#71 - ASK JORGE: The ideal human diet with @shawnbaker1967

Happy Monday, it is August 17th, 2020. This is Jorge Cruise and welcome to the Jorge Cruise Show. Guys, I've missed you. I've been on hiatus for this summer and a lot has been going on. Today's show kicks off our return. I am back. I'm thrilled if you're listening right now to have you back. I've missed you. Hope you've had a good summer. I've been busy, hard at work. I'll give you a couple updates, but the most important is today's show. I have an incredible special guest. He's the author of a book that has really shifted my thinking this summer. As you guys know, the saga of my nutritional, um, kind of research has been really elevated in the last couple of years. Even though I'm a fitness trainer, you know, diet is such an important key to fitness. And it's usually the second question I get after, well, what's this 8 Minute Method? What do you eat? And people want a food list, they want to know about intermittent fasting. So on today's show, we sit down with Dr. He's an incredible doctor, Dr. Shawn Baker. He's an orthopedic surgeon who has become a bit of a diet guru. I think this is the man that will eventually replace Dr. Atkins, really, in the sense that he, through his work as an orthopedic surgeon— interesting, I'll give it to you in a nutshell, you know, he worked with a lot of people that couldn't get knee or hip replacements because of their weight, so he would help them lose weight to get ready for the surgery. Then miraculously, a lot of them wouldn't even need the surgery, let alone they lost weight and kept it off. So today we're gonna talk about really the ideal human diet for anyone in that age group, you know, especially if you have inflammation in your joints. There's a lot of his clients— I mean, that's why they came to Dr. Baker, was to get replacements for hips and knees. And, and if you're young, hopefully, and don't need that, you're gonna learn really about how to maximize health through a high-fat, high-protein diet that I've been using. You guys have seen it. We did a podcast not that long ago with Dr. Paul Saladino, who has similar philosophy, as well as my, my mentor Mark Sisson. And so Dr. Baker is on the show today. We are gonna talk all things Carnivore Diet. That's the name of his book, best-selling book, The Carnivore Diet. And he's an incredible soul. I had the honor of interviewing him a few weeks ago, and so I'm thrilled that we're finally sharing the interview with you because it really will transform your thinking. I think it's gonna blow your mind. So super excited for today's show. We are brought to you by my brand new website, 8minuteslive.com. That's the number 8 minutes live dot com. We've got our Belly Fat Cure course available for everyone. Uh, we should be next week sending out the course at long last. We've been, uh, had, we had to move servers, so it's a new server, a new website. Check it out. Add your name to my 8 Minutes Live newsletter. That's brand new. And the website's super simple. It's the number 8 minutes with an S, M-I-N-U-T-E-S, live, L-I-V-E. And, uh, I want to invite you to, to join our inaugural email newsletter. So you'll love that. We're also brought to you by Primal Kitchen. Primal Kitchen is where I get a lot of the, the best avocado oil products. It's started by Mark Sisson, and he's giving us all a free chipotle lemon mayo made with avocado oil, not the inflammatory soybean oil, corn oil, and all those oils that are really based in vegetable oils that are incredibly inflammatory. Primal Kitchen is giving this to us for free, this chipotle lemon mayo. You just need to go to their website, primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise, and you'll get it on checkout for free. You're gonna love it. Great, great products. I've been using them for years. We're also brought to you by Joovv. Joovv is literally how I started this Monday off. I'm up early, as you guys know, and I turn on this red light therapy, and it is literally how I maximize my energy, maximize my mood, and they're giving us a free gift with the promo code Jorge, J-O-R-G-E, to simply go to their site, check it out at jooovv.com/jorge. Great information there, and it's really cutting edge in the sense of everything from seasonal mood disorder to improving skin production of collagen, etc. So with that said, are you guys ready? I'm so excited for you to meet Dr. Shawn Baker. He's extraordinary. Again, I think he's the next Atkins. So let's enjoy this conversation. It's long. I'm going to give you the heads up, it's almost 90 minutes, but it is one of the best interviews I've done in 2020. So I want you guys to enjoy it and please share it with your loved ones. Let's get started right now. It's a fact, 91% of us have a dangerous amount of belly fat. And it isn't just unsightly. When you have too much belly fat, you are more likely to suffer from aches and pains, low energy, memory loss, and poor sleep, which prevents you from performing your best at work, spending true quality quality time with your loved ones, and simply enjoying life. The good news is that you can cure belly fat and immediately start to work better, reduce pain, improve memory, and sleep better using simple shortcuts I've gathered. Hi, my name is Jorge Cruise, and I'm known as the 8-Minute Life Strategist to the world's busiest celebrities. I've been a fitness, nutrition, and high-performance living strategist for over 20 5 years, and you may have seen my work with Oprah Winfrey, Khloe Kardashian, President Clinton, Tyra Banks, Dr. Oz, Tony Robbins, or even Steve Harvey. My passion to find the best science-backed fitness shortcuts has allowed me to write over 30 books and become a multiple New York Times bestselling author with over 9 million books in print. And I know I can help you too. Welcome to the Jorge Cruise Show. Well, welcome to the podcast. Uh, it's Jorge Cruise here, and I have a very special, uh, show for us today. I'm super excited to be, um, talking to, uh, a man who I met just, uh, this month. Uh, his name is Dr. Shawn Baker. He's the author of an incredible book that I've been reading, uh, incredible book called The Carnivore Diet. And as you guys know, during this COVID-19 window, I've had time to think and I've had time to do some really great conversations. And probably 3 months ago, I think I shared this with everyone, I had a really good hour with Mark Sisson. And he's now in Miami and he's the creator of the Primal Kitchen product lines and all the avocado salad dressings and mayonnaise. And he's been a mentor of mine for goodness, 17 years. And I asked Mark what he was doing because he's 67 years young, he looks incredible, he's got a full six-pack, he's got great get great skin, great energy. He's grandfather now, great family life. And he's always walked his talk. He has high energy. He's up early in the morning. He squeezes every drop out of life. And he's been my mentor for so many years. And I enjoyed really being closer to him when I was in Malibu about 2 years ago. And so I talked to Mark and I said, so what are you doing that's different? He says, I'm eating more meat. I was like, you're eating more meat? I said, you've always eaten meat, you know? And he's like, well, I'm eating a little more meat. I said, what do you mean? So then we got into this conversation. It became became a podcast. We've now done two podcasts, Mark Sisson and I, so you have to check those out. And then he told me about a book he endorsed by Dr. Paul Saladino called The Carnivore Code, similar to Dr. Baker's book here, came out after Dr. Baker's book. And I read that book, then I did an interview and a podcast with Paul Saladino, very intriguing conversation, mind-blowing kind of. And now I feel like I'm so honored because when you pull up a lot of the work out there on a meat-based type of diet and And it's gaining more momentum. It's a bit of a movement, I think. There's always one person that always comes up, and it's the man that I'm thrilled to introduce to you guys. It's Dr. Shawn Baker. Dr. Baker, can you see us? Can you hear me? Where are you? Come on in.

Hey, I can see you. I can hear you. Thank you, Jorge, for having me. Appreciate the opportunity.

You bet. Hey, no, I'm thrilled. We were talking just before we started the conversation here, and I was watching your interview with Joe Rogan, which I thought was incredible. And, but so many interviews, we've done so many of these informative conversations that really are mind-blowing. I mean, and I think Paul Saladino, you know, he's a little younger than you and he's definitely walking his talk, but you're, I think you're in between his age and Mark Sisson's age. You're 53, I think. Is that right?

Yeah, I'm 53. Yeah.

So 53. And you have an incredible medical background where you were an orthopedic surgeon and you were in the military, you played rugby, you did all this stuff. I mean, I'm kind of, I've been really learning about your history. And I feel like I have so many questions. My clients are primarily women, you know, women over 40. And I have a lot of women that are intrigued with this because they used to do the Atkins program, which is a kind of keto-based, high-fat, high-protein diet in the '80s. And a lot of my clients are in their 50s now and 60s. I have some in their 70s. You know, I've worked with all these different people. And I'll tell you, their biggest concern is, Finding a shortcut, obviously, but a healthy one that doesn't have side effects. And a lot of times, you know, there's been this misinformation— I want to call it that, but I'm being a little biased— about a meat-based diet because, you know, so many people have talked about how meat can be hurtful to the health of the human body and we should only have it twice a week. Or what's the recommendation they always whisper, like, have it once a week? Or when they kind of say it's okay, but don't overdo it, right? What have you heard? What's the old, the old myth?

Well, I mean, there's a lot of people out there that are saying that, you know, make it as a condiment. You know, meat should be just a minor part of your diet and everything else should come be made up of a bunch of vegetables, basically grains. And that's been the standard mantra for quite a while now. And they're kind of doubled out, doubling down on that, you know, forward. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, you know, corporate financial investments that are, that are trying to, trying to convince us to do that. Uh, that is completely misguided evidence, you know, based on our nutritional science. And I just, I'm just going to come out and say it's a nutritional science in general is a complete fiasco. I mean, it is the way we do nutrition science, the way we rely on epidemiologic studies to make sort of prescriptions on how we should eat is, I mean, any other scientist laughs at that. So, but it's, and it's not the fault of the researchers in many cases, it's just such, so hard to do the proper science. And so What you have is people trying to say, based on this study of, you know, 200,000 people that we tracked over, you know, 30 years.

Yeah.

And we asked them what they ate once or twice in those 30 years, and they had to remember what they thought they might have. There's so much misremembering or people skewing what they think they eat. And then you use that really incredibly bad data, and then they extrapolate over 30 years. And they tell people what they're supposed to eat. And that is, that is just not helpful at all.

Well, it seems so complicated, you know, and I think what I love about your plan, it really reminds me of when I first met, because, you know, I've been doing this type of work, writing books as an author for 20 years. Next year is my 20-year anniversary. My first book came out in 2001, and I was really lucky that I had been on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and then she had the book in her magazine. I was the kind of like in Playboy, the centerfold. I was the pullout of her magazine of Oprah Oprah Magazine, and it was a huge honor to be the centerfold of Oprah Magazine in 2005. And she had all these exercises I was doing. That was my first book, but I've been doing so many more books on nutrition. And I'll tell you, the man who got me to like, to take a breath and not get overwhelmed was Mark Sisson. And this was almost 17 years ago. And you know, Mark, he's 67. So he's our senior quite a bit for both of us. But if you go to his Instagram, you know, he's now in Miami, he has his gorgeous wife. Carrie, who's in phenomenal shape. And I always show people, like when I saw Steve Harvey at his home for the first time, I took him a picture of a man in his 60s, because Mr. Harvey was just about 64 at the time. And he's like, "He's in his 60s?" He was like, "No way." Blows people's minds away. But Mark kept it so simple. And I'm sure we're going to talk about this today because I feel like as much as all that science can show us what we should eat and all that, if we just look at our history at what he calls, and what I think the world now kind of agrees it's called ancestral health, right? And we look at our ancestors and we, we kind of dumb it down and just look at what did we eat for the last 2 million years as a species and what happened in the last 100 years, 1,000 years. You go back 2,000, 3,000 years. I mean, the diet has changed here and there. I mean, there was, you know, biblical times, wine and things like that and a little bit of bread, but it wasn't like the kind of stuff you see now and you go back 10,000, 20,000 years. I mean, how far back do we have to go to make it simple? I don't think it's that far back because I don't think we were as a species, as a race, overweight, full of disease up until the Industrial Revolution. Would you say it was about, you know, just recent times, right? Last 100 years or so, right?

Yeah. I mean, it really, and I just had this conversation a little bit ago, it really pains me in public and see Yeah. So many people suffering. And I mean, you think about it, if any other species had the overall health quality that we have, they'd be extinct. I mean, can you imagine?

Yeah.

Can you imagine a herd of zebras in Africa where they were all walking around with achy joints and overweight belly fat? You know, if that was possible, they would be wiped out within minutes by all the lions. It'd be like, this is easy picking. So we've got this same absolute disconnect between what humans are supposed to eat and what we currently— what is supposed to be food. And, you know, the food companies, I mean, to their credit, they get a lot of calories out there. They get a lot of good food out there, but it is not food designed for humans. I mean, this is the equivalent of human pet food, and we see what happens to our pets, overweight, obese pets. And so we are— yeah, yeah, this thing on human pet food. And that—

wow, that's a great way to— that's a great, uh, mind-blowing phrase. Say it one more time. Human pet food.

Human pet food. That is what we are being asked to eat. And this is where it was very profitable. Think about it. How profitable?

And especially if we eat all day, 3 meals a day. Sometimes they've invented the 4th meal. I remember Taco Bell came out with that midnight meal. I mean, what are you doing eating at midnight? You're supposed to be sleeping. And it's just insane how we— it really has been a financial kind of business that has encouraged us, don't you think, more than anything?

Of course. And it makes sense from a business standpoint. I mean, I think we would be all very, very sadly disappointed to learn that, guess what? The businesses want to make money and our health is not, is not the primary concern.

And no, no. And then, so we'll, so let's start with this because I think you have a unique perspective as much as you have a diet that's meat-based that you've written about and you talk about and you have this clinical study, which we're going to get into. We'll do it all at the end. We'll tell everyone where they can find out where to find you. And you've got this incredible study that obviously everyone listening should, should participate in and contribute. They can. But I feel like you have this unique background because you were athletic growing up. I remember reading and hearing about your rugby, but you were going to medical school, took a little time off, then went back, finished that. And you have this background in surgery with bones, orthopedics. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. I mean, I can go into my story if you want me to run through.

Well, why don't we do this? Tell everyone the mini version of how that happened, because obviously you were athletic and I'm sure, you know, and you've helped a lot of people that— I mean, my mother had a hip replacement many, many years ago. She's passed now, but I remember how much she suffered. And I'm sure you saw countless people suffering and orthopedics really can help. But I remember you saying something about like, I forget if you were stationed in the US or if you were overseas in your Joe Rogan interview, you were talking about how you notice certain people when they changed their diet, they got healthier. And even, I don't know if it was connected to the bones getting healthier and all that, or just their overall health. But I think a light bulb may have gone on in your head when you were still healing people, if you will, or helping people get out of pain. And now you definitely are still doing it in a very different way, not through surgery and a knife. But yeah, tell us a little bit of the story because, and then take us to where you had that moment where you shifted and you kind of stopped. I mean, how many years ago did you stop performing orthopedics and all that? Has it been quite a while?

So it's been right at 5 years. It'll be another month or so, it'll be 5 years.

Basically, you know, yeah, tell us the story, please.

Yeah, so lifelong athlete. I've been an athlete since I was a little kid. I mean, I've always enjoyed that. I've always enjoyed pushing my body. I was able to achieve, you know, world records in a number of different sports over the years. I was a, you know, a national record-breaking powerlifter as a direct free powerlifter, deadlifted 772 pounds. Incredible. Went on to, uh, you know, I played rugby at an extremely high level, at a semi-professional level, moving to New Zealand to do that. Lived there for a while. I came back and played for the Armed Forces team, the All-Western United States team, the combined services team.

And you're a good guy to have on the team because if I— and not that we've met in person yet, but you're a big man, tall, and you had some muscle behind you. How tall are you, like 6'4", 6'3"?

I'm 6'5". I mean, I'm about 240 pounds now. Yeah. At my peak, I was close to 300 as a big throwing athlete.

So you were very much an athlete, to say the least.

Yeah, I won. I went on to throwing, took— I was All-American track and field as a or a master thrower. I went on to throw the Highland Games, which is where you put on a kilt and run around and throw these telephone poles and—

No way! Did you say telephone poles?

Well, they're called cabers, but they look like mini telephone poles basically.

Oh my God, with a kilt on?

With a kilt on, yes.

You're not scared of wearing a kilt? Hey, you know, I'm not.

And I was able to win the world championship in that as a master athlete. Then I went on to this rowing craziness, this concept too.

Yeah.

And I broke—

like crew or what?

Well, it was, it was, it was basically what they see, like if you go to CrossFit, you've got these machines that everybody competes on and they have these indoor competitions every year and thousands of people compete. And I broke 3 world records on that.

And so never on the water, just indoors?

Yeah, you don't have time to go in the water because it's, it's, it's—

oh, it's a process.

It's a production. So it is the same physiology. It's what the Olympic rowers do. At 50, I broke the world record. By such a huge margin that I was— my times exceeded some of the 20-year-old world records.

And this is 3 years ago or so, right?

Yeah, this is right when I turned 50, and this is just after about 6 months after I transitioned to this carnivore diet. So I've been an athlete my whole life.

Wow.

Um, and so obviously know a lot about sports and training and all that part, but the nutrition part, quite honestly, didn't come to me. I didn't start messing so much with nutrition or taking a real notice until I was in my early 40s, when despite training working extremely hard. I mean, I was putting in the work. I was noticing that, hey, I'm not where I want to be. I've got metabolic syndrome, I've got sleep apnea, I've got higher blood pressure, I don't feel as good. And so then I went to—

You're a physician, so I mean, physician, so you probably did the test. I mean, I don't know if that's weird to test yourself, but would you test yourself or you just have your buddies?

Well, I mean, I just knew how I felt and I could tell what my blood pressure— I'd have the nurse to take my blood pressure and it was a little high and I was like, this isn't good, man. Physician. I'm not a dummy.

You weren't overweight. You weren't a fat doctor.

No, I wasn't fat, but I was big. I mean, I was, I was, you know, 285 pounds.

We're not talking all muscle then.

Well, I mean, you know, in retrospect, when I go back and look at pictures, you can see a little bit of belly fat hidden. Like, I was bigger than I wanted to be, right?

Yeah, a little here and there. I mean, when you're that tall, it doesn't— it's not as noticeable.

It's not as noticeable. But, you know, now in my 50s, I've got a six-pack. I'm lean as ever.

Oh my gosh.

You know, I'm just—

yeah, no, you look amazing. And you put these pictures up where people are like, wow, you look like you're half your age, you know.

Right. Well, I mean, and that's, you know, obviously there's training goes in, but the diet has made a difference. So in my 40s, you know, when I realized this, I was like, okay, I can't just— because my philosophy before was I'm going to eat what I want, but I'm going to train, I'm going to out-train it. And that lasted until it lasted. And then for me, it was mid-early 40s, and then it was just like, it doesn't work anymore.

Can't out-train a poor diet, right?

Right. So then I, then I went into all these different dietary schemes. And the first diet I tried was— and it was effective— I went on a low-fat, high-fiber, lots of vegetables, lean meat diet. And I dropped from— I went from 285 to 230 in 3 months. Wow.

So very— would you call that paleo-ish, right?

Oh yeah. I mean, it was, it was, it was definitely more of a sort of a plant-based sort of, sort of diet with lean cuts of meat, like fish and chicken, probably not as much beef and not fatty meat. Right. Not at all. Right.

And I think a lot of people have embraced that. Do you remember years ago that book called The South Beach Diet?

Remember? Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Kind of like that. So, OK, I think you got a lot of people's attention because they've all done that. So you did that and you were happy. You got results.

No, I wasn't happy. I got results, but I felt miserable. I was grouchy. I was hungry. The nurses said, Dr. Baker, we much prefer the more rotund Dr. Baker because you're quite honestly—

what did they call you? The rotund?

Well, I mean, that was a nice, you know, we like to say Dr. Baker better or whatever, because you know, you're kind of becoming an ass. You're grouchy, you're snapping, you don't have much patience because I was constantly thinking about food. I was constantly hungry.

You're always hungry.

Yeah. And I couldn't maintain that. I knew despite being a disciplined person, I'm a person who's very disciplined. I mean, I am, you know, I don't mind pushing my body as hard as I can, but there's only so long you can do that with hunger. And in my experience in doing this for many years now and seeing thousands of people that have gone through diets, I think two common things occur when you fail. One is you're dealing with hunger constantly, and two, you don't enjoy what you're eating. And so I didn't really like eating a bunch of salads all the time. It didn't really satiate me. It wasn't something I looked forward to. It was kind of like a penance, like, I got to do this, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so I made the transition. And then, and then, like you pointed, Mark Sisson was an influence on me. I read his book. I went on a more paleo diet. You know, and then I went on a prime, you know, primal diet.

This ancestral health, was he kind of the first guy to bring that out to you, or did you know about this way of eating like our ancestors?

I think, you know, like guys like Robb Wolf, who was a— who wrote The Paleo Solution, and Mark Sisson, who's, you know, Primal Blueprint. I'd read both those books. I got into those things. I noticed more satiety. I noticed better sustainability, you know, and I still was able to to maintain the lower levels of body fat. But then, you know, I just got really, really interested in nutrition and I started studying it passionately. I was reading the, obviously the popular books, but I was also getting into the primary literature. And then as I got success, you know, and then I transitioned into a more of a low-carb approach and then eventually a ketogenic approach, I started to see, and that was kind of for me, going from this low-fat to high-fat approach for me.

It was low-fat when you were doing the South Beach version, right? Paleo, whatever. And you were grouchy and all that, right?

Right.

And then as you increased the fat and protein, or was it more fat?

It was initially more fat. It was kind of more ketogenic macronutrient ratios. I mean, I was never, I was never a person that never ate meat. I mean, I always had that as part of my diet, but, but not often. When I did that, it was like a flip switch, a switch flip for me that I was like, wow, satiety. I don't need to eat every 2 or 3 hours. That was enlightening to me. And at the same time, you know, as an orthopedic surgeon who's replacing people's knees and shoulders and hips and dealing with trauma and doing sports medicine and all this stuff and taking care of fracture care, we were having, you know, we see a lot of patients that are dealing with obesity and a lot, and particularly a lot of women in their mid, in their 50s and 60s that are struggling with weight and their knees hurt and they've got arthritis. And it was something like if their BMI was in excess of 35 or whatever, we were like, we have to have them lose weight before we can safely do a surgery on them. And so we were trying to figure out what can you do to have people lose weight? And I would, you know, at that time, this is before I'd kind of figured out what worked for me. I would say, hey, you need to lose weight, you know, maybe eat a little less, get in the gym, start working out.

Have a salad.

Yeah, have a salad, whatever. And it never really worked very well. Or they might lose a couple pounds and then we'd say, good job, keep going. And then they would come back 3 months later and they'd have gained 3 pounds.

Okay.

And then they're in the office crying because their knee hurts so much. And you just say, okay, you know, we're going to do the operation anyway. You're just going to be at higher risk. And it was very frustrating for me and for them.

I totally get it how it was so connected. The weight was connected to the surgeries. You couldn't— I remember my mother had— she didn't have weight loss to deal with, but she had to go through a lot of tests. And that was one of it, you know, that— and because the more weight, the more pressure on the joint. And when it's healing, it can be more adverse, right?

Well, I mean, there's a couple of things and I'll talk about it in a second. But one of the things, you know, we see is that, you know, with weight comes inflammation. You know, when you have excess body fat, that drives a lot of this joint pain. And where there's studies are coming out now that show that, that, you know, some of the fluid in the joints synovial fluid, which is that lubricating fluid in the joint. When we have extremely high levels of insulin, we see that those synoviocytes put out these inflammatory cytokines which irritate the joint and drive arthritic change. So it's just as much and probably more so a metabolic effect, a biological effect, more so than directly the weight. Because you think about it, we have people that have arthritis in their fingers.

Yeah.

How do we— how do we justify that based on weight? People aren't walking on their fingers. We have people with with arthritis in their neck. People's heads aren't getting fat.

It's more diet-based than it is the pressure of walking on your feet or something.

Absolutely.

Now, that comes from diet.

That comes from diet and lifestyle. But as I started to get people on diets that were, you know, and trying to figure out what works. And so these low-carb, I mean, low-fat diets didn't work to effectively reduce weight for surgery. So we'd send some people to bariatric surgeons and they have a gastric bypass gastric sleeve, whatever they chose.

Wow.

And that was, in my view, really, that's really a loss. I mean, I don't think I consider that a win. I think that's almost tragic, quite honestly.

And some people had to do this in order to even get the surgery done in their knee or their hip, right? They had to lose the weight. Do you have a patient in mind that had the surgery? How much weight did they have to lose? And obviously, I mean, I've worked publicly with people like Al Roker who had the gastric, you know, and he's put some on and taken it off, but it's a struggle and it does help. But in And did it help some of your patients back then?

Well, acutely, you know, temporarily, they might lose the 50 pounds or the 80 pounds or 100 pounds they might need to lose. But, you know, if we look at the long-term results, you know, higher rates of depression, suicide, alcoholism, many of them do gain weight back. They don't fix the—

they're still hungry, right?

They're still hungry. And the psychologist goes, so it's not really— I don't consider that a long-term win. You might see better diabetes numbers initially, but it's not the best option out there. But so when we had— so then as I started putting people people on these lower-carb ketogenic diets, one, they would lose weight. And this is kind of interesting. I had a fellow who was 380 pounds and he needed, literally needed both shoulders and both knees replaced. And he was at extreme risk for complication for anesthetic and for infection with that, with everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

So he, I put him on a diet and within 2 months he dropped something like 40 pounds. And then by 3 or 4 months he's down 75 pounds and we're getting him in a place where he can have surgery. Unfortunately, his internal medicine doctor said, well, it's not safe to lose so much weight so quickly, which was shocking to me because he'd been going to this guy, right? He'd been going to this guy for 20 years as his doctor. And I said, look, you've been going to this guy for 20 years and you're still close to 400 pounds.

What—

where is the cognitive dissonance here that you can't figure out that, look, losing weight is healthy and this is what we're doing? But the more exciting— and this is what really, really open my eyes up. I would put people on these diets and they would come back to me 2 weeks later and they might not have lost anything significant. You know, they might have been 320 pounds and they got down to 310, 305, you know, not much, not a tremendous amount. And they would say, I have no more pain whatsoever in my knee. And these are people that we were going to do surgery on. And that really—

Whoa, so say this one more time for everyone watching, listening at home. So you had people that were getting some sort of surgery from you, like a knee replacement or hip, that you got them on this diet so they could lose weight, so they could just be able to have the surgery without danger, without excessive danger. And they would do it for a few weeks, few months, right?

Well, they would do it, you know, sometimes within a few days to a few weeks, they would have zero pain.

And what were they eating? Would you have them eat some meat and all that? Or still back then, what was it?

No, it It was meat, it was fat, it was a little bit of vegetables. It was definitely like a ketogenic approach. And to me, we ended up canceling these people's surgeries because they didn't need it anymore. So they avoided—

Incredible.

They avoided a surgery. And, you know, to me, that was exciting. That really like reinvigorated my belief as being a physician.

Even though it kind of puts you out of business a little bit, right?

Technically.

Well, it absolutely did not help my I mean, you're the only doctor that's happy that he's not doing his work, but I totally get it because if you're here to help people and you take that oath that all physicians have to take, right? I mean, it really should be that. And so when this would happen, like for this example, you were saying they didn't have the surgery at all. Didn't have to— I mean, how do you explain that to someone watching this or listening? They're like, well, that's impossible. I have this inflammation. How is changing my diet going to make my joints feel painful, you know, and yes, I lost 10 pounds or 20 pounds, but explain in a nutshell. And then let's dive into the diet because then I'm guessing we're near to the point where you finally had that, that, that epiphany, I'm sure. And you switched lanes a little bit, even though you're still in the same direction of healing and helping people, but now through your book, through your, your all, all your organization, your work, because you're no longer performing surgeries, right? Right. Dr. Rik.

Yeah, correct. No, I am. So performing life-changing interventions, which is—

yes, nutrition—

much more rewarding for both me and for the people.

Well, and explain for us in a nutshell, how do you explain in a simple way, like if they had joint pain in their hands, their hips, their whatever, shoulders, whatever is hurting, you go on this diet so you lose weight so you can have the surgery, and then you don't have the surgery because you don't have pain there anymore. If someone says, how's that possible? What would you say to them in a simple way?

Well, I would say that, you know, the reason you want to have the surgery in the first place is because you're in pain. That's, that's an underlying primary reason. If you no longer have pain, unless there's some extreme deformity or something like that, you generally don't need surgery. I mean, this is the whole reason we have to put— what, why would I want to have surgery if I had zero pain and my function was good? It doesn't make sense. But what's going on is there is a systemic underlying inflammatory situation that is affecting the joints, affecting all— basically all of our body systems. And it's not just joint pain. We— I can— there are— there are literally almost every chronic condition responds well to this sort of treatment, this lifestyle and diet treatment. This is just something I see.

Basically, the inflammation would start to— and it's— and describe for us what that is like in someone's body who's eating the standard. I'm assuming they were all eating a standard American diet, right? Which is high carb. What— how would you phrase the current diet that most people are eating? It's like 50, 60, 80% carbs. And maybe what would you guess? What have you heard recently?

Well, if we look at the standard American diet, that's been analyzed very well. It's around 55 to 60% carbohydrate. But the problem is most of that tends to be refined grain sugars, high fructose corn syrup, industrialized seed oils. Perhaps soybeans and things like that. That's the majority of the American diet. And there's some fruits and vegetables in there. And yes, there's some animal products in there. Most of it is, quite honestly, by volume, it's dairy. And then there's a little bit of meat. The average American only eats about 2 ounces of beef per day, which is a tiny, tiny amount.

Wow. Wow.

But we have people blaming beef for all of our woes. But really, I think it's becoming quite clear it's these other things. Now, anything eaten in excess to where you gain weight and you put on excess body fat is going to cause an inflammatory milieu or an inflammatory environment. And so it's not just inflammation. And there's— you have to— we have to understand that there is some inflammation in our body that is normal and necessary and good.

Yeah.

When we exercise, we develop a little inflammatory response and then we sort of respond to that. But there's this chronic underlying inflammation. It's not the inflammation inflammation. Completely. It's the response to inflammation, it's the response to the insult. And so there are things that are going on. It could be glycation, excess levels of blood sugar are causing damage to proteins, which are causing dysfunction. And, you know, things are starting to just kind of fall apart. And so we see that in our joints. We see that really quite honestly in all of our systems in our body. And so it's glycation, it may be oxidative stress, it may be some of these oils that we're exposed to that quite honestly didn't enter the human diet, you know, from—

like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, 100, 120 years old.

I mean, the human species has been around, if we believe in an evolutionary scenario, we've been around as humans, not just Homo sapiens, but humans going back to Homo habilis, almost 3 million years. And so 3 million things are so novel to the human diet, they're not even human food. And so when you put this— if we sit there and literally poison another animal, we're going to see the effect. And I would argue some of these foods that we've been exposed to, particularly some of the recent ones, are sort of low-level toxins, low-level— you could, you could use the word poison if you want to be hyperbolic, but it has an effect. Now we test for the acute effects. If we give these people this food, you have the FDA approves, you know, here's something interesting. The, the, uh, USDA or the FDA just approved cotton for human consumption.

Cotton.

Cotton. Cotton, cotton plant. We grow t-shirts out.

You're kidding, right?

So there's a, there's a substance as a fiber or what? Basically as a protein, basically. So protein, we're going to be seeing cotton added to processed food, just like we have methylcellulose, which is sawdust added to our human diet.

Now, what is sawdust?

Methyl, methylcellulose. So when you see methylcellulose as an added product in your food, it's basically sawdust.

It's a nice way to say sawdust without saying sawdust.

And so we're eating this. Wow. Why is it? Why is it? Because it's cheap. It's a source of fiber, I guess. And it expands the volume. So if you put 10% of your product as sawdust, that's 10% profit you're saving basically. Wow. So it's— this is a human diet that we're faced with, and this is not what we're designed to be eating. Clearly.

Yeah.

Whatever you believe we ate 100,000 years ago or 1 million years ago, it is not what we're eating now. And so it has True.

Well, take us back. So let's go back.

Let's go big.

Let's not go 3 million or 2 million. Let's do, let's call it half a million from now. Where were our ancestors? Because I always think of Mark Sisson's simple explanation.

Sure.

That we're this species, we've been around up to 3 million years, and our bodies have adapted to a certain routine and ritual of what we could do for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. And we get the picture of where we were. You had this light bulb go off. You gave them this healthier version of a diet. And then we'll get into that as well. I want to know what the diet is in the book that you have. But so take us back now. We know what we're going through today, but what was it like half a million years ago?

Yeah, I think that's not a bad place to start. And I think it's important to show the transitions occurred since then. So half a million years ago, we were transitioning between Homo erectus and not quite Homo sapiens yet. Homo sapiens came in arguably 300,000, maybe 400,000 years. So we were just in that transition time. Homo erectus had perfected hunting megafaunal animals, and these are primarily, uh, these animals, these animals called prophecians, which are the mammoths, the elephants, the mastodons. They were able to kill them efficiently, effectively, and pretty much whenever they wanted. These animals were abundant throughout the Earth. Human population numbers were very small, so we were literally at an all-you-can-eat basically fatty meat buffet. We had that anytime we wanted it. We could preserve it by drying, by sticking it in ice. We could do it— underwater preservation techniques were all known to occur. Anywhere you find Homo erectus remains, typically you often find these large megafaunal animals. And so elephants were the prime source. We would go after some of the other, you know, rhinoceri and some of the bigger other, you know, oryx and things like that. But that was our primary source of food.

Incredible.

These large animals, it's just for bang for your buck. If you think about it, if I have to hunt an animal that runs away really fast, is really lean like we do now, like an antelope, versus I've got a relatively slow-moving animal that doesn't run away— elephants don't run away. I've been to Africa. When you go in the Serengeti and you come across a bunch of animals, elephants, they don't run from you. They turn and look at you and go, what are you going to do, little man? Because we're you know, 20, 30 times your size.

Tiny.

Yeah. So, but when you— but when humans developed this spear technology, and, you know, particularly, uh, you know, that was a great—

changed the game.

Yeah, it's a game. And so these elephants were literally sitting ducks. And so we feasted on that until that ran out. And so somewhere between 125,000 to 25,000 years ago, depending upon where in the world you were, we saw the megafauna populations dramatically die off. Either we overhunted them, we affected their environment in some way where they couldn't compete anymore, or climate events caused, you know, their extinction. So regardless of what you believe happened, it happened. And so starting somewhere in that time frame, humans had to start eating leaner animals. And with leaner animals, we had to develop different technology. We developed bow and arrow technology maybe 60,000 years ago. So now we're hunting these lean animals and you Guess what? There's not as much energy. We're getting protein. Our protein needs are being met. And probably for a normal human being, about 30% of calories coming from protein is pretty standard from an ancestral standpoint.

Right now, less fatty animals, right? These were less fatty.

You're forced to eat less fatty animals. And so what we would do is we might have harvested the viscera, the brain, the bone marrow, which we, you know, we, we sought out that the whole time. But before, fat was much easier. When you hunt, large animals are fattier just by definition. They have to be.

Yeah.

So you've got all this fat you can eat, and that sup— provides your energy needs. And you think about growing this brain— when you go from Australopithecus, 300cc brain, all the way up to, say, Neanderthal, which had a 1,700% or 1,700cc brain, more than a 500% increase in brain size, uh, it required steady, constant supply of high-quality nutrition, high-volume, high-calorie food, and that came through animal fat. So once we started to hunt these smaller animals, uh, then we had to figure out different strategies. And all the modern indigenous tribes have figured out different strategies for how do I supplement my diet that is now deficient in animal fat. I've got to figure out what plants I can eat. I'll eat more fruit, I'll eat more tubers, I'll eat more. And eventually we'll develop agriculture.

12,000 more for survival, not for trying to thrive as we did originally, trying to get energy, right? To supplement us.

But guess what happens? Guess what happens to human beings?

Tell us.

Our brains shrink. Our brain literally shrunk 200 cc's from, say, a peak of 125,000, 150,000 years ago to when agriculture was adopted. So our brain shrunk 200 cc's. Our skeleton, our size, we dropped 6 inches in height. Our dentition just became horrible. Our teeth started to rot out. Yeah. And our bone became very fragile. So we went from this robust, strong, you know, larger-brained creature to a smaller-brained creature with less physicality. And, you know, the argument for people say, well, they didn't live as long. Well, that's not true at all. Ancient humans— and there's very good evidence that they lived to 70 and 80 if they avoided, you know, violence and infections. And they had such high infant mortality rates that the overall population average might have been 30, 35, or 25, or 30, but individuals would still live to 75, 80 years of age. That's pretty clear now. Uh, and also we know that when we look at the skeletons, how we evaluate them is based on how we evaluate skeletons now. And so when I look at an X-ray of somebody in their 50s and they've got arthritis, that's typical for that person. But if that person was never exposed to to say grains and some of the things that we eat in a modern diet, their skeleton may look very, very different, but we don't know that. Even anthropologists say, hey, we don't know how to really truly date these, these ancient skeletons. But there's clearly some that are, that are showing that they live a lot longer than they did. So the argument that they didn't live very long is not a very valid argument, quite honestly. Right, right.

So for all this time period, we were eating meat in essence, and fattier originally, then we supplemented with other options as these animals were less available. Take us to what happened, maybe bring us closer to the future so we can get to today's diet. Because obviously, was it the Industrial Revolution that really, you know, pardon my French here, but fucked it all up for all of us? Was it— I always read about Dr. Harvey Kellogg, you know, Mr. Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and he created the Corn Flake to help his patients, you know, because they weren't pooping supposedly and all that. And then he created the term break fast, even though it was two words before, you know, there wasn't even the word breakfast, you know, but don't, don't go, don't let's end there, but take us, bridge it from where were we half a million years ago to then it was transitioning. Take us to the next jump.

Yeah. So, uh, you know, obviously we have the domestication of animals and agriculture, but early on, you know, animal domestication, really we use those to plow fields. We didn't eat the cows. We were like, oh, these cows are too valuable. So really the only people that had high-quality nutrition once the agricultural age started were really the wealthy. You see the kings and the royalty or the, you know, the people higher up in the, in the civilization status chain were the ones that had access to this. And then the sort of everyone else was eating kind of a peasant food diet, which was grain heavy. Grain-heavy, maybe a few dirty vegetables, and maybe you might get lucky and get a small amount of animal products, maybe some organ meats. A lot of people found them to be not as palatable. And so this is, you know, this— we have this relationship existing all the way up into really modern farming, quite honestly, where we started to have access to greater and greater quantities of animal products. But as we got into this industrial age, you know, we were able to mass-produce food. We were able to, you know, as we saw population, you know, if we look at the world's population 100 years ago, it has exploded since then because we've been able to import massive amounts of grain and wheat and corn and soybean and what we feed the earth on that, on these, on these handful of grains. And so what we see is, yes, we're able to sustain a larger population, but the individual health of that population is very, very poor.

And so, so we've grown, expanded, but the quality of our health, because we're using all these supplements, we're no longer really eating the meats as much. You said only 2 ounces. Is that about right?

In the American diet? Yeah. The average American eats around 2 ounces of beef per day. We actually get as many, actually now more calories from soybean oil today than we do from beef, which is incredibly inflammatory.

Incredibly.

Well, there's good arguments to be made that that is the case. And so, ah, but you know, you know, like I said, just to kind of move things along a little bit, you can, you can talk about all this ancestral stuff, which I think helps as a framework, but I really talk about, and I think it's the most important thing, is what happens to people in 2020 when you put them on a diet that focuses on meat, often to the case where that's the only thing they eat. And I know that's very controversial, but I will tell you what happens. Happens because I deal with— I spent every single day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year talking to hundreds of people that are doing this in their lives. And without very much exception, I see people that are no longer sick, no longer inflamed, no longer depressed, no longer overweight, no longer diabetic, no longer suffering from autoimmune disease or gastrointestinal and this is, you know, in my view, this has been the most powerful intervention I've ever experienced in my career as a healthcare provider. I mean, there's been nothing as effective and as powerful. Now, does everybody need to do that? No, I don't believe that. But for those people that are suffering, and we, you know, it really breaks my heart when I see people, men, women, whatever, that go from doctor to doctor to doctor, and all they get is another pill or a referral to another specialist. And another test, and they've spent— and they've wasted decades and countless dollars, and they're just suffering and they're miserable. And it's a shame. It's avoidable. And it's what drives me every day to get up in the morning and do what I do. And I know this is, like I said, this is my passion, and this is why it's so important. And like I said, I'm— this is why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Well, I think, uh, on the Joe Rogan podcast, I think you or he said that, that really eating this meat-based meat-based, beef-based type of diet. And let's get into it because I have a few questions I want to throw out there that my clients have asked me to ask you. But I feel like obviously your book, The Carnivore Diet, says it, it's a meat-based diet, but it's become— I think what you said on his podcast was, or he said it, it was a kind of a panacea for health really, that a meat-based diet takes us back to where we were 500,000 years ago and all that time prior, I'm sure, where I mean, everything from your teeth being healthier to your waistline being smaller to no inflammation. I mean, you could function as a species and be productive and have beautiful families and grow and expand and all that. I mean, and I feel like this is not the case now, even though we're bigger now because, you know, as a species, we're how many billions? Is it 7 billion or 8 billion?

Yeah, 7, 7, 7 or 7, 8, something like that.

It's growing. And we're all— how many? I mean, more than half are ill. Still, wouldn't you say, if not the majority?

Yeah, I mean, Western, Western society, you know, developed countries, we have so much, you know, obesity and metabolic dysfunction. You know, there's still parts of the world where food insecurity and starvation are still issues. But yeah, we have a— I would say a huge swath of our population is not even close to being healthy. Absolutely.

Well, let's do this. I would love to do two things before— because we're running short on time here. I'm good for a little longer. You good for a little 10, 15 more minutes.

I can keep going or we can do round 2, either one.

Well, I feel like we're going to do a round 2, but let's try to— I want to give people watching and listening enough information so they could try something like today, I hope, you know, when they hear this, whenever they hear this. But your book is a key, key tool. But in essence, walk us through— obviously now we understand how you came up with this. Obviously it was out of your work and what an incredible way to to help people, you know, not knowing that you would become someone who's not necessarily a diet doctor. You know, you're not Dr. Atkins, but you're definitely doing that kind of work now. And I think he was a heart surgeon or heart doctor, wasn't he, at one point? That's what he did originally.

Yeah, I believe he's a cardiologist.

Yeah, cardiologist. So it just seems to happen when it— when there's that passion. And I feel I can sense your genuine concern for people's well-being. And suffering is hard. I mean, I, I lost my mom 20 years ago, but she had this toxemia, but she took— she had this hip pain. And I'm sure you've heard of people that have had issues with joint pain and they'll take too much ibuprofen. And she did that for about a year or two, and then her kidneys weren't functioning, and then she was going to go on dialysis, and then she passed. So it was really sad to see her in extreme pain, both from her hip and then from her— you know, and you've heard of this, you know, this, this overuse of ibuprofen causing the tissues to break down. And she was super inflamed and her body, her joints, she had in her fingers, she had inflammation in all her joints. I mean, it looked like there were deformities, you know, my poor mom, and she had these hip problems. She had so many problems. So I know that I have that passion. It's why I do what I do to help people overcome that. I was overweight and all that. And, you know, and I feel like at one point you definitely have struggled with your best self. And obviously, you know, your nurses and your staff said, hey, we like the old Dr. Baker, and he's back, obviously. They're not complaining anymore, not that you see them. But tell us in a nutshell this diet, and then I want to ask you, because you had some really great indicators, and I thought maybe we could end with that, and then we'll do round 2 at another time. But I think measuring health, and I know a lot of my clients— I know one of the things that Joe Rogan pointed out when you guys talked was your concern with blood tests. And not that they're bad, they definitely give you some insight, but some people make it the one and only insight. On your website. And I know, I don't know if you currently have done any of that stuff, but maybe you can share about these tests and what are some simple tests we can end on maybe that men and hopefully women can just, I mean, obviously Dr. Oz told me years ago that your waistline is the greatest indicator of good health, right? A small waistline indicates good health. So obviously I believe in that. I think both men and women can do that. I know you go into other ways they can measure good health so we can talk about that. But before we get to that, tell us in a nutshell, because people are going to be thinking, so is this just a meat— just eat meat? This is the diet that the panacea for health is eat beef, or, you know, what kind of meat is it? And then I know people are going to say, well, I don't have a budget, but I love that you don't believe it has to be always grass-fed. It can be more just everyday meat and much better than eating Doritos and pasta and pizza and all that. But take us into the concept of what is this book you wrote? About this concept of the carnivore diet. In a nutshell, is it just meat or something else? And then get into maybe how, what kind of meat is— obviously people are going to be thinking, I don't know if I can afford this, but you know, people have that concern. And then we'll end with maybe some of the ways people can measure their health today as well. But tell us, so is this a meat-based diet? Obviously the answer I think is yes, but take it further for us. Give us a little more detail.

Yeah. One of the, one of the reasons I selected the name carnivore diet because it clearly indicates you're going to be eating meat. And meat is— yeah, so the way I design it when I give lectures on this, again, this is not— I want to be clear, this is not reverse veganism. This is not an ideology. This is not a diet that is based on, you know, a certain belief system. This is a diet that is based on results. And as such, I like to define— I say it is a diet that focuses on animal-based nutrition. So that could be meat, it It could be fish, it could be eggs, it could be dairy, but you will limit or exclude, you know, plant-based foods. And this is real important, as needed. And that's, I think that as needed part is very important in there.

It's the caveat. Yeah.

For the goal of improving health. So, I mean, our goal is to improve health. We do what we need to do, but clearly the focus is on animal products. Right. And so what those are—

and just for anyone out there who doesn't remember the word carnivore. It doesn't mean just beef, it's just animal-based. How would you define that properly?

Yeah, so it can be any sort of animal-based food. So it could be fish, it could be cow, it could be lamb, it could be, you know, it could be goat, it could be, you know, octopus.

It could include dairy and eggs. People are—

it does, it can include dairy and eggs. And I, you know, the caveat I often say is sometimes dairy for people is something they have to walk a little a little bit gingerly around because some people dairy is still problematic. And so I tell people, you have to really kind of be cognizant of that fact that dairy can be an issue for some people. And then again, there are people that will do this and they'll go very strict. And some people, depending on what they're dealing with, if they're dealing with some like severe autoimmune issue or maybe a gastrointestinal problem like Crohn's disease, they need to be very strict or they'll find it's they're more— they do better very strict. And some people do better on a higher fat ratio, and some people will do better with a more protein-based ratio. But regardless of how you do that, you know, we look at the results. And I would say for most people, because it's, you know, we kind of— I kind of use it initially. Let's say, let's assume that nutrition plays a role in your health issues. And I think that's a very safe assumption. Let's just say that's true. And you're trying to figure out what is it in my nutrition that is causing issues? And so we use this as an elimination diet and we minimize the variables. If I say just go eat, you know, beef and some salt and some water, that's very few variables you're dealing with from a dietary standpoint. And then it becomes very quick to figure out, hey, maybe surprisingly all that spinach, that big giant salad I'm eating with all the oxalates, and maybe that fiber was really irritating my gut. And And maybe— I know we think that vegetables are immune from some criticism, but maybe, just maybe in my situation, that was a problem. And I can tell you, having seen thousands of people do this, they see that sometimes those vegetables at high amounts of fiber and vegetation cause a lot of GI issues, bloating.

Spinach, kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts. They have these toxins. And I know Dr. Paul Saladino talks about it, but Dr. Gunthrie, is that his— that's how you say his name?

Yeah, Gunthrie talks, he likes to talk about lectins, which are one of many that are out there that do seem to have a bit of a problem. But, and that's a topic we could talk about that for quite a while.

And these plants, just for anyone listening, they have these properties to protect themselves from being eaten, right? I mean, they're designed to make us not feel good, so we don't want to eat them. Is that basically in a nutshell why plants may have this effect on us, right?

Sure. If I asked you to go outside, and I think you're in San Diego, if I say go outside and start randomly eating leaves off trees, you're gonna get sick very, very quickly. And so the vast majority, something like 98.5% of all plants on Earth, if humans eat them, we get acutely ill.

I mean— And that's 98% of plants on Earth.

All plants will make us sick. Will make us sick. And so, you know.

So these 2 percenters who are, this is what we see in the grocery store, right?

This is what we've been able to cultivate. Been obviously through years and years and centuries of cultivation. We've bred these, these, these fruits and vegetables to be safer, less toxic, toxic for us to eat. They don't make us acutely ill. And for many people, many people are out there fine. I mean, there are people live on plant-based diets. There's lots of populations that are relatively healthy eating this. But for some people, and it's actually surprisingly more people than you think, some people, high chronic amounts can cause things that you wouldn't expect because we don't test for these things. We look at— when we, when we test for a food, if you look at the food testing, it's all about acute toxicity. You know, if I eat a bunch of cassava or I eat a bunch of raw unprocessed cashews, or if I eat a bunch of raw, you know, kidney beans, those will kill me, right? Wow.

Say that one more time because I know clients that have cassava root, these chips. They have these new chips, the siete chips made in avocado. Which isn't as bad, but Siete makes it out of cassava, and cassava is a better form of corn, they say. But how much better is it? Because corn is also inflammatory. But go back to what you were saying.

Well, again, they're one of the most— one of the most common food poisoning and deaths in the world is due to cassava, depending on how it's prepared. So if you don't get your processing just right— now, I'm not saying people in the United States are eating cassava going to die from eating that. But, you know, if we don't process it right— and humans early on didn't know how to process this. We had to figure it out through trial and error. And so when we're saying we're taking, we're taking these foods and we're removing the toxins enough so they don't kill us and we're decreasing the levels. But what is— what happens if we eat at 10% over a period of years? Do we have subtle autoimmune issues show up? Because we don't know what causes these autoimmune diseases. I mean, there's people that speculate, there's evidence that maybe problems with the gut are leading to that for various reasons.

And so leaky gut, things like that.

Yeah, leaky gut, which is controversial. Some people believe in it, some people don't. I think there's pretty good evidence that it definitely exists. What does it do to people? There's a lot of people that think that it leads to autoimmune diseases. And so we don't really know. And all these autoimmune diseases that are out there, and there are thousands of them, and people, when you go to the doctor, like, what causes it? I don't know, bad luck, genetics. No one thinks about food.

Yeah, yeah.

What I'm seeing is people are reversing autoimmune diseases by clearing this stuff out of their diet. And to me, that's really, really— I think that's a really, really huge observation. Now, back to the implementation of the diet, because I know you like that. So, you know, what I tell people at the beginning, you know, a lot of us fail on our diet because we can't resist the pizzas and the cakes cakes and the cookies and the things like that.

And we're hungry. Maybe it's a combination.

Well, we're hungry and that's why we want to eat this because it tastes good. I mean, the food companies know it and they make it that way. And so when you tell somebody, hey, go be hungry and eat food you don't like, go eat a bunch of kale. It doesn't work well for— it didn't work for me. It wasn't sustainable for me. So now when I tell people, hey, how much do you need to eat? Well, go eat a nice bunch of eggs and some steak, maybe some bacon. Something you enjoy, you know, you got to enjoy it.

And we're built to enjoy the flavor of rich foods that have these nice healthy fats, right, from half a million years ago, right?

You look at like the French culture, which fat is a huge part, and they have low traditional rates of heart disease. You know, there's a French paradox, and there's all these paradoxes.

They eat butter, they do all this stuff, right?

So you enjoy this stuff, it satiates you. How much do you eat? People ask me, how much should I eat, Dr. Baker? I tell them, eat enough so you don't want to eat cupcakes. And I know that's kind of a flippant answer, but it really, really makes sense. And if you do that long enough, after a month or two, you don't want those anymore. You literally— and because, you know, people say, well, it's so restrictive just eating meat and stuff like that. But what happens is it becomes very liberating. It becomes very freeing because you're no longer, you know, a slave to your cravings. And you can, you can literally be hungry and walk by that plate of cookies or whatever your favorite food is and say, hey, I'm okay. I don't need this. I can wait till I get home and I can eat something that's going to be more nutritious for me. And that is literally like a superpower. Now, long term, a lot of people will do the diet to eliminate, to figure out their health issues. They'll fix the relationship with food because we're no longer eating for entertainment or for stress or or for boredom or all the various reasons that we eat that aren't for nutrition. And they fix that. And then they might find that, hey, I don't need to be 100%. I can be 90%. I can eat mostly meat, get my nutrition from this, and then maybe have a square of dark chocolate, or I might have an avocado, or I might have some berries, or I might occasionally have that piece of bread. That's fine too. But I mean, at the end of the day, we want to be healthy people. And that's— this This is such a powerful tool.

And it's such a simple diet.

It really is.

Because if you think about it, in essence, tell me if I've got the basics of it, is you put on pause for a while these plant-based foods, just put on pause. 98% of us are going to— 98% of them aren't even something we can ingest. So the 2%, you're only putting 2% of the plant world on hold, put them on hold and then focus in on eating. Now, are we saying avoiding— because I know it's carnivore, so we could do chicken, we could do eggs. I like eggs. I've seen you do these egg scrambles, which are yolk scrambles, which I really like. I've been doing that to kind of cheat a fast a little bit because it's higher fat, less protein, save the protein for later. But regardless, is it just beef? Is it grass-fed? Let's get into that a little bit because I know grass-fed can be $20 a pound or, you know, it's expensive. And then if you go to Costco, they have both sometimes, and I try always to get the the grass-fed beef patties are frozen. They're very affordable, but not everyone has Costco. Not everyone can get them. And sometimes they sell out and they have all the other meat out there. And I, and I liked your perspective on thinking of how to do it, but in essence, it's a meat-based diet with our favorite thing here, beverage, water, right? Is that— give us the basics. So it's meat. You eat enough until you're not hungry, drink water. And am I missing a part of the diet? Is that kind of the essence of it, right?

Yeah, basics. Yeah, that's the basics. I mean, water. Some people will still keep coffee and tea, and I tell people, you know, because it, you know, it can be difficult to—

because I drink a little coffee here. I have a little coffee with butter in it. That's how I kind of cheat a fast with the healthy fats.

A lot of people will still continue drinking coffee and do just fine. There's some people that I don't, I don't recommend people dump coffee until maybe 2, 3 months in, and they can experiment to see if it's going to be beneficial or not. But Yeah. I mean, it's basically just eat meat that you enjoy, that you can afford. And this is, let me just, I don't, this is, this is maybe a topic for another discussion, but, but start it please.

Yeah.

When we, when we talk about meat quality, how it's raised, how humanely, environmentally sound it is to be raised, there are clear differences in, like for instance, regenerative agriculture, which which is even beyond what grass-fed is. Grass-fed just means cows eat grass and they can be grazed any way you want. When we're talking about regenerative agriculture, these cows are grazed in a specific way which causes increased biodiversity and causes improvements in the soil quality. It actually restores the environment. It actually puts more carbon into the ground than it takes out, which is, you know, there's some decent estimates out there from researchers who are doing this. If we can get 30 to 40% of our livestock production in a regenerative fashion, we could completely eliminate all greenhouse gases from all industries in the United States and become net carbon neutral just by doing that. But so I am usually a proponent of that aspect of the environment, regenerative, and I try to encourage people, if you can support that in any way you can, if you can afford to do that financially, that is important. Now, having said that, because this isn't veganism, this is an ideology when it comes to human health. I've been doing this pretty much longer than anybody as far as, you know, observing populations and doing surveys and seeing what people are eating. So I have, you know, I've got a survey I did, 12,000 people in 24 hours responded, and I asked them, are you eating grass-fed? Are you eating, you know, this and that? And what we see is there's no difference in health outcomes in a general sense, uh, on people that are eating grass-fed versus what they can afford in the supermarket so far. Now, um, there are specific people that will say, hey, I feel better when I eat a grass-finished animal, and that's fine. You can experiment with that. But just to make a general swooping observe, you know, a recommendation that everybody needs to do grass-fed to be successful in this diet would be a tremendous disservice to all.

Not true.

Yeah, they don't need to do that, particularly particularly the people that can't afford a lot, because my goal is to help not just people that are wealthy, because I think those guys are fine. I mean, wealth is already— you're already going to live longer just because you're wealthy. I mean, we know that any study out there that doesn't discriminate for socioeconomic status completely is not even comparing apples to apples. It's a completely different comparison. So for the struggling person, the people that doesn't have a lot of resources, go to the grocery store, buy ground beef for $3 a pound, throw some eggs in there. That will work for the vast majority of people.

You don't have to put eggs into the meat and mix it in there.

Yeah, whatever. What I mean, whatever, add a little more extra fat, right? This is, this is how you enjoy it, you know. And then the same thing, you know, like meatballs, all that. Yeah, you can do— there's so many ways you can do this. And you can do chicken, you can do, you know, chicken thighs, you can do, you know, eggs are cheap, you know, ground beef is cheap. You can buy in bulk buy in bulk. If you can, if you've got a freezer, contact a local farmer or rancher, you know, buy half a cow. You can get it for $6 a pound.

Wow.

Get grass-fed sometimes for that. So there are so many ways to do this, you know, inexpensively. And for many people, they actually see their grocery bill go down because they just don't eat as much volume. They don't waste food. All those healthy organic fruits and vegetables where half of it ends up in the trash because you didn't eat it fast You're not wasting that money anymore. All those supplements that you were buying, you're not going to need those anymore typically. So there's— you end up actually saving money. You know, you don't produce as much trash, you don't produce as much waste.

I love this.

It's a really effective, efficient way to eat. And then you just find— the weird thing is, you know, it sounds like weird when you're— when somebody's talking about and you're like, how could I ever give up bread and pasta and all these different things? Yeah, your taste literally changes. Changes. And when I'm sitting there, when I'm thinking about I'm hungry, all I want to eat is, you know, some kind of meat, you know, whether it's a steak. I, you know, I tend toward eating a nice ribeye steak and salt it up, sear it real nice, cook it medium rare, and I'm just salivating. I'm literally salivating for it. I 100% enjoy every meal I sit down to. I'm not lamenting the fact that, oh darn, I've got to eat another, another steak.

You would think it'd become a little boring, but if anything, it just gives you that— it's like it's like a hit of satisfaction, a hit of control. It gives you— how do you describe it in a positive way? Because it's not boring.

It never gets old for me. And so many people that do this, it is viscerally and primally satisfying.

It's almost like I said, it's primal.

It's almost like, like, like, I mean, I'll use the analogy of sex. I mean, this is something humans are designed to do. It is inherently pleasurable. It is like, you know, when you you know, it's not— it's kind of wax poetic here— but when you eat a beautiful, well-cooked, fatty, you know, just delicious steak, yeah, it's like comparing, like, you know, the great classical music versus you eat some little junk food, uh, flash in a pan, it's like pop music, you know. It's like, yeah, things are— these things have the test of time, and meat has stood the test of time, you know. Uh, uh, Nisargadatta Maharaj talks about limbic things that have stood the test of time. Meat's one of them. And these, you know, these— when, you know, what do we get? We get the different flavor of potato chip or different flavor of beverage because they have to keep reinventing flavors to keep us engaged. But you don't have to keep reinventing the flavor of a steak. I mean, it always will satisfy.

It's timeless. Yeah. And it's such a primal— I think the metaphor you use is so simple, but it's so true. We have these natural DNA built in. It's just the way we are as a species, you know, from having sex to eating to sleeping. I mean, it's just a part of what we crave. And when we don't get sleep or we don't have a libido that's alive, or, you know, and we, we eat food that doesn't satisfy us, we end up broken, it seems. And so with that said, I know we got to do another one of these. I mean, I really, I'm excited with this, but can we do— do you mind if we end with some rapid questions, some rapid fire questions? I've got a couple—

absolutely—

clients. And I love how we were talking about ways to measure our health. You talked about simple ways. I mean, we're not going to get into blood tests and any of that for people to measure, because people know how to do that right now. But what are some simple ways? You know, for me, it's been waist measurement. I've dedicated my whole career to really giving people, kind of like you, a peak performance energy in life through— my way to gauge it was a waist a smaller waistline. And so I've done that. A lot of my books have been called like The Belly Fat Cure, the this, the that. And if that is something you agree with, let us know. And then if there's a test for men, I know you talked about when they wake up, they should have an erection. For women, I don't know what the example would be. Give us a quick, rapid solution to measuring health. If right now someone feels unhealthy and they're not sure if they are, what's some simple ways that they don't have to go see a doctor as much as you're a doctor, to find out if they're healthy or not? What are some simple gauges?

Yeah, first of all, like I said, I think labs can be effective. They have to be put in clinical context and we have to know the whole situation. There's more nuance to that. So I think just a blanket look at a lab is, is not that particularly insightful unless you know everything that's going on. But I 100% agree with you. Waist-to-height measurement, belly circumference, uh, relative to your height is a wonderful, wonderful tool. It is probably one of the most cheap and effective tools for screening people for general health. So I mean, as a human being, your waist should be at minimum less than half of your height in inches and waist in inches or centimeters, however you want to do that. And probably getting closer to around 45% is probably closer to ideal. So that is really good. It predicts insulin resistance, it predicts mortality, it predicts, you know, so many things, heart disease. So that's a cheap one.

Easy. And we can all do that, men and women.

Yeah, you can simply do that. Yeah, we got that.

Get a tape measure, guys. It's simple.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's half— tell us one more time—

half the, the, you know, at least, uh, your waist should certainly be no more than half of your height and, and closer to like 45%.

So give us an example.

If I'm 6 foot tall, if you're 6 foot tall, no more than 36 inches, and probably better around 34 inches. And that's measured at the belly button, you know. I mean, that's not your jean size, at the belly button.

Okay, and you pull about— pull the belly button in, right?

Yeah, well, I mean, just relax. Just now, just relax. Just relax, relax and take that, take that measurement. Sometimes you might need somebody to measure it for you. I think that, you know, there are some, I think, tests out there like a coronary artery calcium scan and carotid intermediate thickness when we're looking at vascular health. That's a better measure of actual disease, which is a better measurement than what's my cholesterol or so on and so forth. But sure, without going to the lab and doing that, things you can measure, you know, like we talked about, you know, As a male, I don't care how old you are, you should wake up every day with an erection or almost every day. And I'm gonna say, I'm 53 and I wake up that way every day. That is a function, that is a measurement of what's going on with your vascular health.

And that's just good health. I mean, it's not that you're sexual or wanting to have sex. Maybe you are, but it's not about sex. It's just the way the body— people are thinking, oh, that's so sexual. It's not. It's just the way the human male body is, right?

And the female body too. Humans are designed to to have sex. I mean, this is, this is part of being a healthy human, you know. And again, I mean, maybe, you know, maybe when you're 100 and you don't wake up that way, it's time for you to go, perhaps.

But even at 99, you could have an erection for the gentlemen out there, and you should strive for this. Upon rising, you wake up and there it is. You say good morning. So your friend is there. I think for the ladies, what's the equivalent, or is there something different maybe, or is it the waist measurement maybe?

In the I mean, with— for women, it's kind of interesting. You know, it's kind of odd that guys wake up in the morning, they want to have sex because they have erection. Maybe women don't do— don't correlate with that. It may not be the best time of the morning for women. But I think women in general, I think just a general libido. I mean, I think, you know, you should feel like you have decent libido. And I think that's important.

Again, even after perimenopause or—

absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

So in their 50s and 60s.

Oh, yeah. Of course, there are women that are in their 50s, their 60s, 70s and still have active and very satisfying sex lives. So that is another measurement. Now they have some additional challenges because of the hormonal shifts, but still the physiology, the blood flow, because just like men, you know, they have their erections based on blood flow. Women have blood flow events that occur as well in their anatomy. I don't have to get into details on that, but yeah, that does occur. Other things, you know, it's just mood. How do I feel? If I wake up every day and I'm tired and maybe not tired isn't mood, but I mean, just how do you generally feel about life? I mean, do I look forward to waking up every day? Do I look forward to that? And my general sense is what humans should be is we should generally be kind of just relaxed and happy. I mean, relaxed and happy.

So calm, calm, happy, and happy is, I think, a good place to be.

And I think that has to do sometimes with what's going on with our glucose levels, because we know we're on a glucose glucose-dependent, high-carb roller coaster diet, we see our blood glucose go up and down, but we also see our mood go up and down often to parallel that. You see what happens to kids. You put kids— you hop kids up on sugar and they go crazy for a while, and then they become sullen and moody.

So if people are experiencing anxiety, panic attacks, a lot of times, and this is like the joints, they don't talk about the true source. If you go into more of this kind of a diet that we've been talking about, it can cause this calming, happy effect. Right. I mean, and that should be the way it should be, one of the— without Prozac.

Yeah. One of the most common things that's noticed on this diet for many people, people suffering with lifetime bipolar disorders, debilitating depression, even suicidal depression, crippling anxiety, is that goes away pretty significantly for many people, which is another—

I mean, like, this is like life-altering to hear that. Say one more time, Dr. Maker, please. This is so, so important.

Yeah. There are people that are suffering from severe mental health disorders, whether it's crippling anxiety, suicidal depression, post-traumatic distress disorder, or post-traumatic distress disorder, bipolar disease, and so many others that get profound benefits from changing to a diet like this. I mean, and this is something that, you know, there's researchers in Harvard, Chris Palmer is one of them that's doing this research and it's showing that to bear out to be true. And so I think this is, again, this is another thing. But back to our original, like, how do we assess health? Mental health is a huge part of it. And our brain physiology is just like any other organ. It is, it is influenced by what we—

I like that.

Yeah. It's not special in a sense that it's secluded from our physiology. There is a blood-brain barrier, but we're still affected by those things we occur. And when we have chronic inflammation, when we have glucose, poor glucose homeostasis, all of those things. And also nutrition, certain nutrition we're lacking when we're on a, you know, often a carb-based, grain-based diet. We're lacking brain-critical nutrients. So when we go on these meat-based diets, we get better glucose control, we get less inflammation, we get better nutrition for our brain health. And we see time and time again, I cannot tell you how many thousands of people I've now seen that say, "My mental health has just done a 180. I'm so much happier." And again, this is part of why going from just orthopedics where I'm fixing knee replacements, now I've got people that are depressed and they're no longer depressed and they're back in life. They weren't on the sidelines. You know, like I said, life is not a spectator sport. You know, I mean, or life is, yeah, it's not a spectator sport. So when you're on the sidelines watching, you mean you've already lost.

Yeah.

So when you, when you've got crippling anxiety and you can't participate in life, I mean, gosh, it's so miserable. And so this is one way that I've seen that's been very powerful.

This is incredible. I mean, I feel like I wasn't thinking in this direction when we started the conversation, but definitely I've been applying this diet to myself. And, um, you know, sometimes I will, um, I do intermittent fasting for the most part. And you eat, I think you follow kind of an intermittent fast as well. Is that right? I mean, I mean, that was a question a lot of people had about intermittent fasting in this diet. And I think our ancestors did that to some high degree. They weren't eating night and day, but what are your thoughts briefly on intermittent fasting and how do you do it?

Absolutely. I think that if we go back to ancestral health, I don't think the, the likelihood of us being able to stop and snack every 2 to 3 hours while we were nomads was very implausible. I mean, you think about it, you're, you're walking in a band of 20 people and you're complaining you're hungry to the leader of the group, he's not going to stop and pitch a camp and, you know, light a fire every, every 3 hours.

You had your meal at night when you caught it or you had it fresh or whatever. Right. Yeah.

And so I think, I think that's more consistent with our evolutionary past. You know, again, that's still speculative, but that's my thought. But I, you know, I think that infrequent eating is probably better for most people. Uh, you know, specific athletes may have a different requirement. But for the average person, infrequent meals are probably better than what we have, the snack culture. When I was a kid, when I came from— came home from school, and this is, you know, the early 1970s, "Hey, Mom, I'm hungry," the answer was not, "Here's a granola bar." The answer was, "Wait till dinner." And that's what I did.

And 1950s, you know, I don't have to go back 500,000 years, but we were smarter 50 years ago, right?

So the snack culture is a problem. So what happens to me me is I eat my steak and eggs for breakfast and I just don't want to eat. I am not hungry.

Is that the one meal you do in the morning?

Well, it could be two. I mean, I'd say most of the time it's two meals, but I'd say—

So you rise briefly, you get up, you do your workout, or do you eat?

Yeah, I typically work out early fasted most times.

That's what I recommend too. Yeah.

And then I will eat a fat protein-based meal of some sort, you know, animal-based.

And your eggs and your steak. Yeah.

Yeah. Or something along those lines. And, or may just be a steak and a steak, or it might be a lot of eggs or something depending on the day. I mix it up a little bit. And then I maybe eat again at 5:00 PM or something like that. And that's it for me.

So then that meal will be also similar, similar, another steak.

Sure. Sure. Something like that might be seafood. It might be some salmon. I don't know. It's just, Depends what I'm in the mood. I, you know, like I said, I certainly will use variety if I want to, but I mean, most of the time I just want to say, cause it just, it always tastes good to me.

What are your thoughts on just briefly and not to interrupt, but of using egg yolks? Cause I know you do an egg yolk scramble and a lot of my clients try to eat in a, in a time-restricted window, you know, and they sometimes want to eat something to hold their fast off in the morning. And I've been suggesting that they, you know, obviously I've, you know, like I've been having a little coffee with butter in it in here. We've talked about other little biohacks that don't raise insulin so much and are more fat-based and that helps kind of curb appetite. And I don't know if you know the work of Dr. Jason Fung in Toronto, the guy who just talked to—

I've met Jason, talked to him and interviewed him several times.

You know, Dr. Fung. And so he's given us a few guidelines over some conversations we had to try not to exceed 2 or 3 carbs and proteins to break break a fast so that way you can kind of cheat it. Do you feel like an egg yolk scramble would be something that if people are fasting kind of mimics fasting since it's mainly fat or are there carbs and proteins in the yolk? What do you think?

Uh, no, I think that egg yolks are almost exclusively fat there to the level that there's any significant carb or protein, there's going to be minimal. And so, yeah, I mean, that's a very good way. And you're very correct in saying that fat has very little impact on insulin. Insulin. And so it can. And, you know, if you look, depending on who you're dealing with, and again, I think people that are dealing with metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, or flat-out diabetes, a fat-based diet is clearly the way to go. I mean, clearly the way to go. That is how you're going to improve your insulin resistance. That's kind of how you're going to control your glycemia. You're going to get normal glucose values by doing that. And then, you know, obviously exercise has a role in there and exercise plays a different role. But that is one, because when I, because I've got these big populations I deal with every day and some of them are athletes, some of them are world-class athletes. Some of them are just the people that are suffering from metabolic syndrome and diabetes. And we treat them people very differently. And I think it's becoming clear to me as I've been longer in this space that a fat-based approach, high fat, high fat, 80, 90% of your calories coming from fat is what's going to, is what's going to to fix the diabetes basically.

And do you suggest what I've been suggesting and Dr. Saladino mentioned, beef tallow? You use beef tallow as well as a fat to cook with, or do you just use butter? Sure.

I think again, we have to— my point about dairy, some people find dairy inflammatory. And so if that's the case, then you can easily use beef tallow or lard, or you can use—

Because that comes from the meat itself. So not, not dairy, right? Dairy is more— right, so that's the butters and creams.

If you were to trim the fat off of a steak and cook it until it was— until all the fat was, was kind of liquefied, and then you would take that and strain it from the solids, that would be beef tallow. And then you can reuse that and cook that and use that as a delicious— and it's delicious.

It is. I've been using it too.

Yeah, yeah. Duck fat, geese fat, goose fat, fat, lamb's tallow, all those things are great fats. Fats that use— and we used to— lard was a very common product in the 1920s, well, all back through history.

And lard is beef tallow, is that another way to say it?

Lard comes from pigs, so that's the fat from pigs.

So it's tallow from pigs, pig tallow, right?

That's lard, basically. So you can utilize that too, and a lot of people traditionally use it, and it tastes really, really good relative to some of these canola oils and soybeans.

Oh yeah, and it's not inflammatory. I mean, And that's the magic here. It's this ancestral diet. I think this is the take-home for everyone listening. And I want to invite you back. So let's just do that. And we'll plan on another conversation because I think there's so much to talk about. And I feel like your work, your life's work has become something that's so incredibly simple, but so incredibly important. And I think that that's what I learned more than 20 years ago from Oprah Winfrey, this idea that if you want to reach large people— because I asked her when I was on her show and I was in my 20s, I said, you know, Miss Winfrey, what do you recommend? I want to help as many people as I can. I was a fitness trainer. My dream was to write a book back then, and, you know, I hadn't done a book, but 3 years later I did. And it was a training book, exercise book on just strength training. And she said, keep it simple. That's all she said. And I can't think of a more simple diet than what you've explained here. And then, you know, as people get to that place, maybe after a certain number after a number of days or a week or two, they can start adding back in certain things that are hopefully low-toxic carbs and other things that they've enjoyed in the past and see how it works and add them in one at a time, I would probably say. And I think maybe that's what we talk about the next time is how to get people to have that freedom and option if they choose that. And I think it'd be great to also in the future talk about how patients of yours have transformed their health outside of what you've talked about, because I mean, I can't believe that you were just helping people with knee surgery, hip surgery, these surgeries, and then you of course had to have them lose weight. And in this process, they didn't even need the surgery and their mental happiness improved. I mean, so many, I don't know if you call them side effects, but they're, they're incredibly important effects. And I think I'm just so grateful for your work and what you're doing. And I feel like, you know, the book, tell us the title again, where they should get the book, tell us where they can find you on social and your website. And, and I know you have something that I think is important right now that needs funding. So maybe end on that strongly so everyone listening can contribute if they, if their heart is able to and their wallets are able to, to contribute to a clinical trial you're doing that needs obviously some research money. But tell us how to find you and where, where they can find you both on social and on the web and everything, please.

Yeah. So, uh, The first place, there's, you know, our website meetrx.com, which my— I found with another— my chief technical author is at Silicon Valley.

MeetRx, right?

Rx, like prescription, meet, and then rx.com. I'm there every single day, 365 days a year. Every morning I have a meeting, and you're welcome to join in, and you can talk directly to me. I love talking to people. So fantastic. I do that every day. It's my passion. That's how I learn, because quite frankly, I learn from people. Just like I'm trying to provide information.

Is it a Zoom type of meeting or how do you do it?

Zoom, and we'll have anywhere up to from 50 to 100 people every day in there. And so we talk to people and we ask them how they're doing.

Bright and early California time, Eastern time, what time do you guys do it?

9 AM Pacific time that I do mine. And there's all kinds of meetings or other people that have other groups that we set up on this platform. So it's a great supportive tool. There's all kinds of information, resources.

I love that.

I'm on, you know, my Instagram, Sean, S-H-A-W-N Baker, B-A-K-E-R. @sbaker1967. You know, several posts a day. Some of it's controversial, some of it's— quite frankly, some of it pisses people off. It's kind of like when you just kind of be controversial and you get, you get some—

that's okay. Hey, we can't make everyone happy, you know, right?

And then I've got a Twitter, @sbakermd, and then I've got a YouTube channel, Sean Baker.

Um, we'll put all the links on the show notes. Absolutely. I'm on my site, no problem.

Of course. So what we've seen is, again, thousands upon thousands of people that have all these transformations. And we've got 500+ transformation stories on our website at MediRxiv. You can read all kinds. It's categorized by, you know, diabetes and heart disease and arthritis and depression and GI issues, whatever you want to look at. We have, we have testimonials on the power of this intervention, a lifestyle intervention including diet, on how that's helped. So we've got this, and the criticism keeps coming. Well, there's no randomized controlled clinical trial. Clinical trial that proves this. And for many people, they don't need that because they're like, I, I'm willing to results, listen to results and see that. But for many people out there, particularly physicians that would like to prescribe this for patients, they say, gotcha. And there are many physicians out there that are using it now and getting the same results I'm getting, which is really cool.

But so you're, you're starting a clinical trial to have this option to show people like doctors or anyone the, the numbers, if you will, of what the tests would show. And so where do people go to contribute and what's your goal? How much money do we need to raise to finish this?

Right. So to do a clinical trial of reasonable quality, which is what we want, we don't want to put bad science out there. We need probably about $200,000. And so we are about a third of the way through. We started raising a little over a week ago. So we've already got, you know, almost $70,000, which is pretty cool.

That's fantastic.

Yeah. My social media links will have the, the GoFundMe link, and I can send that to you so you can link to this.

Please. Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes.

That people can go to. And so, you know, it's whatever people can kick in, you know, if we get, you know, 100,000 people to kick in $2, we're there.

So, hey, it's done. It could be $2, right?

Yeah. So, it's, you know, we're happy for anything. And you can read again, if you just read through the people that have contributed, they will say, this has changed my life. You can just read testimonials on the on the GoFundMe.

And you're leading this study, you'll be leading it.

Yeah.

Do you hire a team?

We'll hire a team. I'm not a professional researcher. I want this to be the best quality study possible. So I'm not a, I'm not a researcher. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna mess this up.

Yeah, no, you've got your, you've got your day job here.

We're gonna, we're gonna hire and we've already got several researchers that are super excited to do this study. They're high quality, well-known researchers that say, if we get the money, I'll do the study. And so, you know, we're going to have a really high high-quality randomized controlled trial that will, you know, and again, I don't know what the outcome is going to be. I can only speculate based on what I've seen, but we're going to design it so we can show, you know, what we hope to show, you know, and have it be truly randomized, real true science, not nutritional epidemiology where we don't know what the inputs are. And so if we can, if we can do that, then it'll give more and more physicians the power to do this or prescribe this. Yeah, prescribe this or just other people that are skeptical to at least have that to try it, and then we can change more lives.

And the science is important.

Yeah, it is, it is.

And if people want to do this, go to meatrx.com. They can do a link there, or there's a link on the front page. And if they Google it, what's the name of this, the funding at GoFundMe?

You said so. If you go to gofundme.com and you look under Carnivore Clinical Trial, if you type in those two things together, you should find find the link for that.

We'll provide the link as well.

JorgeCruise.com.

Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I'm just so excited. I feel more confident and more— because I've been— since Mark Sisson had this talk with me a few months ago, before COVID got really going, and we caught up, and then we did these podcasts, and then I met Paul Saladino, and now talking to you, I feel like the picture is getting brighter and it's getting more clear. And if anyone who's been listening to all these conversations has questions, you guys know you can also text me, you can email, you can reach out to us. But please, I mean, I know we're going to have a lot of great questions, uh, Dr. Baker, and I'm just so, so, uh, so happy that you were able to make this time. I didn't realize we spent so much time talking here, but this is, uh, definitely a topic well worth it because out of my whole career, as much as I'm a trainer, uh, by trade, you know, the biggest question people want to know is what do I eat? Number 1 question, give me a food list. What do I eat?

Yeah, we will have to work on seeing if we get Oprah to turn or change her tune a little bit on it.

Well, you know, Miss Winfrey, she has a new show that just was announced for Apple on Apple TV. And she's going to be needing guests on that show. And I bet a lot of this work is something a lot of women, as much as I know you primarily work with people in your field, athletes, and I'm not saying women aren't athletes, athletes, but the women I've worked with have been people like Ms. Winfrey for so many years, last 20 years. And from their 30s to 40s, now they're in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. I feel like what you're sharing, not enough people in this world that— I really contribute my career to Oprah, that have been following her and my work and Dr. Oz and all that. I don't hear this enough in that community. I hear it in the biohacking community, you hear about it in the CrossFit community, you hear about it in the athletic movement communities, but in the everyday middle-aged type of people, women community, I don't hear it enough. And so I feel really honored to have had this conversation because I think there's so many people, women particularly, that need this information. And you know, they— you'd be surprised how many of my online clients, um, are able to adapt what I share and then their husbands get healthy, you know? So it's like this effect and then their kids kids get healthy. And so I see it as a trickling effect. So thank you for allowing me to reach into this new world of the females. And not that you don't deal with wonderful women already, but get ready for a lot more.

Yeah, no, women are essential. They're the decision— nutritional decision makers for the household. They're the health decision makers. They're critical, critically important people. And yes, women definitely benefit from eating meat-based diets. They've been told, they've been sold this. Salad with a little skinny strip of chicken with dressing on the side for too long. They're miserable, they're suffering, they're hungry. That's not the right message.

So we got to change it.

Absolutely.

I'm so grateful to your work. And I know the best is yet to come. And as Mark Sisson says, he's redefining 70. He just turned 67. And his goal is to hit 70 and make it a new look, a new feel, a new outlook on life. And I know you're just a kid, like I'm a little younger. I'm 49 and I look forward to 50 and I'm sure you're going to look forward to your next big milestone, maybe 55. I don't know. That doesn't sound like a big deal. 60 may do it, but you got Mark Sisson out there, 67 already. I feel like 70 is the new number you got to show off at.

Yeah, no.

So we got a while.

We got a while. He set the bar and it's like it's up to the people that come after him to raise it even farther. So I plan on doing it.

And I love that it's just going back to the simple— I don't want to call it primal, but the very ancestral basic necessities we used to do, you know, and pair that with the modern good things that we are doing. You pair the old with the new, then you have— then we can be like superhuman, you know, and be happy and be super happy, you know, and not be overweight and in pain and suffering. So thank you, thank you for providing this for us, and I can't wait to hear the response and until our second conversation. So thank you, Dr. Baker, appreciate it so much.

Yeah, looking forward to round 2. Awesome.

You bet. Hey, it's Jorge. If you have one more minute, I wanted to address something that I think is super important, and that is if you need help with anything from the show, uh, if you need help about losing belly fat, if you want help about intermittent fasting, if you want help about exercise, interval training, anything at all, uh, I want you to join my Fit Family on text. It's a brand new service I've just launched, and And if you really do need help, I want you to text me right now. It really is that simple. You'll be part of my texting family. I have a group of people that I work with via text and it's all for free. So I'd love you to join. All you have to do is text my Malibu number. It's a 424 area code number. So I'm gonna give it to you right now. Jot this down or while you're listening, text me right now, I mean it. 424-228-9548, and you'll join my Fit Family. Let me give it to you one more time. It's area code 424-228-9548. Now, it's going to work only in the US, so I have to say that if you're listening to our show outside of the US, sorry, no international texting yet, at least. And, uh, but 80% of you in the US should be able to text me. I know if you have T-Mobile, you have to put on premium service or something like that, uh, but this is free. And I'm going to be giving away a lot of my time on this texting service. A lot of free things like our Belly Fat Cure course will be announced on here. So if you've done my survey, this is how you'll get access to it. I'll be doing special livestream events only for people in my texting community.. And I'll be announcing my next 19-day challenge on there as well. So really utilize this and, and you'll get first glances from our show as well. So it'll be a great chance for us to connect and I may even call you and FaceTime you. So kind of a fun thing. Again, the number, text me, literally do it right now. Area code 424-228-9548. And I look forward to having you join my Fit Family. Take good care and God bless. Peace and purpose.