 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump. Mind pump. With your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. I'm convinced I'm going to run a little meat diet for me. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it with the whole testosterone. Oh, just between the testosterone thing and the psoriasis thing, too. I've never thought to run that and see. I mean, I've done vegan stuff. I've only tried it for two days. I didn't feel good. That's not enough time. Well, that's true, but I felt I didn't feel good at all and I have to listen to my body. And did you? And did you? I've always felt good. Did you know veggies? None at all. So here's the thing. You also did it off very fast. This is a very compelling episode you're about to listen to. So Dr. Sean Baker, he's the carnivore diet guy. This guy only has eaten meat. Only. No plant product at all. 13 months. Sounds crazy. For 14 months, but he makes a very compelling argument. Not dogmatic. Not dogmatic about it. At the end of the day, the message he's saying is listening to listen to your body, which is I love because he's a doctor. He's a surgeon. And he's saying things like, you know, you know, blood values, there's some merit. However, what's most important is how much energy you have your skin. Do you have pain? You know, what's your digestion? How does that translate to your body's telling you? Yeah, how's your libido? How's your sleep? And it's like, man, that's what we talk about. Can we talk about how different he looks in person compared to Instagram and all the video I saw? He's a monster. A monster. Yeah, he's a big dude. Not a lot of guys make me feel like a little baby. Like he's like, he's up there with like that massive, I mean, he's what? Towers. He's lean as fuck right now at 245. He's like, he's 50 something years old. 52. He's 52 deadlifts. Like what? 700 pounds? That was his most. 770. Bro, all natural. All natural. He's a world record holder in rowing, right? Yeah. He also was a professional rugby player too. So I mean, he's got quite the past as far as athletics is concerned. So yeah, on genetic propensity, like he's definitely up there, but at the same time, what he was saying was very compelling. It's a great conversation. I mean, I was throwing a few curveballs at him to see how it would respond, but he knows his shit. We got in a lot of good topics too, man. We got into the medical industry too and the bullshit behind that. We got into blue zones. He touched that. He's had some really interesting facts talking about the blue zone. The only thing I was upset is that he's holding out on his blood for Rob, our friend Rob. Yeah. So he's going to be revealing that there. That's okay. But he did tell us all fair. Maybe we should just say it here. We should. High jacket. No, we told him we wouldn't. But a compelling, compelling episode. So it's very interesting. I think it's a bit extreme. Definitely don't recommend this for most people. But at the end of the day, the best judge, the best coach, the best anything that you'll ever have is your body. And that's really what he says in this episode. So without any further ado, we're talking to Dr. Sean Baker. Did you say we could find Sean? I'm going to tell him right now. So on Instagram, it's at Sean Baker. That's S-H-A-W-N-B-A-K-E-R-1967. That's his Instagram page. His Twitter page is S Baker, M-D. His Facebook page is World Carnivore Tribe. His websites are meetheels.com, I love that one. Or carnivortrainingsystems.com. Also, don't forget, mindpumpmedia.com. This is where you can go to find out more about our maps programs. These are training systems or programs designed. It's something Sean talks about in this episode. He talks about the, we talk about how the medical system, the prescription is 30 minutes of vigorous activity every day. But they don't talk about resistance training. Right, and he agreed with us as far as the importance of that. And this, I mean, that's really the, our foundational program is Maps Anabolic, which I would say is the perfect program for somebody looking for overall help. Absolutely. And if you get a bundle, a bundle combines several maps programs so you have longer than just, you know, 12 weeks you have a longer period of time. For example, our super bundle, which is like the, that's the ultimate bundle that we offer. It's a year's worth of exercise programs. So in other words, if you enrolled in it and then started tomorrow, you would have your entire year planned out for you. Every week, every couple of weeks, the workout changes. Every few months, the whole goal changes. All the programs come with video demos, exercise blueprints. It's very thorough. It's the best programs we think you can find online. And of course they're expertly programmed by ourselves. So if you want to learn more, or if you just want to get started, go to mindpumpmedia.com. Here we are talking to Dr. Sean Baker. I'm in the bathroom, right? And I'm doing my morning, my morning, one morning shit. And I walk out and Dr. Sean Baker's outside talking to Adam and Justin. And you're a massive person. You're a much bigger than that. He threw us all off. Yeah. Instagram does not do you justice, my friend. You're like a, just like a redwood tree. Yeah. Well, sorry to disappoint you guys. You're surprised. So how would you sports? You're an athlete, right? Yeah. I've been an athlete my whole life. I did a whole bunch of different sports. Highly competitive rower? Right now. Right now that's what I'm done. Playing on that concept too. Breaking some world records on that stuff. Oh shit. No big deal. How does that work? How does that work to like you said on a concept too? Yeah. So concept two has been maintaining world records and national records for about 35 years or so. So basically when you do a legitimate verified distance it has a computer code that spits out and they collect that around the world and just submit your time to get surveilled. So there's usually, I mean they just had the world into a rowing championships and usually there's about 3,000 people to go to that for the 2,000 meter distance but there's probably several hundred thousand people every year that submit their time. Now is it an age category or is it? Yeah, there's both. There's age categories and so I broke the world records for the 500 meter row, the one minute row and the 100 meter row for the over 50 group this year and then last year I broke some of the 40 plus records as a 49 year old. How fast did you pull the 500 meters? 114? Yeah, it's quick. I don't know what reference that is. It's obviously fast if it's a world record. Yeah, that's cool. Not only that, you also did strong man and you mentioned too like with Matt Vincent you did some Highland games as well, huh? Yeah, in my 40s I took up the Highland games I started throwing. I was kind of funny. I was working in my clinic and my physician's assistant comes in and he killed and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? He's telling me about the Highland games and I said, well that looks kind of fun. So I went out there and just went out and did it one time. You know it's throwing a bunch of crap. You throw cabers and shut put stones and throw hammers and throw these weights and I did it and I was pretty decent at it and so I kind of said this sounds fun so I'll train for it. So I think within two years I ended up winning the Masters World Championships at that and so I just went up to Denver one year. It was held in Denver and I competed about five or six years. Either one of the world championships or took second or third a bunch of times. But those are some big dudes, man. Those are guys who are like, because right now I'm down to about 245 but back then I was about 285 and I was a little guy. You know these guys are like 6'9", 340. This is beast. This is beast and you have to be because like when you're throwing that 56 pound weight Matt will tell you if you don't have enough strength or size to counter that it'll just knock you on your ass and I mean I've seen guys, 300 pound guys getting knocked over trying to throw that thing. Oh wow. You train naturally? Are you a natural athlete? Yeah, I've never taken drugs, never taken steroids. I don't take hormones. I've done that my whole life. When I competed as a power lifter I got up to a 350 kilo, 772 pound deadlift as a drug-free athlete. Wait, natural? Absolutely. That's insane. I train hard. I know what I'm doing but I mean I just got a pretty good work ethic on that stuff and so I put that stuff together. So before we talk about the elephant in the room which is this diet that you've been talking about on other podcasts, I heard you, Justin actually was the one that brought you to our attention. He's like you got to listen to this episode. It was the one with Joe Rogan where you were talking about your diet. That was a great conversation. I want to get into that. Before I do like you have a medical background and I know your background is not in nutrition but I think your background does show that you are a capable, intelligent human being. What do you do for a living? What's your training? Well, I mean my training I was an orthopedic surgeon. So I went to medical school, had a biology degree, went to medical school, did my surgical training, went into the military, did a bunch of trauma surgery but nutrition plays a role in medicine for sure. It's not that we're nutritionists but we certainly understand how the body works. We understand how things impact physiology pretty well. I know a lot about physiology. That's part of your training. In fact, in medical school, that was one of my favorite subjects. Even though I ended up being a surgeon. Then through about half a decade of self-exploration, I've been reading the nutrition literature for years now and I've been self-experimenting. Again, any intelligent person, you don't have to have a particular title or degree to configure this stuff out. You just got to have a brain and access to the material. You're looking at three of them right here. There you go. There you go. You figure it out. You make it work. Can you talk about that process of starting the diet? You went through a bunch of different diets and found your way to this carnivore diet. I've been training. Like I said, I've been training my ass off my whole life. My philosophy up until I was about my early 40s was, I'll eat whatever I want as long as I train hard. Then I'll be fine. That same thing here. Then that works until it stops working. At some point, you're like, wait a minute. I'm getting fat. My blood pressure's going up. I'm not sleeping well. I've got probably metabolic syndrome. All those things started happening to me in my mid-40s, and I was like, F that. I'm not going to do that. So I started really focusing on nutrition. I went through the low fat, almost the vegetarian phase where I was eating the lean meats and just a bunch of vegetables. That worked. I lost weight. I got leaner, but I was pretty damn miserable on that particular diet. I was kind of grumpy all the time. I was hungry all the time. I was training three times a day. I was getting up in the morning, knocking out a couple thousand jump ropes, going to work, going to clinic, run home at lunch, train, lift some weights, come back home at night to another couple thousand jump ropes. I lost. I went from 285 to about 230 in about three months. I knocked it off real quick. Wow. I was lean, but I was just like, this is not sustainable for me. I couldn't live that one. Then I got into the Paleo diet. That was about six years, five, six years ago. Then I started, well, this sounds more reasonable. You got to eat more animal protein and it just felt better. Then as I just kind of continued reading about more ketogenic diets, low carb diets, I started playing with that stuff. Were you changing the diets? Obviously, you went from the more vegan diet to the Paleo one because you just felt like shit. When you went from Paleo to Keto, was it also because you weren't feeling good or were you just more curious? I was more curious than anything else. I thought the science seemed to make sense to me. I want to put this in the context of athletic performance and health. What I was seeing, just reading some of the stories, as a surgeon, I was seeing a lot of people getting better from a health standpoint, not just weight loss, because people only focus on how much weight I'm going to lose what I look like. As a physician, you're like, wait a minute, this can potentially help people from having chronic disease issues. I started looking at that. I noticed for myself on a ketogenic diet, I got some things that were troubling me, joint pain, some of that stuff. That started to get a little better. I started to apply it to patients. I started seeing pretty good progress with the patients. Then I just continued to read more. Then I started seeing about these crazy people eating all meat. I was like, well, this sounds kind of interesting. I know there were some historical references that show that some of the earlier bodybuilders gravitated toward that stuff. Then certainly you look at some of these historical populations like the Mongols and what they ate and how robust the people they were or some of the Inuit we know were very, they had really high work capacities. We often talk about their diet, and also if you look at their physical performance, Plains Indians, these people were known to be just physically robust people that really did well. I said, well, I'll try it for a month. I did and I felt really good. At the end of the month I said, okay, I did it for a month. I didn't die. I didn't get scurvy. Nothing bad happened to me. I said, well, that was neat. I went back to my ketogenic diet and I just didn't feel as good. Literally I was just like, my gastrointestinal system doesn't feel good. My energy's not as good. Some of my joints started kind of bugging me a little bit. So I said, well, I'd rather feel good and perform good, and that's what kind of drove me. So then I just continued doing it and now I've been doing it for basically 14 months straight without, I haven't had a vegetable or a piece of fruit or any significant carbohydrate in 14 months. So to be clear, carnivore diet is literally no plant, anything. So like no coconut oil, no nuts. It's basically, I eat a pound or two steak in the morning and a pound or two steak at night, typically. I might have some eggs occasionally. I rarely have a little dairy. When I started out, I had a little more variety. I would eat eggs and bacon and hamburgers and meat with cheese and steaks and a little bit of seafood. And then as I got farther into it, it's kind of weird. It seems so weird and restrictive, but as I got into it, I found that I craved steak more. I felt better when I just ate steak. And that's generally what I do. I mean, sometimes I'll have a little bit of variety if I'm cooking for somebody else. Somebody else wants like, a lot of times a family wants some seafood, I'll cook some shrimp up and I'll eat that with my diet. But if it's just me by myself, 99 times out of 100, I'll just go get a steak and I'll be fine. Now being a doctor and being trained in western, basically with western science, besides the population observations or studies that we have on people like the Inuits, the literature, or at least what's purported by the literature or what's pushed by the FDA and is complete opposite. In fact, if I'm sure your peers think you're crazy, if you tell your doctor peers what you're doing, what do they say to you? Yeah, I mean the majority of them sort of, you know, with my peers, because like I said, I'm a big giant crazy guy. You usually leave me alone and give me a massage. They probably ain't seen you. Whatever you want to go ahead and do. It's interesting. No, but I mean, you know, when you look at it, you know, yeah, I mean, on the surface, it seems like, you know, we think that, you know, we still have this mindset that, you know, eating red meat, eating saturated fat is going to increase our cholesterol and cholesterol is a root of all evil. But I think as we see how this sort of science is developing, we're seeing that probably the underlying source of most diseases is underlying inflammation and possibly hyperinsulinemia. Those things are tending to drive that. And, you know, what I'm seeing is how this diet affects those things is in a significantly positive way. And we see, you know, time and time again, people that do this, you know, their blood pressure normalizes, their insulin status gets better, their inflammation status gets better. You know, all these signs of disease, you know, they tend to get leaner. You know, there's all these things that, you know, how do I predict if I'm going to be sick or if I'm going to be healthy? Well, there's some very consistent things that are out there. If you're inflamed, there's, you know, there's very little research that will counter the fact that inflammation drives disease. Any study you look at for any disease underlying inflammation is always the bad guy. The same thing with hyperinsulinemia, the same thing with things like body composition. So if those things are going in a good direction, and then again, I look at this, you know, I know Rob Wolf talks about this as well, and I'm going to be on Rob's show in a couple of weeks talking about my labs. Good friend of ours, by the way. But I think that, you know, if you look at what are the markers of disease, you know, that you can measure and you care about, how do I feel, how do my joints feel? How do I perform? What's my body composition like? What's my mood like? What's my skin like? What's my libido like? You know, what's my digestion like? And if all of those things get better, right, every one of those things get better, in my view, you're healthier. Now you may get a lab value that says, well, yeah, but your LDL cholesterol went up. It doesn't seem to make sense from just a common sense stand of view that everything gets better, but one lab value is an outlier. Maybe that lab value is not as valuable as we think it is. And there's pretty good evidence that shows that those things don't match up. But many physicians are still just, they don't think about this stuff. They don't have time to think about this stuff. They're busy running patients through, like an assembly line, with 10 minutes to see their patients, you know, look at their labs, check off what drug they need to do, and then doing their typing on their electronic medical records to keep the ball rolling. I mean, it's not that anybody's given any sort of insightful thought to this stuff for most people in practice. Certainly as a practicing orthopedic surgeon when I was doing this, I have no incentive to talk about diet. It's all about how many patients can I push through my clinics? How many procedures can I do? How much money can I make for the hospital? And that's what you're incentivized for. And it's, unfortunately, it's totally backwards. We have a huge emphasis on the back end of disease. You know, we wait till people get sick, and then we have this high tech. Oh, we have these great tools. We can replace your knee. We can give you a heart transplant. You know, we've got all these tools and drugs. And the emphasis is in our own spot. I mean, we've got to go backwards. You know, we can't afford this. We've got this, obviously, this diabetes epidemic that's already here. In 10 years from now, that's going to turn into a dementia epidemic because the underlying disease process is the same thing. So all these overweight diabetics we see now in their 30s and 40s, 10, 15 years from now, they're going to get early dementia. Early dementia is incredibly expensive. You know, there's estimated, you know, and these are probably older dollars, but it takes like something like $50,000 a year to care for somebody with dementia. It's probably more now. It's probably more now. And so can you imagine if you're a 30-year-old dude and your dad who's in his mid-50s, early-60s, gets demented, what do you do? I mean, who's going to pay for that stuff? Because insurance is not going to pay for it. So you're out $50,000 every year. You might have to quit your job. You know, have to move in with you. You know, so this is stuff that's coming home pretty quickly. Some scientists call Alzheimer's and dementia type three diabetes, in fact. You don't sound like a Western medicine doctor. And this is what I mean by that. And I don't mean that as an insult, by the way. I mean that as a positive because you said something very interesting. And I will, I am going to get into the carnivore diet and why I think you may be actually feeling great on it and why I think it may not, it's probably not a good idea for everybody. But you know, there's a few things you said that doctors typically don't say. You said, hey, look, if your joints feel good, you got low inflammation. You got good energy, good skin, good digestion. And you went down a list of things that if they feel good and they're improving, you're probably healthy. Most Western medicine doctors will look at your labs and that's all they push. They really don't ask you how you feel and many of them don't, I don't even know if they don't care necessarily. This is not a personal personality flaw or personal flaw. It's just they don't push those things. It's all about the lab. Well, you said earlier, they're not incentivized for that. You know, that's, I mean, I'm curious. Can you go deeper into that? I've always wondered exactly how doctors are incentivized when it comes to drugs and everything like that. Yeah, I mean, it depends on, on especially obviously, but there are certain like metrics you have to admit, you know, like if you've got a diabetic, you know, you want to get their hemoglobin A1C under a certain level, you know, so they look at these, these sort of, you know, markers for disease that aren't necessary. Don't necessarily always represent disease. So they're, they say like, if you have a diabetic with A1C, you know, you might want to have to put them on this drug. So they're incentivized to use certain drugs to take care of the problem when, you know, we know from experience that if you can get their, their insulin status better through diet, they're going to do a lot better off. But the easier way to do it, maybe is to put them on a drug. And so some of the incentives don't, don't necessarily match up with, you know, really taking care of an underlying, you know, sort of root cause of the problem. It's more just make the symptoms go away, make the symptoms seem better. And it doesn't fix the problem. It doesn't do anything to address why these people are sick. You know, it's like, here's the, here's the thing. If you go to the doctor and you've got, you know, and he prescribes you an anti-inflammatory, you know, say you've got a, you know, I hurt my shoulder or my shoulder's hurting me. And I do this all the time. You know, here's some, here's some, here's some celibrex, you know, here's some Motrin. The more important question should be, well, why am I inflamed in the first place? Not, you're inflamed, here's a drug. Why are you inflamed? If we thought about it, you know, and I found this to be completely true now that I've kind of stepped away from this stuff and looked at it from a bigger picture. The diet has a huge impact on inflammation. And so a lot of these people that came out of my clinic with shoulder pain, knee pain, and I'm seeing this all the time now as I sort of advocate this stuff, that stuff goes away when you fix a diet when you remove certain irritants out of their diet. But instead the answer is, well, here's the Motrin. You know, and this is what, you know, this is the most expeditious way to take care of the patient. The patient's happy. I've got a drug. I went to the doctor. I got a drug. That is their expectation. Physicians are sort of pharmaceutical facilitators. We largely become technicians because it's such an industry now. It's become the biggest, one of the biggest industries in the country is healthcare. And there's a lot of dollars in it. It's become a business. And, you know, we don't, you know, physicians by large part want to do the right thing. They care about their patients. But the system is set up, you know, in a fashion that it doesn't really serve the patients in their best interest. How challenging that has to be to being a doctor. Especially an orthopedic surgeon. I mean, the orthopods I've worked with, and I've trained a lot of doctors and surgeons. And, you know, when you're an orthopod, you have a tool. And that tool, this pretend is a hammer. Well, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So every time somebody would go to them and say, I have knee pain, hip pain, whatever, they'd be like, cool, let's look at it. Okay, I think I can do a surgery that'll fix this rather than correctional exercise, changing lifestyle. But, you know, I think there's another side to it, too. And that's the, you know, patient's adherence to advice. And you tell someone to take a pill versus change your diet. Which one are they more likely to do? Are you losing business? Because of the way you're, you know, because of your, in other words, as an orthopod, when you get someone coming to you with pain, are you telling them to go fix your diet before I work on you? Well, yeah, this is something that I started to do. This is kind of interesting, because I'm not working at the hospital anymore, because I mean, the hospital got in a big fight over this stuff. Really? Let's talk about that. I started, you know, I started to, you know, start to say, hey, I want a day a week where I can just counsel patients on a lifestyle. And they said, no, there's no appetite. You're kidding me. No. Yeah, the administrator said, no, we don't want to do that. So I started doing it anyway. I was just like, so I started, you know, I had all this literature I was handing out, all these videos I wanted people to watch, you know, and this is back more ketogenic stuff. And I was getting good, you know, some good results. But at the same time, the hospital continued to pressure me not to do that. And then eventually they went after me with some peer review and they started pulling records. And the hospital had a long legal battle over the last about two years. I finally left the hospital. And so I'm not practicing actually right now. So I'm doing some of this other stuff. And they get back into that stuff part-time, maybe in a different capacity. But I mean, there's, you know, hospitals, you know, they run on a fairly tight margin. You know, they may be 2%, 3% profit margin. And they depend heavily, heavily on surgical volume for that, particularly orthopedic surgeons, because orthopedic surgeons operate. I was doing, you know, 600 surgeries a year. I mean, I was a busy, busy surgeon. Because those are usually making them a lot of money. Yeah, they're routine surgeries. You show up, schedule them, do them. Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, very good outcomes, patients were doing well. But, you know, when I started to, you know, I was the head of the group. I was a head surgeon. And, you know, I was well-liked. And, you know, it was just something, because I didn't want to match up with their values anymore. They used my competitors to go after me. You know, it was kind of, it was just kind of a messed up deal. There's a lot of politics. I've trained a lot of doctors. Yeah, there's politics and that stuff. I was taking, our group was taking tens of millions of dollars away from this other group. They didn't like that. Anyway, it was a long story short. I'm not actually practicing right now. But hopefully, you know, over the next year or so, is this sort of alternate life is evolving for me. You know, as I'm kind of impacting. I'm literally just sitting there on Twitter and Instagram. I'm changing more lives for the better. Just changing people's diet and letting them reevaluate their health that way. Then I did it two decades operating on people, which to me is shocking that you can do it that way. Well, so far I really like a lot of what you're saying. I really do. I think it's a great gratitude in your approach to, you know, helping people and examining, you know, potentials here because we do know that when it comes to nutrition, there is a tremendous and massive individual variance between people. I mean, I've worked with people who succeeded and did very well with diets that looked the exact opposite of yours. But I do think there's some general truths that one of the questions I have for you is because a lot of times what we find is we've been working in fitness now for 15 to 20 years. We've interviewed some just incredibly brilliant individuals when it comes to nutrition. And many times it's not so much what someone's eating. It's more what they're avoiding that is giving them the benefits. And you're saying when you went back to keto or threw in more vegetables, you started having some of these negative effects. Are you familiar with the term intestinal hyperpermeability or, you know, leaky gut syndrome? Yeah, of course, sure. So I wonder if that was one of your issues. I wonder if you developed antibodies to some of these foods that you ate a lot of and now just avoiding everything. Do you have any other symptoms of autoimmune? No, I don't think I do. I mean, you know, like I said, I think that, you know, there's a transition period. Obviously, you know, you've got a gut microbiome that reacts to what you're eating. You know, there's a period where that flora will adapt to what you're eating. And so, you know, I think for me and a lot of people, they find that fiber in particular can be very irritating to the intestinal mucosa. I mean, it is. I mean, there's actually some studies that will support that. You know, our body can sort of defend against that. It builds up a mucous layer to kind of protect itself and decrease the permeability there. But I think that, you know, for me, you know, what I saw was, you know, things that weren't just directly related to gastrointestinal issues. You know, I mean, you know, I can see, you know, your guts inflamed and irritated by particular foods. But then when it goes beyond that, and then all of a sudden you see the same things you saw six months ago when you were doing the same diet. You know, it's like, yeah, but my knee started hurting again. And that's what I used to have before when I was doing this chronically. So to me, it says that, you know, there's an adaptation period. So if you, you know, if you say, I'm going to go from a carnivore diet to a vegan diet, I'm going to feel crappy for a period of time. And I'm inviting, and sort of the converse is true. If I go from a vegan diet to a carnivore diet, I'm going to feel crappy for about three or four weeks as things sort of transition, as the gut transitions, as, you know, the metabolism transitions. But for me, the chronic things that I'd always had, you know, started to show right back up, which means I was already adapted to that stuff. And so when it shows up again with the same foods to me, it's not necessarily leaky gut, but it's just the same things that bother me all the time, if that makes sense. So God, I remember who we talked to who, oh, I think it was Chris Kresser, who was kind of an expert on that particular subject. And he talks about how, you know, the way you develop these intolerances is, you know, it's typically the foods you eat the most of. And if in the context of inflammation, which by the way, here's another one for you, because you're such an active individual, gut issues, you know, gut, you know, intestinal hyperpermeability or leaky gut syndrome very strongly correlated to people who train intensely. And because intense exercise is an inflammatory, you know, cause or it can cause lots of systemic inflammation, it kind of sets the stage for this potential problem to happen. And of course we tend to feed ourselves right after a workout. And so we talked about how eating the same foods over and over again, if you have any type of issues with your gut, you know, wall or cell wall and some of those proteins get through and your body starts to identify them as anti, you know, and starts to create antibodies, that can display itself as issues anywhere because the immune system is everywhere. So someone might get psoriasis or joint pain or, and we see this with people having food intolerances to things that you would consider totally benign, you know, that, you know, like I've had clients who would develop food intolerances to avocados or to, you know, beef even, you know, which is a meat, which typically, you know, it's not a super common one. And when you look at food allergies in countries, like the highest rate of like rice allergies are in places like Japan, you know, versus other countries where they don't consume much of them. So, you know, it's just an, it's an interesting thing that's going on and considering that you exercise so much, do you think maybe that you created this environment to where you became so intolerant to foods that have a tendency to be, because of course things like gluten, processed foods, certain plants, they do contain things that are more likely to cause a potential autoimmune issue or an issue, maybe because they're defense mechanisms, right? Have you thought of that for yourself? Well, I mean, you know, for me, you know, I don't think I had an autoimmune disorder. I mean, I just don't have any, you know, evidence that would support that. I probably had, you know, early metabolic syndrome. You know, that may contribute to that in some cases. You know, what I'm seeing, and again, I'm only one person, so when I look at the experience of thousands of people that I've been involved with now at this point, I'm seeing, you know, in common people getting rid of psoriasis, eczema, you know, other autoimmune disorders, you know, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, you know, the whole gamut, you know, hypothyroidism. All those things seem to be working well, you know, on this modern diet, which is, you know, again, and for me, you know, I've had nothing but beef for 14 months for the most part. So I haven't developed any issues with that, and I've still exercised just as hard as I've always had in fact, harder because my recovery's better now. Well, I think it highlights the fact that for sure humans can do a lot for a certain period of time. Like the average American can eat the average American diet for five years and appear to be healthy. So, I mean, besides the self-experimentation, you're doing yourself 14 months isn't technically a long period of time, but it does show that you're not doing anything toxic or creating any nutrient deficiencies, which is another good topic here. The nutrients found in me, a lot of people may not realize, we talked about vitamin C. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize this, but you're far more likely to create a nutrient deficiency eating a vegan diet, especially a natural vegan diet when you would find if you were a hunter-gatherer than meat, meat contains pretty much everything. Except for vitamin C that tends to be a tough one, and I know scurvy was a bit of a problem in the old world because of that. How do you feel about that? Yeah, so obviously I don't have scurvy. Scurvy is a fatal disease, and it usually takes place. Some people say that the symptoms... And you're not a pirate. Yeah, I'm not a pirate, but the symptoms show up. Typically, one month to about four months is typically the onset of scurvy. That's like bruising and bleeding. Well, I mean, yes, it's a collagen production problem, but you basically get open sores, you bleed into your joints, you have neurological issues, your gums bleed, your teeth fall out, and eventually you die. So obviously that hasn't happened to me, and it hasn't happened to thousands of other people who are doing this, and it's something I thought about. But when you look at the mechanism of... So there's a couple things that go out of this. So vitamin C is... What do we use vitamin C for? One of the functions is for hydroxylating certain proteins or amino acids to develop collagen. It's also used in an antioxidant. So we know that humans can't make vitamin C. And there are other animals that do make vitamin C. That's why they don't need to supplement it with that. We know that animals, when they are eating high-carb diets, they make more vitamin C, because when you have a higher carbohydrate diet, your vitamin C requirement goes up. One of the reasons that that occurs is because we know that the glucose and vitamin C... The glucose transporter... Sorry, the transporter that brings vitamin C in through the intestinal tract and through some other cell membranes is very similar in structure to glucose. And so when glucose is competing with that, the body will preferentially use glucose and utilize vitamin C less. So again, carbohydrate diets increase that requirement for vitamin C. We also know that one of the functions of vitamin C is an antioxidant. When you go on a lower-carb diet, you're endogenous antioxidants, things like glutathione, things like carnicin, things like... Go through the roof. Superoxidant dismutase all go up. So your antioxidant capacity is already up. So the requirements for vitamin C actually go down on low-carb ketogenics or carnivorous diets. When you look at historically, the people that got scurvy, because we know from the polar expeditions that fresh meat would cure scurvy. We know that's absolutely true. But the reason these sailors, these British sailors, these limies, you would get vitamin C deficiencies is because they were eating dried meats, dried salted meats that didn't have the vitamin C content in there. And they were eating a high-carb, what they call hardtack, which are like biscuits and stuff like that. But they had dried-out meat that didn't have any vitamin C in it. But actually, meat does have vitamin C. The USDA, and this is something that, again, at Amber O'Hearn discovered, they never tested. They never tested meat for vitamin C. They just said, assume it to be zero. They never even bothered to test it. So some independent labs show that a pound of meat has something like 10 milligrams of vitamin C. So that's basically enough to prevent scurvy. So if you eat a pound of beef a day, you're not going to get scurvy. That's four pounds of beef a day. So I don't have scurvy. There's another study. There's a group out of Hungary called Paleo-Medicina that they're running. They have what they call a paleolithic ketogenic diet, which is basically an all-meat diet for most people. They're using that fancy term so they don't sound crazy like you. You tell people, all meat diet, you sound like crazy. But if you call it paleolithic ketogenic, it doesn't sound crazy anymore. It's fancy, right? But they're putting all these people and all these diseases are going away. All these crazy autoimmune diseases are going away. But the other thing they saw is that the bioavailability for vitamin C derived from animal-based products was much better than they saw it from plant-based products. Like we see it with a lot of other issues. Most nutrients. Yeah, with most nutrients. They also saw that supplementation of exogenous vitamin C doesn't work very well. Same thing with antioxidants. One of the things that people from the plant-based world like you're going to get all your antioxidants derived, exogenous, you don't work very well for humans. Most of them, they get to the gut and they're destroyed by our gastric processes. So we don't even absorb most of that stuff. So all this, you know, all this sort of branched chain amino acids that everyone's showing. Well, all the stuff that everybody's showing it's like it doesn't even get to the body anyway. You know, may work in a cell culture but it doesn't actually work in humans. We have our own endogenous antioxidant system that works very well for us. This plant-derived stuff, plants don't make this stuff because nutrients are basically just pesticides. They're trying to keep people to stop eating them. Now, we've kind of co-opted some of those and can show that they have certain functions and a medicinal purpose for some reasons sometimes that works. But they're not designed for us. You know, they're not really, we have our own systems that work better. I think when I look at plants, in the plants that people eat nowadays, they're so different from, I guess, natural plants with the way that we used to eat them. It looks nothing like the wheat that's humans ate for thousands of years at the beginning of the agricultural revolution. And we definitely are in the middle of an autoimmune epidemic. I mean, you're older than I am. How many kids do you remember when you were in school with food allergies? There were almost none and they're everywhere now and I honestly don't think I don't think carnivore diets is great for everybody. That's just my honest opinion. But I do think avoiding some of the stuff for people who are in the state might be a good thing and it's obvious the anecdote is quite powerful. I'm one of those individuals, so I don't eat carnivore diet. I tried, absolutely was not good for my gut. However, I do avoid most grains because when I do eat them, I do get gut issues. That's how my issues tend to show up. But I do know people who get things like inflammation and stuff like that. Now I want to ask you something about the vitamin C. You said it was used to make collagen from was it with amino acids? Hydroxylysinidroxyproline could the increase in vitamin C from higher carbohydrate diet be required because of the reduction in those amino acids? In other words, if I'm eating a high-carb diet and I'm an animal, I'm probably not eating a lot of proline and other amino acids. I'm probably lower protein, therefore I may need more vitamin C to convert more collagen. And on the flip side, as somebody eating meat, I'm going to be consuming a lot of collagen. Or at least I should be, right? Yeah, I mean, if you're in steak, 3% of muscle is collagen. So this is one of the things that people are always talking about. I got to have my collagen supplements. I'm just eating a damn steak. You're getting plenty of collagen if you do that. Particularly if you eat some of the fascial stuff that comes around and cuts the steak. And that's usually tender once you cook it. But yeah, potentially. I don't know that we have a good study that demonstrates that for sure. But certainly if you're on a vegetarian diet, you're not going to get as much amino acids. We know that it's harder to obtain the amount and the correct ratios. It's just more difficult to do. So yeah, I think there's a number of things. We can also look at vitamin D. We can also look at things like magnesium. All these things are commonly deficient. But those requirements, again, go up on a high carbohydrate diet. And again, this group out of Hungary is certainly looking at this stuff and looking at populations that, you know, these Arctic populations eating their native diets, you know, despite no sunlight. You know, they live up in the polar circle. They have excellent vitamin D levels and they're eating reindeer. You know, that's their diet. So they're seeing that same thing with magnesium. One of the things they saw is that as magnesium, as glucose levels go up, magnesium levels tend to decline. And so we have these. And we know that magnesium is a very important cofactor, again for carbohydrate metabolism. So many people are magnesium deficient. People are eating these high carb diets that potentially is creating that deficiency. It's creating, it's driving an increased requirement. And then we also know that magnesium is bound into fiber, phytates and things like that to come in plants, block the absorption of magnesium. So not only you're creating a higher requirement, but you're also making it more difficult to get. I got to ask and this is, I know the audience is all thinking this. Like, what's your bowel movement like? Yeah. Let's talk about that. Is it daily or is it? I am tempted. I'm going to get personal. I'm tempted a little bit to do like a live blog of me taking a policy. I have that question all the time. Like does it happen? Yeah. I have a pretty much a regular bowel movement every day. Now it's not as big as it used to be because I'm not wasting as much material. You know, all that fiber, it just runs through your system. You can't adjust it. It's not as much bulk. But I have a regular normal bowel movement. I don't have constipation. I don't strain. You know, after about a couple weeks, it's fine. You know, the problem people don't understand. This is this, you know, there's a lot of sort of propaganda out there and a lot of it's sort of vegan directed. You know, this whole thing that meat sits there and rots in your colon and sits there. It's ridiculous. There's no evidence to talk to any gastroenterologist. They'll tell you that meat is extremely well, we're well capable of absorbing and digesting meat. I mean, we're just made for that. That's why we have a hydrochloric acid derived system. You know, our gastro-ph is 1.5. It's among the lowest of any animal on earth. Because we digest meat, because we probably start out at scavenger animals and have an evolutionary I think. But, you know, there's ileostomy patients. Patients that have their colon removed. And they can sit there and watch. You feed them meat, what comes out, just a little bit of liquid. You feed them a bunch of vegetables, all that corn and all that stuff just passes right on through. So meat is really well absorbed. So you're just not making much waste product. And so you're, you know, you're really absorbing all that nutrition. Good quality, highly bioavailable nutrition. And that's why I think a lot of people that I've seen are feeling better. You know, I think their nourishment status, their nutrition status goes up. And a lot of people are noticing, you know, that they're getting, you know, they're getting stronger and they're putting on muscle and that sort of stuff, which is interesting. I think that's kind of the newest. Because most people that have done this, you know, out of desperation. Because who's going to go on a freaking all meat diet? You've got to be crazy. You've got to be desperate to do that. So at least in Western society, you know, if you go up and talk, I was talking to a guy yesterday, she's from Mongolia and she's like, that's no big deal. I mean, we all do that. You know, we eat a damn, we eat a whole sheep in a day, you know. So for them it's normal. But in America and Western society, it's like, well, it's crazy, you're eating meat, you know, meat's so bad for it's going to kill you. But these people that do that have initially done this were these desperate people that had all these auto immune diseases and gastrointestinal issues and they solved those issues. Now you got guys like me or athletes doing it and saying, you've gotten stronger. And now I can tell you, I've got guys, I've got New Zealand, New Zealand, all black that's doing this. I'm getting stronger. I'm getting leaner. I'm getting bigger. He's one of the best athletes in the world. MMA fighters, professional baseball players, power, we've got the Canadian powerlifting, like 165 Canadian powerlifting Federation National Record holder. He's blown away his lifts, you know, and he's a drug free guy. He says, I started this for, you know, he pulled his 165, he pulled a 630 bed deadlift with no belt. And he says it's easy. It's the easiest ever been in my life. So there's something here nutrition wise. Now again, to your point, is it right for everybody? I don't know. Maybe not. I would say from an evolutionary status, you know, how long have we been eating meat as humans? You know, if you, if you, if you assume the human genus, I go back to Homo habilis, you know, not Homo sapiens, but Homo habilis, Homo agastro, Homo erectus, all those, that's what human, that's the definition of human. Now, Homo sapiens is one variant among humans. But humans have eaten meat in at least three million years. So it's a highly, highly evolutionary conserved property we have. And if we look what drove our evolution, why can I, why, why do I have big, strong, powerful thorns, shoulders that I can throw stuff? I mean, I wasn't throwing it fruit. You know, I could climb the trees before, right? That's not, that's not why we developed the capacity to throw, you know, it's estimated that a human can throw a spear, you know, with an atel atel, which is what those spear throws that were miles an hour, a hundred yards, right? And that's based on a modern human. What we know about humans before pre-agriculture is they were bigger and they were stronger than we were, you know, because what happened after we adopted agriculture? Our brain shrunk by about 200 cc's. Our height shrunk by about six inches. Our bones got smaller and our muscle attachments got smaller. So we were probably, you know, there's a population called the grovedians. They were these mammoth hunters. I mean, that was their specialty. They lived in Europe. Their average height, you know, back 30,000 years ago was something like 6'2", which is bigger than any modern human height. The biggest modern human height population right now is 6'2". These are the guys from Netherlands and Central Europe, Croatia and stuff like that. So these are like the biggest, strongest, baddest guys on the planet, living 30,000 years ago eating nothing but meat, you know, or mostly meat. You know, I'm not going to say that we are always carnivorous, but you know, I think at times when we're living in an ice age, you know, you don't have, you don't have whole foods. We ate what we could eat, right? You don't have whole foods. And you know, this thing, this, you know, I've got this wide variety of fruits and vegetables that I can piece together all this nutrition. That was not on the menu 30,000 years ago. There's no way it was. You know, you couldn't go to the store and buy blueberries and bananas and strawberries and kale and spirulina and all this stuff. I mean, you had what you had and most of it in ice age times, it's going to be a big rumen and animal because it's grassland. We're not living on ice. We're not living on glaciers, but we're living adjacent to that stuff. And when the weather gets cold, it dries out. When it dries out, grassland develops. When grassland develops, what eats grass? These big roaming animals. Humans don't do very good eating grass. And so that's probably what we, you know, eat for a large part of time. Sean, you touched on a lot of like nutrients that I think a lot of people supplement. I'd like to hear your opinion on just the supplement industry as a whole. What are your thoughts on that in any supplements at all? Yeah, the only, if you consider salt to supplement, that's the only thing I take. I don't take vitamin C. You know, again, we talked about I don't take hormones. I don't take supplements. I don't take drugs. You know, I don't take vitamin C. I don't take any of that stuff, you know. And it hasn't left me any worse for when I was, when I was initially, I was using a little caffeine. I don't drink coffee, but I was using caffeine as kind of a pre-work, caffeine pill as a pre-workup type thing. But then I stopped doing it because I wanted to be part of this study I did. I did my own study in a group of, you know, this N equals many. We did several hundred people. So I said, because I didn't want anybody doing that to confound things, I stopped taking caffeine. And I haven't noticed any negative effect at all whatsoever. So I think, you know, yes, there's this sort of mindset that we have now that you got to have a supplement. You got to have a pre-workout. You got to do all this stuff. And, you know, obviously it's a big business. It's a big industry behind that stuff. And so there's a lot of people that are going to push that. But I just, you know, if you look at most animals in a while, they tell you that human beings are basically animals. I mean, we're just a damn animal. We're just a good animal that knew how to hunt stuff and we got pretty smart. But, you know, most animals in a while are not supplementing. They know what they're supposed to eat. You know, the question is, you know, what's the right diet for a human? And that's up for debate, obviously. But I can tell you that from my experience, you know, as I look at the human animal, you know, we evolved because we hunted. I mean, that's what drove our evolution in a lot. You know, chimpanzees and gorillas and other primates. You look at the evolutionary adaptations that we've made. Again, the shoulder motion, the ability to throw, the brain size, the thinking capacity that hunting as a predator animal requires more intelligence than a prey animal. A prey animal just has to stick his head down on the ground, eat the food and then run. The strategies required to hunt an animal is much more complicated. It requires better communication skills, better organization and planning. So some of that drove our brain growth. Our gut, you know, if we look at a chimpanzee's gut, it has much, much, much huger colon than we do. You know, our colon has shrunk down significantly and one of the reasons is because the chimpanzees have this huge fermentation capacity so they can take all this. And it's even smaller than a gorilla. Gorillas got even more fermentation capacity because their hindgut can ferment her so they can ferment everything in their colon and their secum, which humans have lost most of that capacity. And so, as we see, you know, these evolutionary adaptations that occurred meat. And then the fact that you think about it, what other animal on the planet can eat whales, can eat birds, can eat lions, can eat buffalo, can eat snails. We can eat anything. I mean, we have killed and eaten every animal on the planet. Not that I'm an advocate of killing all these animals, but humans have demonstrated that capacity. There's no other animal on the planet that has done that. Lions have never eaten whales. You know, there's just nothing. Sharks have never eaten, probably they've never eaten cows unless one falls in the water. But you know, you think about it, humans have been so adaptable. We've got all across the planet because we were able to follow and kill and obtain nutrition from all these different animals. So we are carnivorous apex predators. My argument is that largely is our food. Now you can supplement with plant food. It's a less efficient way to get nutrition without a doubt. And there are some, you know, I challenge anybody to go outside and go eat all the plants that you want without going to the grocery store and survive. You'll die. So you can't, we can't say that humans got from Africa to Europe to Asia across the Bering Strait to North America to South America in all these islands relying on plant food because it wasn't consistent. You're not going to find, you know, you're not going to find the same plant foods everywhere. So if certain plants are required, which they're not, then you would expect you'd have to find that in every geographic area that you go to. We don't need to do that. We, you know, because we can eat almost every animal on the planet. There's like a puffer fish you don't want to eat. Maybe polar bear liver is a little toxic, but in general, if there's an animal, it's on the menu. We can eat it. And so that's why I think that this to me from that standpoint makes sense. And then if you look at the people that are doing it, you know, Now do you, do you see any, sorry, do you see any benefits of you rotating your meats or do you stick to basic, to basic? I don't think, you know, here's, here's, and this is another kind of because people say, well, you got to eat liver. You got to, you know, I was going to ask about organ meats. I don't need any, I don't need any organ meats. And it's just because I don't really care for, I mean, I'll take the back. I want to vote, not focus on one of these Brazilian places in Denver. And I mean, I, I sat there and I just had a big feast. And one of the, one of the things I have was chicken hearts on there. So I'll have some chicken hearts. But that was the only organ meat I had all in 2017. And I had no deficiencies, no issues whatsoever with that. When I was in Iceland a couple of weeks ago, I had some friggin Ram's testicles. I was trying all the crazy shit. You know, I was like sharp from any shark and whale blubber and all this crazy, you know, lamb's head, you know, they give you this whole friggin head sitting there looking at you with the teeth and eyes, you're like, Oh, okay, that's pretty cool. So but I mean, I tried all that stuff. But I mean, you know, here's this is a, this is and I think nutrition should be simple. I think if you, if I can explain how to eat to my dog, it shouldn't take a calculator and a macronutrient thing or a line, you say, Here's your food, eat it, you'll do fine. So for me, this is what I believe. And I think it's bearing out. You know, if we look at what we're made, we're made out of animal tissue, you and I are we're made out of red meat, I've cut a lot of people open, I can tell you were made out of red meat. You know, an animal tissue, you know, animal cells, what's in an animal cell, you know, what's required to make that cell run every vitamin and nutrient that that it needs, right? So if my muscle cell requires vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, potassium, calcium, it's in there, right? It has to be to make it run. So if I eat that insufficient quantity, if I eat enough animal cell tissues, I'm going to get what I need. And that's why I don't have nutrient deficiencies. That's why at 51 years of age, I can dunk basketballs and break rowing world records and rep out 500 pounds on a deadlift. That's not nutrition nutritional deficiency. That's thriving in my mind. And, you know, so I mean, that's the most, you know, if we if we try to simplify things, you know, just Occam's Raisers principle, the most simple thing that makes sense to me is that, you know, it's not that the Inuit were somehow sneaking berries, and somehow they're getting enough muck tucked to cover their vitamin C needs. It's that meat has what you need. And it's just that simple. It's, it's, I won't disagree with you at all on that. I mean, for sure, if you just eat meat, you're not going to have a nutrient deficiency, or at least the likelihood is extremely small compared to if you're a vegan, if you're a vegan, and we've talked about this before on the show, to be a vegan means you need to be pretty well planned. You have to plan out your diet. You have to have a lot of variety. You have to have access to fruits and vegetables that wouldn't necessarily grow naturally near each other. You would you would have, you know, terrible deficiencies. But the other side of this is the other side of that is this is that, and yes, you are 100% correct. We are the most successful hunters. And that is why we throw that there's and that's also why we probably are so good at walking upright, we probably outtrack outtracked animals. In fact, we can outtrack almost any animal on earth, including horses. And this is another fact. So we are exceptional hunters. And that's probably why or one of the reasons why we were able to succeed as well as we did. But we were also opportunistic. And if there's a plant or a berry or not or seed, we ate it, you know, nobody turned it down because there's this side of it. And that's although fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds or plants that grow naturally aren't as nutrient dense or as calorie dense. Very few cases we find a calorie dense fruit of vegetable you might find you know coconut or something like that. But usually they're not very energy dense, but you don't have to kill them and you don't have to run them down and you don't have to expend a lot of energy chasing them. And they probably won't kill you except for unless you eat poison. So they do have their benefits in that case. And I know the Inuits, although they do eat for the most part all animal product, you know, seal and seal blubber and, you know, caribou, whatever they do a couple times a year, they do eat some plants, don't they? Yeah, I mean, you know, it depends. It depends on which population because there's inland rain, indoor in inland Inuit, they live up with the reindeer. There's some of the coastal stuff and so they have different access to different stuff like that. And so yeah, certainly, I agree. We're opportunists, you know, we'll, you know, we'll eat a Twinkie if it's in front of us. That's the thing, you know, it's like, you know, again, I'll use a comparison to a modern house cat. What is a what is a house cat? What do we what is a cat? We consider that a carnivore, right? Cat see right now, cats eat much grains. I mean, and they're fat and they're getting sick. But they have that opportunity, they're opportunists that we would put in front of them. Is it ideal for them? That's questionable. You know, I don't think it is. But yeah, certainly, I mean, you know, we would have eaten anything that would have given us nutrition if we had to. Now, if we look at some of those like some of the berries used to grow back then, you know, we knew they were smaller. They were, they were less, less sugar, less energy in those things. And it would require probably a fair bit of energy expenditure to gather enough berries to, to see how much it would take to get from a killing a lamb, you know, because the lambs, all that fat is energy dense, obviously. True. And so, you know, I don't know why I wouldn't, you know, again, the evolutionary arguments are always neat to talk about. But until somebody invents a time machine, we don't know. It's all speculation. So what I like to do is say, let's, let's, let's look at the dudes doing it in 2018. And what are they doing? You know, like me, I mean, just stake. I'm doing fine. You know, and so to me, that's more informative to talk about physiology and what really happens is, is the proofs in the pudding you can, you know, you can speculate about the anatomy, the biochemistry and, you know, history and evolution. But, you know, you're never going to know that stuff for sure. Even all the biochemistry is constantly evolving. You know, all this stuff we think we know we have all these people tell us this is the latest study on, you know, lima beans or coffee or whatever, whatever, whatever nutrient. That stuff changes every couple of years. And all of a sudden you got these people, you know, it generates a lot of supplements. Oh, yeah, we got to all take this and somebody's going to sell a bunch of supplements. So we spent two or three years taking coenzyme Q or chromium peccanole and all this crap that you know, I don't know if you guys remember that. I do. Back in the day. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, I got to take that stuff. And then it's like, well, it didn't even work. You know, honestly, what I tell people is, you know, if you're going to take a supplement, you know, it better have a frigging powerful effect or it's just a waste of time. You know, it's expensive urine. What I'm seeing with these big huge and again, a lot of people talk about moderation and balance. You don't really notice anything. And maybe it's a little bit of placebo. You're like, maybe I felt a little better. You know, this stuff when I'm seeing it's like punch yourself, punch yourself in the face, knock yourself on the ass. Wow, that's a huge difference, you know, for a lot of these people like my chronic back pain, not me, but people say that has been bothering me for 15 years, went away completely in two weeks. That to me is powerful. You don't get that from taking some BS supplement a lot of times. It's like, yeah, maybe Dave Asprey told me it was going to help me. And you know, he's going to live to be 180 because he takes 150 pills a day. It's ridiculous. I doubt it. You know, I can sit here and say I'm going to live to be 180 here by my crap. I mean, but it's just, it's just to me, it's misleading and people that fall for that. It's the same thing like, you know, with this, well, I won't go on a vegan rant right now. But no, I've been trying to get you to get on a rant because I think it may be so calm, but I would think that a lot of this stuff. I'm sure you're getting attacked left and right. Yeah, right. You know, it's, you know, here's a problem, you know, and I don't care what you eat, you know, you eat whatever you want to eat, you know, do whatever makes you healthy. And I think that's, you know, but objectively assessed if you're actually healthy or not. Don't just do it because you think you're healthy, you know, you think it's the right thing to do. If you're not flat out getting healthier and you should be able to fell, you should be able to tell that you should be able to feel this stuff. It should be obvious to you. Then then then then that's not the right thing for you, but do what makes you be healthy. But this is a problem, you know, the there's a big propaganda arm on the vegan stuff and not and many of our great people nice, but I know a lot of them are good, but there are just some that are just so politicized and almost kind of a religious man. That's, you know, like me, I say eat all meat. It's fine if you want to do it, but I don't care what you eat. You don't have to do that. You're not going to save the planet by eating meat. It's not my concern. My concern is what do whatever makes you feel better from a health chamber. But these people are like, if you don't eat it, you're you're a murderer. I mean, I had a lady who literally said, if my kids ate animal products, I would kill my children. Wow. That is that's insanity. That's crazy. There's another guy that slit his own throat to scar his throat to honor the animals that were sacrificed. You guys are nutty. You know what? That's it. That's misplaced. You know, I'm not going to piss people off, but it's misplaced empathy. I mean, humans evolved empathy to be empathetic towards each other. And then we extended it towards animals that benefited us like horses and dogs and and then they just, you know, in modern societies, I think people maybe they feel they need to, you know, they don't have empathy towards humans. We have that we have that fucking luxury. We didn't have that luxury. You know, say we wouldn't be that empathetic if it was how you had to survive. So they put it towards all animals. But you're not you're not not eating vegetables because you feel bad for the vegetables. You know what I'm saying? It's not like you're trying to save trying to save plants. I'm not trying to save tomatoes. Right. My goal here I'm just doing what works for me. Well, I, you know, call me greedy, call me selfish, but I want to be healthy and perform as good as I can. You know, I've been criticized, you know, because they say, oh, you're leading that way because you want to have muscles. I'm like, yeah, I do want to have muscles. Muscles are important for your health. And this is people that don't understand that, especially as you age. Yeah, absolutely. It's a huge one. It's important to maintain your strength. We know quality of life and longevity are tied into muscle mass or strength. What's the saying in medicine, like break your hip and then dive pneumonia or something like that. The mortality rate after a broken hip, you know, with one, you know, you break your hip within one year, 40% of people are going to be dead. You know, why do they break their hip? It's because they're weak. They're weak. They're frail. And we have we have obviously an obesity epidemic, but we have a frailty epidemic. We have an issue with people that, you know, they're they're literally they're very structure is is tenuous. I mean, their bones are weak, their muscles, their sarcopenic, their muscles, their muscles are weak, their kidney size is small, their hearts are small, the brains are shrinking. All of that is due to poor nutrition. Even if you're obese, you're malnourished in most cases. And you're probably malnourished because you're not getting enough animal product. I mean, that and you're probably not getting enough protein. I know there's a big push that protein is better. There's a whole camp on this mTOR, you know, camp about, you know, if you if you if you stimulate mTOR, you're going to die and you're going to get cancer. Well, that I don't think you can extrapolate that evidence into the human beings yet. I mean, that's that's no, it's it depends on context. If we have a good friend that that talks about this all the time. And mTOR is also what stimulates muscle growth and recovery. But in the context of inflammation, in the context of cancer, mTOR will drive cancer to become more malignant and grow and spread. Same thing with insulin like growth factor. But in a context of low inflammation, probably it's not a problem, at least we haven't seen it to be a problem. So yeah, that's a problem in a lot of these labs, people get a lab and then what's your whatever value. And I'm like, it has its context dependent. Yeah, what is the context in the in the in the setting of inflammation or hyperinsulin, or these other things. And so, yeah, to extrapolate that from from anemotone or a mouse study, or a cell culture study, to me is dangerous. You know, we know what happens to people when they restrict their protein, particularly as they age, they end up frail, they break their hip, look at a nursing home, look at these people, look at their diet, look at their eating, and look at their health, their disfrailers can be. But back to the vegan stuff, you know, here's the thing. They're taking, you know, they're going after these kids now in grade school, you know, my kids, my kids are kids are getting this message in there. They're 10 years old, eating animals to bed. You know, I got to counter that all the time. I give my daughter a piece of ribeye and she okay, it's better now. But you know, but I mean, it's just because they're it's almost like the smoking industry, they're praying on the youth. They're driving towards this stuff. They're trying to disney a fi nature. You know, it's not in Zootopia. You know, it's not where we have the Fox and the rabbit are hanging out and best friends know they eat each other in the wild. Yeah. That's that's what really happens. Nature is brutal. But we have these kids, you know, and most of these vegans are 18, 19, 20, 25 year old guys are just kids in my view. And they're very, they're very, you know, super, super excited. They're very, you know, they're very, they're really hyped up to do this stuff. And you know, what happens is because at that age, they still have a lot of physiologic reserve. I mean, they're still young. Their systems are working. Get away with shit. Yeah, they can get you know, any but we could all get away with that. They can live on the Twinkie day and be all right. So they're seeing this stuff and they think, well, I feel good. And you know, if they if they go on a vegan diet and they drop all this process and they drop the Twinkies out and they feel better for the first few months, like, oh, it's a great thing in the world. But what they don't see is, you know, three months, you know, six months down the road, five years down the road, all these people are dropping out. They're having a hard time. And I see all these people that come from veganism and they're like, you know, I got depressed. I just depleted. You know, I have my teeth got bad. You know, I all these autoimmune issues. And you know, that's what they're not seeing. They're not publicizing this stuff. And you know, if you look at some of the biggest proponents of this stuff, they don't look particularly healthy to me, at least the older ones. You know, like I said, I like to put out, I'm a guy in my 50s. You know, I don't see a lot of vegans doing what I do in my 50s, you know, just to put that contrast out there from a from an overall health standpoint. But it's, you know, it's something that there has to be a counter message. And even if, you know, I have to do the entertainment stuff, you know, do the stuff that's kind of a little outrageous, just to say, look, there's there, we're going in a direction. You know, man went plant-based 10,000 years ago, you know, we adopted agriculture. I mean, that's when we did this big push. And right now our diet, the U.S. diet is about 75, 80 percent plant-based as it is now. Now most of that stuff is wheat, soy, corn, and sugar. I mean, well, that's still plant-based stuff. And so I don't know that saying you got to eat more Brussels sprouts is necessarily the right order. I think, you know, we need to get back to what we might have been eating 20,000 years ago. And that would undoubtedly include more animal products. Yeah, I agree. For the most part, what you're saying in terms of, you know, I do think people do need to eat more animal stuff. And I don't think all plants are created equal. So wheat, you know, the reason why we eat so much wheat, soy, and corn is because we figured out how to grow them. We, of course, were able to modify a couple of them so we could, you know, spray the hell out of them and it makes it easier to harvest them and whatnot. But even if we go back thousands of years when humans did eat some plants and stuff, it wasn't two crops. You know, it was, you know, whatever was around you. So it was very, very different. Now, let's talk about, you mentioned depression and people who eat, you know, mostly a vegetarian diet. And actually, this is a real statistic, by the way. So, you know, you know, you're not making this up. I've seen this. I've read this. You can look this up. There is a strong correlation to not eating or at least having low amounts of natural creatine in your diet and having low amount and having low cholesterol. So cholesterol is a big one because we were taught as kids that cholesterol had to be low, the lower the better. But when you look at the literature, low, low cholesterol is very strongly correlated with all cause mortality and depression and cancer. Like if your cholesterol is really low and you have cancer, the odds that you're not going to survive it are much higher. So my question for you is twofold, you know, let's talk about cholesterol for a second. And have you had your blood test done and what do your numbers look like? Let's dig into that. All right. So let me just answer the second question for you. Yes, I've had my numbers done. I know what they look like, but I'm going to share them on Rob's whole spot. Did you promise him you can't? I promise you that. But I will tell you. Fucking Rob. I will tell you. He's our friend. He said it's cool. No, I am. And actually, Rob has got a bunch of crazy new tests he wants me to take to that are probably more advanced indicators and some of that stuff. But I will tell you, I'm happy with my labs in general. And I'll share about those things in a couple of weeks on Rob's show. But yeah, you're right. If you look at the cholesterol associational studies, and again, associational studies, you have to take them with a grain of salt because they're only associational studies. But there is a pretty consistent dichotomy on these studies with cholesterol. Certainly, there was a study on males. Males that had low cholesterol were seven times as likely to commit suicide. And so there probably is something there. And I think your brain has made out a lot of cholesterol, right? And so we're made out of it. You need it. We need it. It's part of our body. So this mad attempt to suppress it and get rid of it and drive it down as low as possible is, in my view, just insanity. And it's causing a lot of problem. Do you think it's the pharmaceutical industry because they discovered a way to lower it with a drug? Right, right. I mean, it'd be funny if they said, well, we got to, you know, I just sit there and in my mind, think of this pharmaceutical meeting. They said, hey, guys, we got a drug that low as we got. Here's cholesterol. We got drug. We don't have drugs that can raise it, but we got drugs that can lower it. Well, then we got to make low cholesterol the good thing. You know, and so. But yeah, you know, it's a multi-billion dollar industry, obviously. And I think that's falling apart. There's people starting to question that a lot of different levels. Some people are saying maybe the effects are not even related to cholesterol. Maybe there's an anti-inflammatory effect to some of these drugs. And so maybe we should just focus on getting rid of the inflammation instead. But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, there's some people that speculate like if you look at people that go to the hospital for a heart attack, their cholesterol will drop after they've had the heart attack. And so we think that cholesterol is actually being used to repair things. So we're using up all that cholesterol to take care of the damage. That's one of the thoughts on, you know, the propagation of atherosclerosis. It's not that there's cholesterol, you know, in the vessel. You know, the reason it got there is just trying to do its job to repair stuff. After you work out, too. After you lift weights really heavy, your cholesterol actually drops. So it's a repair mechanism for our body. The same thing, like I said, when you work out, I will tell you that, you know, because I did these labs, I kind of repeated some of them. I noticed things like my C-reactive protein, my liver function tests, and some of the other things changed in response to exercise. And we know that. That's why when I tell people, you know, you go get your cholesterol tested once or twice a year, you look at one number and I'm like, man, that stuff could have changed, you know, significantly based on what you did in the last few days. And so people get so hung up on that and it's like they put, invest so much energy and anxiety into this one little number. And I'm like, man, that stuff is so changeable day to day. You know, there's a guy named Dave Feldman who's been doing this. I don't know if you know about this guy, but interesting guy. He won an ketogenic diet. Again, he felt the same thing. He felt great, right? Everything's, I'm leaner. I'm stronger. My libido's better. Everything about me feels better. I went to the doctor. My total cholesterol was 400, right? The doctor's like, oh my God, you're going to die, right? So he said, this doesn't make sense to me. So he started just checking his own cholesterol. He got labs. Oh, I did read about this guy. Right. So he found out that his cholesterol, he can change his cholesterol 100 points, which is a shit ton, in a week. And so if your cholesterol can change 100 points in a week, how good is it to just measure it once a year and based all your health care on that and going on these drugs that you may or may not need? It's like, you know, it's like taking the temperature on January 1st and saying, that's the temperature for the year. Yeah. It's madness in my view. But I mean, it's, you know, so I think we have to come away from that. So did you, did you have a pivotal moment in your career where this stuff started to kind of add up or you're like, I'm so. Imagine when you first come out of school and you're probably ambitious and excited to start your career and you're about helping people. And then was there a moment where you started to realize like, fuck, is this really about the people or is this more about money? Yeah, I mean, you know, when you first come out, it takes a long time. It takes, you know, five, 10 years to really learn your craft, you know, because you're just learning. You're trying to learn do as good as you can, you know, learn how to operate, learn how to take care of patients, do the best you can. And then after a while, you know, because when I, when I went to the orthopedics, one of the reasons I liked orthopedics, you know, because I had a sports background, there's a lot of musculoskeletal stuff in there. But, you know, it's one of those fields where you can make an immediate impact. Somebody comes in there and breaks their femur, you know, they had bones sticking out, you can take them to the operating room, put a big metal rod down there and they can be walking the next day, right? That's cool stuff, right? That's one of the nice things about orthopedics. But what you come to find out is most of what you see, that's kind of the rare stuff, you know, for the average guy, most of what you're seeing is you're seeing chronic disease. I mean, all you're seeing is the orthopedic manifestations of chronic disease. And it's probably... Ooh, let's back up for a second. You just said something incredible. Orthopedic manifestations of chronic disease. What do you mean by that? Well, I think a lot of the tendinopathy we see, the tendinitis, the tendinosis, the arthritis, is probably just, you know, how our musculoskeletal system displays underlying systemic inflammation of chronic disease. And I think that's what we're seeing. That's why so many people... That's why when I was seeing people fixing their diets, even though they had a horrible looking x-ray, their knee would stop hurting. And we were like, well, you don't need surgery. When did you start putting that together? Was it like a single patient? That must have blown your mind, Brad. Well, it did, it did. And then I kind of started thinking that all these surgeries I've done, I mean, you know, probably 50% of the surgeries I've done in my life probably could have avoided. Wow, man, Sean, I've gotten an argument over it. Because I trained, I had a wellness personal training facility next to a major hospital. And I've gotten an art, and I had a lot of clients that were surgeons and doctors. So I would train them. And then I actually would get in arguments with other doctors sometimes. Not because I thought I knew better, but because I'd have a client that would come in and say, oh, I have some knee pain. Doctor says I need, you know, whatever, surgery. And we would start doing correctional exercise. We'd start fixing their diet. No more pain. Yet their doctor would still argue that they would need a surgery. And I would get in these arguments with them. And it was like, but they don't hurt anymore. They're moving fine. The X-ray doesn't mean shit if they're okay. Like that, I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, and a lot of these studies are coming out now showing things like all these minisectomies. You know, somebody comes in with a torn meniscus, a degener of meniscus in particular. You go in there and trim it up and say, oh, you're gonna feel better. The data doesn't support that anymore. I mean, I've done, I did thousands of those procedures. I mean, it's just like, oh my God, you know, you feel bad about that stuff. But you know, you do what you know at the time. You see all these, you know, like some of the rotators have surgeries you're showing, they don't make much difference. And some of the, you know, obviously the spine surgeries don't make much difference. We do this stuff all the time continuously just because that's what we know. It's again, that's our hammer. And that's what we know how to hit things with. And so, and some people, you know, you'll get a few people that will respond. You know, maybe, maybe 20% of the people go, yeah, I feel better. That's enough. Okay, good. And then, you know, you can extract like this to the rest of the population. But, you know, I, you know, I found that, you know, as I just kind of read some of the literature outside of my narrow field because orthopedics, you know, I'm reviewing some of this stuff and I look back and they never even mentioned nutrition at all. It's like not even, you know, if you come in with a sore knee, it's gonna be physical therapy, lose weight, take some anti-inflammatories. Maybe we'll inject your knee with a steroid. If that doesn't work, we might scope your knee. And then finally, if none of that stuff works, you know, maybe we'll replace your knee. You know, that's sort of the paradigm. At no point do we say, well, let's play with your diet. Let's play with some of these other lifestyle factors. You know, let's get your recovery better. Let's get you sleeping better. That never comes to the equation. And to me, that's a huge part of that. You know, it's like I said, I've seen it so many times now. You know, just listen to people sending me their stories. You know, I've got this website, meatheels.com, which I encourage people to look at. What a great man's a good man. And we've got all these people with these just tremendous life-changing stories that I could never see by operating on somebody. I just would never see that because every aspect of their health. And I think many of these diseases, whether it's diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, autoimmune disease, probably all share a common, you know, common cause in many cases. And so, if you don't get to that, what's causing that? You know, you're, you know, this is what I used to, this used to reward. This is how I used to think in the past. I'd get somebody to come in and they'd have a bad arthritic knee. I'd replace their knee. They would feel better. You know, it would definitely make them feel better. Maybe not 100%, but a lot better, generally. If you look at the data on knee replacements, you know, not the orthopedic day, but if you look at the pain literature data, about 53% of the people that have a knee replacement, three years out will still have pain. You know, it's because you didn't fix the underlying metabolic issues. But I would see somebody who'd come in there. I'd replace their knee. They'd get a good result. They'd be happy with me. They'd come back next year for their other knee. And I was like, yeah, they like me. Yeah, yeah, they like me. They want me to fix their other knee. What I should have been doing was like, why do, why, how do we prevent you from needing a knee replacement? But that's, so that's a change in mentality, particularly for a surgeon. It's just like, I can get somebody better with a surgeon and I'll operate on them. I'll operate on them 10 times if they want, because, you know, I can fix them. But you're not fixing them. You're just putting a really expensive bandaid on a process. And it's, you know, that's what drives our healthcare industry. That's what drives our dollars. That's how I was incentivized. The more surgeries I did, the better I got paid. Was it ultimately making patients better? Maybe maybe there's helping their symptoms a little bit. You sound like a, you sound like a, those wellness hippie wellness experts of 10 years ago if we're saying that. Now being somebody who's coming from medicine, an actual doctor talking like that is extremely powerful. Like set aside the carnivore diet, set aside that for a second. What you're saying right now is so powerful because of your background, because you have the training and because you worked in that field. And I can only, and I can only, and it, because you're so powerful, that is extremely threatening to the establishment. If you, I hate using that works. It sounds like this Illuminati thing, but I'm talking about the medical establishment. The backlash must be crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's not a message that people wanna hear that depend on their living doing this stuff. Cause then we do, I mean, this is healthcare, unfortunately has set itself up where if you do not have sick people, the healthcare companies fail. You have to have sick people to make this work. And you can't make a profit or can't keep the lights on. You can't afford employee, pay your employees unless you have a steady stream of sick people. And there's no incentive to stop that from going on from that end. And so they're not gonna, I know Chris Crescer talks about this too, is how we can change medicine. We train armies of paramedical people. The radiology texts or lab texts or CNA nursing assistants, all these people were training to take care of sick people when we should be training an army of prevention specialists. I mean, that's what I think should happen. And some of the folks in the fitness industry, they get that, and the social media, so I talked to Mark Bell when I was Mark Pell's podcast, I said, look, Mark, you got a big loudspeaker. You can use this to do good besides selling slingshots and all this. We're just fucking guilty on our side though. Well, but I mean, that's the thing, you guys can, once you guys have a big audience, you can say, look, we can make people healthier. It's not gonna come from the government. There's too many conflicts of interest. There's all these business inferences that's gonna take forever for that stuff to cycle through. And so if you've got loved ones, people you care about in your life, you just don't have time to wait for this stuff. And so I think you have to use stuff like I'm doing on social media, like what you guys are doing with some of these other people are doing. And it's kind of funny because three years ago, I thought social media was stupid. I mean, I was like, I don't wanna spend on fucking Facebook. It's people whining and bitching, complaining and trolling. I don't wanna be part of that stuff. And that stuff is still there, obviously. You got these idiots on there that just do stupid stuff. Yeah, I don't know, get a job or something. You know, do something. Be productive, good. But I mean, at the same time, this is where people are listening. You know, they're listening to podcasts, they're checking out Instagram, they're checking out Snapchat or whatever. And I'm learning about that stuff now. But I mean, this is where people are getting their information from. And so the people that are going sort of outside the main channels are gonna have a bigger impact. You know, it's not, people aren't waiting for a Harvard study to tell them what to eat or how to live their life. Cause half the time it's not gonna get read. You know, no one knows how to read those studies. You know, it's like, it's boring, you know? And so- And it takes a long time. Like it takes a long time for them to come out and be like, oh, it looks like saturated fat may not be, you know, after decades of- 30 years, yeah. Damage of severe damage. Oxygen magazine has more impact on a lot of people. It just, I mean, incredible amounts of damage that we've caused because of government, you know, centralized, you know, not just power, but, you know, when they put out a plan, like, okay, this is what everybody needs to do. This is what we think was a Dr. Ansel's keys that came out with that hypothesis, which is completely flawed and bullshit was obviously, you know, used politically and we've have terrible, terrible health. And so people just don't trust that stuff anymore. Well, I mean, you know, and I think Joe Rogan talked about this in the show. You know, the sugar industry, you know, paying to suppress data and corrupting and trying to point the trigger at saturated fat and the vegan doctors are still running that same propaganda, you know, it's, veganism, in my view, is just a sort of a, sort of a, the underlings for the processed food industry in a lot of cases because most of the vegans are eating all this processed product because they have to, because they can't stand. Who wants to sit there and eat kale and carrots all day long? You know, I mean, and a few beans. I mean, they end up gravitating towards this, the fake desserts and the fake meats and stuff like that. Some of the most processed food is vegan. You go to the store and you look in this section with the fake bacon and burger and look at the ingredients on those things. It's like a hundred ingredients to make that thing taste like. And the reason they're in the store is because people are eating them. You know, it's like all the vegans say, well, I never eat that stuff. Well, who's eating them in the store? Somebody's like, why do we have 25 miles of garbage, you know, in the grocery store? It's because people eat that crap. That's why it's there. It's not because it's sitting there, you know, no one's eating it. So the reason it's there is people are eating that and the processed food industry knows that. So they're like, yeah, yeah, go ahead, eat your vegan processed food. We're going to make it cheap and we're going to make a good profit over that. And so again, this is, you know, again, I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's just business. Yeah. I mean, if the consumer's wanting it, right? We're paying for it. We keep asking for it. That's the question is, would anyone do otherwise? I would be curious if the people that came in for surgery, how many people would opt out of it if they knew that they had to go change their diet and do a bunch of things? Some people would just want the surgery. Right, yeah, I mean, absolutely. There are some people that just want the easy road. I mean, there's no doubt about that. I used to have, I would have women in my office crying because I wouldn't give them an injection because I said, we need to fix your diet. I mean, they would get so mad. These are the few times they ever got like a negative complaint from patients. He's like, Dr. Baker, so mean, he wants me to lose weight. He wants me to go on a diet and he won't give me a cortisone injection. By the way, it probably doesn't help very much in the long run. Oh, deteriorates your joints a lot, right? Yeah, so yeah, exactly. So I would have these people that would just, they literally, they're like, you know, I want to see another provider because they'll give me one. Touch on that a little bit once you know because I've had a lot of clients that would opt to rather do that than put in the work. And I got to constantly tell them, like, we got to fix the root cause. You keep getting, they just banned any. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, like I said, again, it's a band aid, like particularly cortisone injections. I would, personally, I would almost never want to do that unless it was a desperate situation for me. And I've given thousands of cortisone injections over the years. And at this point, I'm like, you know, even the orthopedic literature now doesn't really support it. It's being very efficacious, you know, in the long term, it's just, you know, you might tamp down inflammation for, you know, a couple of weeks, a few months at best, but the long-term results of that tend to make, you know, the outcome worse. And so, you know, if you want to look at the best interest in somebody, don't do that. You know, fix, again, fix the root cause. Again, modify the light stactures, the diet, the exercise, the sleep, the recovery, the stress, all those things are going to have a far greater impact on their overall health and the health of that particular joint. You know, you know, strengthen the joint. You know, that's the thing, you know, a weak joint is never a healthy joint. You know, it's like no one ever got better by getting weaker. You know, that's why, you know, people like, people are like, well, I can't, I can't deadlift cause I have back pain. I'm like, you know, you can, you can learn how to do that or do some heavy kettlebell swings or something. You can strengthen your back and you're going to make it better regardless of what situation you're in. Oh, we think for sure, like up until recently or now, the recommendation for exercise was, you know, 30 minutes of vigorous cardiovascular activity, which is horrible, horrible advice. Not that 30 minutes of vigorous cardiovascular activity is not good for you, but that's the wrong activity we should, we're promoting. What we should be telling people, especially the aging population is strength training. Cause that, the only form of exercise that directly combats all of the things that happen with age from, you know, loss of mobility, loss of strength, hormone changes and declines, metabolic, you know, disease where the metabolism slows down. I mean, osteopenia, osteoporosis, all are directly combated from resistance training and no other form of exercise does that, but no doctors recommend any resistance training. It's all vigorous cardiovascular activity. In fact, they're telling people to not lift weights. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, again, and this is some of this CYA anti-law suit stuff because if you tell somebody to go deadlift and they hurt their back, you know, because you're alive with it. So a lot of the advice, again, don't go to your doctor for nutrition and health advice. You're not going to get any, you're going to get shitty advice. Coming from a doctor, by the way. They don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I mean, doctors, they don't know anything more than your plumber for weightlifting, you know, I mean, you know, in general. I know, I trained them. They didn't know anything about, I had to train them. Yeah, but I mean, you know, like I said, it's, you know, it's, yeah, the strength training is important. We're starting to see, you know, the advice mostly is go walk. You know, just go, you know, add a few more, do your 10,000 steps. You get your Fitbit on and do your 10,000. That's bullshit advice. I mean, that, you know, it's got to help, you know. It'll help more than nothing. It'll help more than nothing, you know, but it's not going to do much, you know, like I said, I believe in balance and moderation is basically a fairy tale. I mean, I just think you've got to do a meaningful, you have to have a meaningful impact to make an impact. And so this stuff of don't over, don't do anything much, just moderate everything. It doesn't help very much. You've got to really make an effort and you, you know, you have to, I mean, it doesn't mean you have to progress. I mean, you don't have to start, you know, doing some- It had to be appropriate. You don't have to start doing snatches and box jumps and running sprints and the crazy stuff I'm doing. You know, I'm doing stuff because I've been doing this for 40 years, but I mean, you've got to, you know, set down the gauntlet and say, you got to progress. I mean, you can't be weak and expect to age, you know, appropriately. You're going to be, you know, you're going to be the lady in the grocery cart and the, in the scooter. I mean, that's what's going to happen. And you're going to need someone to carry your grocery bags out to the store. You're out to the car, which is, you know, not where you need to be. Does your family eat like you then? Or are you the only one that's pure meat? I'm the only one that's pure meat. They all love meat though. I mean, so my girlfriend, you know, she's, it's kind of funny. I met my girlfriend five years ago and she's from France when I started dating her. She said she was a vegetarian. Like, how the fuck can you be a vegetarian and be from France? This makes no sense. But she was having this awful GI issues and couldn't figure out what to eat and been to all these, you know, naturopathic doctors and they're telling her all this stuff. And, you know, as I kind of came through it, I said, look, just start eating a little more meat. You know, and so she's, she's doing this now. Now she eats probably, you know, 80% of her diet is meat and that she includes some fruits and vegetables that she likes and is doing pretty well with that. And she's much happier and probably your health is the best it's been ever. My kids, you know, I'm divorced, so I have kids, my kids have time. So I don't get, I can't dictate their whole diet. But I, you know, what I do is I make a bunch of meat and I, my kids love it and they want to eat it. And this is a sad thing is cause I make a nice steak and those, my daughter's particular, my seven and 10 year old daughter, they know where the best piece of that steak's going to be. And they always say, hey dad, I want this piece. So I'm giving them, you know, I'm giving away my best cuts of steak to those girls. But, you know, and then if they're still hungry, you know, they'll get whatever, they'll get a piece of fruit or they'll get, you know, whatever. They don't usually ask for vegetables. I don't think any kid in, maybe some weird kids do, but most people, most kids, you know, they'll give me a piece of fruit, you know, maybe a little yogurt or something like that or your piece of dark chocolate, you know, kind of the ketogenic type stuff. That's how they tend to eat, you know. But there's days where they'll only eat meat like that. We wouldn't want to do it to you. And I have no problem with that. On those forums that you talked about with these people doing the carnivore diet, have you noticed anybody saying like after a certain amount of time, like just sticking with meat, that it was a challenge, like just as far as like, you know, not having variety and not having a different flavor to kind of introduce. Yeah, that's typically more early on than later, quite honestly. You know, most people, you know, they get excited. You know, here's the thing. You know, I, you know, I don't expect the whole world to go carnivore, right? They mean, no one's going to do it. The whole world's never going to do any diet. I mean, we're all going to have variety. You know, there are certain people, like Berkeley young guys right now, they're doing it to be cool. Hey, I'm a carnivore, I'm a beast, you know, whatever, they're doing it just to be cool right now. So some guys are doing that. There's a significant population that literally do have some health issues. And so what they're finding is, you know, they got a transition, they got used to not running on carbohydrates. You know, they eat, you know, for the first week or two, they're like, this is cool, I'm eating steak every day. And then they start to get a little bit bored with this stuff, you know, there's people like, yeah, you know, I need a little more variety. You know, so what I, and a lot of times they under eat, they tend to because it's so satiating, they find their energies low. And because meat is, it's really hard to eat, you know, you know, if I tell somebody to eat two pounds of meat, that's a challenge for most people. For me, it's a snack now. I can step across that. Oh, you get palate fatigue really quickly, for sure. But, you know, you find that it's a little hard, but you know, the people that do it a long time, they make it past the first two or three months, those are the ones that find that now all of a sudden all they want is steak, that sort of variety goes away from them because they find that I just really crave this nutrition. And literally, I'm like my dogs now. You know, when I feed my dogs, I feed my dogs meat, you know, every day they get the same damn meal. I don't give them a menu and they're happy as can be. They're dancing, they're jumping, they're drooling all over the place, their tails are wagging. That's literally how I am when I'm cooking my steak. I'm like, you know, I'm drooling, I'm sitting here, I can't wait to eat this. You know, half the time I'm talking to people on Instagram while I'm cooking this stuff, while I'm sitting here drooling, I'm drooling thinking about it right now because I haven't eaten breakfast. But, you know, so, but what I tell people initially is, you know, make as much variety as you can do it. You know, put bacon and eggs and a little bit of cheese on there, put a little spices on there, rotate your meats, get some seafood, get some chicken, change it, change it, change it for a while, just to get you through that period of time because it's usually the first month or two where people have this variety issue. And then the people that sort of do this, then they find out that, man, I just really want meat. I just want steak. Steak, I think, you know, let's look at, again, back to evolution. I'm just thinking, what do we hunt? What could we have hunted back then? It's probably easier to kill a big, slow-moving ruminant animal with a spear because that's what we had than it is to kill a bird. I mean, how hard is it to throw a spear at a bare bird and eat chicken? So that's why I think a lot of people will find it, things like poultry. Again, poultry's not as nutritious in my view. I mean, if you look at the data, you know, in the U.S., we started, we've, over the last, since about the 1970s, our beef consumption has dropped about 30 to 40%. And our chicken consumption has gone up to match that. So we're eating about the same amount of meat, but it's went from mostly meat to mostly chicken. And, you know, you can, you know, that's probably a response to the whole low-fat thing. Right, because you get these boneless, skinless chicken breasts that taste like garbage, you know, but you gotta eat them because they're good for you, they're healthy and you're gonna be low-fat. But I think that, you know, and again, as the red meat consumption has fallen, our obesity rates and our diabetes rates have gone up. So I'm like, you know, for the people that say red meat is causing obesity and diabetes, I'm like, well, that doesn't really match up, you know? And, you know, so- Red meat's more nutrient-dense. It's more nutrient-dense. It is more, and I will tell you, if somebody only eats meat, it's more say shit. There's no doubt about it. You know, if you give me 100 pieces of meat in front of me, I'm gonna pick a rib eye steak 99 times out of 100 because I know it's got enough fat and the flavor's good and it's just very, very nourishing. And I think it is, it's nutrient-dense. I mean, it's got all that heme iron, it's got all that protein, it's got all that creatine in there, it's got all the carnison in there, all these, you know, it's kind of funny. The supplements that seem to work, most of them come from meat, you know? I mean, you know, other than steroids, you know, but I mean, you think about creatine, baleenine, carnicine, you know, nitrates are in meat, you know? It's funny because nitrates- That's a great point. Nitrates used to be evil, right? Until they found it, it worked in beet juice. No, yeah, nitrates are okay. Nitric oxide- Well, that kind of- Yeah, nitrate, you know, so it's like, all the stuff that actually works is just found in meat, like collagen supplementation, just eat a freaking steak, you know? Yeah, that kind of answers my other question, though, as far as the expensive side. Like, you look at, like, eating steaks all the time, that sounds like really expensive, but then if you're somebody that's supplementing with all these other products that cost, you know, X amount of money, but like, how do you, how do you, like, suggest, like, do you actually go, like, buy an actual, a full cow, or like, do you have, like, a huge freezer for all this stuff? Yeah, I don't have a huge enough freezer, you know, but I will buy in bulk, you know, and I'll find out when it's a good value, and I'll just load up, I'll buy 50 pounds, call the butcher up and say, hey, you got rib eyes for five bucks a pound, cut me 50 pounds, that stuff, and I'll, and they love it, man. I tell, because I tell the butchers about this carnivore stuff, and they love it, man. Those guys are like, yeah. That's cool. Oh, my best friend. Best customer, right there. But, you know, ultimately, I spend less money on this, you know, and then I would if I was eating a diet of organic fruits and vegetables and all this other, you know, processed stuff and the supplements that would need to come with it in a lot of cases. So ultimately, my diet is cheaper, you know, and again, I'm atypical because I'm eating four pounds of meat today and it's mostly ribeye, which is more expensive than a lot of people can do. A lot of people do this on ground beef and they eat two pounds a day, and so you can make it happen on five, six bucks a day, which is, you know, it's a cup of coffee at Starbucks in a lot of cases, I think, and so there are a lot of people, you know, and again, there's an argument, you know, do we have to have grass finished, you know, all this stuff, and I'll make the argument that there is not a lot of data that shows there's a huge nutritional difference on that when it comes to human health. I mean, I can tell you from people that I've seen, observing it from what I've seen myself, it doesn't make a difference in human health for most people. There may be a few people that say I feel better on grass-fed meat, but most people say I can tell no difference or even the opposite. And if you look at, you know, let's talk about hormones. And a lot of people, oh, there's hormones out of these beef, okay? An animal naturally produces hormones anyway. So even if you're eating grass-finished hormone, quote-unquote hormone-free beef, you're still eating hormones. Yeah, it's just the animal produced in the self, and the stuff they give those animals, they give them testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and two other synthetic ones, but the animals display that stuff anyway, and so if you compare that, the amounts or when you implant the animals, the amounts go from a few nanograms, like six nanograms to nine nanograms, which is infinitesimally small amounts, right? If you compare that to what you produce indaginally in your own body, what you would get from eating an egg, what you would get from eating dairy, what you would get, you know, if you were to. Milk is the one that you'd have to be careful for with hormones. Yeah, milk. That one can have higher amounts. And then, organ meats, organ meats have higher hormone amounts. So if you're gonna say I need to eat liver and I need to eat dairy, it's way more than you're gonna get from even a grain-finished hormone-implanted piece of beef. I would go organic just to avoid the glyphocytes and shit that are in the food, the grass that they may eat or the plant that they may eat. Yeah, I think cows in particular are pretty good at detoxifying that stuff and that's it, but that may be an argument. I think the biggest argument for preferencing grass-fed or grass-finished animals versus the traditional sort of animals, because most people don't understand this, but cows, whether they're finished on corn or grain are spending 80% of their life on pasture anyway. That's how they start. If you go up to Harris Ranch, I guess South of here, 80% of their life is spent on in pasture. So they're pastured anyway. They spend that last three, four months fattening up on grains and so it's not like they're never on grass. And so that's when we talk about environmental impact. The other thing is, if we wanna talk about environmental impact, because this is a big topic, well, how do you, this isn't sustainable. Regardless of how you finish the animal, how you pasture on their whole life is really important. And so if we decide we wanna do this, people decide that, hey, meat is not the bad guy. Meat is actually health food, which I think it is. I think it's one of the healthiest foods on the planet. If we start saying, well, wait a minute, if meat's healthy, we need to get more people to eat it. How do we make that happen? The U.S. is pretty efficient. Our carbon footprint's the lowest in the whole world. I mean, we've got very good efficiency practice through selective breeding. We've got animals that make more meat for less feed, for less time. But I think the stuff like Alan Savry's talking about Joe Salatin, how do we graze the animals properly, rotating the pastures, and then we can actually, if the calculations are correct, with the soil regeneration and the soil, putting the carbon and methane back into the soil, that could actually bring down the greenhouse gases with animals managed properly. So it could be, again, if the will were there, the technology is there, we know how to do that. It's just a matter of having the will to do that. We could actually make it to where eating meat would be, both environmentally sustainable, but net positive for the environment. I agree completely. When it comes to feeding the world, it's not a food production problem at all. Nobody will, no economist will say it's a food production problem. It's a food distribution problem, which can only be solved through markets. Let markets figure this out and make it more efficient. Well, if you look at Southeast Asia and Africa, how they manage their cattle, it's very inefficient. That's where the problems tend to be in many cases, but you compare it to people that say, I'm eating a vegan diet, it's environmentally friendly. Well, you got your grapes from Venezuela and you got your oranges from Australia. How much transportation cost to bring all that food non-seasonal? 100%. How much does that impact the environment? It's very true. I think what it is, is that when you look at diets in general and how people, and yes, there is a, you have to agree, right? I'm sure you wouldn't disagree with me. There's a massive individual variance, right? Some people do well on some things and others don't. And there are general truths, but the individuals themselves can be quite, quite different in terms of how they respond to these types of things. But when you look at diets, only one type of diet has a moral, ethical, religious fervor behind it, and that's veganism. And I've always said this, if this is how you want to eat, I totally support it. But there is no other diet where somebody eats it because they believe not eating that way is immoral and killing or murder. Whereas vegans believe, many vegans, not all, but at least the most consistent ones. Cause if you look at the literature, vegans who eat that way because they think it's healthy don't stay vegan very long, or at least they go on and off all the time. They cheat quite a bit. In fact, I read an interesting study where vegans who, when they drink alcohol, tend to eat meat after drinking alcohol because their inhibitions are down. But vegans who are vegans because of the moral, ethical, you know, in quotes religious aspect of it where they believe firmly that killing animals is murder, they tend to be extremely consistent. And I think because, I mean, if I thought every time I ate something, I was killing, like I was murdering something, you better believe I would, if I believe that strongly about it, I would use everything at my disposal to make my case. Everything, the environment, it's better for the environment. I would say, you know, of course it's immoral. I would say, you know, I would make crazy claims about, you know, the health and how much better it is for you and how much worse it is. And I would make documentaries showing the plight of these animals and I would go to schools and teach. And so that's, that's I think where a lot of that comes from. I think a lot of that information. And of course, food manufacturers who, you know, cause it's a billion, billion dollar industry, they're gonna grab onto that. Cause now you've got this group of people who are gonna preach, you know, selling your stuff because they believe so wholeheartedly that eating an animal is murder. I think that's where a lot of that information comes from. Like people who eat lots of meat don't do it with that same type of fervor. So again, you're not eating it to save, you're not eating meat to save plants. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, when I, cause I've gotten, I used to start to, I used to debate with the vegans and I just, now I just block them cause I just don't want to deal with that. It's like, they're silly. But I would say, you know, this is my question. I said, if your health was bad and the only way you could improve it was by eating meat, would you do that? And they would all say no. And I would say- It's a different- It's a whole different system. I would just say then you- It's not logical. Then you're not logical. It's like converting someone's religion, you can't do it. Yeah, I was just like, okay, if you want to sacrifice your health, that's fine, but don't expect me to do that. Don't expect everyone else to do that stuff. And so, but yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, I've talked to some people that know some of these people that the V, I was talking with Vinny Tortorich and he said he had a relatively famous vegan. And he goes, hey man, I won't say the guy's name, but he said, hey man, why are you guys sort of letting out some of this misinformation? And the guy was like, it's for the greater good. I mean, it's just- Yeah, of course. It's just for the greater good. It totally sounds like a religion right there. We don't, the means justify the, the end is justify the means. Hey man, if people were eating humans, I would, you better believe I would say everything to get them to stop eating humans. And a lot of vegans, they make it parallel. Like animals are like people. And I saw a display once where there were people making a protest and they were, they had shrink wrap themselves. And they were naked lying on the floor. And they were spain. Like they were meat, like with a label on them. And you know, it's because they, and look, here's the deal. Like if you have that kind of, you know, if you really love animals and you're doing it in a way that in your, you know, for your beliefs and you're not lying, like all power to you, but a lot of this information is coming from that side. And a lot of it's just not true. Now I'm not supporting, I'm not saying eating all meat is the best either. So I'm not saying that either. And I know you're a big supporter of that Sean, but I do enjoy what you're saying about, you know, in support of it. And I don't hear you saying, this is the way everybody should eat. Whereas I hear that from other people in other diets. This is the way everybody should eat. In fact, I don't want everybody to eat that because it'll drive the price up too much. Yeah, that's right. It's hard for me to do that. No, but I, you know, I, you know, like I said, I truly am doing this because I want people to find an option to help their healthcare. They're health issues because, you know, there's people that have, I mean, literally horrible, horrible diseases that, you know, they go to the doctors for 10, 15 years going from drug to drug to specialist to specialist. And they're, I mean, they're depressed. They're miserable. And they're literally able to change their life around doing this stuff. And I think this is a very powerful tool. You know, there, here's what I, you know, people ask me about genetic diversity, you know, how do people tolerate different diets? Well, we know, again, I'll use the evolutionary argument back, you know, 3 million years ago we've been eating meat. So I think most of us tolerate meat pretty well for the most part. Can you tolerate other things? That becomes a question. Can you tolerate certain wheats? Can you tolerate dairy? I mean, that probably, cause those things were introduced into our diet 10, you know, 10, 15,000 years ago. People that grew up in those regions, you know, at least ancestrally, probably have greater capacity to handle those things. Even some of the vegetables that we buy in the grocery store, we know most of the vegetables that we buy in the grocery store today, they didn't exist. I mean, they weren't even, they weren't created over the last several thousand years. So, you know, people haven't been eating broccoli for 50,000 years. It's only the last, you know, even hundreds of years. You're 100% right. If you look at lactose intolerance, they actually, they can show you, like if you're from the Northern European regions, the rate of lactose intolerance is extremely low when you compare it to the Mediterranean or some Asian cultures or some African cultures minus maybe the Maasai people where lactose intolerance is like 70 to 80%. Meanwhile, you go up to Northern Europe and 95% of the people can tolerate dairy, no problem. Which part of the world was, using dairy and making it a staple in their diet first, well, it was the Northern Europeans. So, it makes perfect sense. Yeah, I got back from Iceland and there's skier and all the Icelandic yogurt and stuff like that. This is funny, because I went to Iceland and Iceland's only got about 300 and I got 350,000 people. They're not a big country, but look what they've produced from athletics standpoint. They've got eight world's strongest man titles. They're massive. I mean, you got, it was Magnus from Magnuson and John Paul Sigmar. Those guys are the guys that won those and then they've got how many CrossFit athletes have won CrossFit titles. Tiny, tiny country. What is their historical diet? I mean, it's lamb, it's seafood, it's dairy and they have very little fruits and vegetables and a little bit of grain. They got a little bit of grain, some rye bread that they had to import from Denmark. And so when I'm talking to these people right now, so Iceland has 300,000 people-ish, they've got 1,000 people trying this carnivore diet. Oh, wow. I mean, that's a huge- That's a big percentage. That's a big percentage compared to the U.S. where we maybe have 20, 30,000 people who are doing it right now. And only because I'm getting out there and being crazy about it. It's all your fault. It's all it is, but I mean, so they've got a huge percentage of people doing it, but they get it because they look, I live on this friggin' frozen island. It makes sense to me from an evolution, just a historical standpoint. I just don't have access to this stuff. They've got a big vegan population in Iceland now. They've got like 20,000 people in their group or maybe it wasn't 20,000, maybe it's 5,000, because they're getting this Western influence from the rest of them. But the people that are like, yeah, my grandfather, he pretty much only ate animal products and he lived 100, they have, not only are they big, beastly, strong people, kick-ass athletes, they have more 100-year-old men than anywhere else on the planet per capita. There's more Icelandic since then. Blue zone? I did not know that. It's not a blue zone. I don't know how they determine these blue zones. That's another thing that I can certainly talk on that stuff. Iceland is a healthy, healthy country. I did not know that, because I am familiar with like, the island of Sardinia, all these other places where they have a high amount of Cinterians, but I did not know about Iceland. Yeah, Iceland is, I mean, it's not considered technically a blue zone. You can look at Hong Kong. This is another one, another place. Hong Kong, if you look at the life longevity statistics, Hong Kong is like number one or number two in the world right now and there's seven million people. It's not like some little Loma Linda or they've got 50,000 people. The Seventh-day Adventist. Yeah, but I mean, so they've got a huge population. They're living longer than anybody else and they put away the meat there. I mean, they put the US to shame on their red meat consumption and their pork consumption. I mean, they eat a ton of meat and they're living a ton, really, really long time. So I don't know who decided how these blue zones were picked out. You know, it's kind of like, the other thing is so, Okinawa is considered a blue zone, right? And the vegans love to point this one out. They say, well, Okinawans, they lived a long time. They ate a lot of carbohydrate, a lot of rice. They also eat pork and seafood and stuff like that. But one of the things they did a study on the Okinawans that lived over 100, the only ones that lived over 100 were not vegetarians. There were no vegetarians that lived over 100. Only ones that lived over 100 was ones that included meat in their diet. You know, if you look at the, because they love to tout the Seventh-day Adventist study because they've got, you know, who are the Seventh-day Adventists? You know, they're a religious group. You know, basically out of Loma Linda that has a big vegetarian founding situation back. It's their religion. It's like the 1800s. And so they don't smoke, they don't drink. They don't, I don't think they drink caffeine. They exercise. They exercise. It's part of the religion. The bodies of the temple, that's their religion. That is why they live longer. It's not the veganism. So when they look at this study, they like to quote that study. The ones that lived longest in that group are the ones that actually include fish in their diet. So when they include animal diet, when they add animal food back and they live even longer. And then if you compare that to- That's fascinating. Another similar religious group like the Mormons, the Mormons live just as long, but they're meat eaters. And so, you know, when we talk about what actually impacts longevity, really diet has a role, but it's not a huge role. If you go, if you live in a rich country that has good access to healthcare and favorable climate, certain geographic latitudes, you live longer. It's not, you know, that's why Sweden and Monaco and France and Switzerland and places like that have some of the highest longevity in the world. It's because they're wealthy countries and diet. And they eat a ton of meat there. Those places eat tons of meat. It's not, it's not, you know, it's not the veganism. You look at India, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, they are the most vegetarian countries in the world. Their life expectancy is like 68, you know? You know, but poverty pays a role in that as well. I mean, it's, you know, there's some impoverished places. And this is the thing that people like to point out. Well, the Maasai or the Inuit didn't live as long. You know, their life expectancy is 60s or 70s compared to people living in other parts of Canada. Again, socioeconomic status is the biggest driver of longevity. So if you compare like them, the Inuit, compared to somebody equally impoverished, because these people are living on the fringes, they're living up in the frie, in the frozen ones. If you live to your 70 and you're living in harsh conditions. In those conditions. And they have no, you know, very little access to healthcare. If you compare that to somebody like in Africa, you know, Central Africa or something like that that has similar living conditions, they outlive them by quite a bit, you know? So it's, you know, because they always like to point out well, they didn't live as long. The same thing was saying, you know, prehistoric man, they didn't live, they lived to 25. That's a lot of that doesn't take into account, you know, infant mortality rates. You know, if you, you know, they were, they, they found. They mean by the average of it. Yeah, but no, but I mean, they have actually, they've actually found fossil records of people that they think are 50, 60, 60 years old living in prehistoric times. And that presupposes, so the way we date skeletal remains, right? You can date kids pretty well. When I look at an X-ray, I can look at an X-ray of a kid's hand. And I can say, oh, that kid's about four or five years old. And I'm using Acre within a few months or a year at least. Once you reach skeletal maturity, say 25 when your clavicle ossifies, it becomes harder to date that. So you have to look at wear and tear things. Sometimes they look at rates of cartilage ossification in the ribs. But that presupposes people age the same way that we do now. And we know it. And the same thing with the dental. That's interesting. So what they're doing is they're taking like, they're taking some guy from 1850. And they say, they know this guy lived to 62. And this is what his bones look like. And so they're saying, well, this is what a guy who lived 20,000 years ago's bones should look like. When that doesn't hold up. And even the guys that do this, they say there's a big issue with that. So we don't even know for sure if those adult skeletons that look young and healthy, maybe they weren't 25. Maybe they were 55. But they didn't. Maybe they were 70. They just looked awesome, right? But they didn't get all this disease process from eating all the wheat and all the other stuff that we were using. And they were active as hell. Yeah, exactly. And they were active as hell. That's fascinating. A lot of the dogma that we have out there, a lot of our nutritional truths are based on really shaky stuff. And so I think it's, you know, I think to me it's like, to me, I say, you know, that's why I say, let's just run the clock back and say, let's assume humans are basically carnivorous animals, which we are. I think there's no doubt about it. And then let's put nutrition in that frame. And did we eat berries from time to time? Did we find some stuff? Sure we did. What's that impact to that for many people? It's good. It's negative. I mean, there's no negative to that. For some people it's an issue, depending on what plant there is. You know, we can't eat 98.5% of the plants on earth we cannot eat. Doesn't make it a good, doesn't make a very good argument that we're herbivores, which the vegans try to do, which I think is just insane, you know. You know, why would you be an herbivore when you can't eat most of these plants on the planet when you can eat every single animal? So if you, you know, you can look at some of these things about protein. You know, this is another thing. You get too much protein. It's gonna, it's gonna destroy your kidneys. We've got so many research studies coming out here. Jose Antonio, I don't know if you're familiar with his work, ran a bunch of resistance trains guys and he fed them, it was like four grams per pound, you know, of protein. Wow. No issue with kidney issues. It was a short, it was a short term, shorter term stuff. But you know, I think it was out of year. I think it was out of year. I think it would fall up up to two years. Now here's a deal though with protein is that, you know, supplement companies will push incredible amounts of protein through supplementation. I think if you're just eating meat, you're probably not going to consume more than, because I'm telling you right now. Yeah, good luck eating four grams per pound of body weight all steak. That would be tough. Yeah, you'd have it. I do, I do it. You're also a massive human being. I mean, sure, some people can get away with it, but it would be tough for most people. Like 150 pound female or 130 pound female trying to get, you know, 300 grams of protein a day is gonna be, she might have a tough time doing it from food. Right. I mean, yeah, like I said, if I wanted to eat, you know, 800 grams of protein a day, I couldn't do it during steak. I mean, I could do it with, I could take some whey protein, mix it up, mix it up in water and I could do that pretty easily without, but you know, what is too much protein? How do we determine that? And I think, again, if you're on a diet, you're, you know, a whole food, natural, human appropriate diet, you have something called an appetite, right? Right. And there's your gauge. There's your gauge. And I think, I think, you know, I love what you're saying. Yeah. No, I think we were designed, there was some intelligence that went into our design and why do we have an appetite? Cause you're supposed to eat, you're supposed to hungry. That's why these people that are, that are like, you got to fast all this time. I'm like, I prefer the term intermittent feasting. You know, I just eat, I crush a bunch of food and then I eat again when I'm hungry, you know. How does that work out for you? How often, how long do you go without? So for me, typically, this is a natural pattern for me is I usually eat about twice a day. So I usually might, you know, depending on a workout schedule, I might eat a breakfast, work out over the lunch hour, then eat again, you know, five, six o'clock at night and then not eat again for 14, 16 hours. And that, again, you get the benefits of autophagy, right? I mean, you know, some people argue it's a different timeframe, but I would say it probably isn't. But when I'm hungry and I'm only eating one thing, you know, why would my body tell me I'm hungry? If I'm, and I'm only giving it one thing. So it's telling me I'm hungry because, hey, dumb butt, you need some energy and you need some nutrient, you need some structure. And so for me, it's just, it just makes sense. That's how every other animal in the wild does it, you know, and some people, sorry, arguable, lions don't always, they're not always successful on their hunt. When they hunt, well, yeah, but they're still trying. You know, it's not like they're saying, I'm going to sit here and wait, I'm going to wait till tomorrow because I'm, I got this intermittent fast I'm doing. I mean, you know, and I would say pre-stork humans are the same thing. I mean, I would say. We probably went without food for long periods of time just because it was, I don't think you, like eating meat twice a day, you'd have to be a damn good successful hunter and maybe some refrigeration. Well, I mean, again, it depends on where you live. And I think, you know, I think to your point, you know, you got to make your own name fire and you're a nomad and you're not carrying a kitchen with you. I mean, you might, you know, you're probably cooking on rocks and you got to build your own fire. So they probably, my guess is they probably ate about once a day. But, you know, if you think about, again, one of the problems we, people use is modern hunter gatherers to approximate what we probably did 20,000 years ago. We don't live in the same world. You know, modern hunter gatherers are on the fringes. They're dealing with the dregs of what's left. Back then, we had these vast herds of megafauna. We had mammoths that we wiped out with impunity. I mean, we just took these mammoths out. You know, you kill a mammoth. Say you're living in a tribe of 20, 30 dudes and you take down a mammoth. How much meat do you have? And it's the ice age. It is cold and you probably can figure it out at a store of this stuff. You got food for a little while there. You got food for a little while. So maybe you only got to kill a mammoth every two months. And so maybe you're not going through all these periods where you're starving. I'd say there's at least periods of time. So you don't do fasting then or prolonged fasting? I don't do, I'm not going to go sit there. I'm working out. I'm not going to sit there and spend three or four days without eating. I mean, it's like, what the fuck? I mean, you know, I mean, have you seen the science supporting the prolonged fasting? Yeah, I mean, I know some of the, I know some of the theory behind that. But again, what population is doing that carbohydrate plan eating populations, right? It's showing huge benefits to these two. Well, even Dr. Walter Longo talks, he's like one of the leading world. Right, sure, sure. And he does a fasting mimicking diet, which is of course no carbohydrates. Right, yeah. So I mean, there's, again, all the data that we've seen on animal studies which show calorie restriction leads to longevity. It's all done in animals eating carbohydrates. And so we don't have a good pure carnivore studies showing that, that they've done some dog studies, but what were they feeding the dogs? They're feeding the dogs dog food, you know, which is grains and all that crap. And they show that if they ate less grain dog food, they'd live a little longer. But, you know, I've not seen, again, this is my thought on this stuff with all this stuff, because it's all theoretical, until you've got guys walking around at 120 years old that are still jacked, you know, this is all theory. So if you put too much faith in that stuff, I mean, to me it's just, you know, it's a leap of faith and, you know, like I said, it's the same thing with the chromium pecanolate, you know. Yeah, that sounded like a good time at the time, but then the science went by and now you're like, so for me, you know, I don't care, I don't know when I'm gonna die. I mean, I have no idea. I'm gonna get hit by a bus tomorrow, who knows. The vegans will blame it on me, of course, but, you know, but I'm serious. But, you know, what I think is, you know, what can I do today to get myself as healthy as possible and how do I gauge that? Again, what's my libido-like skin-like, you know, strength-like, capacity-like, what's my exercise capacity-like? All those things to me, you know, if you're strong and fit in your 30s, you're more likely to be strong and fit in your 40s than if you weren't. And so to me, that's just as simple, you know, I have this, you know, try to make things as simple as possible and some people, it makes their head explode because they're like, I gotta have everything complicated. I have to have calculators to figure out what to do, how to live, what labs to get, what macros to count. You know, and so I'm just like, it can be very simple, you know, pretend you're a stupid animal and just get on with your life. Yeah, yeah. Well, you make, I mean, I appreciate a lot of the stuff you're saying. I don't necessarily, well, see, here's the deal. It's not that I disagree with you because you're not necessarily speaking in absolutes, but you make a very compelling case and you're talking about, you know, evidence and you're making a lot of sense and I appreciate it, I really appreciate it because one thing that you said that I agree with 100% is that there needs to be a counter argument. Yes. Whether it's right or wrong, maybe you're completely wrong, maybe you're way out there, but there does need to be a counter argument because there doesn't exist, there isn't one right now. And if you just get one side all the time, you're gonna get some mistakes. Well, that's why I always appreciate outliers. You know, I like people challenging like common thought and so this is what definitely drew you to my attention and I thought it'd be a good conversation and of course, you know, it panned out so. I'm looking forward to seeing what your results look like on Rob Wolfe's podcast. Sure, sure. I'll talk to you, I'll talk to you with him. I'll talk to you with him off air. Okay, okay, there you go. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, this is a thing because, you know, we have some freaky outliers. You look at the bodybuilder community and stuff like that and I'm like, these, you know, how do you get lean and muscular? Well, ask a fucking bodybuilder. Don't ask a nutritionist, you know, because, you know, it's just like, you know, these guys are, you know, they're pushing the envelope and sometimes you need to get these guys that push the envelope. You know, somebody had to learn how to fly. You know, somebody had to learn how to build an airplane so you gotta have the guys that are willing to be on the edge. They do kind of the crazy stuff. The crazy stuff and you know, a lot of times it's the athletes because they're like, I just wanna perform, you know, and so they do what they need to do. Not that I'm promoting, taking a bunch of drugs and stuff like that, but I mean, you know, so it's, you know, it's an outlier. Yeah, I certainly may be wrong. I mean, certainly. At the end of the day, you're listening to your body, right? So if your body told you to change it. Yeah, I mean, like, here's the thing, because you know, I don't know if you know, you got a Mark Lobliner, he's a fitness guy, bodybuilder guy and he wants to do the carnivore diet and you know, he's like, man, but I sell whey protein for a living. And I'm like, I'm like, you know, I'm like, well, you know, whey protein probably doesn't, you don't need whey protein if you're eating all meat. I don't see a real reason why I got, but dude, man, I'm selling whey protein. So here's what I would do. You know, I would be, cut down your meat, you know, you had some whey protein, included a little extra fat in there. So you kind of get at least a normal meat-like ratio. And he's like, oh yeah, cool, that's great. So now he's in there doing that stuff. And so I said, well, I'm just, you know, I've got some whey protein in my house. I haven't used it in a year because it's been sitting on my shelf. Cause I'm like, why do I need whey protein when I'm getting 400 grams of protein? So I had some of that, ate it. And then I mean like, I was like GI distress and I woke up in the middle of the night with diarrhea. I'm like, fuck the whey protein. I don't need that stuff. But I mean, you know, I'm, you know, at some point, because there's more and more athletes wanting to do this or asking me, well, how can I do a cheat meal? How do I sneak in? You know, cause it's the same thing with the ketogenic diet. You know, when I did all that stuff, cyclic ketogenic diet, targeted ketogenic diet, you know, the carb night stuff, I did all those things. And you know, for me, I didn't find a big benefit in that stuff. And a lot of times it just made me feel more lethargic, my digestion was an issue. And so I found that wasn't a net benefit for me. It's not to say that you can't do this a lot of different ways. And you know, maybe you eat carnivore. You know, there's some carnivore purists out there and I deal with these people and I understand what they're getting at and they're mostly dealing with sick people. And they got people that don't have discipline and if they have a bite of a, you know, stevia, they're gonna go crazy and they're gonna end up on a three month binge eating cupcakes and wreck all their health. And so there's people that like, we don't want you to do that. But at the same time, you know, cause I'm pretty disciplined. I mean, I ate a crappy near vegan diet for six months. You know, like, I'm gonna eat this shit because I think I'm making me healthy. And I'm disciplined enough, you know, as an athlete, you find it, you know, you do what it takes, you sacrifice and you do what it takes to get the job done. So I could, you know, certainly see that, you know, maybe I could do a piece of fruit here and there. And if it didn't mess me up, then that might have a net positive to my performance. And so maybe I'll experiment with that going forward. I'm not sure. I don't wanna, like I said, right now I wanna be fair and be honest about what I'm doing and saying what does an all meat diet do to me, physiologically, performance wise and health wise. And you know, so that's where, you know, I'm kind of at, I'm 14 months in, I'm still doing better. I'm, you know, my performance continues to get better. I feel like I'm getting healthier. I like the way I feel. And you know, if that changes, and certainly I'm not opposed to changing that. And I think we should all be open to that stuff. Well, I really appreciate you doing all this and I appreciate the way you talk about it. And I know, when you did your blood test, did you get your hormones tested also? That was another question I had. Yes, I did some of them. I'll probably get some more, you know, Rob's got, he's got a, he's involved with some group and he's got some advanced testing stuff that I'm gonna probably add a few more testing before I go there, but I did do some of that stuff. I have a hunch that, you know, well, not a hunch. I mean, there's some evidence to suggest that eating more, especially saturated fats in your diet will increase testosterone. And we are in an epidemic of lower testosterone. And man, it's been going down for decades now, so. Yeah, I think that there's some evidence to say, and I've seen a number of guys, and I won't talk about my lab because, but I've seen a number of guys that have done this, that have shown an increase in their testosterone from doing this for a couple months. So that interesting, I think there's a lot of, you know, again, I think we put a lot of faith in a single number, and I think there's some more variables that go into our hormone system that we have to be cognizant about. So I'll just leave it at that. But, you know, we'll talk off the air. Excellent, well, thanks for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. It's been fun. Go to YouTube, check out Mind Pump TV. This is where we post videos, different content than we do on the podcast, and they are free. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. 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