diverticulosis, what you will find is that in most people and I will link to this amazing study that I'll send you this amazing study that the removal of fiber as you are finding Ben, the removal of fiber often results in complete resolution of constipation and associated symptoms. So the study that we will link to is called stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation and disease associated symptoms. And in this study when they removed fiber, 100% of the people in the zero fiber group, which was small, but it was, I think it was 16 people in the zero fiber group. 100% of them had no symptoms of constipation or bloating. They had complete resolution with removal of fiber. So we've really been fed a fairy tale with, regarding with regard to fiber and constipation, fiber with regard to diverticular. So that's the first part of the.

Fiber story that makes sense. I want to throw this in there because I don't know if any studies like this exist, but just from my own observation of how my gut feels after vegetable consumption, if I steam and boil and mash and puree the vegetables and it's not roughage as you would find in like a raw kale salad or a carrot stick. But you know, if I like steam carrots or do like a mashed sweet potato puree or a mashed potato mashed pumpkin, or cook up like a winter squash and then blend that to make a soup out of it, I don't really have any issues with fiber and I don't see anything appearing in my stool. Is there anything that looks into the way the fiber is prepared, whether it's mashed and steamed and boiled versus eaten raw?

Nothing that I'm aware of. But we could look into the literature more and see if there's a change there.

It'd be very interesting because I to a certain extent, and I know you want to finish your observation on fiber, but some of this for me is a little bit of the enjoyment of food variety, different tastes, different colors, being able to have my ribeye steak, but maybe some nice winter squash soup on the side or some steamed baby carrots that are very simple to digest. Regardless, throwing out the Idea that, well, you don't need the carrots, right? You don't need the carotenoids and the carrots because you've got the retinol from the liver that you're consuming along with that rib eye steak. Like, part of it for me is, and I think my wife, my wife is very big on this because she's super into like entertaining people and food and cooking and having this vast array of colors on the table. I think part of it for me, my resistance to going full on carnivore is just this idea of variety.

And I think that's totally valid. And what's so cool about that is that I would argue that you are a facultative carnivore. So you can do that.

What does that mean, a facultative carnivore?

So a facultative carnivore is different than an obligate carnivore. An obligate carnivore we would think of as like an animal, like a lion or a tiger that only eats animal products. And if they eat plants, they get sick. But this is part of the evolutionary story that it goes back to the idea that facultative carnivores are like dogs. They, for facultative carnivores, animals provide all the nutrients they need, but they can, can eat plant foods during times of starvation and they can actually digest plant foods. So you have the ability to digest some plant foods as a facultative carnivore. Whether or not that's ideal for you is part of the discussion and what we're talking about here. And there are potentially, you know, potentially detrimental side effects for people eating some plants. But as a facultative carnivore, you can do that. You can just have the variety and say, hey, you know what, so you.

Could eat some carrots, plants prepared properly, not necessary, but could contribute to life enjoyment.

Exactly.

If you want those as part of your diet.

Exactly.

Totally got it.

Yeah. So what I'll just add here is that one of the things that's fascinating to me about a carnivore diet is that, you know, I think people should approach it from the perspective of what's optimal and then how do they feel? There are a lot of people coming to the carnivore diet because they're sick. And I think that for people who are sick, the carnivore diet may be particularly interesting because the elimination of, of plants may lead to resolution of their symptoms. And I think in those cases, and.

Dairy and other things.

Exactly.

That could cause autoimmune issues in people who have leaky gut issues or digestive inflammation.

And that's exactly what I would say, perhaps to bring it around again, is the idea that I am concerned that many of these plant toxins may be contributing to this autoimmunity and that much of the autoimmune conditions that we see in society, whether they're psychiatric, as you know, I really view a lot of psychiatric illnesses as autoimmune, whether they're psychiatric or endocrine or dermatologic. I think that a lot of these autoimmune issues that we are seeing may in fact be related to these plant toxins, whether they're from the whole spectrum of plant toxins. And so for people that are sick, they may approach the diet differently than people that are. Well, I mean, you are clearly kicking a lot of ass in your life, Ben.

And for you kicked your ass this morning.

Just wait till we go surface orphan. So the. For people that are well or kicking the tons of ass, they might have a little more ability to tolerate plants. I would say that my thesis, I would still say, is probably, you know, true. You know, the animal foods would provide the most beneficial source of the nutrients without plant toxins. But if you're. Well, you may be able to handle those better. But people who are sick might approach it from a different perspective, saying, maybe I should cut out the plants and see if I feel better. Maybe, maybe. Maybe There's a possibility that some of these plant toxins are actually contributing to the autoimmune issues, contributing to leaky gut, contributing to immune activation in the tissue surrounding the gut.

Shift, shift to nose to tail. Start skipping your morning cup of coffee. Now, I interrupted you as I was talking about steaming and boiling and mashing my vegetables to potentially mitigate some of the issues you were talking about with fiber. It sounded to me like there was something else you wanted to say about fiber.

Well, the other thing that people hear about fiber is that either that it is beneficial with regard to cancer or precancerous lesions or cardiovascular disease as well. Well, yeah, so that we can talk about that as well. So I can talk about all three of those things. So fiber is just this whole. This whole interesting topic to explore. So with regard to precancerous lesions, which are called adenomas, tubulovillus or villus adenomas, in context, the colon, which are precancerous lesions, there is no evidence that either fiber in the diet or fiber supplementation improves that. And this is quite contrary to what people might be thinking. I mean, there is simply no evidence from studies in the New England Journal of Medicine interventional trials that either fiber in the diet or inclusion of fiber as a supplement improves adenoma recurrence or colon cancer progression. In some studies, the addition of husks, which are in the same genus as psyllium, which is metamucil, actually worsened adenoma recurrence. So what we're seeing here is quite contrary to what many people may have been told, that if you look at the data, not only is fiber not helpful for diverticulosis, it might be associated with diverticulosis, it's not helpful for constipation, it probably causes constipation for a lot of people, potentially through overgrowth mechanisms like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which we know the methane from some of the methane producers in a small interior, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth situation may paralyze the entire gut nervous system. So fiber may worsen constipation, it may worsen bloating, it certainly worsens gas, which is no fun for anyone. And in terms of adenomas or precancerous lesions and colon cancer recurrence, there's no benefit. And in some cases with metamucil, like asphagol hus supplementation, it actually worsens it.

It's interesting. Many of the benefits of fiber are attributed to its effects on the microbiome and on short chain fatty acid production in the gut, particularly the colon, including most notably butyrate. And this is very interesting and I'll link to this article. It just came out this week on the Virta Health website website. It has a host of evidence showing that beta hydroxybutyrate bodies, which we would find if you were eating a ketosis based diet, carnivorous diet. And actually after I comment on this, I would love for you to compare and contrast ketosis and a carnivorous diet. But basically beta hydroxybutyrate ketones, which you would have if you were eating a well structured carnivore or ketotic diet, simulate all of the values that short chain fatty acids, including butyrate, produce in the gut. So you kind of have your option. You could do a high fiber diet for short chain fatty acid production, but at the same time get some of the risks that you've just talked about, including everything from gas and bloating, constipation to diverticulitis and diverticulosis. Or you could lower your fiber intake, definitely lower your carbohydrate intake, shift into A ketotic diet, which and ketosis is different than a carnivore diet to a certain extent, which I'll let you comment on, and get those same benefits that you get from fiber by simply generating a lot of ketones.

Right, Exactly. That has to do with the idea that butyrate may be fuel for the colonic enterocytes. So the epithelial cells at the level of the colon and the small intestine may use butyrate as a fuel. And in many circles there was a concern that if you didn't eat enough fiber, that you wouldn't make enough of the short chain fatty acid butyrate. Well, as that article in Virta illustrated, and as I was talking about with Lane, when you are eating a carnivorous diet, what happens is pretty amazing. There are also microbes in your gut that can use protein and fatty acids to make short chain fatty acids. So the short chain fatty acids butyrate is not the only one. We can also have isobutyrate propionate and those can feed the colonic and terrace or the ketone bodies can be directly used by the colonic enterocytes as fuel. So what we're seeing here is you don't need fiber to have a healthy gut lining, which is one of the main concerns of a low fiber diet. And then you also mentioned something that I want to touch on for people in the debate with Lane. He consistently brought up meta analyses, which are epidemiologic studies showing that when people consumed more fiber, they had better cardiovascular outcomes. And what I will point out to people is that those studies are confounded by what is called healthy user bias. And those studies are really only done on westernized populations that show this phenomenon. If you look at Eastern populations, if you look in Hong Kong or you look in Asia, you don't see the same association with fruit and vegetable consumption. In fact, you see the opposite in, in Asian cultures. What you see is that when people eat more meat, they are more healthy. So the fact that we can compare cultures helps us really delineate where healthy user bias is happening. But in the westernized cultures that have been studied, most of these studies that suggest that fiber consumption is associated with better cardiovascular outcomes are confounded by this healthy user bias. And this means what this is is the idea that for the last 30 to 40 years, we have been told that red meat is bad for us. And so people that eat less red meat and eat more fiber are generally doing other healthy behaviors which are probably what are accounting for their better cardiovascular outcomes. These are Epidemiologic studies, they're not causal studies.

Whenever you talk about that, all I could think of is the SNL skit, the bears, you know, the guys who look like they just eat steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Exactly.

I think the guy, I think one of the dudes just has like a heart attack right then and there.

Yeah.

Cheering for the bears. But that's the stereotypical red meat eating steakhouse also, you know, whatever, Scotch chugging.

Cigar smoking, french fries, acrylamide, have a.

Little bit of brussels sprouts fried in canola oil before your steak comes out, eat the bread basket, finish up with a little chocolate cake, hey, I'm a meat eater. Like, that's the healthy user bias.

That's the healthy user bias and that's the non healthy user effect which is being demonstrated in these studies. And so what these studies I think suggest to us is that that there's a lot of value in the healthy behaviors that people that were eating a lot of fiber did. But it probably wasn't the fiber that gave them those cardiovascular benefits. It was the community, it was sunlight, it was exercise. All the things we talked about earlier today, which can also create an optimal state in the human body, whether it's from an oxidative, reductive perspective and include a thione production. But those are the behaviors that were beneficial, most likely, rather than the fiber. Because the fiber itself, as we've seen, doesn't really hold up in interventional trials. And if you look across cultures, you don't see the same protective effects of fruits and vegetables. In fact, what you see is that people in eastern cultures who eat more meat have the best outcomes, which is a crazy thing, right?

Yeah, it's very interesting because you look at the blue zones and one of the prevailing characteristics of many of them is high intake of wild plants. And so this begs the question of, well, if you were to say, look at the progression of those cultures across time, did that high consumption of wild plant intake result at a time when there was starvation, poor access to fish, dha, marine food, along with poor access to animal food. So they had to adopt these plants as part of their diet. And perhaps there's so many other things they're doing gardening and living outdoors, being out in the sunshine, moving frequently, et cetera, that perhaps the wild plant intake and the enhanced survivability of a lot of these cultures in Okinawa and Nicoya and Sardinia, et cetera, their longevity would still persist and possibly even be enhanced if they were able to and sustainably able to shift to fish and good organic meat.

I would agree with that. The other thing I'll notice, I'll mention about the centenarians, and I think this is an interesting, again, a misconception is that there are a lot of people who really think, think that the benefits or the longevity of a centenarian is actually due to genetics, that these people would be healthy in spite of what they eat. No matter what they eat, these people will be healthy. Peter Atti has talked about this on his podcast. I think specifically with Tom Dayspring is that we have to be careful when we look at the centenarians. And this concept of blue zones, I fear, has been misinterpreted, incorrectly interpreted and associated with the diet. When in fact, when we look at these cultures, what we see see are clusters of longevity mutations in genes like Foxo3, CETP, PCSK9. And so these are cultures that tend to cluster genetic mutations which improve things like insulin sensitivity, antioxidant status, which we can talk about how those could be benefited. You know, those are the type of things that improve on a carnivorous or ketogenic diet. But the longevity type of mutations these cultures have are insulin sensitivity and oxidative reductive status. And so that, I think, is the alternative hypothesis for blue zones. That perhaps, in fact, and I think there's a lot of evidence for this, and most people actually believe this is the case now, that centenarians are people who would live longer than other people no matter what they eat. They could eat anything.

Yeah. Now, you mentioned that about insulin sensitivity, but isn't it true that if you are on a ketotic or a carnivore diet and you do introduce carbohydrates, you see wild fluctuations in insulin and glucose?

We talked about this a little bit last night in the hot tub, right?

I know I'm throwing you a softball right now because I know what the answer is, but I want to present it to people because I find it very interesting.

So what happens here is that there is this phenomenon that people may have heard of that if you are on a ketogenic diet or a carnivorous diet and you introduce glucose, it takes your body a little bit of time to adjust to the processing of that glucose. It probably has to do with the fact that your body has to do transcriptional changes and place the GLUT4 transporters in the muscle cell membranes to actually import the glucose. So there is this phenomenon that when people are on a carnivorous or a ketogenic diet, if you do A insulin. If you do a glucose tolerance test in the first 24 to 48 hours.

After that, consume a bolus of glucose and then track your blood glucose over time, that.

That may look abnormal, but that is an artifact that does not reflect insulin insensitivity. It's just an artifact that has to. To do with the fact that it takes the body a little bit of time to adjust the transcriptional regulation of the things in the cell membranes that import glucose and that process glucose in the body. If you refeed someone with glucose or carbohydrates who's on a ketogenic or a carnivorous diet, and you wait a day or two to do the insulin sensitivity testing through the glucose tolerance test, they are extremely insulin sensitive. And what we see in general and people on carnivorous or ketogenic diets, I mean, I probably should not put those together. What we see in general in people on carnivore diets is they're extremely insulin sensitive through measures like hemoglobin A1C fasting glucose and especially fasting insulin.

And that's because there's a downregulation of GLUT4 and GLUT5 transporters that would normally be necessary to get the glucose into, say, muscle or liver tissue. So when you're doing a glucose tank tolerance test after you've been on a ketotic or carnivorous diet, you haven't had time to re upregulate those glucose transporters. So the glucose stays present in the bloodstream for longer periods of time.

Yeah, I believe glute five is for fructose, but glute four is for glucose.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yes, you need to upregulate that. So it's just an. It's an artifactual effect. But people are extremely insulin sensitive when they cut out carbohydrates and, and avoid things like seed oils, which are probably creating a lot of insulin and sensitivity and. And if people look at overarching patterns.

By the way, you had me cook your steak with no oil last night.

No oil.

Flat up on the cast iron skill.

It was delicious.

I've never done that before. Look, I'm going to try that for my next cook.

Totally worked. Yeah, it totally worked. I mean, you could use tallow to cook it. I would never use a vegetable oil to cook it. There's a lot of.

Really? That's right. You traveled with your own little can of tallow.

I brought all my good stuff for you guys to try. I brought jerky.

Heart jerky.

Yeah, I wanted to Share it and collagen.

You're practicing what you preach. I appreciate that.

That's. You gotta live it, man. It's a good thing.

Okay, so before we tackle another elephant in the room, which is the link between protein and cancer and the fact that we are talking about a very high protein diet by definition. Can you differentiate, compare and contrast ketosis versus carnivore diet? Because I think what we've established thus far is that if you are going to do a carnivore diet, it would benefit you from the short chain fatty acid production standpoint or the beta hydroxybuty butyride standpoint to be sure that you're staying in ketosis. If you're doing a carnivore diet, you're not like cheating in and out. And basically you want to generate a lot of beta hydroxybutyrate if you're on a carnivore diet, I would imagine, for the gut benefits. And you can comment on that if you want, but also comment on ketosis versus a carnivore diet and the differences, because I think people get confused by that.

Yeah. So what Ben is referring to is the idea that, you know, when you restrict carbohydrates in your diet, so there are three macronutrients, there's carbohydrates, protein, and fat. And our bodies are pretty incredible. We essentially can run on two fuels. We can run on fat, or we can run on carbohydrates. We can't really run the engine of our bodies biochemically on protein. We can do a little bit of energy metabolism on that, but it's mostly building blocks at like a very basic level. And so you have an engine in your body which can run on carbohydrates or fat. And this is what's probably what was most striking about the ketogenic movement and was that a lot of people didn't realize you could also run on fat, and you can run on your own fat that is stored, or you can run on fat that you are eating, and you don't need to run on carbohydrates. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. And so when we construct ketogenic diets or diets that place humans into ketosis, we restrict carbohydrates, and then the body, in the process of adaptation, upregulates enzymes that do beta oxidation and use the oxidation of fats to make ketones like beta hydrogen hydroxybutyrate, which can then be converted into acetyl coa Go through the TCA cycle and produce reducing intermediates and electron transport chain carriers for electrons. And we can run our human engine on ketones. So you could have a ketogenic diet that is not carnivorous and that includes, that can include some plant foods. And for some people on ketogenic diets, they include a lot of dairy, which can be problematic for some, some people for a variety of reasons, which we can talk about. But the idea is that the difference between a ketogenic diet and a carnivore diet is that a carnivore diet is obviously not going to have any plant foods. But on a ketogenic diet, you could include some plant foods that may be potentially immunotoxic, like we're talking about. You can include things that might have immunogenicity. Specifically, I'm thinking of some of the most toxic offenders or the most immunologically active offenders for people are plants like in the genus Solanaceae, which are the nightshade vegetables. Potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant peppers. Those are all quite immunologically stimulating for people in a bad way. So you can have people on a.

Ketogenic diet are doing like resistant starch, for example, green bananas.

Exactly.

Cooked potatoes that have been refrigerated after being cooked in coconut oil, that type of thing.

Right. So you could have a lot of foods on a ketogenic diet which may have toxins, may have plant toxins like we're talking about, or may have lectins or other things which could trigger the, the immune system. So the carnivore diet is not going to have any of those plant foods. Now, when you are on a carnivorous diet, when you're eating nose to tail, you will also be in ketosis because there are no carbohydrates or no plant based carbohydrates. There's actually a small amount of carbohydrate in meat. If you look at it, it's on the order of 10 grams a day. When you're just eating meat, you are getting some carbohydrates from the meat, but it's very small. So on a carnivorous diet you will be in ketosis. And if you check your ketone level, depending on the fat to protein macro, they usually depending on the person's individual genetics, what we Generally see is 0.5 to 1.5. People on ketogenic diets may have a little bit higher levels of ketones, but it just depends on the fat macro and how much fat to protein you do.

So the fact that I have over there in the ice cream or over in the freezer behind us, ice cream made of egg yolks, butter, coconut cream, a little bit of monk fruit and dark chocolate powder. Makes that a very non carnivorous ice cream. Although it is ketogenic.

Exactly.

So you cannot say you're on a carnivorous diet if you're say like having butter, coffee and cooking your steaks in coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil and having like a keto bomb ice cream.

Exactly. And again, I would say that the reason that you would want to cut out those plant foods for a lot of people, people would be to see if you feel better from an energy standpoint, from a mental clarity standpoint, from a sleep standpoint, from a mood standpoint, from an autoimmune standpoint, without the plants that could potentially be triggering immunologic reactions in people or creating net nutrient deficiencies.

Coconut oil and coconut cream.

So there's an interesting thing here. So coconut has salicylates in it, which a lot of people can be talked, can be sensitive to. So coconut butter or the coconut cream has a lot of the husk in it. So that's going to have more of like the actual coconut fiber and the coconut things in it. The coconut oil technically isn't going to have any of the coconut particles in it, but it could still have some salicylates. Then you get into this idea, it gets pretty granular of oleocenes, which are these sort of plant derived fat based molecules with proteinaceous structure in them. So even some of the plant oils like olive oil and coconut oil can have proteins that identify that as a plant based food in them. And those may even trigger some people. So if people are at a very immunologically triggered state, I would recommend that they consider cutting those out completely and then reintroducing them.

Those dairy, eggs, everything.

Dairy is a specific case. I am really not a fan of dairy. One of the things that we see on ketogenic diets, and this is what I see almost exclusively for people that gain weight on ketogenic diets, is it's the dairy causing them to gain weight. We were actually talking about this at dinner last night. Dairy's an interesting little sidebar here.

I think you and my wife were talking about it with. I think by that point I was off doing the dishes. But you're talking about breast milk.

Yeah, we were talking about breast milk. So dairy is extremely addictive for humans because it is the combination of fat and sugar. And that combination of fat and sugar feeds into our infant brains and says, you should eat a lot of this, which is a great survival advantage. That's what we, we want infants to want to eat as much breast milk as possible. But when we combine fat and sugar, it short circuits the mechanisms in our brain around satiety. If you look in the animal kingdom, if you look in the natural world, there are no other naturally occurring foods that have fat and sugar, not necessarily sucrose, but fat and carbohydrates occurring together in them. Breast milk is the only substance that does that. These are some of the ideas put forth by Ted Naiman. I'll give a hat tip to him him, but those type of foods, fat and sugar together, are extremely sort of disruptive of human satiety and are extremely obesogenic. And so basically what I was talking about with your wife was that ice cream is the ultimate obesogen because it is essentially like breast milk ice cream.

Breast milk is good to a certain extent. And one could argue that the development of the lactose persistence gene, or is it the lactose or lactase persistence? Lactase, yeah, the lactase persistence gene. That is something that evolved during the agricultural revolution or during the development and domestication of animals. But prior to that point, humans had no need for it and didn't have a craving for dairy or milk or even the ability to be able to handle it until after that gene began to persist.

It's an interesting story regarding that gene. There are other things in dairy as well which can short circuit our satiety mechanisms. Specifically case of morphine, which is an opiate like compound in dairy, which is why cheese is so rewarding but not satiating. So what we see and what I've seen in clients and people I've worked with and other people in the carnivore community, is that when they cut out dairy, they are so much better able to manage their satiety and, and sense their satiety for mixed meals. I had a friend who I do quite a bit of research with and he told me that when he stopped eating dairy, he was able to, he was much more satiated when eating meat. So when he was eating dairy with meat or when he had dairy in his diet, he ended up eating more meat and more animal products and he just was more satiated and was more able to, to sense when he was full, when he eliminated dairy. So I think it has to do with case of morphine in general, kind of hijacking some of our satiety mechanisms. And so if people are on a Ketogenic diet, and they gain weight. Dom d' Agostino's sister, I think Dom de Agostino, people probably know him. He's a pretty smart guy in the ketogenic world. His sister gained a bunch of weight on a ketogenic diet, and I really believe that was due to dairy. I think that if you construct a ketogenic diet with. Without dairy, you're much more likely to be successful in terms of weight loss with that diet. But I also feel like for most people, I don't recommend dairy on a carnivorous diet. I think there's other ways to get calcium, that there are no nutrients that we really need in the milk and the dairy, and that does hijack these satiety mechanisms.

Okay. There are a lot of studies, especially like yeast and fruit flies, that show that limiting amino acid intake can enhance longevity or inhibit the potential for carcinogenicity. And when we're eating nose to tail, you and I have probably eaten in just the past 12 hours alone. How many grams of protein would you say? I would say 200, 250.

So last night, what I ate was probably a pound and a quarter steak, which is small for me. I usually eat 300.

I'm sorry, I would have made two. That one ready for you?

I know we got another one. Yeah, it's all right. I eat extra liver jerky and tallow and some extra hard jerky with it. But yeah, I. I generally eat 3 pounds of meat a day, so I have no shortage of amino acids in my diet.

So. Are you going to get cancer?

Absolutely not, and I'll tell you why. So the studies that were done in rodents and other animals were looking at methionine. And what they found was that it was generally in terms of longevity. When they restricted methionine, they had longevity benefits. But what they also found, Ben, goes back to the collagen story. When they added glycine, they got the same longevity benefits. So it wasn't necessarily the protein restriction or the methionine restriction that induced longevity. It was the problem of a methionine glycine imbalance. So just to bring people back full circle, Ben asked me earlier why I added collagen to my steak. Collagen is a three amino acid peptide that forms all the connective tissues in our bodies. And one of those amino acids is glycine. And this goes back to the idea of eating nosetale, eating tendons and all these things. And so I want to make sure that my body gets enough glycine from an evolutionarily consistent standpoint. And this is also based on the research in animals that when they supplement glycine in animals, they see the same improvements. When you improve the methionine glycine ratio by glycine supplementation or addition of collagen, you see the same normalization of life band that you do, or you see the improvements in the lifespan that you get when you get methionine restriction. So it's probably not that protein itself is causing a problem here, and we can dive further into this. It's that the addition of methionine without concomitant or congruent amounts of glycine is a problem for people.

Which returns again to the concept of eating nose and tail, including. Do you drink bone broth as well?

I do, yeah.

Okay, yeah. Which can be a source of glycine.

Exactly, yes. And maybe we can enumerate those for people. So probably people can do directly. They can just eat glycine directly. I think collagen is a better source because collagen also has. There are three amino acids in collagen which are glycine, proline and hydroxy lysine, I believe. And so you're getting all the amino acids in collagen which complement the amino acids in muscle meat. You can supplement directly with glycogen, glycine, but you'll miss out on some of the proline. And then you can get bone broth which will have collagen in it. So when you put the bone broth in the fridge and it turns to jelly, you know that your bone broth is good because that is collagen in your bone broth.

Okay. Okay.

And so that's what you want. So people making bone broth is a fantastic addition or substitute for collagen.

Now some people are concerned about constant activation of MTOR and even myself in shifting to a much higher meat intake over the past week. Week I have focused quite a bit on making sure that I nail that 12 hour to 16 hour intermittent fasted window. And I'm curious. And I've even been consuming what I call autophagy tea, which was introduced to me by my friend Dr. Mercola, which actually contains a lot of the plant compounds we talked about earlier. We probably don't have time to dive down the rabbit hole of inducing autophagy through plant compounds, because I think we've kind of explored that already a little bit.

Or the fantasy of it.

Yeah. Are you concerned about not having enough cellular autophagy and too much MTOR activation Inhibiting your longevity. And if not, why?

No, I'll tell you about this. This is a really interesting part of the story, Ben. So two things with this. If you look at carnivores and you actually look at the level of IGF1, okay? So IGF1 is insulin growth factor 1. And IGF1 has been linked to SAMTOR activation. IGF1 binding binds to the IGF1 receptor and the insulin receptor, which can trigger, you know, MTOR downstream. And so people are concerned that increasing a whole bunch of protein is going to trigger tons of IGF1. But what I have seen across the board is that IGF1 levels are actually lower in carnivores than on people on mixed diets. So I see IGF1 levels around 120, 125, mixed dieters 190, 180. So I'll again refer back to Peter, Peter Attia, who shared a lot of his data about IGF1 levels. So, and the reason for this is ketosis. And this is what's interesting about a carnivorous diet versus a semicondorous diet, right? If you look at the benefits of caloric restriction, if you those are mediated by what appears to be the sirtuin family of genes, right? And that's why resveratrol is one of these plant compounds that has a lot of interest because it appears to potentially trigger sirtuin activation through a variety of mechanisms. But caloric restriction benefits come from the activation of the sirtuin family of genes. That family of genes is also activated by beta hydroxybutyrate turns again to beta hydroxybutyrate.

Interesting.

Amazing, right? So ketosis, if you look at the molecular mechanisms, ketosis, beta hydroxybutyrate appear to have the essentially the exact same benefits as caloric restriction. Activation of the sirtuin family of genes. NAD to NADH changes, right? Sirtuins are NAD dependent enzymes. They're deacetylases. Beta hydroxybutyrate increases NAD in the cell. It is also an HDAC inhibitor, so histone deacetylase inhibitor. So the mechanisms of beta hydroxybutyrate and sirtuins are very similar. And actually I should say that beta hydroxybutyrate appears to trigger the activation of the sirtuin dreams as well. And so, so when you're in ketosis, you actually get more of the AMPK activation than the MTOR activation. So it's this interesting balance where you're eating a lot of protein, you're not losing muscle. I actually, and many people found gains in strength and performance because of the protein, the anabolic effects of the protein. But what you see clinically or what you see biochemically is that IGF1 does not go through the roof. It's in the middle. And if you look at it molecularly, AMPK is actually getting activated because of the ketones. And many of these same mechanisms around caloric restriction are getting activated from the ketones, which is one of the things I would illustrate regarding resveratrol. Because people say, oh, isn't resveratrol one of these beneficial compounds? And I would say, yes, it seems to have some benefits. However, just like I said earlier, it also has collateral damage. And the benefits of resveratrol are not unique to resveratrol. We can get those same potential longevity benefits, activation of their twin genes, supplementing with those Veritol.

Do you know, most supplements don't come from grape skins. They make that from peanut skins.

And it's really high levels, which are not evolutionarily consistent. But we can get all those molecular benefits from ketosis. And so that's what's really crazy is that like, oh, this is really interesting, like beta hydroxybutyrate. There's some amazing articles I'll send you, you know, to link in the podcast notes. But they, I mean, some of the these studies are, you know, beta hydroxybutyrate much more than metabolite. Ketone bodies as signaling molecules. Ketone bodies being involved in longevity as well, and being all connected with MTMTOR and the AMPK pathway, NAD and IGF1. And so it's a really interesting thing because people would say that aren't you just going to over activate mtor, over activate these things? But it doesn't. It kind of gets balanced because of the ketogenic state of this diet.

Okay, interesting.

That's pretty wild.

I have another concern, and this is actually one of the final things that I wanted to cover with you. And that is the idea that if we all started eating nose the tail, like I hunt my own meat for the most part, you know, and we're surrounded right now. There's probably right now peering in through the windows at us. I would say maybe 20 whitetail deer minimum, just wandering around my property, enough to feed this entire neighborhood for a couple of weeks. Right, right, right. But let's face it, not everybody's going to go out and hunt down their own animals. Not everybody lives in a locale like Washington state, suburbs that are conducive to hunting your own meat. You know, somebody might be listening in. In LA and be concerned about the idea that if everybody began to eat a carnivorous diet, yeah, maybe we could throw in a bunch of insects, perhaps, which have some value. There's minerals, there's nutrients. But even with that, is this even something that's sustainable? Is this something ethical that we should be endorsing for a lot of people to do? What's your take on that?

So that's a really interesting, really important question. I'll just back up one point from that and say that I think there are two ways to look at this. The first way that I look at it, you can look at it from a population basis and you can look at it from an individual basis basis. And by the individual basis, what I mean is that as a physician, I see patients and I see people who are individual stories. And that's how my interest in this kind of got started, this idea that as humans, when somebody comes to see me and they have debilitating depression or recalcitrant autoimmune disease, that's an individual. And as a physician, I'm really interested in how to help an individual. And so I think that one of the things we need to answer and not. Not jump to conclusions about the inability of a carnivore diet to be helpful for people is we need to answer the individual questions before we talk about the population questions. Because if a diet like this, if the exclusion of print products can be beneficial to some people with really debilitating diseases, we can change individual stories and lives. And when, if we can establish that academically, then we can start saying, okay, we know this is valuable, this is a tool, and we, maybe we don't use it for everyone, but we use it for people who are really sick. And we know this is a tool that works and it returns us to an ancestral way of life. So that's the first piece, is that I like to think about things as an individual, as individuals, and then if we think about things from a population level, I agree with you. We have major problems as humans on this planet. You know, and what I would argue with regard to this section of the equation is that if you talk to environmental scientists, the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions are fossil fuels. No one would debate that. We are living as humans in ways which are accelerating knowledge sharing. What we're doing right now is incredible. We are talking and sharing things with people all over the world, but that comes at a cost. And we are using fossil fuels by doing this right. And the majority of our environmental change appears to be related to greenhouse gas emissions connected with fossil fuels. The vast majority people say, oh, if you put more cattle on the earth, it's going to increase the greenhouse gases. It may slightly, but let's just break it down. The vast majority of greenhouse gases come from fossil fuel emissions, I.e. transportation, industry, electronics, all these things. So if we are, I think that as humans what we have to ask ourselves is where do we place our, where do we place our priorities and how do we, how do we, how do we mitigate or how do we, how do we allocate our environmental resources? Because I think we're actually going to get to a point where we can only do so many things environmentally with regard to greenhouse, we can't do all of it.

Right?

But then if you look at agriculture, agriculture I think represents about 8% of the greenhouse gas emissions. And of that only 3 to 4% is animal agriculture. So half of our agriculture is actually related to greenhouse gas emissions. Half of our emissions from agriculture are related to plant based growing of food. So only like 3 to 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions are from animal based agriculture. So it's a very small percentage of the overall emissions. I'm not saying it's insignificant, I'm not saying we shouldn't know about it, but it's not this huge percentage that we're talking about. And we're talking about Perhaps more than 60, 70% of the overall emissions are coming from fossil fuels and industry. So we're sort of saying like, oh, okay, like let's just have a sense of like the, the relative proportions of all these things. And I get worried when people say like, oh, they sort of short circuit the whole argument around this saying that's not sustainable, we shouldn't do it. And I, I, the first, like I said, the first thing I say to them is talk to me when your brother or your sister has a disease that could potentially be helped by this type of diet. You know, you tell me.

And, and I mean, honestly dude, where my mind goes is, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe it is an individualized diet that we use in a case by case scenario. And maybe we have to face reality. Maybe our earth is populated to the extent where we need to incorporate survival food, right? Like maybe part of it actually is including some amount of plant matter simply because we've painted ourself into a population corner to where it might not be the best thing for the human body. And you've made a compelling argument that it may not be, but it might just be that we still have to eat Tubers and we still have to go out and harvest seeds and nuts and more nutrient dense foods and work our asses off to figure out ways to render them digestible. Because this is just life. Like Jordan Peterson says, we just gotawe, got to carry our weight up the hill. And yeah, if you're rich and you're wealthy enough to be able to just go out and either or hunt down any meat that you want, or you live in an area where you can do that, or you can afford to purchase salmon roe and ribeye steaks and everything, then yeah, I mean, life isn't fair. Like maybe, maybe you can eat a really solid carnivore diet and not have to eat quote, poor man's food. And I realize what I'm saying is inflammatory and potentially disruptive to a lot of thought patterns, but I mean, maybe we just live in a situation on planet Earth currently to lab based nose to tail, that's a whole different.

We don't want to talk about that.

We don't have the time to get into that. But I mean maybe, maybe it is the case where we do have to eat survival food, but we shouldn't be walking around telling everyone that that's the ideal diet or the most healthy way to go.

Well, I agree with most of what you said. I don't want to, I hesitate to agree with the depiction of a carnivore diet is like, and you know, like a rich person's diet or like some.

Sort of, well, a rich person's diet or a hunter gatherer diet. Right, Those would be the two situations.

Or yeah, like a really good hunter. But I do think that, you know, like I said and I tried to sort of create the context here, like I also think about it first and foremost as a physician because that's kind of my vocation. And for me, like if there are things that we can do for patients that will ease suffering, that's a valuable intervention. And I agree with you. Perhaps everyone doesn't need that intervention, but we need to know what that intervention is, is, you know, so that when my brother, my sister, my, you know, spouse, my child becomes sick, you say, oh wow, that person is really sick with autoimmune disease. Maybe we should try this way of eating. Right. Which may help them, you know. But you're right, maybe some people have a genetic ability to tolerate some plants more than others. But I think that to dismiss this as a potentially useful therapeutic intervention for humans is to discard something that can be very valuable and brings up a lot of issues around how humans have lived and who we are and how we can leverage medical therapies because we are spending, you know, billions of dollars a year developing very fancy chemotherapeutic drugs and all these fancy things. And it's like, wait a minute, I mean, if you look at the way that we treat autoimmune disease now with biologics, they have horrible side effects, tuberculosis, pneumonia, cancers. If for people with really debilitating autoimmune disease, which could include psychiatric disease, like I said, we could say, wait a minute, maybe you're really sensitive to food, maybe you're really sensitive to plants and the plant toxins here. And there's this ancestral way of eating which is perhaps the most consistent way of humans eating. We can employ this type of diet for you and that can help someone. We need to know that that exists. We need to not stop the conversation and stop asking that if that can help certain people. Now, if we can accept that or if we can understand that from an academic perspective and say, yeah, this is really cool, like, look at this, this might be the optimal way for humans to eat, Then we can also say to the climate change scientists, like, hey, we have this really valuable therapy, but we also have seven and a half billion or eight billion people on the planet, like, how do we scale this? And then we can actually have the conversation with people who are much smarter than me in terms of climate based science and say, how do we make this sustainable? How do we do this for more people? But I think it does the whole idea an injustice to short circuit the conversation in the beginning and say this isn't sustainable because it can be very valuable at an individual level. But I think we have to be ethically responsible to like the whole planet and everything as well.

Yeah.

And also realize, you know, that like I said, that the relative contributions of all the different sectors of emissions because, you know, maybe we could do something where we can increase our animal agriculture and create more supplies of meat in sustainable grass fed ways. And then, you know, Elon Musk figures out how to make Tesla's $15,000 and, and fossil fuel emissions go down.

You know, Paul, I know you've got a rib eye steak to cook up for lunch in a long time in Seattle.

I'm excited about it.

I've got phone calls to go out in the sunshine and make. I am incredibly grateful that you made the trip. You've got me and a lot of other people thinking a little bit more intelligently and deeply about this dietary approach. And I appreciate what you're doing. I'm going to link to your YouTube channel, which is fantastic. I think think a lot of people will benefit from exploring some of the topics you dive into there. I'm going to link to that debate that you did with Lane Norton, which I originally discovered you and I'll link to everything else that we talked about as well. If folks, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Carnivore I'll have it all there. So thanks for making the drive over, man.

It's my pleasure.

It's been a great time for eating meat with me and just doing the full experience. I really appreciate it.

It's been an incredible, incredible experience. The Greenfield experience. Yeah, it's amazing.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield and Dr. Paul Saladino signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links.