 There has been fairly strong anti-carbohydrate dogma in the keto and carnivore communities lately, and they have fairly good reason. If you consume carbohydrates in large amounts on a diet with low-quality foods, you'll get sick in more ways than one. It could be as simple as becoming overweight, perhaps gut issues, but when you're eating feline conventional meats and agrochemical sprayed crops every day, you're a far cry from true health. I'd like to think I've made it fairly clear on my channel that I think plant foods are healthy, certain ones that is, and that I just haven't been eating them due to my personal health problems. I've even made videos on how to make sourdough bread, how to properly ferment oats, and even videos outlining specific plant foods that I consider healthy. But what makes a plant food healthy? First, we have to rule out the negatives, two primary factors. One is that the food is free from inflammation, pretty simple, that means no modern agrochemicals, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, insecticides, the stuff they're spraying on the crops so that they can make more money and poison us at the same time. And two is that it's low in omega-6, and that really rules out feedlot meats, seed oils, as well as nuts and seeds. So, if you adhere by these two simple things to avoid, you have a healthy diet. Second, we have to find the positives in the food. Again, we have two primary factors. One, does the food offer caloric energy? After all, the main purpose of eating is survival, and we need those calories to function on a day-to-day basis, as well as store fat for times of less food, times of famine, something that's not really so common in our modern world. Two, does the food have a significant vitamin, mineral, or fatty acid content that it can play a major role in providing that nutrient in our diet? And of course, there are a bunch of other factors that aren't as important. Is the food raw? How was the food prepared? Was it heated extensively? Is the food of heirloom indigenous quality? Did it exist thousands of years ago? But before we start asking and answering all of those questions, we definitely want to take a look at what our indigenous ancestors ate in our much healthier past, so we might not have to do all that stuff. And in just about every tribe, group of people, their diet consisted of two main components, animal nutrition and plant nutrition, usually some type of starch. So they would hunt or practice animal husbandry for the animal component, and forage or farm for the plant component. But what were these people trying to achieve by consuming those plant foods, those starches? To my understanding, you need to feed your gut microbiome, and that plays a big role in energy, in digesting food properly, and even in things like staying warm in the wintertime. You need to fuel your body with that carbohydrate energy. Your body, your cells need glucose, whether it's synthesized from the starches, the fats, the proteins. You have the trace minerals that aren't as high in animal foods, such as copper, manganese, molybdenum, and boron. You have vitamin C, the high anti-scorbutic fruits, and you also balance your fat-civil vitamins by consuming certain plant foods. You reduce the vitamin A, and since most people aren't getting enough vitamin D3, when you consume a lot of animal fat, you can kind of overdo it, and it also feeds your gut to synthesize vitamin K2. So, fat-civil-vitamin synergy and balance by consuming grains, tubers, fruits, whatever isn't something people really consider, but when you look at it from a mechanistic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. And real quick question, should you consume carbs or fats as your main source of energy? Do you have a high-fat ancestry, and are you in a high-wifi environment? Those are two main considerations because if you're like me, where you're Italian, and you don't necessarily tolerate large amounts of fats, the answer is probably a no. And a wifi environment, high stress, if you're not reducing that properly, can also make you intolerant to carbohydrates. We did a video several weeks back, something like cell phones cause diabetes. Those are two main considerations before you even look into any of this stuff. So most of you have probably heard of this book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. It's basically a dentist who explored these groups of peoples in the early 1900s, and he observed that the Swiss people consumed rye bread and dairy, the Scots ate oats and fish, the Sea Islanders foraged for shellfish and cooked various starchy fruits and vegetables, and some Native Americans ate mostly land meat, while the Native Alaskans ate mostly fish. This coincides with my book, The Ancestral Indigenous Diet, which parallels the animal food consumption between all of these groups of people. They were all in excellent health with a similar nutrient profile from animal foods, despite having drastically different energy sources. Some consumed animal fat, while others consumed bread, two very different foods. So you definitely want to take a look at your ancestry and start from there, but most importantly, see how you feel after eating certain foods. Some obvious ones might be an Italian eating durham wheat pasta. After all, an awful lot of Italians live into their hundreds eating wheat, which is allegedly one of the most harmful foods in our modern dietary wisdom, gluten is bad for you, it's gonna kill you. The main issue is what's being sprayed on the food, as well as the soil quality, not necessarily what is growing, although if it is like a GMO grain, then we have some issues. What's really crazy is that our past ancestors all ate with intuition. They basically knew what they needed to eat, their bodies told them, and young babies are like that now. A baby knows what food he should eat, but our modern world has caused us to lose that instinct. So we need to apply our modern knowledge of nutrient profiles to fix and amend our modern stupidity. One example of this is people saying that a carnivore diet has all of the nutrients you need. That might be true, but they're not in the proper ratios and certain ones aren't high enough. And those ones I mentioned, copper, manganese, molydenum, boron, especially selenium, you need to get those from plant foods or ocean life, shellfish, seafood, salmon. And since we don't have access to the wild plant foods of our past, we have to figure out what are good sources of energy as well as nutrition for right now that you can go get in the supermarket. From what I've observed, most of the nutrition, the vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids should still come from those animal foods, whether it be land or ocean, but some people do benefit from using carbohydrates as opposed to animal fat. So we're briefly going to go over the pros and cons of various fruits, tubers, grains, and over the next few months, you know, I have a feeling I'm not going to be carnivore by the end of this year. So we'll definitely do some experimenting and some more videos about my thoughts more in depth on specific carbohydrates, like maybe a whole video on white rice, for instance. So fruits in general, the positives, they're low in anti-nutrients, at least most of them are. One thing I know for certain is that bananas cause a lot of issues for some people and there's other fruits that are like that. They don't stress the body's enzymes because it tends to be glucose and fructose and you don't need to produce anything to break down starch or as you do with other plant foods. They have B vitamins, vitamin C, and electrolyte minerals. So with most fruits, you aren't getting these minerals, but you are getting potassium, some vitamin C, stuff that helps reduce insulin load on the body when you consume those sugars. You do have the fructose stressing the liver, not really that big of a deal unless you're bodybuilding and need to eat a large amount of fruit, so I'm kind of in that boat. Some fruits are very high in carotenoids and flavonoids and they're not meant to be consumed in large amounts because these very colorful substances in certain foods can stress your liver. Really depends on the person, really depends on the tolerance, but there's a reason most groups ate mostly grains, not only because they couldn't gather these in large enough amounts, they tended to cause issues in large amounts. And then you have the accessibility and storage issue. Very unrealistic to have ripe fruit at all times of the year. I would argue that alcohol is more realistic than that and I didn't put alcohol on here, but I'm glad I brought that up because a lot of these groups of people did consume alcohol as a reasonable part of their calories and they still lived very healthily into old age because they had minimal inflammatory factors and their lifestyle, they were in low Wi-Fi environments. It's a very natural alcohol and it even has some gut bacterial benefits. So moving on to the starchy tubers as well as grains, these have a lot of parallels between them. So both are high in starch, mostly glucose. So if you look at the profile breakdown of starches, it tends to be a small amount of glucose, mostly starch, and then there's some sucrose which gets broken down into glucose and fructose. So compared to the fructose load on the liver, it's much lower. They're easy to harvest and store. So from a realistic perspective, you could have potatoes, wheat, barley, whatever grains you want in your cupboard for months and months enough to get through the winter and they're present in most native groups. So we know it's something realistic whereas not all of these people were eating fruits. The downside is mainly anti-nutrients and this can include things like gluten that might irritate some guts. There's a mineral leaching problem due to phytates, phytic acid and grains and you have various depending on a specific food. I think something in potatoes is solanines. So you have to ferment, soak and cook these various foods in order for them to be edible and in different cultures you can observe this and we mentioned the sourdough bread, we mentioned the Scottish oat fermentation, something like potatoes, if you tend to just boil them in salted water that tends to be enough and this carotenoid flavonoid concern can almost overarch to something like sweet potatoes where you can't eat a large amount of sweet potatoes without getting too much carotene. And then there is very unique foods like cassava that actually have cyanide in them and it needs to be reduced. That being said, there are very, very healthy groups of people that consume large amounts of grains so it's hard to argue against this from that perspective and as opposed to looking at anti-nutrients as the devil, what you really wanna look at is do you have enough animal foods in your diet, enough minerals to make up for anti-nutrient concern? It could just be a matter of taking a magnesium capsule that you probably have to take anyway due to soil depletion. Moving on to nuts, seeds, and seasonings. They work present in most, if not all, indigenous groups so if someone's gonna tell you, you shouldn't add this to your food, you shouldn't add that or that, the reason you're not tolerating something is likely a gut issue. The downside is that nuts and seeds tend to be very high in anti-nutrients and they weren't really accessible in large amounts so I think as long as you're consuming these products in reasonable amounts and you're adhering to these principles, you should be good to go. One category I didn't put in here is fermented foods and regardless of the indigenous group, they had fermented versions of the foods they were consuming in their diet so if they ate beef, they had some type of fermented beef product whether it's animal fat or marrow, they buried it, whatever. If they consumed a lot of corn, maize, they likely made a beer from that maize. There was one article I was reading where they would chew the corn and start the fermentation and they had a beer to drink so fermentation is definitely a big food category that we're kind of not including here, mainly for the gut bacterial benefits but hopefully this gets you guys to understand why we want to consume carbohydrates, what their purposes are and overall I'm hoping you guys understand that it's perfectly okay and healthy to include each of these things into your diet but judging the positives and the negatives, what access we would have in nature, you can make some sense of it so fruits you might only eat at certain times of the year, maybe a few times a month, grains, you can pretty much consume on a daily basis if they're made properly, same thing with adding certain spices and seasonings and then in regards to the animal food consumption and the shellfish seafood consumption, we can touch on balancing that stuff in a different video but it's basically anywhere from 45 to 65% animal foods and the remainder being plant foods. What determines your height, the height of like a child isn't like eating only meat versus eating too many grains. An Italian person that is five foot eight might have eaten 35% of their calories from animal foods whereas a Dutch person that's six foot seven might have eaten 65 to 70% of their calories from animal foods. So it's not an all or nothing thing but there is a significant difference in physical development by incorporating more animal foods into your diet in younger stages of life. What I'm getting at is if you're an adult and you're already a shorty, you don't need that much animal protein. Me as an Italian following a carnivore diet is almost kind of silly because I don't need all of this animal protein to be healthy. It's probably a reason why those Italians that are eating a lot of grains live so long because they're giving their body what it needs. Some interesting things to think about but I think we can wrap it up there. So thank you guys for joining me. One thing I didn't mention was the best source of carbohydrates is our nature's glucose that we just launched yesterday and it doesn't have fiber and I will touch on fiber in future videos and how it can be helpful for restoring proper gut function but you definitely wanna check that out on frankiesfreerangefoods.com. I will link everything down in the description below. If you guys could please like the video, leave me a comment down below. Above all, if you can share it on social media, I will see you guys for tomorrow's video and if you guys could let me know any videos you guys would like to see in the near future. I have a list of way too many thousands of videos but you guys generally come up with pretty good ones, popular ideas that I prefer to do over those.