Episode 180: Organ Nutrition with Chef James Barry

Foreigner back for another edition of the Thyroid Answers podcast. And today's a little different. We're not going to be doing as much thyroidy science stuff, but we're going to be talking, really, about one of the foundational principles I talk about in the book, which is dietary fitness. And it's one of the biggest challenges for a lot of people who have chronic health issues is they don't have great dietary fitness fitness. So today we. I'm pleased to welcome James Barry to the podcast. He's a chef. He's been in the business for almost two decades cooking for people. And one of his things that he was doing was finding people who were seeing practitioners who had these. Getting recommendations for how to change their diet, how to modify, and these people superstars. And I'll let him explain that in a bit, who were like, okay, that sounds great, but how the heck am I supposed to do it? And so he was. The guy would help formulate the AIP diet or a carnivore diet for the individual clients so they could get better nutrition. And he's. One of the reasons we brought him on is he's got a blend of seasonings that contain organ meat, which I think is awesome, because I've said this multiple times on the podcast, that the organs are the probably the most nutritional part of the meat. We just don't eat enough of it. And he's bringing the organs back to the diet in an easy way to consume them with their seasonings. And they've sent me some of this, and it is unbelievably good. And I'm a fan now. So, James, welcome to the Thyroid Answers podcast. How are you today?

Excellent. Thanks so much for having me, Dr. Eric.

And you call me Erica. Fine. Don't worry about the doctor.

But you got to call me Chef. No, I'm kidding. Oh, all right.

Okay.

You got it. I'm kidding. I'm totally kidding.

I've seen it. Yes, Chef. No, Chef. Yes, Chef. Right.

You watch the bear, right? You watch the bear.

Yeah. So here's what we want to get started with you. You're. You've got a nice bio, but I prefer that you give us your background. Give us, like, the short or intro, you know, the. The version of your history of how you got into the world of food and cooking and being a chef, and then we'll talk about why this product came about.

Yeah. To this day, my mom is just completely baffled that I became a chef because I grew up in a household where you knew dinner was ready because the smoke detector went off. So we were not foodies growing up. I wasn't raised eating organ meats. You mentioned you're a hunter. I did not get raised hunting. We. We had frozen vegetables, meat and potatoes on our plates. Very. It's funny, even though I grew up in the 70s, I say I grew up eating 50s food because I think a lot of times we. We get the foods that our parents grew up eating. You know, that's how I think a lot of generations pass down their illnesses or, you know, psychological or physicals, because they're just teaching you what they learned. Right, right. And. And so we were not a foodie household, but yet I. I fell into cooking. I just loved it. Did not see it as a career, though, not until I was in my 30s. And it was actually 911 when 911 happened, I did a complete audit of my life, and I really only wanted to focus on the things that had a heart that I truly believed I was here to do. And I. And I kind of re. Reminded myself that cooking was something I've loved, you know, my whole life, and decided to go to culinary school for it. I went to a school in New York that specialized in really healthy cooking. Like, we looked at all these different diet types. I learned about organ meats then through the Weston A. Price foundation, we studied Weston Price's book, which is a fantastic book, but very hard. Like, everyone's got it on their shelves, but no one actually reads it because it's very hard to go read, read and follow just because it's so dense. But it's a fantastic book about kind of nourishing foods, traditional foods, and how to prepare them. So learned about it then, but did not incorporate. And yet, when I got out of school, I was cooking for some big names like Tom Cruise, Gerard Butler, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand, briefly John Cusack. And yet I didn't cook organ meats for these people. I did a lot of really healthy things for them, but I just. I didn't do organ meats. And I think it's mostly because I wasn't doing them. And it really wasn't until I had kids that I started to get really, like, really serious about, okay, what are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet? Like, what are the ones that you're just going to get the most bang for your buck? And it's organ meats, hands down. And so then it was all about, well, how. How do I actually support not only my kids, but myself and clients and people in general with Getting them because really there's, there's, there's really three, three main hurdles. We either think they're disgusting, we don't know how to cook them, or we don't know how to source them. Right. And so that's ultimately, as a chef, I've always been someone who looks at things from kind of a, an outlier perspective or a skewed perspective. I'm not a celebrity hound chef. Even though I cooked for celebrities. I, I'm not the type that would go on a cooking show or like a competition show because I, for me, cooking has all always been about how can I support someone's health, how can I help them get healthier, not how can I stroke my ego or something like that. So, so it's, it, it was really about that. And so fortunately, after I cooked for these celebrities, I then had my own meal delivery service in LA for about eight years. And then I had to leave LA to just escape the kind of work mentality and environment I had kind of gotten myself in the muck in because I had created a business that requires so much of my attention and so much of my physical exertion that I was basically not getting sleep, I wasn't exercising, I wasn't eating right and I felt a decline in my health severely. And those eight years. And so I left. We moved from LA just so I could get out from under it. I sold that business and I was a stay at home dad for about, oh, about four years. And it was during that time that no staying at home, being a father, one of the hardest jobs I've ever done, first of all, so kudos to anyone out there that's ever been a stay at home parent. It's extremely difficult job. But it was during that time that I got my health back. I napped with my, our newest child at the time a lot. I just, I was able to get more sleep, I started exercising again. I definitely got my diet back in alignment. And that's when I came up with the idea for Pluck and I had ideas when I previously had my own, my other company, I had ideas for cultured condiments way before they were there. I had ideas for bone broth companies where it's the concentrated bone broth and you're just adding hot water way before anyone else did. But I couldn't execute them because I was swallowed by my business. And when I got the idea for Pluck and, and the idea of fusing organ meats with seasonings that no one else had done, I was Like, I have to do that. I cannot sit on this because it felt not only important, but unique, and I wanted to hit the market before anyone else thought of it.

Yeah, well, I. I think it's great, and we'll get into it in more detail. It's interesting. I'm not sure how old you are. I think we're probably pretty similar in age of be my guess. But when you're off the. You know, when I was in college, I was in college in the. In the late 80s, right. And we had. I don't think, like, cooking was not a thing that most of the people were thinking of. And one of my. One of my buddies on my rugby team disappeared one day, right? And we didn't know what happened to him. And then it was like three or four months later, he shows back up, and we're like, dude, off the face of the earth, what happened to you? And he had headed off. Is there Johnson in Wales? Is it. Is that a cooking. Is that a cooking school in New England somewhere?

Possibly. I'm not familiar. As familiar with that one because I'm mostly from the west coast, but I think you're right. I think it is.

But he had it. He went off to cooking school. And I'm like, dude, why didn't you, like Alice? She went to cooking school. He's like, I. I didn't. You know, wasn't. I didn't want anybody giving me a hard time. Like, it's not cool. But we were like, we weren't. You know, we'd make fun of you. Of course we'd make fun of you. That's what we do. But we didn't think much of it. And. And you're talking about how you became. Because I want to ask you how you got. Became like a celebrity chef. But it's funny, you just don't know how these things happen when one day I get a phone call from one of my buddies on the rugby team. It's a decade later, and they're like, hey, you gotta turn on the TV and turn on, like, ETV or something. Benzi's doing the Oscar dinner. And our friend Matt Benzavanga, who worked for Wolfgang Puck, was doing the Oscar dinner. And you can hear him yelling and screaming in the. In the background because they're filming the kitchens. What's going on behind the Oscar dinner, all the cooking and stuff. And I'm like, there's Benzi, like, this simple, you know, just a regular guy who takes off for, you know, sneaks out to go to cooking School and is now Wolfgang Pucks, one of his main guys, and running the Oscar dinner. Like, how did, like, it just didn't, it was just like the funniest thing ever. But so he, he got connected with a whole bunch of celebrities through cooking. But how did you get connected through cooking?

Well, I, I, yeah, I'll answer that, but at first I gotta. Yeah, you, you're so right about the culinary culture back in the day. Cause people forget, you know, there were two chefs on. @ least when I was a kid. I remember two chefs on, and they were both on pbs and it was Julia Childs and a Frugal Gourmet.

Right?

Like, that was it there. There was no other culture, you know, there, there was no TV culture with chefs. Wolfgang Puck was probably the first celebrity chef, really, where he. But he was known to your point, for catering events, you know, and, and he wasn't, he didn't necessarily have his food brand then that, you know, you find in the market. So it's, this is a more recent phenomena. And I was, you know, it's, it's fascinating. I don't know if you felt like this around becoming a functional doctor, but I, I was pursuing acting for a long time, basically for like 10 years. And anyone that's ever been in that entertainment business, you got to put out a hundred percent and you maybe get 15%. Like, you put out way more than you get. It's a very challenging career to stay in for a long time. But I was, I was a hard worker. I've always been a hard worker, but I worked hard. I was not one of those people that waited around for people to come in. I was constantly doing stuff. Well, when I pursued cooking, it was almost like the stars aligned because I still did my 100% working hard, but I got back 200%. It went the other direction. So it kind of had this feeling of maybe I tapped into what it was meant to do because it was so effortless compared to the things I'd previously done. So I got out of culinary school, and it was crazy, man. I mean, I literally would think it and it would just manifest. I would, I, like. I got out of culinary school. My first job was working as an intern at a rehab center. It was in Malibu Canyons. And, and then I got out. I ended up getting my first client, which was a CBS reporter, a news anchor. And then I was like, I want to cook for a band. I just thought it. And suddenly I got a call two weeks later to be the Vans, the vegan, vegetarian, Chef on the Vans Warp Tour. I mean, just this random thing where we traveled. It was a 60 day tour. We traveled to 50 cities in 60 days and we even hit Canada. And it was an amazingly challenging job. But I wanted that. I, I knew that I didn't want to work in a restaurant and then I needed the discipline because there' cooking is, is not, it's not very cerebral, it's, it's instinctual and it, and particularly if you're a baker, yes, you do have to have more kind of analytical thinking skills. But when you're a chef, it's very instinctual and it's very physical. And a lot of what you need to learn, you can't learn in a book and you can't learn in school. You have to do it. And, and so I knew that I was missing part of my education because I wasn't working like your friend in a CA catering service or in a restaurant. I knew that I was missing, missing something. So the Vans Warp tour is my kind of like super powered, you know, like just dive into that world because we basically, I was cooking for 200 people every day and in extreme conditions. And the rest of the team was cooking for 50, something like a thousand people. So in a day we were cooking for between 1200 and 1400 people. So it was insane. And I really learned how to be faster and better and just kind of able to deal with stressful situations from that job. But from there, this school, fortunately, the school I went to is very well known for. Well, actually I didn't know this going into it. The school ended up being a school where the people that manage celebrities would call the school Looking for private chefs. I did not know that when I applied, but that's what I learned afterwards is that the school, basically my first two years out of school, I got every job I wanted from the school. And yes, it was a great school, but it's also because I, I was in my 30s when I went. I was not right out of high school. I paid for it myself and it was very expensive and I, I didn't waste a minute, man. Like I, I, I showed up to every class. I got perfect attendance. I was the only person to get that. And anytime there was an opportunity to learn, I grabbed it and I showed up fully. And I think the school saw that I was a dependable person. And so every time they got a call for anything that was in la, I got referred for it.

Yeah, the right time, you're hitting the peak as cooking's becoming cool. And now everybody who's cool is doing chef work, Right. I think it's great. I definitely. There's. I think, do agree there's something innate to. And a certain skill set that people have that are just really good. My sister's an awesome cook and man, when she comes to the house, we just kind of get out of her way and you ask her, like, what's the recipe? I don't know what the recipe. Like, she's just throwing stuff together and somehow it always turns out awesome, which is great. But let's talk about food. Food in America at some point. At one point, we ate nose to tail, right?

Yeah.

And then we went through a change somewhere where we really shifted away from eating organs and eating nose to tail. What happened? Because in other cultures, eating those organs which are so nutritionally dense, and I don't think it's as big of a. Of a. Like a weird thing in other countries, but here it's like nobody eats it. You know, it's not a big thing. So why did we get a. Why did we get away from eating organs, especially if they're so healthy and dense with nutrition?

There's a little bit of history to it. So. So back in the day when they were trying to centralize meat industry, they. They kind of put it over near Chicago, kind of center of the US Kind of thing, and they started doing real. The railroad system to try to get meat from that Midwest to either coast. Well, when they did that, refrigeration isn't what we know of it now. Refrigeration didn't get as cold. And so you could ship muscle in those train cars, but you couldn't ship organs because they need to actually be held at a colder temperature than meat or they'll go bad. That was one of the first steps where you started to have more transportation limitations on getting whole animal to people. That was the first stage. But then what you had is During World War II, you had this time when there was actually. Well, so let's back up a little bit. So prior to World War II, there was already a decline in eating organ meats. And During World War II, there was a concern that there was going to be a protein shortage, a meat protein shortage, because of all they were having to get more meat abroad. Right. And so they, the government actually invested money in campaigns to support people not eating meat or eating different cuts of meat. So that is where Meatless Mondays came around was World War II. A lot of people don't realize that, but that's when it Came out because it was there. They were motivated, like, let's figure something out to get people not to eat so much meat. So Meatless Mondays was a thing then. And then they also, that's when they came out with names for different names for organ meats. Now organ meat is typically called offal o f f a l which is.

Not a great sales.

Sales, not a great sell. So they were coming up with names that would inspire different associations. So that's when they start calling it like variety meats. There's, there's multiple other names that people may have heard. But, but we mostly notice organ meats are awful now. And, and actually pluck is an old term for organ meats. A lot of people don't know that. That's why I called my company what, what I call it.

It was on my list. Yeah, like, where'd the name come from? So I'm glad you put that out there.

Pluck is the name what they used to say for, you know, they'd say, oh, do you want your pluck with that? You know, if you were getting some meat or like say the carcass of the chicken or something like this. So you want your pluck. And they're referring to the organ meats. But so basically we invested in re, you know, reframing organ meats in people's minds. Because the thing is, is that what happened is that organ meats started to be looked at as poor people's food. So this is very much a, a economical, social economical kind of issue. It's cheaper. So what I'm always telling people, like, if anyone is kind of overwhelmed with the cost of grass, 100 grass fed meat these days, right? Same cow, same 100 grass fed cow that the ribeyes cost you 24.99. You can get the tongue or the liver or another part of that animal for like 4.99 to 7.99. So I mean like not just half, but a third of the cost. Right. So right away you can get the same quality animal for less. Well, that was a disadvantage back in the day because people, you know, they came back from World War II. So first of all, it worked. People started eating more organs. So that's why our grandparents, or great grandparents, depending on how old someone is listening to this, but that's why they ate liver and onions growing up is because it worked. The government helped people start eating more organs. They ate them. But then when the people from, you know, fighting came back, well, the women had started working when they left. And then when they came back, women didn't want to stop working. So now you had two people in the household working. You had twice as much money. Well, not twice because women didn't get equal pay. But, but you had more money coming into the household. Right. So what happens then? Well, oh well, we can afford the roast beef cut, we don't want the cheap. So it was all this kind of mix mash of economics and socio status. And then what happens is when you have people, and this is a really important point that I hope anyone out there that's questioning, well, what power do I have in this kind of like ultra process world of marketing and we're getting all this misinformation around health and push these foods that are bad for us. What is our power? What's the same power they had back then? It just went the other way then. So when you stop buying something, they stop carrying it. So as people stop buying organ meat, you started to not see it at the butcher shop because they're not going to carry something people aren't going to buy. So when it's not carried, then you start to not think about it. If it's not in, if you don't, you can't see it, you don't think about it. If you don't think about it, you don't cook it. If you stop cooking it, you lose the culinary background of how to cook it. And, and then if you're not cooking it, they're not carrying it, it gets harder to source. Right. So. And then that gets us to where we are now, which is all three of those are major hurdles for people.

Yeah. And then, and that's, and I think that that one point becomes really good is it's, it's really out of our thought process, out of our vocabulary. Like when you say like we can, I can harvest, like we harvest our own, break down our own animals and you can take the liver and heart and just utilize it real easy when in that mode. But if you're, if you're a person who's not doing that, you're buying at the grocery store and your mom didn't cook it, your dad and grandma didn't cook it, you wouldn't even know how to cook. And you're like, what am I gonna do with that? A tongue, what am I gonna do with that? And the tongue can be so good. Oh, but you gotta know, you gotta know how to cook it. Right.

It's so overwhelming. It's so overwhelming because, because have you ever seen a liver start to defrost and just on a countertop when you. I know you hunt, so have you ever seen you notice it starts to melt? It literally starts to, like, disintegrate. It just become this soupy mess on your. And like, people like what. Like, no one understands what to do that. And plus, if you're getting them for particularly a cow liver, I mean, they're humongous. Humongous. So what I always tell people, and we probably are jumping ahead, but what I always tell people, one of the big tricks of how to ease organ meats into your diet is keep it frozen, because it's really when it gets defrosted that you get overwhelmed. And if it's frozen, there's so much you can do with it. A it doesn't go bad as fast. You're. You know, it's still frozen, so you just kind of look at it as like a chunk of ice or meat. You don't really think about it as a liver. But what you can do is you can cut it up into really small pieces the size of a pill and keep them on a tray in your oven. Just get them frozen and. And then once they're frozen in that little small size, you can then put them all in a bag and they'll keep separate, but you got to keep them frozen. And then you can just pop them in your mouth and swallow them like a pill. So they call those liver pills. And we can talk later. Why? I don't necessarily recommend that, but. But that's one option. No. You can also take that liver and you can grate it. You can literally take it with a box grater and just grate it into your ground meats and just do like, a tablespoon at a time and to 1 pound of meat. Do about 1 to 2 tablespoons of grated liver, and you're done. Put it right back in the freezer. Not overwhelming. And you mix it up, and no one will even know it's there. They won't taste it. It won't change the texture. Because those are really what we're talking about when. When we talk about people thinking these things are gross is we're just talking texture and then we're kind of talking taste. But people don't really understand taste.

They.

The. The taste that they associate with organ meats is actually incorrect. The actual organ meat itself doesn't taste bad. It's because people are overcooking it. It's because of how people are preparing it that's bad.

Now, I think the first time I Ate liver and heart. You know, I think I was in maybe southwest Texas, and we took in the owner of the ranch, cooked up hearts and some livers. Very simple cook. The garlic, some butter, fried them up in a pan. Very simple cook. And maybe had I not known, you know, if I had known what it was, maybe I would have been like, at that point, I was already into hunting and stuff, and we just ate it. And I was like, man, that was really good. What was that? They're like, oh, that was heart. That was hearts and livers. So I'm like, holy cow. That's like. Because that you have a connotation in your mind of what it might tastes like. But it is, I think, yeah, it's a lot of it's in our mind that we think it's going to taste a certain way or it's. Or it's gross before we eat it. I mean, it's like kids, like, I don't like chicken. Well, how do you know? I just know. Like, I don't like broccoli. How do you know? Because I just know. No, you don't. And it does take. For some people, if you're eating big chunks of it, it's you. And it may take you a couple times to get used to something, but things like pluck make it really easy to get some. Get some of that organ nutrition into you. Really super easy. But let's talk about why we need. Why we should be organ meat eating more organ blends or organ meat more awful. Right.

And.

Why it's better to eat than what we're doing being sold as the gourmet stuff, which is these expensive cuts of meat. What's the nutritional difference between some of these organs versus the muscle meat?

Yeah, so. So it's. This is an old number, but in 2015, so you can only imagine it's higher. But in 2015, the. The percentage of people that were deficient of at least one or more vitamin or mineral in the US was 92%. My guess is that's probably closer to 94, 95 now. And yet we're not calorie deficient. And that's a really important distinction. So it's not an issue of like, we're not eating enough food. That's why we're deficient. It's like, no, no, we're eating the wrong foods and we're getting fat from those foods, yet we're still nutrient deficient. And a lot of people don't even realize. And I'm sure this is one of the Things you're constantly trying to teach people is that they don't realize their nagging health issues are usually due to a mineral or vitamin deficiency. Like. Like, you. You got to look at what you're eating, and then of course, you got to look at your environment as well and how much sleep you're getting. But a lot of people don't go straight to what they're eating, and they don't realize how much of an effect what we eat has on them. But organ meats are literally mother nature's multivitamin. They are the most concentrated source of virtually every important vitamin, mineral, amino acid, and fat you can get. And do they overlap with muscle meat? Yes. But organ meats are more concentrated forms they have. And depending on what mineral or vitamin we're talking about, sometimes they are higher than muscle meat. So in my judgment, it's not necessarily about, like. And I see this a lot is. You see. Particularly carnivores. All I eat is ribeye, and then I'm. And then I eat only liver, and I'm like, okay, yeah, that's. That's cool. But if we were a tribe back in the day, how it would probably go down is a bunch of us, let's say there's 23 people in the tribe. A handful of us would fast, go hunting after we fasted, because the fasting is going to sharpen our skills. We're going to go hunting. We're going to get that animal. It would be one animal we would probably get because it's big enough and there's only however many of us, five to eight people, we got to take that back. Right? So the first thing we do after we kill the animal is we need to then replenish our stores right away from fasting. What do we do? We probably eat the liver or the heart raw right there, right then and there. We eat it right there. Because that is the most concentrated.

It's.

It's like basically what we would try to equate to like a nutrition bar now or something. Like, even though they're not act. That's not accurate, but you know what I mean? Like, the way people look at nutrition bars, they're like, oh, I need concentrated amount of nutrition. Let me eat this bar. It's like, that's the true. That's the original superfood right there. They would do that, then they would dress the animal, and then they would cart it back. Well, once they got it back, let's say they ate the heart already. So now there's no heart. For everyone else, because they ate it. Because the animal has one heart, the animal has one liver, has two little kidneys. You know, I mean, like, there's not a lot. So when we talk about organ meats, you don't want to get into the weeds with just, well, I'm just going to eat liver. So I really try to promote people, you got to eat the whole animal. Because when we get, when we think about our needs, the whole animal, there's this concept called like, supports. Like, so what you're eating is going to support that part in your body. So muscle meat is pretty obvious. So if you eat the muscle meat, it's going to support your muscles, right? Well, if we look at heart, for example, so heart has CoQ10 and anyone that takes any heart supplements, CoQ10 is usually a part of it, but heart has that in it. You know, liver is high in vitamin A and it's one of the highest, most, you know, concentrated forms. And, and you probably already talk about this, but vitamin A is, is basically a thyroid supporter. It's, it's the vitamin that helps the thyroid. It contains. It's like it directly supports thyroid hormone metabolism. Right. I mean, it's, it's, it's critical and.

Well, it is important. And even more important, it. For thyroid signaling at the nucleus, all of the receptor, a lot of the receptors that thyroid hormone has to interact with are retinoic acid receptors. And so for retinoic, what retinoic acid is, is vitamin A. So you need appropriate levels of vitamin A. I think that's one of the big challenges today. I talk about this all the time, is that we are overdosing in vitamin D and taking it in a form that we were never really meant to take a lot of vitamin D orally, that if it was, all the foods would be super rich in vitamin D. And very few foods are super rich in vitamin D. There foods are rich in vitamin A. We're meant to get most of our vitamin D from the sun. But there is some discussion about how the excessive amounts of vitamin D may reduce the vitamin A, the actual vitamin A that we need from our food because we're taking so much vitamin D in the absorption process.

I love that you mentioned excess because that's the other thing I love about organs is that when you're taking something synthetically, when you're, as you mentioned, taking things orally, it. You can go act you can get too much of something and you don't always know how these things are going to mix because the person that the bottle that you bought is focused on one specific outcome.

Right.

Where when you get organ meats, that is Mother Nature's multivitamin, it is literally designed, the properties are set up in a way like the minerals that are best absorbable together happen to also they're all there, the vitamins that need that are, that are fat soluble. It's part of the food, you know. You know, so there, there's an aspect to when you eat it as found in nature. It's kind of perfect. Like you, you don't have to do too much. Of course there, there's delineations of that, you know, like it's the animal you're eating from, is it being raised well, is it sick? You know, there's all that stuff. But if we assume that Mother Nature or if you believe in religion, God, whatever it is, did it right, then you should be able to get much of what you need from nature. Now we've mucked that up with our modern living and our, and our modern lifestyle. And that's why we now have to supplement. We do all these things. But if you go back in time, everything you needed was there, even vitamin D. Like vitamin D is found in organ meats. It's also in lard, for example. So one of the things I'm always telling people, when you're cooking like a pate, you're making liver pate or something like that, or even liver and onions, cook it in lard because it's going to help you the vitamin D and the lard is going to support the absorption of the vitamin A. Yeah.

And that there, there's huge benefit into eating as close to nature as possible. I, my, my model is EAS close to the, you know, the way it came from the, from the ground, from the water off the tree, you know, blew in the air like you want to eat. We want it. We should be eating as close to that as we can. And it doesn't, doesn't really have to be that difficult. But unfortunately we've gotten so far away from really knowing where our foods come comes from and what it takes to get the food. And we just think about, you know, just buy the chicken breast. Right. It's easy to cook. I know what to do with it versus taking a look at that, you know, buying the whole chicken and trying to utilize everything like grandma used to do, which was, which was great. We really need, do need to get back to that. So I guess that's the, the next thing we probably should talk about is. And we, you Talked a little bit about liver. People think about organs like these are the, why would the organs be beneficial if these are the things that are really. They're kind of dirty, right? Like the liver is dirty. Isn't that doing all the detox? Isn't that where all the chem, you know, all chemicals go through? And is, is that really healthy for us to be eating like something like a liver versus just eating the organ meat because of the cleanliness of, of the organ and because of what it does?

Yeah. I love this question because I think we're forgetting when, when people are asking that question or thinking like that, we're forgetting how just resilient and amazing the human body is. So if you think about it, it's not really a sponge, which I think people are thinking that that's what the organ is when they talk, when they ask that kind of question, that it's more of a filter. But it's a filter that's designed to work so it's, it's not gonna, it's not like your drain filter or you know, the, the drain screen, you know, in your drain where it gets clogged and then you have to lift, you know, physically lift it up and knock it out in the garbage and then clean it. If your body was like that, we would all be dead. You know, we would basically be sick because, you know, how would we, how, you know, how is your body going to internally like do that? So it has to be resilient. And so what really the liver or even the kidneys, that what they're doing is they're taking that toxic material that we're acquiring from the foods we eat, from the environment, the air, water, all that, and they're turning these toxic, these elements into water soluble forms because that's how they're going to leave our body. We're going to poop them out, we're going to pee them out, we're going to sweat them out. And if we don't, if our elimination pathways are not working properly, which as you probably already know and see in all your, you know, clients, a huge percentage people do not poop daily. A huge percentage of people are not sweating properly. A huge percent of people are not, are basically not filtering out these toxins properly. So where does it go? Well, it doesn't stay necessarily in the liver or the kidney. It actually goes to your fat. And that's why people that are very obese, when they detoxify and they lose weight too fast, they can actually either kill themselves because of the the amount of toxins that go into their.

Get.

Get absorbed in their body or they can get very sick. And so that, to me, is a very important piece because it kind of goes to. Another question we get asked a lot is like, well, how much, you know, am I really getting when I do pluck? And. And. And I really. I guess I want to point it out now because when we talk about the human body, it's a very American concept to go all or nothing. Like, that's. That's, you know, we pride ourselves and being like, I work hard to play hard, you know, go big or go home, right? It's. It's a very, like. It's a very false story. It's like we're projecting that. It's a mentality that we've acquired socially that we're projecting onto the human body. But the human body doesn't actually do well with extremities. The human body likes things that are gradual, and it likes to do things slowly because if it goes too fast, that's when chaos can happen, right? That's when. Because if you lose weight too fast, that's when you get the stretch marks. When you lose weight too fast, that's when you get sick from the toxin release. You know, when you lose. When you gain weight too fast, you get sick. Your gallbladder, you know, you get too much fat in your body. I mean, your bodies are resilient, but it doesn't like extremes. And that's why it's always working very hard to get back to middle, you know, back to homeostasis. So for my money, I believe that the best things are the things that we do daily. Those are the things that truly move the health needle, the things that we can make a daily habit. And I like to use this as an example, like, so let's just say if you're struggling with intimacy, because I could pick anything, we're focusing on food, but let's just pick intimacy because it's totally random, right? Well, if you're working on intimacy, is you getting a hug a month gonna move your intimacy needle, or is you getting. Or is you're getting intimate connection daily, if just briefly brief, intimate connection daily. Whether it's a gentle touch, whether that's connection eye to eye, any kind of intimate connection daily, even if it's just two minutes, is going to move your intimacy needle more than one hug a month. And that's literally what people are normally doing, is they're eating liver once a month or they're working out really intensely For a week and then three weeks. They're not, you know, we kind of go all. We go all in and then we just fall off because we, we. We set ourselves up for failure because we're, we're going too extreme. So I am all about those little things. And so pluck, for example, is. Yes. You're just, it's. You're seasoning. Right. So you're getting pinches of organ meat every time you use it. However, you're getting the microdosing frequently because you're using it with every meal, which is ideally what it's set up for you to do. And when you ever get a little bit of something, all the time, that's cumulative effect. And we can see that in a positive way or we can see it in a negative way. Like, for example, glyphosate. Well, glyphosate, when it's sold in America in the late 50s, we were told it's micro amounts. It's not going to hurt human health. FDA approved it. Well, look at us now. It's in breast milk, it's in our water, it's in our soil, it's in our air. We can't get rid of it. This micro amount of glyphosate is now equated to it being in every aspect of our life. And we have no idea that kind of havoc it's wrecking on our bodies. Yeah.

And for the listener, glyphosate, what they're talking about is. What he's talking about is essentially roundup. Was this a chemical that almost everybody's heard of that was used as an. Essentially, as an antibiotic. Right. To help kill organisms and make it so we could, you know, we could grow plants without all the disease and everything on it. It would kill the organ organisms. And then we were told, hey, it doesn't hurt us because we don't have this thing called a Shikamati pathway, so therefore it can't hurt us. But what they. We didn't learn until later was that our gut flora has a shikimate pathway. And so, yeah, it didn't hurt us directly because we don't have that pathway, but it hurt us indirectly because of the impact it had on our gut biome and our gut biome. The way our gut biome goes, so goes our health and wellbeing because we got more organisms in our gut than we have our own, our own genes. And if they're dis. If there's dysbiosis there and there's. That's a rampant Thing in today's world with the, with the amount of processed foods and chemicals and everything else we consume, that, that, that stuff can lead something like a glyphosate on a, just from a micro dose perspective. And it's probably more of that. A micro dose at this point.

Oh, at this point, yeah, it's yeah.

Huge the impact it has. So yeah, I think, I think that's a good topic to talk about. We kind of should slide right in there. Like when we think about getting it maybe small consistent doses. And I like the idea that it's more of a seasoning. You could season things with it. You can put it in a shaker and just use it as your seasoning and you know, over just putting table salt right on, on it or, or just a regular seasoning salt, you could use this in place of that and get continual micro doses. And I agree with what you said. Like when, even when somebody's taking a B complex, right. They're taking a B complex. That is somehow we had to derive those vitamins somewhere, sometimes chemically derived, some artificially derived them. And we're Giving somebody like 1000% of what the, maybe the daily requirements. And you could say, well the RDA is too low, it needs to be higher. But if you' 1,333% of the daily intake, maybe that's. We don't need that mega dose all at one time as a supplement or as a capsule.

I think the other thing, unless you've been tested, like if you've gotten tested and you have someone overseeing the testing, you know, let them designate what you need. Right. But most people are not tested.

But I would, but I would still, I mean, I still use supplementation to help people get better. But the blends we put together are often too much. Yeah, they're too much. And I think one of the things that's missing and I've, I've formulated so I, I get this. We're trying to put things together that we think are good blends, but when we eat plants in their natural state, when we eat organs in there and, and be close to nature, we're eating things in their natural forms. And not only are we eating, getting some of these individual micronutrients that we want out of our foods, we're also getting the cofactors that help them work often in the body appropriately. And what we're also getting is the things that we don't know are necessarily in those foods that have a synergistic effect. And this isn't a great example, but it's the chicken noodle soup analogy. And you probably know the story where, hey, chicken noodle soup was thought to help people get over being sick faster. And the food industry realized that, okay, well, let's, let's figure out what ingredient this is. It was the pharmaceutical company or one of the, you know, somebody smart was like, let's just break it down and we'll figure out what ingredient it was and then we'll just sell that. Right? So they broke the chicken noodle soup down to everything they can measure, tried each one. Not one individual ingredient by itself seemed to be beneficial. But then when they gave him chicken noodle, you know, chicken soup, chicken noodle soup, people got better. So what was it? Which ingredient? What was it about it? It was probably the synergistic effect and there was probably ingredients in there that we don't, maybe we don't even know what they are at this point.

And I love that you're saying this right. I think it's so important when, when people with, with your educational background admit like, there's so much we don't know and, and let alone there's so much that there's nobody that knows how it all mixes together. So anytime we're studying something, we're isolating things no one knows how. Like when, when you have this one thing going on in this specific environment also coupled with this other thing and then coupled with that and then in, you know, ingesting or inhaling this air and this kind of water, like, no one knows the synergy, you know, everything mixed together. No one knows the toxic soup.

We have a reductionist view of almost everything. Why? Because it's easier to learn that way. And I, I have that discussion with clients all the time. Why are you taking that? Well, because that's going to help my thyroid convert. Your body is going to take in whatever take in. Let's say it's selenium and it's going to use that selenium for what's important. You don't get to determine that. You want that selenium to support T4 to T3 conversion. Maybe if you're in a homeostatic low stress state and you're low on selenium, maybe it helps convert T4 to T3. But you are chronically inflamed. You have chronic health issues. You're in an allostatic state and which is an excessive stress state. So what does the body do? It slows down. Normal metabolism, ramps up cell defense. You're not Going to convert more T4 to T3. When you're in that model, you don't get to dictate what happens with that selenium. Your body deals with these micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and use them for what's best for what that cell, that tissue state is in. So I take B6. I think I'm allergic to B6 because when I take it, it creates these symptoms. You're not allergic to it. That B6 is getting used probably for an inflammatory cell defense process because that's the more important thing at the moment. But we, we have this silly concept that we get to determine like what happens to this stuff when we put it in. And really this cellular innate intelligence of the body doesn't really make that many mistakes. We came from two cells, right? And to, to what we are today. And we think that, hey, the body just forgets how to work. No, most of what we think as sickness or illness is really a defensive positioning, what we call allostatic regulation. And yes, long term allostatic regulation creates dysfunction and disease. But that's really, at the early part especially, that's not the thing. Like the fever is not your problem. The fever is the body's solution to a threat, a toxin, an organism. That's what your body's trying to do is increase the fever to kill something off. We always kind of think about it today, like Grant, my grandma wouldn't have thought that way. But we today we think, oh, I got a fever, I'm sick, I gotta get rid of the fever. As if that fixes it. And it's just silliness.

Yeah, it's, it's. We're seeing it with Ozempic, right? Everyone thinks like, oh, I'm, it's gonna remove the fat exactly where I want it to be removed. And it's like, nope, you don't get to control where the fat goes. It could come from your brain.

You don't know what's funny, what's not funny, but is that almost Everybody that's a GLP1 agonist drug. So what it's doing, right, is it's providing it's a drug that binds to GLP1 receptors. And so when you think about what, where does GLP1 comes, it comes from a healthy gut, healthy GI tract. So anybody who's got decreased GLP1 signaling probably has a gut issue. A dipbiotic butt gut, inflammatory gut. So yes, we can sell them the GLP1 agonist, which they can take. It'll reduce glucose absorption. It'll stimulate more insulin production. They'll lose some body fat. They're also going to lose a lot of muscle mass.

But at the end of the day.

What, what haven't we fixed? We haven't fixed the dysbiosis and the gut inflammation that was there to begin with. And so what happens when they're done? They've got less muscle mass. They have less. They may have some, some less body fat, but they've got a lot, They've lost a lot of muscle mass. They still have the same inflammatory issue. And now they put the Franken food right back in again. And they go, I'm gaining weight. And that's why people are like, yeah, once you're on it, it's hard to come off of it. And I've got patients now that have, like, paralyzed ILI because they heard that.

Yeah.

And, you know, they can't eat anything at this point because their GI tract is so damaged from, from these meds. It's, it's sad, it's scary.

But that's.

Let's get back on our, on your topic, because I could spend all day talking about that.

I was gonna say, I mean, this is a similar concept, which is. So we, we solder these, let's say the cow, we slaughter our cow. And when we're focusing just on muscle meat, it's about 50% of the cow. It's a little off, you know, a little degree here, a little degree there, but it's, it's basically about 50. So that means 50 is the awful or the orgame. And now orgamed is classified as anything that's not muscle or bone. Right. So that, that's the, that's every other part of the animal. So we're designating the muscle as for human consumption, but then we're designating most of the organ or offal as not for human consumption. And then we're turning around, we're giving it to other industry. It still gets used. I mean, some, some cases it gets tossed, but in most cases it gets used. But it goes to pet food, it goes to, to bone meal for, for agriculture, it goes to feeding animals and zoos and in our agricultural system. So it goes to other industry. But then what happens to us? Well, we're nutrient deficient because of how we're eating. And so what do we do? We turn around and we look to replace the nutrients we could have gotten from that other 50% of the animal. And we're, we're turning towards supplement industry and $1 billion industry and just putting money towards there and then Achie potentially hitting the barriers that you've already talked about, which may be too, too much of this, too little of that, and not knowing how it's going to work with the body. So when I think about that, I'm like, you know, we can greenwash all we want, but one of the most green things you can do for the planet and for our own health and to kind of close loop the system, which is really how our ancestors did it, is to use every part of that animal for human consumption or as much of it as you can.

Yeah. So not everybody's going to go out and harvest their own animals and be able to get that stuff. So let's talk about how somebody. How. Where does somebody start to incorporate or how do you recommend somebody start to incorporate some of the, some of the awful into their regular diet? Yeah.

So if organ meats are the gateway to nutritional abundance, I would say pluck is the gateway to organs. And it's mostly because it's so easy and delicious. It's just, it's just an easy entry point. You can give it to kids. There's no real hurdles. But that's. I don't want you to stop there because I'm not just selling product. I'm trying to get. I'm trying to support people in eating that whole animal. So then I would say stage two might be what we've already discussed is taking. Getting a frozen liver. And you can get that from your local store. You can go to a farmer's market. It's. It's not too hard to find it. You can find them online. There's some great resources like US Wellness Meats. There's white oak pastures on the East Coast. Great, great sources of organ meats. Get. Once you get it, it's frozen. You always get. Most of the time when you get organs from a farmer's market or from online, it's. It always comes frozen. So you then can keep it in your freezer. You can grate it. Like I told you, for 1 pound of meat, you do about 1T1 tablespoon. Only go about 2 tablespoons because you don't want to do too much where it starts to change the texture of the taste. Because now we're talking about easing into organics. Right. So we're not trying to do that just yet. That's going to come in time. Because really what we're doing as we ease in ornaments is we're also shifting the palate. So our palate, the four that we mostly talk about are salty, sweet, bitter and sour. But we have a fifth one. It was discovered in Japan in the 90s. It's called Umami. And umami is found in lots of different foods. It's, it's in meat, it's in tomatoes, it's in mushrooms. Like you can find umami in a lot of different sources, but it's particularly present in concentrated organ meats like what we use in pluck. So concentrated, freeze dried powdered organ meats. So what happens when people start using something like pluck or an umami source, even just eating the organs, is we start to shift that palette. And, and if anyone has thought about someone, if anyone's ever heard or met someone who's been incarcerated, they'll tell you about the first time they went in. The food was horrible, sucked. But then by the time they got out, they actually missed the food. They actually craved it. And, and that's basically proof of that. We can change. We can basically get ourselves to like anything. We just have to do it all the time. It has to be a daily thing. And so by incorporating that umami flavor into your diet, whether like I said, through the seasoning or through just little bits of it in your food, not enough to change the taste, just enough to get a little bit of that umami in your food, your palate will start to change and you will start to actually crave it. You'll actually start to welcome these new flavors into your diet. So as we start to do that, you have the grading option. You can also buy ground meat that already has the ori meats in it. Companies like Force of Nature, they use about 10% and they usually, you can find it in the freezer aisle at your grocery store. And it's basically heart and liver, I think is what they're using. They, they usually call them ancestral blends. Then what you can do is you can start to actually like, basically as you get the flavor for it is you can start to incorporate organs that are closest to muscle meat. And you actually already identified one of them. You said tongue. So tongue and heart are the two that are closest to organ meats. But we don't have to jump to beef heart or tongue. I actually recommend the first organ you, you kind of start to buy and incorporate is poultry heart. So chicken heart. Chicken hearts are tiny. They're kind of the size of a mushroom and they're extremely mild. So you can literally, when you get them, you'll probably end up getting about 10 to 12 or even 15 in a container, right? And. And what you can do is just treat them. Let's say you're making a spaghetti sauce. Treat it just like you would a mushroom. Like, I'm not gonna put 10 mushrooms in that space. I might do two to three and I might chop them up, right? So just do the same thing with that chicken heart. Grab two or three, chop them up just like you would a mushroom. Or like into. Dice them, you know, and a bite size, and then throw them in that spaghetti sauce. No one will know they're there. They will all think it's a mushroom because it's got a texture of a mushroom. Then once you're ready to start graduating even further. Now let's get like a beef tongue. Beef tongues are amazing because, as you already mentioned, they're actually really tasty. They actually taste really good. They're just overwhelming because they've got this thick skin on the outside and the shape of them reminds you of your own tongue. That's the only reason, you know, they're a little overwhelming. But I always say, you know, have fun, bust up the, the, the mindset on it. So, like, if you're someone who shares things on social media, when you get a tongue, first thing you should do is hold it up to your mouth and, you know, pretend you're Gene Simmons or something like that from Kiss, right? It's like, just have fun with it. Pretend it's not this heavy thing. And then what you do is you just braise it. You just gotta. You can slow cook it, you can put it in a pressure cooker, but you basically just gotta cook it for about an hour and a half with some liquid. And what happens is that sheath will just kind of peel right off. You just slice it a little bit and it peels right off. And underneath that is this delicate, tasty muscle. And you can take that muscle and you can season it, you can saute it in some butter, you can stick it under your broiler and kind of crisp it up. And then just use a fork. And if you've cooked it long enough, it will shred just like carnitas or something like that. And what I usually recommend is if people. Because one of the ways you see tongue show up in cuisines is you show. You see it in tacos. It shows up in Mexican restaurants as langua. So, so basically treat it the same way. Let's say if you're someone who makes taco, does taco Tuesdays at home, right? Well, you're usually braising your meat, so just add the tongue when you're braising the pork shoulder or your, your barbacoa, your beef. Right. And then same the tongue is going to be smaller than that other cut. You know, shred it, cook it the way I just described and then combine it with the pork or the beef. And once again no one will know it's there. Right?

Yeah, I think that's the best. And I, you know, incorporating it into with other things I think makes it so much easier. Burger meat, nobody knows the difference when it's, when it's blended in there and you're get, you're getting the benefits of it. Yeah. And I think it's a process. I think, you know, it's not something that most people are going to do. But I think this is, I think the, this is a probably a really good. I love the flavor of this. I think it's a great strategy to get people started thinking about it. Because if you can do the seasoning and you're like oh, that's a bunch. I think it's an easier jump to get to the next part. How is, can you explain how this is process? Because I think the one of the things that people might think who is like when you process it, how do you protect the nutritional value of the organs as it's processed?

Yeah. So basically, I mean anytime we do any heat with anything, it's going to denature it slightly. The, the longer, you know, increases histamines and it denatures it. So raw is always going to be the most nutritious. Now modern technology has allowed us to also freeze dry and freeze drying is actually maintains more of the nutrition than even dehydrating just to give people something to compare to. So I would say free, it goes raw, then freeze drying or some kind of drum, drum drying something very low, low heat that allows it to dry and lose the water moisture. Because that's the key is we're preserving it. Because when you have a raw organ and you freeze dry it, you're left with about 20%. So that kind of also answers the question of like well, how concentrated is the, the organ meats in plug 100% organ down to 20% when it's freeze dried that's incredibly concentrated. Once you remove the water weight, incredibly concentrated. And we're doing five organs. Pluck has liver, heart, kidney, spleen and pancreas. And it's those concentrated organs powdered. So that right there to me kind of tells you how powerful it can even a little bit is like. So we have with Pluck we have four varieties. So we have three that have Redmond real salt and spices and herbs, organic spices and herbs, and then one that's just the organ meat and the one that's just the organize our black back. It's called pure. And I'm always telling people if you just do a teaspoon of that, that is equivalent to 2 ounces of organs. Just you know, raw, raw organs. And what's powerful about it is that you can add it to a smoothie, you can add to that spaghetti sauce I was talking about. And now you just got 2 ounces of organ meats effortlessly in your, in your, in your sauce or your dressing. But how we actually source the organ meats is so we get it from New Zealand. And honestly that's where most of the companies that sell organ meats and capsules, that's what they do as well. We, we source from New Zealand because New Zealand is an island. So they're able to very much control the, the what comes in and out of that island. And they do, they're very, very intense about it. It's one of their major exports. So they've also created a supply chain where you can get access to pretty much the whole animal. That's where most of the protein powders come from. The, the, the bone broth protein powders and the, the beef isolate protein powders. The most of them are coming from either Argentina or New Zealand. New Zealand is kind of within the industry, is known to be a better, a slightly higher quality. They're also able, the cows are able to eat green grass year round there because of the weather. Now whenever we read that a cow is 100% grass fed, it's kind of the question is, well, what grass? Because it's only green grass part of the year in the US and in most of the world. But in New Zealand you can get green grass year round. So no cow is getting green grass year round except for New Zealand. So even when you buy in a green, you know, grass fed in the US it's not green grass. It's, it's, sometimes it's, it's hay or it's dried grass. And then what they do is they sometimes ferment it to increase the digestibility of it and to increase the nutrition. So they are trying to make it as nutrient viable as they can. But the green 100% green grass is really the way to go. And then they're freeze draining as I said, which is preserving as much of the nutrients and how we recommend people use pluck is, well, you can add it to your ground meats and mix it in. It's going to preserve it. But I actually don't recommend putting it on the outside of like a steak or we talked earlier about, you know, like a ribs, you know, smoked ribs or something like that. I think a lot of times people do that. But as you can attest, when you smoke a rib or grill a rib, what happens to all the spices that you rubbed on the outside? They turn black, they get burnt. And that's the reality. Yes, we've grown an affinity for that, but it's actually not very healthy for you.

Really.

It's carcinogenic, you know, when it's. When it turns black like that. So ultimately a lot of those spices burn like paprika burns really quickly. Any kind of pepper is going to burn very fast. But what I recommend is people just use it as a finishing salt because you're going to maximize the nutrition and you're going to maximize the flavor because you want the flavor to pop and when it gets burnt, it gets bitter. So just sprinkling that flavor on top after like one of the best things. I love this, actually. If you're a steak eater, one of the best ways to use steak is you cook the steak however you want to cook it on a grill or on a stovetop. But then what you do beforehand is you make some compounded butter. So you take butter and you mix it. You let it get room temperature, you mix it with the plot until it's nice and concentrated in the butter. And then you put it in the refrigerator, kind of mold it to the shape you want it in the refrigerator. And then when that steak is ready to be served, you slice it, just cut a piece of that butter on and let the butter and the pluck just melt over it. It is phenomenal. I mean, like, it's one of the best steaks you'll ever have. You can put, you could put pluck on popcorn, you can put it on salads, you could put it in dressings. I mean, it's so versatile. Anything you can salt, you can flow. So that's why it's the gateway.

And so there's, you know, organ supplements are. I mean, they've hit a high. They did hit a little when the. When the. One of the owners of one of the big organ supplement companies, Liver King.

Liver King.

Liver King, got himself a little bit of trouble there publicly. There was maybe a little dip, but I think there. A lot of people are buying organ blends and you know, They're. I think it's a good strategy. Again, another potential bridge. But how would you compare the pluck to the capsules? You think it's just another strategy to get more organ into somebody, or do you see this as a better option, potentially?

Well, I definitely am. I, I'm, I'm never gonna poo poo on anyone else's company, first of all, because it's like, you know, running a company is incredibly hard. And so I would never disparage them. I think that any way you're gonna get these nutrients in your diet is the right way. If, if it's the one you're gonna do, whatever you can do is the right way. However, that said, there is something called the lingual neural response, and that's basically where taste communicates to our brain through neural signaling what it is that our body wants and needs. And the only way to trigger this biological communication, that's, that's basically been formed since, you know, homo, since the body was formed. You know, because keep in mind, our taste is what kept us alive. You know, if you ate something and it was bitter, that was probably poisonous. If you ate something that was sweet, it was probably nutritious. Like we, we, our bodies, our biological communication developed over, you know, 100,000 plus years, right? So this is not something that we just, just, you know, it's the last 50 years. It's like, no, no. This is established to help us survive. And what's happening when we swallow a capsule is we're bypassing that. And so that's what happens. I get, I get told this all the time. People that are taking those capsules and is, they'll say, hey, I'm following the back of the bottle. It says, take six to eight of these capsules. And I do. And I feel nauseous. And I'm like, yeah, that's probably because you don't need six to eight. I don't know what's going on in your body, but there's no way a bottle can tell you what you need. So the only way to really know is for you to eat it. And what's beautiful about our body, and I'll even share it, shows up in a few ways. But what's so beautiful about our human body is that it will tell you whether it needs it or not. You just got to be listening. So first of all, think about when a woman gets pregnant. The first month, they could still drink alcohol, it's fine. But by the second month, if they tried the second or third month, when they start to try to drink that wine, it literally tastes different. What changed? The wine didn't change. It's their body that it's, it's. The body now is doing something totally different. It's growing something different than it was before. And so thus the body, that lingual response is communicating. Hey, you shouldn't be drinking this because this will hurt what you're now growing. Right? Well, the body does the same thing with organ meats or any food that if you go to eat it, like let's say salt, for example. If I put salt on your tongue, your body will tell you when to stop. If I do the first dip, it will taste pretty good. By the second dip maybe, but definitely not the third. The third dip, your body's probably going like, you better stop. This is, is. I'm overstimulated. This is not. I don't want anymore. And the salt will literally taste gross. It will go from tasting really good to gross. Well, if I gave you a salt tablet, you swallow that salt tablet, 15, 20, 30 minutes later, you're like, wait, why am I so bloated? Oh, I got too much of something because we completely bypassed it. So I am a big, big believer in the only way to truly get back to that kind of ancestral knowledge of what your body wants and needs is to eat the food and to eat it mindfully. To not just, you know, gulp it down or to go crazy and not chew and just swallow, but to really like mindfully choose your food, mindfully eat, do it in an environment that's conducive towards, you know, joy and like positivity. Be around people when you're eating that also are positive that, you know, don't talk business at the table kind of concept. Like, because you don't want to be in a stressed out state. You want to be in a calm like absorption conducive state. And you also want to be of the right mindset where you're not thinking that the food you're eating is going to harm you. You want to be thinking that it's going to help you. These things are very, very powerful and we don't give them enough credit.

Yeah. And I think to some degree we can actually train our brain the other ways too. And I think that's part of the problem with some of these artificial sweeteners and everything else is we start to give the, we, we get more of this more processed kind of franken based foods and we, we start to change that, that neural programming and altered a little bit and Then real food doesn't, doesn't taste like it should. And the other thing, and we didn't get into it, but, you know, you, you grow some broccoli in your backyard, it's going to have a taste. You buy it at the regular grocery store, it may not have any taste, right?

No taste. Yeah, yeah. And so, and that's mindful growing. I think of that as like you're, you're mindfully thinking about the sourcing of your food and how it was grown, how long it was on the vine or in the ground, you know, or on the tree. It's like these things matter and, and it affects the flavor and it affects the nutrition of it. Absolutely.

Yeah. And I, I think to some degree it affects the toxicity. And I think this is where people are, you know, especially the carnivore world. And people are talking about plants are toxic and they're going to kill, have toxins in them. I, I think a lot of those plants are meant to be. The problem is, is that we plot, we mass produce, pull them before they're ripe forks, ripen them, which means that they haven't lost a lot of maybe the toxicity that protected them from being eaten by nature, you know, nature's animals, until they were ripe and ready to eat. And so they have, they potentially have a higher level of toxicity. But we, I think to a large degree, we, we've lost the innate understanding of what good quality food tastes like because we've eaten bland, kind of heavy, you know, heavily manufactured, heavily farmed, processed foods. And we're like, I don't know. I think, I thought broccoli was just, it tastes bland. And versus when you get a, get the broccoli from your garden, you're like, wow, that's got a really pungent, kind of mustardy taste to it. Right? No, that's, that's what, that's what broccoli tastes like. That's what a tomato actually tastes like. And I think we've lost that. And that's probably the same thing we have to do is from, especially from an organ perspective, it's kind of rebuild that and reconnect that neural pathway, bring it back because it's innate inside of us. But if you don't ever use it, that pathway gets kind of gets tamped down.

So I think I was going to share that. There's a professor of archaeology, his name is Bill Schindler. He wrote a book called Eat Like a Human. He's got a fantastic quote. We are the only species in the world that looks to someone else to tell us what to eat. It always just kind of floors me when I hear that quote. Because here's the thing. There's nearly 9 million species in the world. So for us to be the only one that doesn't know what to eat, it tells you how far we've really come, you know, and how messed up we've, we've made it for ourselves by putting profit over health.

Yeah, I, I totally agree. And I, I tell people all the time when, when I'm trying to get them like my, when they're like, what do I need a multivitamin? Like, I, I would suggest the digestive enzyme to help you break down the food you're already eating to get the most nutritional value, some type of organ or organ supplement. And those things would be before you even consider or think about a multivitamin. Because if you eat the, if you get Eato organ blend, you're getting so much nutritional value if you're eating. We have a habit of eating 80% of the time, whole food based diet. The nutrition is going to be in there and you just have to be able to break it down and digest it better.

So I mean, and ultimately the question that becomes is like, well, easier said than done. Right. Because we're, we're dealing with, you know, addictions, we're dealing with mass marketing of these ultra processed foods. You know, we only know what we know. Right. So if you're eating these foods, like this is kind of the argument around young people. Right. Young people will eat these foods, don't feel any effects, so they don't see the problem. Right. But we only know what we know. And so I'm always trying to just tell people, look, just choose one thing, one thing you can do this week. And the best thing that you can do when you're buying food is just buy things that are an ingredient versus that have ingredients. Yeah, just start there. You know, it doesn't have to get much more complicated than that and then, and then start to lower these ultra processed foods that we are getting into our diet randomly or consciously, you know, whatever it is. But we, but the only way we're going to get change is kind of what I said earlier, which is we got to stop buying the foods that we don't want to see on the shelves.

Yeah.

And we're, we're all guilty of this. We're all good. We're all going to the grocery stores or the fast food places or the restaurants and we're like, oh, well, I just do it in moderation. It's okay. It's like. No, no, no. It will never change if you keep going to it. Never.

Yeah, I, I totally agree there. So let's do this. Let's talk about where people can learn more about flock, that if they're interested in checking this out, where do they go and what would you know, where do they start? You have a number of different things there. Obviously you might be like prime. All right. But like, where would you say? I would say this, you know, if I would say that the original is a great, great place to start.

But absolutely, yeah, it's. So find us@eatpluck.com. you can also find it on Amazon. If you're an Amazon shopper. It's just easy. Just add it to your order there. But yeah, the original, the yellow bag that you showed everyone at the beginning, that that is the, the original luck, like that is the first product we came out with. So I definitely think if you're interested in the seasonings, that's a good place to start. It kind of has a flavor like, I don't know if you'd agree, but it's kind of like Old Bay or Lowry's. It's got that kind of all purpose seasoning kind of flavor to it.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So then we have this spicy, which is you take the original and just add a little cayenne to it. It's very mild. Because the whole goal, Pluck, is to truly be a gateway for not just the adults, but for the kids too. So I didn't want to make anything too extreme, but it's got a little bit of heat at the end. You get flavor first and heat. And the proportions are slightly different of the other ingredients. And so that one has a little bit more of like a barbecue taste to it, even though there's no sweetener in it. And then the zesty garlic is really cool. That I would say probably that would be your second best bet, is start with the original and maybe go to Zesty Garlic. But the zested garlic is what we call aip and it's got no nightshades and no seeds for anyone that has issues with those. And what I love about that one is if anyone out there that's listening is aip, you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about is like every seasoning for AIP is turmeric based. Like, it's just like you cannot escape the flavor profile that most of the industry is focused on for aip. And I'm so. I'M just really happy that anyone will like zesty garlic. But if you're aap, you're going to really like it because it's completely different from what is out there on the market. And all three of those are really great gateways. They're, they're ones that are more savory than, than other. Like they're really things that are going to add flavor to the foods, flavor and nutrition to the food you're adding it to. The black bag is more specific. It's just the organ meats. No salt, no spices nor herbs. That one's called pure. Now that one, what's cool about that one is it can go sweet or savory. So you could add that to a smoothie. Like I think I said that earlier, you could add that to even brownies. If you're making brownies, you could add it to that. Like no one will know as long as you keep the, the, the amount you're adding smaller than the, the entire, the rest of the, the, the recipe.

The.

Also, the really cool thing about pure is you can give it to pets like cats and dogs. Most pet food does not have organ meat in it, most particularly the dry food. It doesn't, it should, but it doesn't. And so you just add a sprinkle of that onto their food and they will go crazy, particularly if they're a picky eater. It's truly amazing for that. But what ultimately the pure is as well, is it your gateway to control what you're doing? Like if you're like, hey man, I, I have, I have seasonings, I love my seasonings. I don't want to mess with those, then great, keep your seasonings and then buy pure and then add pure to your seasoning. Just, you know, add the proportion of organ meats to your seasoning that fit your taste, your, you know, your, your flavor profile. Like the pure is there for you to be in control of it. I just want you to get the organ meats. And, and pure is no different than what you're getting from capsules. It's just not in capsules. And it's a little cheaper. That's really it. But it's the same quality. Sourcing from 100 grass fed cows from New Zealand. So you kind of, I tried to really make it very easy to get. You have lots of different choices. We use about 17, I'm trying to get it to 20%, but about 17% organ meats to our flavored bags. I have found that that's kind of, I can Go to about that. And it won't affect the flavor. You know, you won't taste organ meats.

Right.

So to me, the flavors are more like maintenance. You're just doing that every day, every meal. Like I said, it's very versatile. You can put on anything, but you can just kind of go on autopilot with it. And if you get organ meats on the side, great. If you get more, you're still golden. It's not going to push you into a danger zone because it's. It's very kind of well balanced. But if you're someone who's like, look, I've been tested, you know, Dr. Eric, he told me that I was anemic. I need to get organ meats. I need a certain amount. Then I would get the black bag, and I would just either add more of the black bag to the other bags, or I would just do a teaspoon of that a day, because that's 2 ounces. Organize right there.

Awesome. Well. And I know we'll finish with this. I know you've done some. You've got. You've authored or co authored a few cookbooks. Is there any of your cookbooks that you kind of have recipes for organ meats? Or is it on the. Do you have that on your. On your pluck website of how to get more organ. Organ meats into your regular diet?

Yeah, so I would definitely go to our website. We have. It's all free. Go to recipes. It's at the top of the site. There's tons of recipes, and they don't just have pluck like they. There's organ meat recipes.

It's.

It's kind of a little bit of everything to show you. And they're very good recipes. They're not. Some of them are for me, but I've curated a lot of recipes from really talented chefs and just passionate cooks, you know, so really, really great recipes. The. The cookbooks that I did, I did not actually incorporate organ meats back in the day, so. So those ones don't have them. However, I'm in the process of working on one now, and that one is going to. Basically, I'm going through. I'm grabbing all my historic recipes that I make because I've made some really, really solid recipes over. Over the years that are really easy and flavorful. So I don't want to necessarily reinvent the wheel. I'm going to take those, but I'm going to really help to make kind of this ancestral eating very everyday. And that's actually the name of the cookbook is Everyday Ancestral. So it's going to show people how to incorporate these foods into your diet so easily, effortlessly, and in a daily manner.

Awesome. Well, James, I, I appreciate you coming on the the podcast. We'll be sure to make sure we put the information out there, a link to the website. I'm a fan, and I'd recommend everybody at least give these guys give it a shot. It is. I thought, I thought it was really, really good. So kudos to you and coming up with the product. And, yeah, we'll get more people involved and get them on the gateway to get more organ meats. I think this will be really helpful.

All right, awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate the talk.