 John leaves veganism, so you're going to leave veganism? That's very bizarre to me because that's just totally not what veganism is. Worry about it if myself or Dr. Ornish or Dr. Esselstyn or Dr. Furman leave it, because we're the ones that are doing the research on this and studying and treating patients with it. Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of The Carp Strong Cast. Today we have Dr. Garth Davis who is a medical doctor and author of the book Proteinoholic. Thanks for coming in Dr. Garth. Good to be here, Joe. Garth could you please give everyone sort of a more in-depth outline of what you do? So I am a general surgeon by trade. I started specializing in weight loss in 2001 and I also got board certified in medical management of weight loss and now I do surgical medical management of weight loss and obesity and I also do some studies on nutrition as well as being a general surgeon. So it seems like you're pretty well versed in a lot of the research and you spend a lot of your time going over a lot of the things that are written in the literature, yeah? That's one thing I do a lot and to the chagrin of my family who is like stop reading all that stuff. Well I just wanted to get straight into it so I'm an animal rights activist and I don't focus too much in the health arena because we've got so many amazing doctors who are qualified in that area but of course you know veganism is an ethical philosophy like a moral principle and why do you think people will seem to conflate this ethical philosophy with like plant-based health? It's a little bit weird to me. I try to explain this to people that veganism and whole food plant-based diets are really two different things. I mean I've seen vegans who come into my office overweight. They're not eating a healthy diet at all like someone tells me they're vegan. I got no idea what they're I know what they're not eating but I don't know what they're actually eating. I mean they could be eating a completely unhealthy you know standard American diet where they're eating you know chicken nuggets and fries and burgers and brownies and so it's very different than a whole food plant-based diet and you know the doctors that are discussing plant-based diets for health and are focused on the health side of stuff are not focusing on the vegan side because they don't like the vegan processed foods. To them they're like I don't want to talk about veganism because veganism is not necessarily healthy if you're eating a junk food diet. Likewise I find it weird when people are like oh I can't be vegan because you know I have this nutrient deficiency or that that's all handled easily handled. If you're vegan you're telling me you have an ethic and I would expect that if it's an ethic it's something that you feel very strongly about and that you'll therefore you know do anything you can to stand up to it. There I see so many people like oh I'm vegan and then a few weeks later yeah I'm no longer vegan anymore you know it's that doesn't make sense from you know if it's a true ethical standard. Yeah I agree it's a kind of like well animals are being tortured and abused and if you're against like animal abuse it's like if you I sort of make the analogy towards like say child abuse or some human rights violation like we don't go back on our principles on that like that's why I sort of hold the same similar standard to animals you know like I wouldn't go back on my principle against harming them. There's been a few influences like within the last couple of years and one recently who have sort of gone back on their ethics in their plant-based diet because of health concerns so I just wanted to like talk to you because you're very qualified in this area and should people be like worried about the efficacy of a well-planned plant-based diet like if they shouldn't why not. I mean there's so much to see about this right. I mean first off there's not that many people there's a lot more people becoming vegan than there are people leaving veganism. It gets like this I always hear these like carnival websites and stuff saying oh all these people are leaving veganism that's them. They've got no data to support that they're basing it on a couple people. I mean I know I could count on one hand the number of people that left a plant-based diet. These people they're always young for whatever reason you know the you know the youth are more into the YouTube hits and I don't I don't give a damn how many followers I have. I really don't. People are like I'm unfollowing you. All right bye-bye. It's not important to me but I mean a lot of these people it's extremely important to them. It's part of their brand. They make money off of these things and it's their job and and so sometimes business opportunities change and I think a lot of that influences it. It's also not necessarily easy to be vegan. I mean it's a somewhat tough ethic. It's a lot easier now than when I started it when it was like geez gosh impossible but now you know it's pretty easy but still you know you could be somewhere and not be able to get something vegan. I also find a lot of these influencers are easily influenced if that makes sense. Like you know they're not they're very into the influencing scenes so they follow other influencers and then someone you know another influencer says something like oh my god did you hear what he said maybe he's right instead of this other person. They're not at all versed in science you know and so their decisions are not based scientifically and so I think it's fairly easy for them to you know to to be like oh I heard something different oh there may be a business opportunity if I switch maybe I've maxed out my vegan you know fame and I could switch that over I could do it's like a country music singer crossing over to pop music maybe I could pull in some more people and so I like I see a lot of that. The funny thing to me is that there's influencers that switch but then you look at the people that like the the whole food plant-based guys that really started the research on this none of them have switched. I mean Colin Campbell is what 80-something years old Esselstyn who I see quite often looks fantastic. I think he's 80 years old you know rich role. I mean there's so many of us that have been in this for a long time. We're not switching. We're not the guys we're not even close to switching. We're the opposite. We're like oh my god I can't believe. I went to my high school reunion I'm like oh my god you know people are like you know what are you doing that you that you look so good and doing so well and I'm like well I eat a plant-based diet they're all never mind you know and so I don't know it's so weird and let me say one final thing. A lot of these influencers like I know a couple of one of them I talked on the phone obviously I'm not going to give details they do like they take it too far right they're like I'm going to be vegan I'm not going to just be vegan. I'm going to be no oil no nut I'm going to eat only fruit juices and I'm going to fast for 30 days and that type of vegan and then their health suffers and they're like oh my god it's because I was vegan which is you know it's silly. It's almost like people are searching for some optimal utopian magical lifestyle and it's like they take the plant-based diet to the end extreme and they're just not balanced and grounded and they don't you know have a vegan burger here and there or you know do something outside of the the confines of this raw raw juicing or something like that and you know just I find it's those who are searching for this optimal thing they never reach it and then they keep over analyzing everything can then like fall off. Exactly yeah you know there's this kind of anti-westernization going on you know that's kind of like we need to be back to our paleo roots and things like that I want I want to go back to what we used to eat and I mean people got to understand that like all our fruits and vegetables have been hybridized our animals aren't a cow is not paleo in any way shape or form neither is a pig neither is a chicken neither quite honestly are your strawberries and your blueberries and your bananas these are all been hybridized and it's it's it's not the same as what cavemen people were eating and so this anti kind of westernization has also led to an ant like kind of a fear of ever taking any supplements whatsoever but quite honestly sometimes we need supplements in our diet and you know most meat eaters are doing it and my you know one thing I always hear people talking about nutritional deficiencies and stuff one thing that kind of in my practice I you know test vitamin levels on everybody all the time frequently in follow-up etc so I know the I see with my own eyes the actual vitamin deficiencies and there's as many deficiencies and meat eaters there's some plant eaters in fact there's more if you look at the and Haines data that was done in 2011 plant-based diet people plant-based dieters tend to people that identify themselves as vegetarian tend to get better calcium levels better vitamin a better vitamin c better just about every vitamin except b12 and so I mean people are a little bit off but they they're so fearful of ever taking a supplement and so they get into this weird kind of I want to eat everything to be natural but I can't you know it's I can't possibly take a single supplement it's just ridiculous yeah and then you see actually take a look at their diet and they're having like vegan ice cream cheat days and they're taking protein powders and doing all of these other energy drinks and coffee and all of these other processed unnatural quote unquote unnatural things and then they go to go to eating grass fed beef which is like a hybridized selectively bred Holstein cow or whatever like and it's like in what way is that natural and they're using a phone and it's just not logically consistent and that makes no sense to like completely throw out vegetables and a plant-based diet but like you talked about nutrient deficiencies and like let's talk about b12 specifically because a lot of the data like you like you say like vegans might be lower in b12 but they might be higher in folate or folic acid or something like that but there's things that we're higher and lowering now because uh animal people might say this they might say animal products are the only reliable source there's no evidence to suggest we can get it from eating plants alone like how would you respond to someone if they said uh something like that we can only get it from animal foods and we can't get it from plants I would say fine but I could get it from a supplement okay take once a week I mean here's the thing b12 is is bacteria all right it comes from bacteria so meat obviously has it because meat's got a lot of bacteria in it plants you know typically don't I do think and I gotta emphasize think here so don't go off and do this and say Dr. Davis told me that this is gonna work but it is my belief that we didn't have the 12 deficiencies thousands of years ago because we ate our food dirty if you grow a garden with organic soil and eat compost and you pull that carrot out of that garden and eat it right there instead of washing and all that stuff you will get adequate b12 we don't have a prospect of randomized control trial on this so I can't say that's definitely going to be the way but it it makes sense that way I kind of experimented with doing that but I was getting this organic produce and like you know there was just bugs all over I mean everything I pulled it out like the box would come delivered out to pull out the grubs and all that stuff uh I'm quite certain if I would have kept eating it might be 12 would have been fine uh but then I was like this is I'm just gonna take a b12 yeah this is that easy it might be 12 is great of course because that's not really a practical solution for like a growing population either and when you look at like when they say our cows get it from the grass and they eat the soil and the soil goes in their stomach and the they get the b12 but like a lot of the soils are depleted and they have their injecting cows would be 12 and they're putting supplements all throughout the animal's feed and then they go oh look the b12's in the animal products and it's like well you just bypass the animal and have the supplement is there any studies to show that b12 supplements actually work when someone's got a deficiency or as a doctor oh yeah they definitely they definitely work they definitely get the b12 level up sometimes they may work too much there's some concern about like b12 causing acne and things like that if you're too high level um but yeah they definitely do work um getting a little bit more complex but b12 deficiency there's a whole pathway they could lead to this increase in homocysteine so looking at homocysteine levels um and there was like if you look at the epic database the epic database was interesting because um they looked at people in oxford england that were vegan um over many years so this wasn't like a cross-sectional study where they just said oh he's vegan and you know tomorrow he's not vegan been vegan for many years these people tended to be ethical vegans so they weren't necessarily health conscious they weren't eating a health food plant-based diet we know that because if you look at a lot of the things like they're they tended to have a fairly low calcium intake um and they did not supplement b12 a lot so there were b12 deficiencies in the group and they also had a little bit of an elevated homocysteine level whenever you're looking at those nutritional deficiencies you do have to look at the endpoint so okay what are the end factors that we should see from the b12 deficiency well we should see neurological disorders did they have more neurological disorders no we should see because of this elevated homocysteine level increased cardiovascular disease and heart disease did we see that no in fact they had less cardiovascular disease than a low meat eating weight matched group the um that they were compared to so we could speculate about nutritional deficiencies all we want the the question is is there an end-stage disease from these deficiencies and i have taken care of uh fruitarians and in strong vegans that weren't taking supplements that did have low b12 but had absolutely no symptomatology because of that low b12 so you got to keep that in mind too i'm not saying don't supplement b12 i do i'm just saying that we may be a little bit excessive in our warrior over yeah and like let's just say like you said about the study where some vegans were low and b12 like you know does that mean the the diet if well planned and supplemented is inherently flawed like because if you're taking like a bunch of ethical vegans they identify as ethical vegans they're obviously not you know it doesn't mean that you can't plan a diet to be nutritionally adequate because when are they they should just grab all you plant-based doctors and test all you guys and i'm sure they'll get different results yeah yeah i mean yeah we just haven't done that study so yeah yeah you know it's even when i say they're ethically that wasn't really a test question with them it's just that their fiber levels were so low that it was that it was figured that oh they can't possibly be eating a high plant-based diet because you know if you're eating a high plant-based diet you shouldn't have a 20 grams of fiber intake it should be much higher than that yeah i probably had 20 grams of fiber for breakfast so yeah yeah definitely i think it's about obviously it's about being responsible even as an ethical vegan look after yourself too i mean is no point just ruining your entire health but at the same time don't take it too far to the point where you're just going to be eating raw lettuce and you know a bit of orange juice here in there it's just crazy what people do uh they're and i gotta say they um a lot of them leave off starch a lot that's another thing looks like they're partly influenced by the plant-based diet but then they think carbs are bad which just doesn't make any sense so they avoid starches which i think are one of our i mean mcdougal was totally on about starches because the one thing i found when helping patients go on diet is starch is my most valuable tool to help them feel satiated and energetic you're not going to be that energetic eating a salad no and and what happens when you get hungry you go for the junk food because you're looking for that calorie-rich food but if i find if i'm having oats and i'm having big plates of brown rice i'm less likely to want vegan ice cream at night or junk food and exactly so let's just talk about our children so like you for adults obviously you're you know very well that a well-planned whole foods plant-based diet can be healthy should is it any different for children or should be we like let's just say there's an ethical vegan they have children who also don't want to harm animals and they also want to keep them healthy should they have any worries or should that just translate to the children as well or do they need to watch anything in particular well look there's different stages we've got in utero which is important i do think omate there's enough data now that omega-3 fatty acids are important for a pregnant mother for neural tube development of the child and so you know mom should be getting omega-3s meat eating moms fish eating moms are still told to eat to take omega-3 supplements i think plant-based women should take omega-3 supplements i don't think they should eat fish because fish is very high in mercury and so i think omega-3 algae supplement is is perfectly good in a growing kid you know kids could be finicky eaters and you got to watch out for that you always hear these like stupid things about these parents that were tried for you know child abuse because they put their patient their their their kid on it you know and they're feeding their kid like these ridiculous like a fruit terrarium diet where they don't give them anything else it's just ridiculous i mean kids need things they need zinc they need vitamin d they need iron they need protein they need calcium these are all important parts and i worry about it with my kids growing up but i gave these things and they ate it if they weren't eating it i'd be concerned but they're eating it um my kids eat beans and vegetables and fruits and you know um you know i'll go to dinner and my kids are like there was one time and i always talk about it in my talks and stuff but i was at uh lunch with my kids and a friend of mine and his kid and my kids are just downing crudité downing it hummus and crudité going crazy and his kids eating a cheeseburger and fries and he says to me aren't you worried about your kids nutrition like it's just like what look at my kids i mean look at what they're eating right there they've got beans they've got dark green vegetables they're gonna eat fruit i mean they're getting everything and they're my kids are 90 something percentile height and 50 percent weight uh one of them is actually 40 percent weight on the lower end of weight which is perfect that's what you want most kids are you know obese like the obesity of kids is a lot so can you do it on a plant-based diet hell yeah you can do it on a plant-based diet i give them my kids multi vitamin um to make sure that i'm not missing anything but the their diets are extraordinarily healthy and and they lead a healthy life my kids i got to say are not necessarily vegan they're vegan in the house but when they're not vegan and we can get into why they're not vegan i don't want to force them i want them to choose it themselves because if i force them i'll be paying for psychiatric bills later on and rebel against me and all that stuff but when they're not vegan that's not what's creating their health when they're not vegan they're eating ice cream and pizza right so um so their health is because of their their vegan part of their diet for sure yeah is there any resources for uh parents to find like we're like let's just say they're a parent they're a bit concerned i i don't have a kid but i'm sure if i did i'd be especially concerned about them and i'd want to go somewhere where i can get like really good advice uh like science-based advice where can they go so um i think pcrm physicians committee of responsible medicine has a uh if you put in their children's nutrition and stuff they've got some stuff there um oh what is jackie's name there is a pediatrician who does a really good instagram um uh plant-based pediatrician but if you look up plant-based pediatricians on google i'm sure you'll find her and others we've talked about specific nutrient deficiencies like obviously if if you're planning your diet well and getting a blood test from a doctor you don't have to worry about them or first of all you should get a blood test by a doctor i think it's always important to to check what your nutrient levels are um there you know people could vary like for instance um there are certain genetic factors do you methylate folate and do you need methylfolate i mean these kind of things are important it's rare problem but probably good to know um i do check levels on everybody at check levels on myself constantly and so i i think it's important to check that i think probably we could go through some of the nutrition deficiencies that vegans do get now again if you look at n hanes data if you look at anti-inflammatory index if you look at all these studies plant-based eaters tend to be way healthier than meat eaters when you look at life expectancy when you look at heart disease the number one problem we have in america right now is obesity obesity and diabetes are what we call diabetes and you should not going to find that in plant-based eaters so again plant-based eating is extremely healthy but there are some nutrient deficiencies we need to look out for um so you do need to look out for b12 we talked about that vitamin d now i see vitamin d deficiencies in everybody because they're just not going outside um the best source for vitamin d is to get outside and get sun but that could be impossible at times and inadequate um you do need exposure without sunscreen so these are things that you have to keep in mind 15 minutes daily is is what we need on uh for exposure um but get your vitamin d level check that's really important it's actually important we're starting to find out what in this covid epidemic and your ability to mount immune response vitamin d is kind of interesting it's it's a it's a vitamin but it's also almost like a steroid hormone okay and so it is important to get that uh other things people worry about are iron and if you look at long-term studies and I really like looking at adventist health because adventist health the vegans and vegetarians were um more focused on health it wasn't just ethic in fact i don't even know how much of it is ethics a lot of it was health um and if you look at their numbers they were a little bit low on iron but they were not anemic which is important because high iron is actually oxidizing and not good for you so you do not want excess iron if you're not anemic the lower the iron is probably beneficial um you could get iron in plant-based I mean legumes a huge great source of iron you could get get them from nuts seeds molasses things like that there can be zinc deficiencies I don't people overstate the zinc deficiencies again if you're eating a pretty rounded plant-based diet you're gonna get zinc um the the other thing people seem to worry about a lot is calcium um calcium is important we do need to get calcium I think when you look at bone disease it's not just calcium it's multiple other things if you look at the epigata study the the vegans it did have a propensity to osteoporosis if they weren't getting 500 grams of calcium a day if they were getting 500 grams of calcium a day there was no worry about it now one of the best sources is soy people that's another thing going back to influencers and stuff they get influenced that they shouldn't be taking soy I don't the meat industry or dairy industry has done a good job demonizing soy and I don't understand it because soy is an unbelievably healthy it's got everything right it's got calcium it's got iron it's got zinc it's got everything you need and so if you're getting some tofu if you're getting dark green vegetables besides spinach but dark green vegetables uh even sweet potatoes I mean there's all kinds of foods that have calcium in them but you do need a varied plant-based source you don't get at least 500 milligrams of calcium a day um that's the other thing people seem to worry about a lot there are some studies showing bone mineral density problems in plant-based eaters but again they tend to be plant-based eaters that aren't healthy plant-based eaters they've got a low fiber intake yeah would you recommend it oh go ahead oh i was just gonna say there's some other obscure vitamins that people are worried about like k2 um yeah i've had that yeah yeah i mean there's some evidence for benefits for k2 but again if you look at vegans long term you can get k2 from from again k2 is kind of like v12 uh it comes from bacteria and so you can get it from like natto and and sauerkraut and things like that which i eat a lot of fermented food uh i you can't really i don't get my k2 level checked i'd be a specialized level k2 does help with bone mineral density um is it vital there's no studies that show it's vital uh the supplement i take a multivitamin that um i've got no affiliation with whatsoever um i don't even know he knows that i take his vitamins but joel firman has a vitamin and it's got k2 in it does that benefit me i've got no idea i just take my multivitamin daily don't worry about it um but that's the other one that people seem to worry about then all of a sudden i was at the usda so in america we have this the the usda kind of has a experts panel that comes up with a dietary recommendations and i went there to testify about what they should be saying about diet and it's amazing because you see the lobbyists there right lobbyists just hundreds of them and they get up and they're i mean they are just saying absolute crap right they're just meat is good for the heart what like what where do you get that but the one thing i noticed i'm saying is they all kept getting up and they started talking about coli oh eggs are high in choline choline this choline that and then i started seeing this online effort to try to say that vegans are deficient in choline that affects our brain this is absurd we are not deficient in choline choline is not essential you can create it yourself uh there you find it in a lot of foods anyway and beans and white beans specifically and chickpeas and so you're not no coline is not something that i'm worried about at all uh in fact quite honestly i'm not really worried about much i take my multivitamin and that's it yeah in omega three to be i take an omega three supplement and a multivitamin and that's it okay uh would you recommend anyone to use like a chronometer app to start with to get an idea about what's in food or it's it's helpful i think it's it's it's helpful to do that i don't um i've kind of started getting away a bit from all this like chronometer apps i did all of this stuff with patients where i had them um journal everything they put everything in a computer and i did all this analysis and it became so cumbersome and so difficult and like eating became this like task for people and i i try to do everything that i recommend to my patients i try to do it myself too and it was just a pain i kind of got to say i like gregor's um little food app where you just man and it's basically what i do i want to make sure at the end of the day i've had a couple servings of beans um i want to make sure i've had dark green vegetables i've had berries i've had a whole fruit i've had some starch and some grains and i try to do that every day and that to me is a little bit easier if i'm doing that i know i'm getting it asked yeah so just being mindful of each have i had my greens today have i had my fruit uh today and have i had some flax on my oatmeal and all of these things just keep it just being mindful of these specific things and just uh cover your back with the like some b12 and vitamin d in the winter and if you're not getting sun and you recommend a omega-3 supplement what about say let's just say um what you don't just let me say about the omega-3 yeah yeah i cautiously recommend it the data is not that strong behind it um again if you go back to the epic data they weren't supplementing omega-3 they still had very good health i take it somewhat because when i look at the Adventist health study in the longevity studies and there was a great study done in 2013 on the Adventist health study and um the pesco vegetarians seem to do as well as the vegans if not a little bit better and i think part of that may be that omega-3 supplementation um we do need a central fatty acids we do need you know we do need some fats in our diet it helps absorb fat soluble vitamins i do eat nuts and seeds i think they're very healthy um which a lot of you know the vegan people will not eat but there's certainly nutrient dense foods and so i do eat nuts and seeds too yeah i just go for the ground flax um on top of my oatmeal just for the amigas but um yeah it's interesting that uh what you said about the fish because like it's like the fish has the amigas in it but they get it from the algae and it also comes with all this other stuff inside the flesh of the fish like you were saying mercury and i think fish has saturated fat of course and all these other things for a while when i first started doing this you know i started off pure health i mean veganism came later um but i started off pure health because i was very unhealthy i was probably about 20 pounds heavier than i am now i went to get a life insurance policy test and just did horrible i had hypertension i had fatty liver i had very high cholesterol and that started me you know on this on this quest to be like i'm counseling people on their weight but i'm overweight and i'm counseling them on their metabolic disease but i have metabolic disease and you know that my family history of diabetes and things like that so i was like okay i'm going to tackle this i'm going to try and see if i can come to you know what causes these problems and at one time i got very into Mediterranean diet was doing a lot of fish but like i told you i get my levels checked and my mercury was sky high it was 22 and i called up the company that did the test and i was like can someone tell me what a normal mercury level is and they were like um well i mean technically at zero we should wow mercury and i was like oh damn okay uh so yeah so that was the end of my pescaterium this one yeah not a not a essential nutrient mercury no no heavy metals no and also like just of course like let's not forget about the the fish off fish feel pain they suffer and then we're destroying the oceans at the same time as well so yeah you go to you get to the veganism takes a whole different i mean at this point i would need fish even if it was healthy and didn't have mercury in it because what i know about the fishing industry and uh did you was it you or was it earthling edu had that video recently of them yeah and oh my god i mean everyone should see that because what how could that it's just come on people it's just not sustainable no one thinks about that that's the thing about being vegan you know you always hear these things about oh if you go get vegan you're gonna become depressed as if there's something in being vegan that's gonna make you depressed which is obviously it's not true at all but there is becoming an empath and becoming you know aware and awakened to what goes on in the world is a little bit depressing ah yeah i get a when i look around me at a restaurant people are you know digging into their fish and i think aware that comes from oh my god yeah it's almost like you become aware of certain things and with that awareness becomes you know some well-being issues because no one wants to listen and you're seeing the animal suffering and you try to talk to people about it and they might really kill you about it and you know it's just a bit tough it's always tough with me with my kids because i want to raise them right but i don't want to force them and you know you can imagine having me as a father it might be a little bit difficult um and i want them to be proud of their choices which they are um but one day my my daughter said hey all my friends go to Chick-fil-A do you guys have Chick-fil-A uh no but i know what it is yeah fast food chicken and people love it here yeah and so dad all my friends go to Chick-fil-A i want to go with it for Chick-fil-A i want to have some chicken and i'm like all right um you can have the chicken but before you have the chicken i just want you to watch a video of where that chicken comes from and i'm showing her the video and i'm part of me thinking because i see the tears in the eyes and i'm like oh my god this is going to cost me psychiatric bills i'm sure uh dad showed me this video when i was young but i mean gosh she did not you know once you're aware and kids are very you know they're they're not they're social infrastructure isn't so strong in their brain that they've got cognitive dissonance yet you know they're able to to change their mind and so she she was able to look at that video and be like oh my god i don't want to contribute to this in any way and so yeah she she uh well did not have the Chick-fil-A it doesn't want Chick-fil-A anymore yeah and i think that's what i say when people say oh you're forcing this on your children it's like well wait a second you haven't showed them the other side of the coin yet for them to make a choice they should see where it comes from and they choose based on the information not choose because you told them to eat meat or told them to be vegan or whatever but there's always that thing like we teach our children to be nice to the cat not to hit their brother and to operate with this ethical framework and then we go oh here's a gas chamber stabbed in a throat pig have that and it's like sends and mix messages you know what i mean it's like exactly it does that's a i mean so it's a good point because people don't you're forcing the kids but they've kind of forced their kids to eat meat they've programmed them to eat meat all their life and so yeah it's it is a little bit of a double standard there yeah definitely definitely definitely and so let's just go back to the x-vegan thing there was another thing that was said about um the fact that the fact that let's just say we've been hunters and gatherers you know for hundreds of thousands of years and people might argue that it's not safe to change such a long-standing pattern of eating meat and you know scavenging for meat and all these things so what are your thoughts on this it's humorous like everybody who talks about our patterns of eating and what paleo man ate and writes all this stuff none of them are anthropologists all right and anthropologists actually they find it very weird when they look at these diet um discussions that go on online with pseudo experts they're talking about paleo diet they think it's there's a great book a great book the lady's not vegan in any way shape or form she's just an anthropologist and her book's called paleo fantasy her name is marlene zuck and she's just curious as to where people get these ridiculous ideas they're they're not studying the anthropological uh data they're just coming up with this this idea and i get this idea of this like strong cave man like i and you know it appeals to these macho men like oh i'm going to eat this and this is the natural diet of the kind but it assumes it makes some assumptions number one it assumes that all cavemen were eating nothing but meat and that of course is ridiculous so cavemen you know paleo man was eating all different diets depending on where they were number one number two from what we know from looking for instance at um carbon structures and in teeth of australopithecus or even they've had fossilized stool believe it or not they found fossilized stool and then analyzing these things i mean paleo man was eating an extraordinarily high fiber diet that was mainly bark and vegetables and gathered foods and things like that we also had foods like a lot of times like they won't eat beans because they say paleo man didn't eat beans but we're now starting to find that there were legumes back then um and and so their assumption on what many like i hear this all the time meat allowed us to get make our brains bigger and that's according to nathanae domini is one of the absolute world's experts on this that's absolutely not true he thinks that brain development came from uh roots and tubers uh so basically like bulbs and tubers that is what he said you know was the highest calorie density food that we could get was the ability to get that high calorie density allowed us to develop our brains and so basically bulbs and tubers are you know potatoes and and onions not the potatoes and onions we eat now but you know the ancient variety um and so this idea of what paleo man was eating is completely wrong they didn't have meat all the time actually very seldomly did they have meat most of their life was spent gathering the other huge huge mistake they make is this idea that our genetics are the same as paleo man that that we haven't had any evolution whatsoever but in fact that's categorically not true we've had lots of evolutionary changes from the development amylase in our saliva we have adapted our environment we're still adapting we're still changing um and so this idea that we don't adapt and we haven't changed is completely wrong I think the final thing that's wrong is is this idea that paleo man was necessarily healthy that this is the example in fact we didn't start taking over the world uh until the agricultural boom until we started actually doing agriculture growing fruits and vegetables uh that's when we really started getting enough calories to really uh prosper wasn't meat and um the paleo man wasn't necessarily healthy died in an early age or we have no idea you know exactly how healthy it was but it certainly wasn't as healthy as we are now they paleo man was living to procreate and then dying we're living to see our grandchildren graduate from high school and get married right we want to live as long as we can and as vital as we can I mean I'm 50 right now I would be ancient you know back in times and they would be you know casting me off into the thing but you know I'm still living my best life so uh we've got different goals now than we did and we want to maximize our health and yeah and try to be as healthy as possible so I mean the whole paleo argument to me is I hate to say this because it means but it's kind of childish and ignorant quite honestly uh this we got to eat like paleo man this is this is silly we got to eat like paleo man but use our cell phones and yeah go to the sauna and do all these crazy things yeah I was just gonna say like we uh would we want to pick one thing like a paleo man does like a one thing a lion does right but we we want to use hospitals and we want to use uh modern medicine and we want to go to the dentist paleo people weren't doing all those things so there are things we'll do for our health that aren't to do with diet but are to do with technology and advancement but not to do with diet for some reason it's just crazy it's it's crazy and then people do stuff with diet that's crazy you know I'm gonna go and get a colonic a coffee enema you know it's just like these people and it's I don't know they call them bio hackers you know these people that are so into like hacking their body to try every little thing to try to get healthy um and yet you know they're gonna eat meat because lions do and that's the other thing it's not just paleo man the the the attempt to try to make us look carnivores but these are not canines we might call them canines they're not canines I mean look at your dog and compare your canines I just got bit by mine and uh their canines are a lot different than our canines um they're our jaws go side to side this is it you know the ability to grind these are molars to grind up plant substance we have amylase in our saliva to break down starch we are we're hindgut for menors not foregut for menors we've got a much longer small intestine and and colon I mean everything about us our microbiome and in our hindgut it's all based upon a plant based diet quite honestly we are we're our closest genetic relative is a bonobos and you know they're basically plant-based eaters I mean and in fact in studies done in a Congo when apes are given a preference of fruit versus other things they're going to take the fruit the only time they ever go for any kind of uh animal um consumption is when they're in a starvation situation yeah so you would say we don't have any like specific biological adaptations to eating flesh no definitely not um so we can if we cut it into nice little pieces and you know cook it and put some nice spices and all that kind of stuff but when you look at comparative anatomy um not to get too technical but the the best comparative anatomy is to look at intestinal absorption area versus body surface area um that's the best way to kind of differentiate a carnivore from an herbivore from an omnivore and when you look at our intestinal absorption area versus our body surface area we are basically apes we're basically right right along the lines of apes and so looking at an ape diet is basically if you want to look at a diet in the natural world that's most set up for us you look at an ape though again we're still different than apes I think apes are basically more fruititarians they're and they eat a lot more than we do right they get huge they they're just eaten all day long which we're not I would say we're probably more of a starch-based species we're very well designed to eat starches from our glycogen stores and our muscles the amylase and our saliva um our ability to eat starch and our ability to process starch seems to be a big differentiator for us yeah and obviously the brain runs on glucose as well and very well yeah so I had another I had another point that I wanted to make about that um oh also like if we adapted to eating meat over hundreds of thousands of years how come we still develop heart disease and the main risk factor for heart disease is cholesterol uh raising a blood cholesterol and animal products always almost certainly have cholesterol in them it's cholesterol saturated fat I mean a lot of the the the true paleo guys are going to tell you well it's the meat we're eating and um and you know the meat back then is different and if we hunt the meat and they are right in parts if you if you eat game food it's going to have a higher omega-3 level lower omega-6 lower saturated fat lower cholesterol levels and so there's there is probably some truth to the fact that the meat they're eating back then is different but they've looked at fossilized you know um the inuits that were frozen and they did have evidence of cardiovascular disease so you could find cardiovascular disease even thousands of years ago um because you know they were eating you know blover and things like that yeah I remember when they dug up those were they mummies and they they said yeah and they had a atherosclerosis in the mummies yeah they did they did cat scans of them and they did have atherosclerosis yeah and that's funny the mummies the mummy study was kind of interesting because they mummified the the um the richer people you know the the royalty and things like that and so they were more likely to be getting animal proteins and animal fats in their diet whereas the um the peasants were eating a more you know plant-based diet if you look at the bed one um they tended to basically survive on a grain-based diet they still do when you go out to you know if you go into Tunisia Tunisia is interesting because Tunisia was had a very ancient diet for many years and uh in Tunisia they had very low heart disease and the bed one um you know eat a very high grain diet very low heart disease then of course Tunisia finds oil they become rich they start eating a lot more meat they start getting obesity and a huge increase in heart disease but if you could bear the the rich people in Tunisia that were benefiting from the oil and getting this westernized food to the bed one that were still eating their ancient diet and their traditional diet they didn't have heart disease so is Tunisia was a really good example of what happens when you start introducing meat to the diet interesting very very good points now um i want to raise another point that i heard um how that you might get like a plant-based advocate and a meat-based advocate read the same study and come to a different conclusion is that just because someone out of the two is wrong or one person can read the research better or the is it is it something inherently flawed in the study oh gosh um both i mean they're they look we're in this really weird phase of the world where we're almost like post-factual um in this huge relativism i kind of blame trump for a lot of that like he's kind of really created this this there's no facts there's no truth i could i i i could tell you the the sky is green and there's going to be truth to it um you can read a study like okay so there this was pretty interesting because recently a study came out probably the best study ever done looking at a keto diet versus a vegan diet it was done by the NIH by some really great researchers that anybody who tries to pull their their bias is completely wrong i know the researchers well they're not the least bit vegan one of them invited me out to a barbecue chicken place uh for dinner one night and i was like i'm gonna have to pass um they are not vegan um they took people i i don't know who volunteers for these studies but um they got people to volunteer to stay in a hospital for one month and they did a randomized control trial with crossover so what that means is they took these people and they put them on a vegan diet for two weeks and then flipped them to a keto diet or vice versa keto diet vegan diet and they looked at several different things i mean this study was so what they really wanted to know is whether this um whether the insulin hypothesis holds true so a lot of the low carb people think that the big evil in the world is insulin which is ridiculous we all have insulin in our blood meat actually stimulates insulin secretion but they've been saying this for many years and so they looked at the when you're on the keto diet you have a fairly low insulin level because you're not eating any carbs so you're not stimulating insulin on the plant-based diet they had a high insulin they're eating a high car it was a high carb plant-based diet and they're only 10 fat um so very high carb and they did get a higher stimulation of insulin so did that mean that they gained more fat no in fact on the vegan diet they actually lost fat but on the on the keto diet they didn't lose any fat despite the slow insulin and the theory that insulin causes fat gain um other things happened they looked at like poor glucose tolerance test and the vegans actually had an improvement in their insulin resistance whereas the ketosis diet actually created insulin resistance so this was really to me a huge win for a plant-based diet when you go on the keto websites and things like that they're trying to spin this diet the study any way they can trying to find any factored like oh but this but that and it's I mean it was comical to look at because I gotta tell you I if the study had gone the opposite I would have been like I was a little bit worried when they were doing the study now I knew they were doing the study and I thought to myself I trust these researchers implicitly and I trust the research design so if it goes against what I've been saying I'm gonna have to acknowledge that it doesn't mean I'm not gonna be vegan anymore because again like we talked about before I'm vegan for reasons other than my health but I would have to at least tell my patients and things if this went other ways these guys are so they're cognitive dissonance uh they've got it under control because they they're trying to flip this any way they can and and going through this mental acrobatics to try to somehow show that it benefits them and so in essence they're just clearly wrong I mean the the head researchers like I don't know these guys are crazy that this is wrong that the other thing they were looking at because you know the keto people say that it controls satiety so well but the vegan people actually in the study the vegans did better with satiety so anyway you try to spin this is wrong but they do spin it that way and I've seen some of them actually report on this study to their audiences in social media saying this is a win for them so yeah two people could read the study and get different answers but one of them is wrong all right it just clearly wrong now I think the other thing that you got to remember is there could be studies that differ with each other and then you got to look at methodology so you're in Australia right I'm in the UK at the moment but I'm from Australia yeah I'm from Australia so then there was an Australian study called 40 I think the 45 and over study or something like that 45 and up study and it's about the only study that really showed this in one other study that showed it said that vegetarians have an unhealthy that are more likely to die early well that's different than just about every other study right that's different than the epic study and different than the advanced health study and so how is that possible so you do have to look at study design all right in study design and the 45 and over study they asked people at 45 some simple questionnaires what do you eat that's it they never followed these people ever again they don't know how long they were vegetarian they don't know when they began vegetarian and vegetarianism they don't know if they became vegetarian like me because my cholesterol was high and I had a family the history of of this they didn't do any controls you know usually in a in a study you want to do we could talk about that you want to do controls for fact I didn't do any of that yeah they didn't do any of that then what they did is they just looked at death records many years later and they said oh there were more deaths in the vegetarian group but I know several people that were in that study that you know messaged me they were like oh my god that study is ridiculous I started that study as a meat eater and then went vegetarian but I'm counted as a win for the meat eaters you know so it's just a horribly designed study it's just it like you would design that study if you wanted to prove like there's ways to like so there's ways to manipulate data and it's done quite often I talk about this a bit in my book there's ways to do bad studies so for instance the meat industry hates this idea of cholesterol causing high cholesterol so they wanted the egg industry wanted to prove this wrong so there's a couple ways of doing this if you eat a lot of cholesterol you saturate your cholesterol receptors so if you then eat more cholesterol you don't get that much of a rise in cholesterol okay that's one thing number two the the number one factor that causes a rise in cholesterol is saturated fat so they set up a prospective study randomized but in the control group they ate more saturated fat so they may have eaten less so in the experimental group they ate more cholesterol but less saturated fat it was an easy little way of torquing it so that even though they were eating more cholesterol they still wouldn't get a gain in cholesterol so they don't put that in their in their abstract right so you like the average person who doesn't know how to look through appendices and things like that is going to read it and say oh look they ate more cholesterol and their cholesterol actually dropped therefore cholesterol drops no they didn't control for saturated fat likewise there was that really huge study that was done quite a few years ago that started people saying saturated fat causes doesn't cause heart disease yeah I don't know if you remember when that came out I was like oh saturated fat doesn't cause taking as good was that did they put something on the time front of time magazine was that with the butter yeah right yeah so that all came from the study called the siri terino study everyone on that study received money from industry every single person and they did a little trick in there that the average person wouldn't understand so they did controls which is good right if you're doing a study a lot of people do univariate analysis so univariate analysis is to say like for instance in Hong Kong they eat a lot of meat and they don't die early therefore meat's good for you well that's a univariate analysis there's a whole bunch of other factors why people in Hong Kong live longer besides just that meat intake and and so that's missing out a whole bunch so you've got to control you got to control for genetics you got to control for weight all that stuff so in the siri terino study they did do controls which is good science except this is what they did they controlled for cholesterol all right so what that means is that anybody with high cholesterol in that study is basically taken out of the statistical analysis well that's a problem because saturated fat causes heart disease by raising cholesterol so they took away the mechanism of saturated fat causing heart disease leaving just people that genetically were okay eating saturated fat and not getting high cholesterol uh or in in not getting heart disease and so it it made it look like saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease but it's because of the control it's called over adjustment bias but the other person wouldn't see that so there's difficulties to not just in how people interpret studies but how people you know how the methodology of the study and how you can get bad results because of that yeah so i guess there's someone who might not be as well versed with how to read papers and they might have a bias towards eating meat and then they just read an abstract of a poorly designed study and then they plaster all over the internet and people who never read research at all on who are on another level will just believe the influencer from that point because they presented a study and that's where that's where like um in my response i said look if you're not a nutritional expert you're not even an expert on scientific data like leave that up to the experts or at least consult with an expert to see and present a study and say well there here's here's some conflicting data to plant-based diets you're an expert can you please give me some some advice on how to read this and what they did here did they is it poorly designed did they control for many factors like what is it with this study if you don't understand it get some help from someone who does right and a lot of people you got to really get into who actually understands it too i mean there's people that are you know nutritionists even dietitians i know a lot of dietitians just don't understand the research literature and how to do um research design um it's it's complex and you really need you know you need to be able to speak that language you need to be able to look through appendices look through graphs be able to analysis do analysis it doesn't mean that you have to have a phd or anything like that i don't have a phd um but you do need to have like you know a facility with being able to evaluate a study for its proper methodology yeah i see like statistical significance too and they've got that little uh that arrow with the 0.0 and if it's like above o then it's you know like that sort of stuff there matters like yeah i mean you know the funny thing to me is um like i see like on the you know this is carnivore movement eating nothing but meat yeah i mean okay so they've got zero science behind that right zero there's no stands and say um their study is quite the opposite but no study to support that so they'll criticize epidemiology whenever they criticize epidemiology i could tell immediately they don't understand what epidemiology is they think epidemiology is all univariate analysis which is not beliefs but true um the other thing they'll do is they hate epidemiology unless they could find an article that supports their view then they love epidemiology um and they they cherry pick like i've never seen anybody cherry pick like they will find anything they can't but then when you point out the fallacies in it while you're vegan therefore you know you don't understand uh or you're biased um look by everyone's got biases we're all born there's no way there's a non-biased person out there we all have biases i mean uh i don't take any money from any industry so i'm not financially biased in fact quite honestly financially i probably work against myself trying to get people to you know lose weight without surgery because you know i make more money doing surgery than i do counseling people um but there are people out there you don't see them much on social media but if i go to scientific meetings and things like that there are people out there that aren't necessarily biased in that way they they're able to look at two sides of an argument they're able to i've got friends you know there's one guy online who's got a really big following Dr. Spencer and Adolski and we play with each other a lot we joke a lot he's not vegan but he understands my side but i understand his side and we we reach a pretty good understanding of you know what it is and quite honestly vegan diet's definitely healthy there's no question maybe the healthiest diet out there uh there really isn't great studies one way or the other you know again there's the other thing that i see people do is create the impossibility discreet like well there's never been a randomized controlled trial there never will be we're not going to do a randomized controlled trial that last 20 years until we have to use some deduction you know um but the vegan diet is certainly healthy it may not be the necessarily that you have to be vegan in order to be healthy we're vegan again for different reasons we're you know the reason Nadolski's not vegan is because he doesn't have the same ethic i have about veganism so eats a healthy diet that's very high in plants and eats a lot of legumes but i take it to the extreme simply because to me i don't want to consume a product that was based in suffering is damaging to our environment is completely not necessary for my health and so people lose that in in this discussion quite a bit yeah i feel like they're focusing on the optimal health thing and excluding the suffering and violence that the animals go through and the world is going to trash right now it's just like if we keep going in this this trajectory right now is doomed it's doomed we're using all our resources and our land and we're filling up these slaughterhouses and health is one thing but then you've got the ethical principle and the environmental thing which will destroy us all so i feel like the the ethics in environment should take precedent over some optimal health nonsense that you'll never achieve and then this hunting this hunting idea this idea of like oh you know like i'm going to go into the woods and hire out someone pay a farmer to hire out their land and shoot some deer who the hell practically can do that are you going to feed the population like that like with the plant based art we can feed the population and take care of all these other things like it's just nonsense it is not and the other thing that's nonsense is the regenerative farming idea and so there are these farms that are regenerative and you can use animals in a farming situation that does control co2 and help so there's a guy jill salatin he does this what's it called agricultural rotation where he brings the cows into graves and then the chickens in and then you know all that kind of stuff and people always like well if you just eat that way that will be healthy okay fine that that is regenerative farming it does make environmental sense but it takes a lot of land to produce very few cows go and try and buy some of joe's meats they are exceedingly expensive this is in no way something that could be done for the rest of the world i mean leave out the the ethics of whether or not it's ethical to kill a cow that's lived a happy life you know you're still killing it but let's leave that that ethical argument we're just doing environmental argument we can't everybody can't have a regenerative farm and no one's going to be able to afford that and it's not possibly going to be able to feed the entire world it just can't possibly be done so anytime there's an environmental argument people say well meat eating can be environmentally good if you do regenerative farming yes a regenerative farm is good for the environment but not if you're going to tear down the whole world in order to feed the whole world at the current demand levels it just can't possibly be done i love when these carnivore dieters or meat based dieters point to the most best possible case scenario for meat uh but and then the worst possible base scenario scenario for plants so they'll point to like um you know monocropping and then they'll compare it to like joel salatin's beef and it's like well wait a second let's get um veganically farmed potatoes and tell me how much land and calories can get out of that and how many crop deaths and then you can get vertical farming you know and like all of these like so if you're going to make an equivalency not don't do some false equivalency because if you get worst-case scenario beef and worst-case scenario plants plants win and if you get best-case scenario plants and best-case scenario beef plants win you can you can like have plant agriculture that doesn't harm any animals like basically like any animals but with with grass-fed cow you're clearing all that land and you're killing the cow as well so yeah yeah they always say that right they're always like old vegans you guys are hypocritical because when you clear all that land you're killing rodents things like that what they seem to miss is monocultural crops are there to feed animals that's the whole purpose of having monocultural crops so we can the animals become a middleman we're putting huge resources so we can feed huge resources so we could feed ourselves and in those monocultural crops we wouldn't need them if we if we were you know not feeding animals that massive study that joseph paw from oxford university put out i think it was 2018 and he said 82 percent of the farmland is used for for livestock and then you could reduce it by 75 percent if we all adopted a vegan diet so i mean we could recreate the world if we recreated demand i mean recreate the world we could reforest we could vertical farms hydroponics you look at what they've done in israel in a desert they've been able to have you know unbelievable hydroponics and vertical farming we could absolutely bring back nature and and and do it you can still have some regenerative farming you know but we've got to change our demands it's just the only way we're going to survive yeah definitely um let's continue on with it i've got a few more things i wanted to discuss and here this is a really important one because uh someone tried to discredit the position paper from the academy of nutrition dietetics by saying because they have corporate tires um this then makes the position paper invalid and they don't trust the organization therefore that position statement which has i think 117 sources uh linked to it is then invalid what do you think about this who said that uh john venus said it in his video that is absurd absurd um they are heavily funded by meat dairy nabisco i actually went on an out of like a tirade against them when they when they came to um houston when i was in houston because they had mcdonald's giving the um it was like a key sponsor and telling them that an egg mink muffin was safe what plant-based person in fact i was quite impressed by by the fact that they released that because it was the antithesis really of what they teach or what they're what if there's any interest the interest is the opposite of a vegan diet in that organization so i was kind of impressed i thought it was impressive that they released that i thought it was fairly honest of them to do so uh and you know it's incredibly well sourced like you mentioned i mean it's it's science uh it's the position paper is really a review of science yeah the review of science is is is fairly blatant to say that that's really bizarre to say that an organization that's basically funded by companies that don't want you to be vegan uh coming out with a paper saying that vegan is a good diet that's gotta be pretty crazy what about people might say that those who are in charge of doing that review or um sort of pushing that paper to the forefront where we're actually vegans and vegetarians i think i think a couple of them might have been vegan vegetarian what did you what would you say about that does that then invalidate all of that review no like i said before everybody's got biases we gotta stand like i'm biased towards a plant-based diet because i've done the research i've seen the effects of it in treating patients and so therefore i'm biased because you know because i know that it works i mean it's because a dietitian believes in the research behind it doesn't make them invalid it actually makes them more valid they're they're they're walking the talk uh no i mean that's kind of that's kind of ridiculous uh i kind of going through the biases i think industry funded studies you definitely got to watch out for but you're never going to get rid of all bias and you know if you think there's a bias then go and show me what it is go and show me which paper was wrong yeah and why it was wrong what was their methodology that was wrong and doing it you know uh just saying oh because they they were vegetarian to me when i see a dietitian that's how could there be a dietitian that's not vegetarian in my mind i mean you go at least predominantly plant-based i mean if you look at the science it's so unbelievably clear i would be shocked at the opposite although i see the opposite on a daily basis yeah makes sense it's almost like they're trying anything to discredit the individual or the organization instead of going into the paper pulling up the sources and then debunking the sources that they've used to support the paper they never they never do that they just go well the whole whole organization is corrupt so you can't trust what they say about vegan diets even though they're trying they're constantly trying to push eggs and all these other things and that's such a bizarre i've never heard anybody make that argument that that's a weird argument because when that paper came out i was like when that position statement came out i was like shocked i was like wow i did not expect that from this organization yeah well it is the carnival crowd that are pulling out these conspiracy theories and they're polluting people's minds and they're kind of gaslighting people and um you know that's a conspiracy yeah you know the weird thing is i so i got no debate with um with lane norton do you know lane nortoness i've heard of him yeah definitely so late late norton's he's got a phd he's a smart guy he's a power lifter body builder um and does a lot on nutritionally pretty balanced guy not ketosis not carnivore makes fun of everybody so makes fun of the ketosis guys and the carnival guys as well as he does vegans and he went crazy over game changers all right just absolutely crazy he went crazy over game changers before game changers was even released all right so that's biased right if you're going to criticize the movie before it's even released that's ridiculous but anyway he wrote this long expose and i was just going to leave it be but the expose was incredible because every single study that he put in that expose was funded by the beef industry and in fact the lab where he grew up is the most fun to the lab and in fact his his mentor that he loves so much has probably gotten more money than anybody from the national cattleman's association so i came up with um if you go to proteinaholic.com and you go to blogs um my response to lane norton i go into humor i list article after article and i go into his his source because he he accuses the people in the in the movie game changers of being biased um none of them take money from plant-based sources he's trying to somehow say that because james Cameron has investments in plant-based protein products that therefore the whole thing is biased which is stupid james Cameron's got 700 million dollars he's investing in these products because he's worried about the environment so that in that expose i go into plant-based into his funding for for him to say bias is crazy because his funding for all of his research all of it is exceedingly industry funded exceedingly so there's a huge double standard that they say well vegans are vegan and therefore they're biased and then totally ignore the fact that their funding for their studies is all industry none of our fundings are industry the studies i cite don't have any there's no big kale you know i'm not getting money from the apple association or the blueberry association it's just absolutely ridiculous there's no plant-based funding the only plant-based funding studies have ever seen are olive oil and almonds which a lot of vegans tell you not to eat um there's no big kale industry uh it's just a ridiculous thing to to to even state it's only ever becomes biased when it's a pro plant-based study it's never biased when it's a you know funded by the beef industry it's crazy and the funny thing is when i go when i meet these scientists that write a lot of the studies that that i cite whether it's like you know i went to dinner with a bunch of the harvard scientists that have done a lot of the health profession study and you know eat less me eat less dairy eat more fruits and vegetables healthy eating indexes fruits vegetables all that stuff i you know going out to eat with those guys you're like boy you're not following your rules i mean they're they're not vegan you know these guys that are doing these studies are not vegan the nih studies that are funded especially the one by kevin hall he's not the least bit vegan uh these are not biased people doing the the main studies that we've done like look you could say ornish is is biased but he's biased over years of success with it you could say esselstyn's bias again biased years of success of what he's doing but you there they're certainly not industry funded yeah i mean i'm t colin cambell he was the one who was he was originally trying to find a protein source to feed uh was it poor poorer children yeah he's looking at dairy dairy the casing set off sorry he was looking at aflatoxin and then okay the casing sets off sets off from cancer yeah no i know it's it's really it's really strange when you look at it most of the plant-based doctors that i know are so dedicated to the cause not do you know how much money i could make if i if i if i if i so i write a book proteinaholic about how we don't need that much protein if i was to accept i i get messaged all the time all the time okay will you try our protein product will you endure i can make so much money endorsing protein i can make a ton of money if i went to the if i went carnivore tomorrow i was wrong about veganism i'm starting this youtube i made a ton of money uh but you know i just would never do none of us would ever do that i mean the one thing from all the plant-based guys that i know and we argue amongst ourselves too about little minor things uh is they're all very dedicated to what really is helping patients i whether it's ferman or camber or essleston or ornish or greger there is a fundamental caring on all their parts as to and they're i don't even know which of them i'm like the only me and barnard are like the only guys that really talk about the ethical side of stuff um i don't know what their ethics are the other guys i mean i i i get a sense that there's ethics behind their stuff too but they stick strictly to the science and plant-based eating but i'll tell you they're they're they're concerned for people and they're concerned for the welfare of their patients is really extraordinary yeah it's almost like um when something comes up that goes against what they want to hear what what the general public want to hear they fight back at it so people want to hear these good things about the steak and the good things about the eggs and they don't want to hear the plant-based doctors going no no no there's a bad for you so of course they're gonna you're gonna get more pushback and then you're gonna get more support when they say there's a big big vegan movement telling all these people not to eat these animal products and then someone comes out and goes no it's actually healthy for you actually i'm not vegan anymore of course it is gonna get a bunch of support from people who don't want to change and like to be validated yeah you know it's funny i go to you know i do i go to western medicine scientific meetings that deal with surgery of obesity and things like that it's funny going to those surgery of obesity you would tear your just go crazy gouge your eyes out because you know it's been a week studying obesity and really no one's talking about food whatsoever which is you know absurd it's like what medicine and what surgery but the funny thing is you look around at the doctors and then i go to a plant-trition conference a thousand five hundred plant-based doctors and you look at those doctors it's like a vibrant health right the interesting thing is everybody practices what they preach and it's just a vibrant health like vibrant everyone looks going for runs and just looks extremely healthy much different than when i go to obesity conference where the doctors look overweight and just don't look nearly as healthy and people are going out for state dinners and things like that it's just it's there's a tangible difference when i when i interact with plant-based doctors yeah i totally agree with you there um so i think we've covered a lot of the research um the most like would you say there's any like the most compelling data for you is there's like some study that is the most compelling and would you say it's just more about the accumulation of all the data pointing into one direction yeah you got to look at data as an accumulation you can't look at any one data point right you need to have a breadth of data so from you know let's take prostate cancer okay so in japan they have less prostate cancer than they do in america but could that be that's just a univariate analysis so we could say well in japan they eat less dairy in america we eat more dairy you can't say dairy causes prostate cancer that's a univariate analysis there'll be a multiple different things so you have to look at an epidemiology study that's prospective and that controls for different factors so let's look at the harvard health profession study so now we look at a study where they followed physicians for many years and they found that the ones that ate more dairy had a much higher risk of prostate cancer still correlation not causation but they control for confounding factors right they control for weight they control for other independent carcinogens etc so now how do we evaluate that well do we have a mechanism how does dairy cause obesity i mean prostate cancer well we know that dairy like we were just talking about the casing studies with dr. Campbell that they increase igf one and igf one is an independent risk factor for prostate cancer we know people that can generally make high igf one people with acromegaly tend to have higher prostate cancer risk so now we've got a mechanism but now let's do a prospective randomized controlled trial to check our theory so then there's a study done by ornish where they took people with elevated psa in early stage prostate cancer and half of them went on a plant-based diet and half didn't the ones that went on a plant-based diet dropped their psa and they isolated their blood and found they had more natural killer cells to prostate cancer cells so you can see there's multiple different studies in order to prove a point in that situation and that's what it looks like in all these different things that's why i try to go through my book is that you can't there's not just one study i can't stand it when people like go on pub med and find one random study to support their view you have to look at the breadth of science in order to create a hypothesis in science we don't accept any study until it's been replicated and that's the interesting thing about the epidemiology it's not one epidemiologic study showing the benefits of vegetarian diets or plant based diets it's multiple all around the world in multiple different places uh and we know the mechanisms of action we know the mechanisms action for how meat causes heart disease or how meat causes cancer or how meat contributes to obesity and then you got to look at randomized control trials if we take out meat does this mechanism of action have an actual effect just like we were talking about before does not having k2 have an actual effect on your bones long term well we don't really think that we'd see that so does not having meat in a randomized control trial have an effect on obesity yes it does we know that in multiple different randomized control trials as a matter of fact on heart disease yes we know that taking meat out of a diet completely reverses not completely but actually could go to reversing heart disease uh you know so it takes multiple studies like this in order to to really come up with a true scientific argument yeah i think uh everyone should listen to that and not if they see one opposing study maybe look into more or maybe like you taught uh here uh doctors talk about the hierarchy of evidence too and the strength of the study as well like a you know systematic review would be stronger than a cross-sectional study and sometimes oh cross-sectional studies are the worst there there's some systematic reviews that have been done there was i don't know if you saw there was a american journal of internal medicine ran a series of systemic reviews that were just horrible it was funded by the meat industry and they came up with conclusions different than the actual studies showed so it goes back to that interpretation of studies um and they used they used to evaluate a systemic analysis you have to use certain protocols that they did they were using protocols used to judge medications where you could do double blind placebo control basically they came down to saying because we weren't doing double blind placebo control studies on plant-based diets plant-based diets don't work which of course is stupid we can't do a double blind placebo control trial it's just it's it's unrealistic expectations but yeah there is a hierarchy of evidence uh the worst being anecdotal which is exactly what you see out of the carnival movement uh is nothing but anecdotal oh i mean i feel better okay anecdotal evidence is becoming a religion in the the carnival scene i see that now and even in the x vegan um scene they don't they they seem to think anecdotes mean some something scientific which is crazy so like with all of this out there all these anecdotes all these x vegans all of this you know pro meat and anti sort of plant-based you know rhetoric out there who should people be taking health advice from because as a new let's just say you're a new vegan you know you really care about animals and you know you've heard plant-based diets are healthy but you're getting slammed like what's what's your advice to new new vegans getting mixed messages and where they should get their information from such a tough one right yeah you know we have a problem in the world now i i read this great this great blog they were looking at you know george orwell had thought that the problem in the future was going to be that a few people would possess all the information and that the masses would be under control because they would have a lack of information albos huxley is one of my favorite writers had a different view he thought that the problem was going to be that there was going to be so much information out there that it was almost going to become irrelevant and how prescient that guy was because that's the problem right there's way too much information and not enough knowledge there's a lot of plant-based doctors out there i mean it sounds stupid for me to say well listen to plant-based doctors because you know listen to me uh but there are a lot of good doctors out there that are in the plant-based world um true health initiative is a group of not all plant-based doctors i mean one of the uh isn't vegan at all but kind of goes towards a more vegan diet um there's doctors that have been studying this all their lives that's like you know i did that video recently about um about john leaving veganism and i said okay why would people be worried john leaves veganism so you're gonna leave veganism that's very bizarre to me because that's just totally not what veganism is worry about it if myself or dr ornish or dr esselstyn or dr firman leave it because we're the ones that are doing the research on this and studying and the treating patients with it look at those people for the nutritional advice look at the people that have been writing the books on it that have been doing the research um they're gonna be a much better resource i looking at an influencer for i always it's always weird to me when people go to an influencer for nutrition advice so people i didn't realize people were going to john for nutrition advice i guess because he had muscles which you know i get wary of anybody with muscles a lot of muscles with a lot of lean weight there's there's a lot of ways you could get muscles that aren't the the the best way to do it and it also could be genetic that's not having muscles should not be a resume for giving nutrition advice all right there's a lot of complexity with nutrition advice when i sit down with a patient i'm going to check their vitamin levels he can't do that uh i'm going to look at what they eat i'm going to follow it regularly they're going to come back with journals you got you got to look at people that are doing that kind of work not people that just have big muscles and tell you to do what they do because a lot of times they're not telling you to do everything they do and they're also maybe completely different than you maybe just completely different genetics completely different age i mean i'm 50 i can't compare myself to a 25 year old it's just a completely different situation yeah i think it's pretty complicated and i i'd agree with you there to stick to those people who are experts in their field or have been doing it for a long time and are actually practicing there's a lot of practicing medical doctors who are experts in the plant-based science and nutrition arena as well and they've got you guys have all got your own resources like your own websites and your own social media channels and you know you present evidence with your claims always i've never seen you guys make a claim without scientific evidence and if you did you say i believe or i think this and you've even said that in this podcast here today you've said i believe that there's no evidence for this but if you have evidence you present it and you'd say that this is scientifically proven absolutely i mean i could writing my book was painful they want me to write another book now i'm like it was painful because i didn't want to make a single statement that i couldn't stand 100 behind i wanted to make sure that even the most simple statement i wanted to make sure i had tons of evidence for uh in fact at one point they were just like okay stop you know you gotta stop we got too many references already you gotta stop you gotta tone it down uh and so people need to focus on people like that that are that are really presenting the science and i really would say people that are treating patients it's it's one thing to say things it's another thing to actually treat people because when you treat people you realize the complexity uh the the differences in different people it's it's a lot more complicated taking the science into the clinical setting i agree we do have resources like the Plantrition Project is an excellent project it's a bunch of plant-based medical doctors the American College of Lifestyle Medicine fantastic group of doctors not all plant-based but very dedicated towards a plant-based diet well where can everyone like find your book if they wanted to go and like read your book is it you know uh is it on audio book or can you just buy the hard book it's on audio uh it's not my voice but um on audio um it's you know amazon parts and nobles a lot of bookstores are still and still have it i still see it sometimes hanging around uh though i published in 2016 so it's getting a little long in the tooth for the bookstores but you could still get it on amazon.com and in places like that well thank you so much for coming um onto the podcast mate i appreciate that you're so busy but you've got a wealth of knowledge and i think this you've really um helped maybe a lot of people who are new to veganism and or might be a little bit worried about john because they might have trusted him before and he's saying all these other things and there's not just been john there's been sort of a trend here happening with influencers doing this so where can everyone find your work specifically if they wanted to go follow dr garth davis on instagram or facebook i will say be careful because i don't know a lot of people steal my pictures and uh create these fake dr garth davis accounts um a lot when i say a lot uh there's thousands of fake ones so mine are all verified so make sure there's a blue check next to it from face from facebook or instagram so that you know it's really me i know i don't want to date you and i don't want to i don't want to marry you and please don't send me any money i don't know these things i don't need your i don't need your apple gift oh the internet is so full of it isn't it it's crazy god it's crazy right it's both good and bad i mean it's a great way to get information out but a bad way to get a lot of bad information out well thanks again for coming on may i appreciate your time and i share what you do for the world so thank you so much man cheers brother thanks a lot all right take care see you bud