Reclaim Your Health Through the Carnivore Diet with Dr. Shawn Baker

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I'm JJ Virgin PhD dropout. Sorry mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. The carnivore diet. Now I'm sure you've heard of it. It's the diet where you only eat meat. Or maybe you eat some meat and chicken and eggs and fish and some dairy products. Well, today we are going to dive into this dietary approach that has been literally sparking like crazy heated debates in the nutrition world and turning conventional wisdom really on its head. The Carnivore Diet strips things back to the basics. It asks the question, what if by simplifying your diet to its most basic form, you could potentially alleviate chronic health issues, boost your energy and even avoid surgery. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that's exactly what we're going to be exploring today. To guide us through this paradigm shifting conversation, we have the incredible Dr. Sean Baker. Dr. Baker brings a unique perspective to the world of nutrition. He's an orthopedic surgeon who's witnessed firsthand the transformative power of diet on health. He's become a leading voice in the nutrition revolution. He's the co founder of Revero, a world leading authority on medical nutritional therapy and an Amazon best selling author. Dr. Baker Dr. Baker's journey from the operating room to the forefront of dietary science provides invaluable insights into how what we eat can dramatically impact our health and well being. Dr. Baker will share the science behind the carnivore diet and its potential impact on everything from gut health to joint pain. We're going to challenge the status quo of nutrition advice and explore why the typical eat everything in moderation approach might not be serving everyone. And we're going to share plenty of practical, actionable strategies you can start implementing today. Whether you're dealing with chronic health issues, looking to optimize your athletic performance, or just curious about a different type of diet, this episode is your roadmap to understanding a way of eating that's both ancient and cutting edge. Let's dive into this game changing conversation with the phenomenal Dr. Shawn Baker foreign. Hey, it's J.J. here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend, and honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time and that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year. @monarch.com with code Virgin the holidays are all about family.

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Dr. Sean Baker I am super thrilled that you said yes, you didn't know what you were getting yourself into.

But I'm happy now.

All right, all right, all right. We actually are very symbiotic in that. I love elimination diets, and I see the carnivore diet is the. The ultimate elimination diet and a great tool. And where I would love to start is what it actually is, because I think there's a lot of information floating about, and I'd like people to really know the ins and outs.

Yeah. You know, I. I think if we make the assumption that food impacts our health, which I think is a pretty reasonable assumption.

It's reasonable, but yet unknown.

Yeah.

Surprisingly, it's surprising that many physicians don't even, you know, gastroenterologists say food has nothing to do with things like Crohn's disease. I'm like, that seems very bizarre. But if we make the assumption that food is contributing to disease or how we feel, and we have a diet that consists of thousands of things, if you eliminate one or two of those, you still left, you know, another 900 in there that you can't fill up. You can't tell because sometimes multiple things cause problems. So eliminating things down to the most simplest form as possible is something that is providing reasonable nourishment, something like a carnivore diet. This makes sense. And I kind of talk about it as a therapeutic tool. I mean, it's been very efficacious for things like autoimmune disease, cardiometabolic disease, obesity, food addiction, those things that are increasingly more common. You look at autoimmunity, it's right now in the United States, it's estimated between 22 and 50 million people suffer from that. We have 11% of the population suffering from diabetes. We have maybe a quarter of the population has some sort of mental health disorder. So it's like, there's a lot of people that can benefit from this sort of thing. And so, in essence, it's basically kind of animal terms. I mean, for most people, they have some level of variety where they might include eggs and meat and cheese, a little bit of dairy products. But for some people, it can be as simple as just steak and water, which is kind of crazy, it sounds like, but it's. It's literally, that is something you can sustain for a. A fairly long period of time. I've done it for years at a time with no, you know, no ill effects. I think that a lot of things like autoimmune disease, inflammatory processes begin in the gut. And if our gut is inflamed irritated. You think about, you think about what? How do we interact with the world? Most people think that our skin is our, our largest organ and has the most interaction with the external environment. But really our skin is designed to keep things out. First of all, right, so you're not absorbing that much to your skin or you're not supposed to. Whereas our gut, you know, people don't understand this, but from our mouth, through our stomach, through all the way through our intestines is actually external to our body. 70% of our immune system presides in our gut. The service area of our gut is estimated to be about the size of a tennis court. Right? So you have a tennis court size surface area of something that's designed to absorb things. So most of our interaction with the, with the world from a volume standpoint is going through our gut. And so what we put in our mouth has a huge impact on our body. So something like a carnivore diet or any other elimination diet has been tremendously efficacious. And I think this is obviously said this is the, like the, you know, it's just like the, the ultimate elimination diet.

Yeah, that's what I looked at it when. I love elimination diets. I think that they are the ultimate, like the original biohacking. When you really look at it, we're connecting the dots, right?

I mean, we're sitting here at a biohacking conference and I, you know, I look at all these various inputs that you can provide which can have some efficacy, but really, if you don't stop poisoning yourself, I don't care what you do, you can stand in front of red lights all day long. Don't stop poisoning yourself.

Amen. Well, don't you think that the fastest way that you can turn your health around is to change what's at the end of your fourth.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely for sure.

Now I'm glad I asked that first question because I had thought and that the carnivore diet meant that you had to eat, what do they call it, from hoof to snout.

Oh, nose to tail.

And I'm like, oh, no. Yeah, so you don't, you could just.

No, you do not have to sit there and eat raw testicles and raw liver like you see some people do. And that's, that's just kind of, I think that's for entertainment purposes only. I mean, literally, I've been tracking, you know, I took a survey of 12,000 people on this side, Harvard University, when they studied this, of 2,000 people, I specifically asked David Dead Ludwig and Melinda Leonards in Harvard to ask this question. I said, discern between people that consume Morty meats and those that don't. And the outcomes were equivalent. There was no difference in resolution of disease, no increase or decrease incidence of deficiency symptoms. So it's unnecessary.

How quickly when you start this, do you start to see people shift and feel better?

So I think the metabolic transition takes between three and eight weeks for most people. There are people that symptomatic, like gut issues. A lot of people have noticed that bloating goes away a lot because a lot of, you know, you see a lot with women there, they've been brainwashed to just eat low fat, eat salads all the time, maybe have a tiny little piece of chicken on there.

Right.

And then they're binging on ice cream at night because they're starving and they're complaining that their guts are all swollen. And they say, oh, that's normal. It's not normal for your gut to hurt. I don't care. We wouldn't accept that in any other organ system in our body. If we were walking around and we had chest pain, we would say, there's a problem. I walk around, my knee hurts, there's a problem. But we accept, oh, bloating and discomfort as normal. It's really not. It either means reading the wrong food, which is most likely the case, or our gut is broken somehow. So when I see people dealing with diseases by three months, most people see some sort of inflection point. So many people see it earlier. Most people buy three months. So I said, if you're going to do it, do it for three months. Give it a fair shot and, you know, make a decision. Either works for you or not. At worst, you ate a bunch of steaks or something like that, which is not, not that bad of a thing.

Right. I say if I had to do one diet for the rest of my life, I could easily live on steak.

Yeah.

With some coffee.

And you can, you can.

That would be the reality. That would be my trifecta diet. Now, when you say carnivore, does that mean it is just meat? Would it be a meat, chicken, fish, or is it really meat?

You can do it with variety for sure. Most people, for some. And I think there's reasons why this occurs. And most people tend to gravitate towards ruminant meat, whether it be for lamb, particularly in this country. But I mean, you can do it with fish, chicken, pork, seafood, some people eggs, if they tolerate, some people dairy, if they tolerate dairy. Is One of those ones which is kind of a gray area for Moaning Ripple. But yeah, I mean, it can, it can be tremendously varied. However, funnily enough, the longer you do it, the more you just want a damn steak. It's just like, just give me a steak. Yeah, you just get drawn to that because it's, it's kind of primitively and viscerally satisfying in a way that a lot of other foods are. If you think about, like our human evolutionary, you know, time. Well, for a long period of time, the only technology we had to hunt with was a spear up until about around 80,000 years. And can you imagine how many birds you could get with a sphere? It's not very efficient. So we were starting out the big, big megafaul animals. You know, kill a large animal you can eat for several weeks and you only got to hunt once. If you're chasing birds around with a spear, good luck with that.

Yeah. And you probably expended more calories in the, in the hunt. So what about nutrient deficiencies? I'm sure you get asked this all the time.

Yeah. So one of the things people ask about particularly is what about phytonutrients, these, these wonderful polyphenols and all those types of things. So it's interesting and most people don't know that, but there's a great bit of research that I got in, Stefan Van Vliet out of Duke University has done with another guy named Fred Provenza, and they've demonstrated that actually, believe it or not, beef has something like 70,000 individual nutrients. It's not just protein, fat, a couple of vitamins. It's 70,000 unique compounds to include many, many of the vital nutrients that the cow consumes. So the cow actually has a more diverse diet than you or I can, we can't. I can't go out eating grass and leaves. I get sick. They can do that. They, they actually bioaccumulate a lot of these phytonutrients. And not only are they there, but they're more bioavailable to us. You know, when you eat a big diet from the fibrous vegetables and fruits, the fiber. Actually there's a nice study from 1978 that showed that by consuming a high fiber diet, you lose twice as much protein, twice as much fat, twice as much carbohydrate from the food. So it's inefficient. You think about, you know, food prices are going up. Does it make sense to have half your nutrition end up in the toilet? So it's very nutrient dense. The only thing people talk about is vitamin C. Are we going to get stirred from vitamin C? We've known for at least 100 years or probably since, since the days of Arctic exploration back in the, you know, late 1800s, early 1900s, that actually if you have access to fresh meat, Lily cures scurvy, that prevents and cures scurvy. And the reason these sailors used to get scurvy back in the day was because they were eating dried preserved meat as their, as their source of nutrition. And that doesn't work as long as it's fresh. And I don't mean you got to eat it, you know, from a warm animal. I mean as long as it's not been dried and canned and preserved, it provides enough to prevent things like scurvy. And I've yet to see it. I've literally as a physician, I've seen thousands upon thousands of people on this diet. I've yet to see somebody with any sort of demonstrate or mature deficiency. You know, it's such, it's. And we have, with regard to vitamin C, we have all these compensatory mechanisms like most people don't know. You can actually recycle vitamin C in the red salts. Most people don't know that. The glucose molecule and the vitamin C molecule are very similar. They're almost identical except for one small difference. They use the same, they use the same transporters. And when there's a high amounts of glucose around, vitamin C transport is, is, is minimized. When glucose is lower, which happens on a lower carb diet, we get more vitamin C shuttling.

So how important is it to get grass finished? Because I know that everything's grass fed. So is the grass finished?

What's right? Right. So that's an interesting question. It's a question I get all the time.

Sure.

The data that we have on humans, there's not much. So there's, there's no real studies that show that. I mean, yes, there are nutritional differences. You can say grass finished beef on average has more conjugated linoleic acid, has more vitamin A, more vitamin E, you know, things like that. But the outcome studies in humans, there's been really two studies have been done. One Texas, Texas A and M did it about 2014 comparing grassfen versus grain finish hamburger meat and looking at like biomarkers like cholesterol and things like that. So really no, no significant difference. Another study was done in Australia looking at grass finish cattle and kangaroo meat. No brain finished cattle and kangaroo meat. So it wasn't really a apples to apples comparison. They saw that the grain finish cattle had a higher rate of postprandial or after meal inflammation, which we're not sure what that really means.

Wouldn't it just be because there's more arachidonic acid in that fat? I mean, kangaroo meat would be really lean.

Well, it is gonna be very. Yeah. So it's not a really accurate comparison. So the real answer is we don't really have good evidence to show one is better than the other, at least from a human health standpoint. Now, environmentally there are some benefits, clearly. I mean, you know, but just because it says grass finish on a label is very, is very misleading because that just means a cow has access to grass if it warrants. It may not eat it. It may just be still be finished out on, you know, hay or silage or something like, or even grain. They can still let call it grass finish. There is, you know, in my experience, again, this is the same thing. The Harvard study I've surveyed 12,000 people asking about does it make a difference? Again, for most people know there are people that anecdotally will say I feel better on grass finished beef, but there's some people say I feel better on grain fetish beef. So it's kind of interesting. So I, I can't in good conscious tell you that you should only eat grass fish meat because some people find it one financially difficult for some reason. Some people don't like it, you know, because it tastes different. It definitely tastes different. The other thing is grass finishing and I love regenerative branches. I support those guys all the time. But it's a skill that is more difficult. Grain finishing is easy, it's formulaic. They're very consistent results. You know what it's going to taste like. Some people prefer that with grass finishing. I've had some really wonderful grass finished but, but likewise, I've had some stuff that's like, I'm not a big fan.

So kind of like a car tire.

So the real answer is at this point in 2024, eat what you enjoy.

Well, what you have access to.

Access to what you enjoy.

When you dine out sometimes you're like, yeah, what are you going to do? I just recently was listening to a podcast and I heard this statistic and I went and you basically alluded to it where you were talking about what you would have to do to digest and how much you would lose. And they were talking about the difference between eating a mixed meal. Because I'm all about how much Protein you're getting. Cause I work with women and they do eat enough protein, so that's true. You know, but he was talking about when you eat a mixed meal, that you're absorbing less of those essential amino acids versus if you just ate straight meat versus if you just took essential amino acids. Can you unpack that one?

Right, yeah. So it's interesting. Like, we hear about things like polyphenols are great, but actually polyphenols block the absorption of protein and fats. So it's like, what's the net effect here? And there are numerous studies that show that different nutritional mixtures. And you mentioned mixed meals. Often things like phytic acid, which is high in things like grains and legumes and things like that actually binds minerals. It interferes with the absorption, a whole host of things. So it's like you have to eat more of it, you know, and, and deal with the. Maybe more calories to get the same amount of nutrition. In fact, like, there's. We know that with the RDA right now for things like zinc, for instance, if you have 1000mg of phytic acid in your diet, you have to double your zinc reform. You have two pills, that's one gram, two grams of, you know, phytic acid, which you get in grains and, and ordoons. You have to triple your shake intake just to make up for that.

And what would, what would that look like in terms of a serving?

So, you know, you might have like a cup, like a cup of cereal, you know, your standard cereal, which I don't recommend anybody eat anyway, but. But that would literally double your sacred fiber for that meal. And so, you know. And then where are you going to get your zinc from? Well, obviously seafood, things like that. Meat, of course, good sources of that.

Yeah. I would wonder with carnivore diet, if it's actually people get to a point where it's hard to keep their weight up.

Yes, that is. That is probably.

Which is a problem every woman wants to have is how do I keep my weight down?

Yeah.

But I can't.

See, that is one thing. And, you know, it's. It's great if you want to lose weight. And many people do lose weight on that. Not everybody, but most people. And it's, you know, we have this crazy. Well, as I'm sure you're aware of the ozempic stuff. Right. Everybody's on this magnetite.

Right.

And it's interesting. There are studies looking at beef isolate being incredibly potent at stimulating GLP1. It's like nature's.

So with bone broth protein like the.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, B5 says bone broth protein, but, but beef in general, it's got we in there. So that actually, and the way that system is supposed to work is we have something called the ileal brain. So our digestive system, we look at the stomach, then you have the, the first part of the small intestine called the duodenum, then the jujutum, then finally the ilium. And in the ilium there are cells that sense nutrients and there is these so called L cells which is secrete G up 1. So when nutrients wind their way through the digestive tract and they stimulate those L cells, it says, hey, we got too much food coming in right now. Slow things down so we can digest and absorb it. So the drugs artificially manipulates that system and it slows it down for days and weeks where you get all backed up. Whereas meat tells you to slow it down just for, you know, five minutes or so until you get so you have a chance to digest and absorb that stuff. So meat is just an incredibly. I mean it's an efficient food. You think about if I were going to build a brick house, right. I'd like a lot of bricks. You know, I don't want straw and mud because a lot more work. And that's really the analogy between plant consumption and animal consumption. Every cell in my body is an animal cell and everything I need is contained in animal cells. I know it sounds simplistic, but.

Right.

You know, if you look at the history of every animal species on the planet, something like 85% of every animal has ever flown, swam and walked on earth has been carnivorous because it's easier, it's more efficient. To be herbivorous you have to have all these extra anatomic digestive adaptations that have occurred. Like, you know, a hindgut flamer, like a horse or foregut fermenter or women, like a cow, they have this specialized adaptation. So we don't have very much of that as humans. We can, you know, if we compare ourselves to other primates, a chimpanzee can get up to 40 to 50% of its calories from fiber. Humans can get about 4% of our calories. So it's kind of one of those things where it's like you get a little bit, but it's not the main deal. The main deal is that were designed for hardware wise is basically meat.

So you brought up fiber and that was definitely one of the questions. I'm sure you get asked a lot because gut microbiome is such the buzz now. And fiber, you know the General recommendation of 30 grams.

Right.

How do you reconcile this diet and the fiber?

Right. So I will tell you with 100% certainty fiber is not essential. If it was, I'd be dead a long time ago. I basically consume essentially no fiber in eight years and I'm fine. Go to the bathroom normally every day. There's a nice paper that a guy named Tommy Wood and Lucy bailey did in 2021. It talks about the metabolic flexibility of the gut. And the main benefit with regard to the microbiome and the gut with, with regard to fiber is thought to be the creation of something called butyrate or butyric acid with cells used for energy. Right. But that pathway is not unique to fiber. There are many, many ways to get that. Actually pro protein can actually be broken down into these short chain amino fatty acids. If you are a low carbon, you're starting to produce ketones that beta hydro 2 butyrate, which sounds very much like butyric acid. We're only one hydroxyl molecule apart. It's a very easily reversible reaction. So you get plenty of gut energy for that. So it's not really, it's not really an issue. So fiber was conditionally beneficial. If you're eating a western junk food diet of cookies and cakes and potato chips. Yeah. Eat some fruits and vegetables. It's got to displace some of that, I think really a high fiber diet. Most of these studies are associational studies and they're really a marker of diet quality. If I eat a high fiber diet, I'll probably eat whole fruits, vegetables, whole grains and so on and so forth. And I'm not eating as much of that pure junk process. But what are you comparing it to? So yeah, anything's going to look good compared to the standard junk food diet.

I think back, I did a reality show called Freaky Eaters and it was where people were basically, they got hooked on one thing and that's all they would eat. So there were a lot of French fried people.

Oh goodness.

But there were two guys. One would only eat raw meat.

Right.

And one would only eat meat.

Right.

And they wanted to show, we would do all of this to show how bad this was because the, the girlfriends and wives wanted them to be able to eat everything.

Right? Right.

Except I went and did stool tests, lab tests and, and body comp and I go, they look perfect.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm trying to find the thing.

Maybe I could Find some like parasites in the stool and try and find something.

But yeah, it's interesting because I've seen a number of people now that have actually had, you know, gut microbiome diversity checks and it's actually gotten better by going carnivore. So they actually become more diverse.

Wow.

So it's, it's, it's surprising. It's surprising. You think? And the note, you know, I've got a case series that we, we've submitted written up on Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. You know, biopsy, biopsy, proven colonoscopy, proven Crohn's disease, an intervention which was clearly documented. Carnivore diet for three or six months. You repeat biopsy and colonoscopy, disease is gone. Right.

Wow.

That is that. That study is now sitting there at Harvard and also at Monterey Tech waiting on the IRB to approve it because the institutional review board is saying, well, we don't know if it's ethical to publish this data, which I think is insane.

It's so clear based agenda. That's so ridiculous.

Such a propaganda.

It's not ethical. It's, it's not ethical not to publish.

I agree.

Double negatives are hard. Right. Is when someone does this, do they go straight into it or is there better off to do an adaptation transition period? What works best?

I think it depends on the person. You know, there are people that are profoundly sick. They're diabetic, maybe they're a lot of diabetic medicine, they have hypertension, maybe they're on mental health drugs and those things. Probably in that situation it makes sense to taper down, taper down the fiber, taper down the carbohydrate. Don't quit coffee right away because that's a, that's a disaster.

Why would you ever quit coffee?

Well, that's true.

What am I, what am I hearing? I thought we were friends.

Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. But yeah, I think for some people, if they're, if they're generally pretty healthy, maybe younger maybe they've already kind of been used to a lower carb diet and then you can kind of transition right away. But I find a lot of people, because there are, there are concerns for transitioning right away. Some people get profoundly low on energy.

I was going to say they'd be exhausted. They're used to fueling glucose all the time.

Yeah. You, you do best with what you're adapted to. And most people are adapted to, you know, they've been eating that way for 20, 30 40, 50 years, you can't expect within a few days or weeks to just totally, you know, be ready to transition over.

Now what about types of meat? Like when someone's doing this is are they better off eating higher fat cuts? So they.

Yeah. So if, if you are at a point where you're not consuming carbohydrates, you got to get energy from somewhere. Right. And, and proteins is not a protein's wonderful, as you and I both know, but it's not a great source of energy. I mean, we can, we can do it. And it's, you know, the nice thing about it is it's kind of inefficient so you can actually eat right. Protein.

It's really hard to gain weight eating protein.

Yeah.

You know, you look at guys like Jose Antonio's work where they gave bodybuilders 5 grams per kilo and they couldn't figure out where it went. There was no fat gain. It was just like protein and it disappeared to them. I find, you know, women probably tend to do a little better with a little bit of higher fat because women in general, sorry, are a little. Have a little more body fat than men.

Well, they do. Men have 3 to 5% essential fat. Women have.

Right.

10 to 15.

Right. So women are probably going to do better with a little bit higher fat push. Now, typically from a caloric standpoint, it looks like anywhere between 60 and 80% fat, which means 20 to 40% protein, which is clearly a high protein diet. I mean, the average American eats 15% protein, which is hepatic. Clearly too low. Right. So yeah, I mean, the fat becomes important and then how do you assess that really? It's kind of like how do I feel? How much energy do I have? I mean, there's amount that you're going to need and you know, you got to figure out how to tolerate it because some people, a lot of fat, they don't do well. Maybe they need sensitive stomach. Yeah. So they've got a, they've got to maybe space it out. They've got to be careful with rendered fat. Rendered fat processes a little differently than whole fat. You know, you think about what our stomach does. If I eat a steak, like a prime, you know, beautiful, well, marbled steak.

I'm so hungry right now, as you're talking about this.

That's great. I had some great stuff last night. Yeah. The others right across the street.

Yeah, we had a tomahawk. We had a 48 house tomahawk.

Good for you.

Well, not just me, that would be there Were three of us than the toast.

That's a one person.

My husband and I will do that easily.

But no, but with a fat digestion, if I, you know, if I eat like a big old ribeye steak, right, My stomach has to spend about three or four hours breaking it down into liquid and little by little it'll go into the duodenum. If I eat a big blob of rendered fat, a big blob of butter, grease, right sort of liquid, the stomach has nothing, it has literally nothing to do to it. So it just shoots it all into the small intestine and then comes overwhelmed and then you have bloating and diarrhea and things like that. So you just have to be careful with the vat, the type and how much you eat at one sitting. So some people might find initially they just have to eat maybe three or four smaller meals until they get used to it. Because there is a process where our body adapts and we have different differential expression of different gut cells. You know, because the gut's turning over, every one or two days we have a new set of gut cells. So it takes a while for that to happen. Enzymes are being upregulated. So fat is absolutely important. People with like central nervous system issues, like things like multiple sclerosis, which I've seen, believe it or not, respond tremendously well to include people MRIs where the plaques start going away, they become asymptomatic. So you know, mental health issues. Remember, our brain is large, it can standposed to fat. And if we're not getting it, you know, wonder everybody's so stupid these days.

And do you think you can get enough Omega 3s from this from the meat that you would need to supplement?

Yeah, I mean it's interesting. You don't really need a lot of omega 3. The requirement is fairly small. Now you can like again I use it for.

I have a son with a traumatic brain injury and bipolar. So we're always pushing out.

I mean it's clearly beneficial, right. And again I think it has to do with great herbs bioavailability absorption. So grain finish has a little bit less than grass finish, but both of them are pretty good. And if you really, really wanted to push Jim bag of three, just eat a piece of fish once a week. You know, throw a piece of salmon in there, some other fatty fish and you're going to be, you're going to.

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Have ample.

So I don't know if you saw this paper recently and probably did so such a buzz all over the Internet about there's no upper limit for protein.

Yeah, that was somebody out of Finland.

The 100 gram. What's your comment on that?

Well it's interesting because don't know if you know what Don Layman is. Don. Don talked. Don's the guy who discovered the leucine trigger.

Right.

And I saw his criticism study one thing he was saying, well it was, it was used, it was a study uses casein, which is a slower digestion study solar digesting protein. This comparative groups were 20 grams versus 100 grams. And it said it could have been 20 grams, was it 50 grams and you might have saw a difference, you know, from 50 to 80. Right. So it was kind of not the ideal study. Although it was quadruply label. They had like four different isotopes they labeled I believe, you know, because I asked Don, I've interviewed Don, I said Don, you know, most of the studies you've done on you know, 30 gram, you know, boluses, it's often protein powder. It's absorbed very differently. If I sit there and eat a two pound steak, what is happening with me? And he says, you know, we really don't have data on that. That and what we do know is that when I eat a, like I said, this is old glp. One thing when I eat a big old steak, it's going to take 12, 16, 18 hours for me to absorb all those amino acids. So, so it's almost like I'm eating multiple meals because it's not being absorbed right away. As opposed to protein powder which absorption characteristics are very rapid, especially whey. Right. So I, I, I don't think, I think you can eat certainly more than 30 grams in one meal and still produce muscle. I mean I, you know, I, I'm, you know, I'm almost six years of age. I put on 10 pounds of muscle in the last eight years eating nothing but two, three pounds of meat in one one setting. So it's definitely doable.

Yeah. I find the only thing that's limiting me is like I get full.

Yeah.

And I guess.

Yeah, well that's, that's the limiting factor. That's the thing about Carnival. A lot of women will say and that is a lot of women have to, they have to break it down into smaller meals because it's so easy to fall into this. Well and it's, it's I think it's probably normal two meals a day type of pattern. You know we've been trained to eat six or seven times that we've been trained to graze from 7am to 10pm it's like three meals and three snacks and maybe another extra meal on top of that.

The forced meal.

Don't you remember in Taco Bell was.

Marketing that fourth meal hobbits where he's got.

Yeah.

Breakfast. Yeah.

Well it was happened when the low fat thing happened and all of a sudden we're like starving to that we have to eat all the time and then we're having stuff snack wells which that really just sent us over.

It didn't even taste good.

No, but. And no one ever ate just one. You kept eating them and eating them. I just completely lost my train of thought. But what I would love to know is what your diet is like now. Like do you. Is there a place for fruits and vegetables? You know, are there foods beyond ultra processed foods that you just think are problematic we should avoid?

Yeah, I mean it's interesting because you know, you think this is an extreme diet. Why would anybody just only eat meat again? I think it is a therapeutic tool. I think if you want to fix a broken gut, this is a great way to do it. It might take three months, it might take six months, it might take a year. But you know, you think about it, humans are omnivorous. We've eaten fruits and vegetables and other foods for, you know, for as long as we've been humans quite honestly. But I think the current diet is so God awful bad that it makes people unable to tolerate things that we probably could have tolerated in the past. You know, when you're like, like you think about it, most of us when we were kids, we weren't sick. We were running around with tummy aches and bloody ghosts.

Overweight kids, right.

You didn't see the overweight kids. And I think there's something that changes over time and your capacity to handle these things is a problem. So I think, I think an elimination diet like the carnival diet is almost like a reset button in a way. Like let me just hit the factory set, factory reset settings and then I can slowly try to reintroduce this thing. I encourage people to do that. I say fix whatever issue is causing a problem and then see what you can tolerate. And some people have great success. I've seen people with Crohn's disease that now are eating, I mean mostly meat, but they're still including a little bit of maybe A sweet potato or some avocado or some, a little bit of fruit and things like that and they're doing just fine. So I think there's nothing wrong with that. Again, it's personal preference. You know, some people, some people like the simplicity of like, should I cook a steak and I'm done.

I would imagine a lot of people go on this and never go back. It's so much easier.

A lot of people are so profoundly, positively affected and are so kind of pissed off about how they felt, they've been misled. They're like, it's easy and it's, you know, I mean, honestly, it's pretty enjoyable. I mean, I, I don't like not look forward to eating a big old ribeye steak every day. I was like, I'm, I'm happy. I feel like I'm luckiest guy on earth. You know, you think about it, this is how only royalty, you're eaten for most of human, you know, most of modern, modern humanity, you know, before, you know, if you're a peasant, you're getting dirty grains and some dirty vegetables and maybe, maybe somebody throwing a piece of spleen once in a while and you get lucky. But this is, you know, it's quite enjoyable, surprisingly so.

Are you sure, carnivore or do you put some other things in here and there? So I like what happens if you are have your birth. Like someone gave you a birthday.

So interesting. Yeah. So I am not religious, right. I'm like, if I'm at home, I'm cooking for myself. I'll just get, I'll just make myself a steak. I probably, without exaggeration, in the last eight years have eaten 10,000 steaks. I mean, I'm not. That's legit. I will include dairy products occasionally. Sometimes I have some yogurt, some cheese. Sometimes I'll have eggs. Sometimes I'll have fish. Every once in a while I'll have a little small piece of fruit. And every really once in a while I'll have a piece of cake. You know, it's just like, you know, but not, you know, it's like once or twice a year maybe at most, like my kid will have a birthday and like dad have a piece of cake to sell my birth. I have a little small piece and I don't, you know, again, it's, it's what you do. The vast majority of time is going to dictate what's going on because, I mean, we all live in a world there's air pollution and sound pollution. You can't hide from everything. So you got to, you got to, you got to live in the world that you're in. And sometimes, I mean, the honest answer is, I mostly don't want that stuff, which is kind of cool. That's really underrated because people say this is such a restrictive diet. And I'm like, it's actually pretty freeing because I don't, I'm not addicted to this crap anymore. I can leave it if I want. I'll have it, but I really want it.

Well, I mean, the biggest thing with protein is it's so satisfying. It's two things. It's satiating, but more than that, it's satisfying. Like, you stop. I put people on just a seven day eat protein first challenge. And the big things I see is they're not hungry, but they don't have cravings either. People will be not hungry and have cravings and eat. So you got to have both those.

Yeah, there's that concept of satiety versus satiation. How do you feel right after you eat versus how long you're not hungry for? And you get that. You know, we get people that like, like I said, they fall into this natural rhythm of two meals a day, typically for most. And that's, you know, that's, that's probably beneficial because if you're, you know, like I remember when I was, you know, when I was operating on patient, I go by the doctor's bake room and there'd be a bunch of donuts in there and I like, I'm not gonna eat that stuff. Walk in there three or four times and it was like, I'll just have one and then one turns into five or six and, you know, I'm a big guy. I still like to eat a lot. I, you know, I just, it's just, it's, it's tough once you start eating that stuff. That is, I mean, designed to be so, so yeah, I mean, the processed foods are really, we should call it what they are, the recreation drugs. You know, if we treat them like a recreational drug, we realize I got to stay away from that. And once you, once you sort of see it that way, it kind of changes your, your relationship with food. The biggest thing I see people is changing their relationship with food. I'm not eating because I'm bored. I'm stressed. The guy on the TV told me to. Or it's this time or social pressure. You know, you eat for nutrition and you can still enjoy it and still have fun. I mean, I went to a nice party Last night we had a bunch of tomahawk ribeyes and it was a great social environment. It was so good food. I wasn't, I wasn't poisoning myself to have fun.

Well, we also probably don't hang out with people who do that anyway, so it makes it simple. Well, switching gears because you just mentioned being an orthopedic surgeon. So you were an orthopedic surgeon, started using this diet, started keeping people from having to go onto the operating table, which I'm sure made your hospital was not happy.

Hospital was not happy. I was that. That was something that really opened my eyes to the reality of medicine when I discovered that hey, I was able to make people not need surgery anymore and brought it to the administration of the hospital and they weren't happy about that. That was something that I was really sort of. I became very jaded because of that. And you know, because you're talking about women, I think and I like to talk about musculoskeletal health. I don't, I'm known for nutrition, but I'm really an athlete and I've been talking about training. But one of the things that's interesting and I'm going to be talking about this later today when we look at what distinguishes a young joint from an old joint. If you look in there with a camera and I used to like knee arthroscopies and shoulder arthroscopy. You go in there with a young person, perfectly white, it looked like freshly fallen snow. It was beautiful. You get there in a 50 year old and it looked like the inside of an ash tree. Like somebody been smoking, chain smoking for years and it's all yellow and crumbly and why is it, I was always wondering myself, why does it look different? Well, it turns out there's something called an advanced glycation end product or so called age and that is a product of hyperglycemia, lipid peroxidation, something called the polyol pathway. Those things are all under the influence of diet. So it's not that you can never have arthritis, but you can dramatically slow down the progression of that because even wild animals get arthritis even on their natural diet. Lions will get arthritis in the wild, in their back and things like that. But you can dramatically alter that. And the other thing I've seen on carnivore diet, believe it or not, is people that have sorties, sore backs, arthritis, suddenly don't have it anymore. And when you are not hurting all the time, guess what, you can be more active, you can get out there and walk and jump and run and play and get stronger. And so I think that's a huge, huge benefit. So ch. You know, because a lot of times you go to bed, you wake up the next morning like, oh, my elbow hurts. What did I do? Did I sleep on it wrong? Or maybe I was those. Maybe that's tennis from three days ago. Maybe it was a chocolate cake you ate last night. You think when you start thinking about that, how food actually impacts inflammation and how we feel. So it's kind of when you start realizing that that does have an effect. I'll see. People will say, let me on a carnivore diet. They're like, oh, I got off it and I. I had a bunch of cake and garbage. They wake up the next day and they feel like they're hungover and they're like, their knees start turning. I'm like, that's. That's real. It's really happening.

You just connected the dots. So you saw that you couldn't unsee it, right? You had to shift. What are you up to now?

So I have been complaining about the health care system for a number of years. I'm frustrated with it and, you know, instead of shaking my fist at the TV like the old man, you know, so we. We started a company. My partner was out of Silicon Valley, was a tech engineer, AI engineer. I developed a company called Revero. And basically what we do is we've got physicians in all 50 states that are aligned with this sort of philosophy that let's get people off medications, let's provide them the support they need. And it's not so easy as just telling people what to do, because a lot of people need a whole support network.

Please.

If it was as easy as telling people what to do, I could give them a buck and we wouldn't have our price.

What I tried to do as an orthopedic surgeon, I was like, hey, read this book. Hey, go look at this video. That's not very efficient. You have to literally provide them. Some people, you got to hold their hand for months and years even. So we provide all that stuff. And that's the thing that, you know, even. Even doctors that are, well, meaning that want to view this, they don't have the resources to get this done right. So this is what we did. So we, we, you know, we hired a great team. We've got a great coaching team, We've got a whole bunch of great physicians, you know, an engineering team, marketing team. So that's, you know, that's my hope to kind of change the paradigm of healthcare.

We are right there with you. I have another company called Mindshare Collaborative and that's our biggest thing is taking on big food, big karma, big healthcare, big insurance and really elevating the doctors and healthcare practitioners that are working outside the system. Because the system doesn't support health.

Well, I mean if you look at where healthcare is going, the allopathic system increasingly corporatized. You know these big companies, you know, Kaiser, Intermount Health, they're taking over every small practice so they're essentialized. And when central, when something is overly centralized, you have no choice in a matter what you're going to, you're going to see and you're going to continue to see is more and more pharma pressure. Like right now with like the Ozempics everyone is being inundated to get on these drugs, right? And some of the doctors, if they don't prescribe it right away, they'll go to somebody else or they have all these little pop up clinics that are just like their GLP1 Pez dispensers. Right. And so you're going to have a period of time where you're going to go into where AI will take over for a lot of it. You go and you'll, you'll interact with some sort of computer interface. Put your finger in there, sample some blood. They'll run a lab like on the spot and they'll have an Amazon drone delivering your drugs to your house at the back end will have one physician signing 10,000 VIS a day so they don't have to spend money on marketing physicians, taking them out to eat, buying their, buying their staff lunch. It'll save them a lot of money. The patients will get the drugs right away and everyone will be medicated and pharma will be happy. The patients will be miserable, but they'll have their drugs.

It's absolutely frightening.

That is.

And you can totally see it.

Yep.

All right, well we support you.

Thank you.

I'll put this into the show notes.

I'm going to put all the show notes@jjvirgin.com carnivore and I just love what you're doing.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Good talking to you.

Good talking to you too.

Thank you.

Foreign.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website, jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss a single single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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