 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast, we wanted to cover a topic that is quite popular right now in the fitness and health space. This is a dietary topic. Now, we've heard about all the potential benefits of the vegan diet or the plant-based diet, but more recently, we've been hearing a lot about the carnivore diet. In fact, there's been quite a few people that have messaged us and said that eating in a carnivore style has solved a lot of their health problems. So we wanted to do an episode where we got who we consider to be two of the best experts on both sides of those arguments to discuss the benefits of why they're on the carnivore side or why they're on the vegan side. We picked two amazing people who are not zealots, who are very intelligent and who present a very, very good case. So we open up the episode by talking to Dr. Will Bulsiewicz. Now, he's a gastroenterologist. He's pro-plant-based, very, very smart guy. Really liked the guy. He wrote a book called Fiber Fueled, and you can find him online at theplantfedgut.com. So that's the first guy that I talked to in interview. The second guy I talked to is Dr. Paul Saladino. He's an internal medicine specialist. He's the author of the book, The Carnivore Code. In fact, that's going to be re-released here shortly. Paul is a very, very smart guy. He's on the meat side, and he makes some really, really good arguments. We think you're going to enjoy this episode because none of them are dogmatic. Both of them answer all of my questions very well, and both of them make really good arguments, really, really good arguments. Now, at the end of the episode, Adam, Justin, and myself have a discussion about the interview. We talk about who we thought did a better job, the points that they both made, and then we threw in our two cents of experience training people for two decades. We have our own experiences with diet, having worked with so many people over a long period of time. So at the end of the episode, you get to hear our opinion. By the way, Dr. Paul Saladino's book can be found at the carnivorecodebook.com. He also has a great podcast called Fundamental Health with Paul Saladino, and then you can find his website, carnivoremd.com. Now, before the episode starts, I want to let everybody know that there's two days left for two massive promotions. The first one is 75% off your first year fee for enrolling in our private forum. We have a mine pump private forum where everything mine pump is discussed. This includes fitness. This includes humor, entertainment, current events. We have trainers on there. We have doctors on there. We're on there every once in a while, and we have regular people on there. It's a great place to talk to other like-minded individuals. It's 75% off. That ends in two days. What you got to do is go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and use the code 75 off. That's 75, and the word off with no space. Now, the other thing that we are ending soon is our launch of our new maps program. We haven't launched a new maps program a long time. This one is really popular right now. It's Maps Suspension. This is a full workout that utilizes only suspension trainers. That's it. That's all you need, and you can train your entire body. Of course, like all maps programs, this includes exercise demos and videos and blueprints that tell you how many reps and sets and what things you need to focus on. It's a full body workout. All you need are suspension trainers. You don't need a gym. You can do it outside, inside, in your apartment, anywhere, and it's a very effective workout because you can change the leverage with suspension trainers. This program is appropriate for beginners and super advanced lifters. That's how good this program is. Now, right now, because it's launched, it's $20 off. Again, only two days left for this promotion. Here's how you take advantage of it. Go to mapssuspension.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-U-S-P-E-N-S-I-O-N .com, and then use the code suspension20. Suspension20 with no space for $20 off. Again, that ends Tuesday in two days. To open up the conversation, I asked Will if he was pro-plant-based or was he pro-vegan? What's the difference between the two? I think it is important to understand the difference because although I do consider myself vegan, I really came to this and became interested in nutrition from the perspective of being plant-based. Plant-based is a more broad and I would say more inclusive umbrella term where basically it just means that you are trying to orient your diet towards being predominantly plant-based. To me, that could be 70, 80, 90, 100%. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is the complete absence of animal products. Veganism, to me, is really truly an ethic that is motivated by animal welfare concerns and also environmental concerns. You could make the argument for nutrition in there as well, but truly, to me, veganism comes back to you basically say, I'm not going to eat literally any animal products. The reason why is because I don't agree with what they're doing to the animals and I have concerns about the effect on the environment. Therefore, no animal products at all. The issue with veganism is that you could be a junk food vegan, which many people are, and I would never characterize that as a healthy diet. If you eat junk food all day long just because it's devoid of animal products, that doesn't mean that it's healthy. That's where to me, I really come to this from the perspective of being plant-based because even for people who are vegan, I want them to actually increase the consumption of real food, real fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes. Right out the gates, you can see that Will is also not a dogmatic zealot. This is why I interviewed him for this portion of the podcast. I wanted to know what brought him to this place. What got him to the point of wanting to eat plant-based and then what got him to be a vegan? If you go back 10 years, I was 30, like I'm turning 40 next month, and so 10 years ago I was 30, and I was just not in a good place from a health perspective. I had gained 50 pounds compared to where I was in high school, which for me was hard to swallow because I was a three-support athlete in high school. It was weird to look in the mirror and see basically a beer gut, and had super low energy levels, low self-esteem, even though I was the chief medical resident at Northwestern, one of the top residency programs in the country, super low self-esteem, high blood pressure, tons of anxiety. At that time, my diet was very much like this standard American diet. By no means did I think that I had a clean diet, but my diet was truly 50, 60% processed food and 30% animal products. My favorite food was for lunch, an Italian cold cut sub. For dinner, a filly cheese steak or like I lived in Chicago at that time, I would get a Chicago style hot dog. I loved ribeye steaks. If it was my birthday, I would go out for a ribeye and a glass of red wine. That was the diet that I ate, and I was raised on that food. It never really dawned on me that that food could actually be the source of my issues, my health issues that I had. Here I am. I was the chief resident in internal medicine at Northwestern. I had this great training. I never really made the connection that it was my food that was holding me back. I tried to work my way out of it because I'm a very type A type of guy. I started hitting the gym and just pounding workouts six days a week, thinking if you work out enough, you can work your way out of this and eat whatever the heck you want. You'll be fine. I was doing six days of workouts, 45 minutes or so of heavy weights, and then jump on the treadmill for a 5-10K, or if it was the summertime, I would go do 100 laps in the pool. I could make myself strong. I could run a great 5K. I could become a very efficient swimmer. I couldn't lose the gut. I couldn't get rid of the medical issues. Ultimately for me, it was the discovery I made the connection actually by meeting my wife of a plant-based diet being a way to eat. I'd really never been around anyone who ate this way my entire life. I made the connection that this is a way that you could eat that you can eat without restriction, you can enjoy your food, and you can have your health back. I started to make these changes in my life. The fat melted off, the blood pressure dropped, my confidence surged back. I started feeling young again. I started looking for research studies because I hadn't heard anything about this. At the end of the day, I am people who know me figure out really quickly. I'm a research junkie. I'm a nerd. I turned to the research studies to see what the heck the deal was and why I hadn't heard anything about this. I was shocked when I found that there were thousands of studies backing up this path to health through a plant-based diet. I started bringing it into my clinic as a gastroenterologist and treating my patients who have, of course, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel, all these different digestive issues. I started treating them. To me, my philosophy is very much, this is not, hey, you have to be 100% or you're not a good person. I want to meet people where they are. If you are 10% plant-based, then that's cool. That's the way that I used to be. Let me try to get you up to 30%. I brought into my clinic and had amazing results with my patients healing digestive issues. It became so powerful that I felt compelled to share the story beyond just being a doctor and seeing people one-on-one in Charleston, South Carolina. I started my Instagram account in 2016, and one thing led to another. I had a podcast go viral in 2018. Then I got a book deal. Here we are. My Instagram account has 123,000 followers. My book is a New York Times best seller. It's just like, this was not the plant. It's crazy. Will was talking a lot about his own personal experience, how he lost weight and felt much better, but I couldn't help but think to myself that maybe that had more to do with the fact that he cut out junk food and calories and less to do the fact that he cut out animal products. That's what I asked him. Is it about the reduction or elimination of animal products, or is it the fact that you ate just less calories and less junk food? I think there is 100% some validity to that mindset in the sense that if you eliminate processed foods, that's the one thing that I think every single reasonable scientist can agree on. No matter who you are, no matter which dietary religion you have, I think we can all agree that processed foods, there's nothing really redeeming there and we should get rid of them. For example, with the carnivore diet, when I hear that people claim that they have improvement of their autoimmune disease, to me, that's because the processed food that you have successfully eliminated contains 10,000 different chemicals that our food and drug administration has allowed into our food supply, and that's where you find them in the processed foods. I certainly understand where people will say that, but Sal, the other thing from my perspective is that we have other studies that I would be happy to elaborate on that suggests that a plant-based diet where fiber becomes the centerpiece, activates satiety hormones, allows you to get into that calorie deficit and allows you to eat. I've never counted calories in my entire life, so I never did during the weight loss process that I had, and we have studies where people are allowed to eat without restriction. If it's a plant-based diet, they still lose weight because basically the fiber activates the satiety hormones to stop them from overeating. So he talks about satiety, and so I wanted to bring up the studies that I'm familiar with that show that protein is the macronutrient that produces the most satiety. It's the most filling from all the studies that I've read, and of course, plant-based sources of protein are harder to come by. Obviously, animal sources have much more protein, so what about that? What about protein being the most satisfying macronutrient? No, that's fair. I mean, there's both. Protein does produce satiety, but so does fiber, and fiber actually produces these hormones like leptin and ghrelin that have been connected to activating those satiety hormones. And there was a really interesting study that just came out in the last couple of weeks where Sal, doing these studies with real people, we're harder to herd than cats, and it's hard to do good high-quality nutritional studies with real humans out in the wild because we just do whatever the heck we want. So there was a study that came out from Kevin Hall, who's one of the leading nutritional researchers in the countries at the National Institute of Health. And he convinced a group of people who were fairly young, they were average 28 years old, to lock themselves in a nutritional ward, like effectively in a hospital for a month. And he fed them either a ketogenic diet or a completely plant-based diet. And by plant-based, by the way, in this case, there was still some junk food in there, like it wasn't just purely plants. And so two weeks of ketogenic diet versus two weeks on this plant-based diet. And the beauty of this is that he's controlling everything, like he's controlling what's on that tray that they give to people. And they gave them unlimited food. You could eat if you were hungry, and they were not told what was the point of the study. So basically, they just knew they were locked up and they were brought these trays of food, they were brought snacks, and you could eat when you were hungry and you could stop when you weren't hungry, you could do whatever the heck you wanted. And basically, what was fascinating, and I'm happy, by the way, to send you the reference so that you can include it in the show notes. What was fascinating is that these people, they flipped between the two. So two weeks of ketogenic and then over the two weeks of plant-based or the opposite two weeks of plant-based over the two weeks of ketogenic. And the people who were on the plant-based diet during their two weeks, they consumed on average 600 calories less than the people on the ketogenic diet. Yet they achieved the same level of satiety in their diet. So it kind of speaks to the importance of the fiber in the diet. And to be fair, like to your point, Sal, the protein wasn't what was being varied there. When they're comparing the ketogenic diet to the plant-based diet, really what they're varying is the high fat low carb versus high carb low fat. And in this case, trying to really sort of minimize the processed food. So he brings up the issue of heavily processed foods. Now, I'm very familiar with this as a trainer. Heavily processed foods just promote overeating across the board. And one of the challenges that I would run into with clients when they would want to go plant-based or vegan is that the only unprocessed foods in their diet were often animal products. You know, they eat eggs or meat or milk and then everything else was processed. And then they would go vegan or plant-based, they would cut out animal products. So now their entire diet was heavily processed. So I asked him about this. I wanted to know if he encountered this problem and how he informed his patients when they would remove meat or animal products from their diet. Yeah. No, I think that that's a very valid point. And one of the issues that we've had as a culture, like, you know, on a national basis is that many people will criticize how things have played out in terms of the recommendations that we've received from, you know, for example, the USDA, where, you know, years ago, they said cut down on saturated fat. And so what you saw in the United States was that people replaced saturated fat with vegetable oil. And I wouldn't say that's making people any healthier, right? So, and that's part of the issue is there's an educational problem. But this is the reason why I prefer to have the conversation speaking on the grounds of plant-based because then I'm being very clear and upfront that what I'm talking about is whole plant food and going 70, 80, 90, 100 percent whole plant food stuff that you like could grow in your backyard and stuff where when you look at the list of ingredients, there is no list of ingredients because it's just a real food. So I thought that was a very reasonable response from Will. So next up, I wanted to ask him the evolutionary question, the problem that a lot of plant-based advocates run into, which is, you know, we evolved eating lots of meat. We couldn't survive eating just plants. We didn't have the variety of fruits and vegetables, nuts, and seeds that we do now in modern markets. What about certain vitamins that are almost impossible to find in plant-based sources like B vitamins or iron, for example? Well, first of all, I enjoy these. I enjoy the evolutionary conversations. I find them very interesting. But the issue is that I don't know that it's fair to take the way that we ate during sort of pre-modern times where things were radically different. We lived in famine. It was a violent world. We had no healthcare system and way too many people didn't live long enough to actually have children. And it truly was survival of the fittest. And we ate based upon those circumstances with the intention of just trying to survive long enough to be able to have some kids, pass on our genetic code, and get that to a new generation so that you're part of the evolutionary tree and not removed from it. I mean, that's the world that we lived in for the majority of human history. And I get that. And if I were living in that world where starvation is legitimately a concern, then I would absolutely go for high-calorie foods. And that's what animal products are. You get more bang for your buck in terms of calories. And if I were living in those times, in the interest of my own survival, I would be eating those exact same things. But there's this idea that I actually find to be very interesting. So there's two things I would like to present to you, Sal, in response to that. The first is an idea called antagonistic pleotropy. And antagonistic pleotropy, which I think is completely at play, is the idea that the way that we evolved to support life during prehistoric times is now actually coming back to bite us in the ass right now. That the genetics that we built to help us during that time is now becoming actually our enemy. And so the idea is that, for example, we evolved ways to efficiently absorb our food because we lived in famine. And now here we are and 70% of Americans are obese and type 2 diabetes is taking over. Or we evolved ways to form blood clots to protect us if we had an injury. And now the number one cause of death is heart disease related to blood clots. Or that we evolved inflammatory systems to help to fight infections. And now here we have all these things that are inflammation related, including cancer. And so the problem is life has changed. Life in 2020 is not the way that it was 15,000 years ago. And that's part of the challenge. Now, the second part of this cell that I want to present to you is that evolution, like every time I hear these evolutionary arguments, and I do find them interesting and I enjoy these conversations, but there's one major point that we always overlook, which I think is really critically important for people to understand, which is that evolution does not care at all what happens to you once you have kids. Evolution doesn't select for you to live longer and be healthier and make it to 90 and still have a brain and not like develop dementia. Like evolution is designed so that you survive long enough to have children and then you pass on your genetic code to those children. And the problem is that now here we are today and everyone lives long enough to potentially have children. And in fact, many people who are the least fit to have children are having the most children. And so we're passing on the genetic code, not necessarily of the strongest people. We're just passing on whatever genetic code. If we want to have longevity, if we want to be able to, like for me, what I care about, I want to, I have kids just like you and I want to live time 80 or 90 and still be able to enjoy that time with my family and not be sick in my 70s and 80s. Okay, so I had to stop them and actually interrupt them right there because I didn't fully agree with what he was saying. Now, we do know or anthropologists, I guess, agree that although women can't procreate past menopause, their role is still very important in evolution. The role of the grandmother, for example, is very important to the building of our tribes and society. And then men, we can procreate until the age or until we die, theoretically, if we're still healthy. So I wanted to stop them there and ask them about that. No, I see what you're saying. I mean, basically what you're saying is that in the interest of the tribe's survival, that it's better for people to live longer. And I totally agree with that. I guess my point to you is, and just to kind of wrap up my point real quick, because I know we want to move on to other things, my point is that longevity is engineered at this point, that evolution is not selecting for us to live longer. In fact, evolution at this point may be selecting for us to be less healthy. And that my point is that if we want to be healthy, and we want to be healthy in our 70s and 80s, we have to use science as our compass to guide us there. We can't look to the way people ate 10,000 years ago and say, well, that's going to help me to live to be 80 and be healthy. We have to allow science to be the compass that guides us there. And we have to engineer that. And I would argue that the right approach to getting there is through an anti-inflammatory diet. And the challenge is that we are living to an unprecedented age now. You go back 120 years, and the life expectancy was about 50. And now the life expectancy is 80. So we need to adapt our approach so that we can have that health with those extra 30 years that we're tacking on to the back end there. Now, and real quick sale to address your points about the deficiencies that exist. So with regard to a completely vegan diet, there are some deficiencies that do exist. And the truth is that if you look at any diet, there are weak points. There are clearly weak points to a 100% animal product diet that excludes plants. And so these weak points, the question is, how do we adapt to those weak points? With a completely vegan diet, a completely plant-based diet, the main point that I would characterize as being weakness, it's not really that big of a deal. It's the B12. B12 is produced by bacteria that includes the animals that have B12. And by the way, many of the cows in animal agriculture are supplemented with B12 because they're not getting it in their diet. And so because they're not allowed basically to freely graze. So B12 is actually incredibly simple for us to supplement. From my perspective, I believe that whether you are an omnivore or you are completely plant-based, you still should be taking a B12 supplement because in the studies where they've looked in the United States, 40% of people are either deficient or borderline deficient. I also think that we should be taking an omega-3 supplement. I think that everyone should be taking an omega-3 supplement. We have big issues with omega-3 and I could break that down. That's a larger conversation that also includes our excessive use of the plant oils, which are high in omega-6 and end up affecting our omega-3. So I think that we should be taking a DHA and EPA supplement. I think that we should be taking a B12 supplement. And as for vitamin D, that's not really so much a plant-based thing. That's more that we are living inside and we're not getting outside and getting enough sunlight. Okay. So he basically is advocating for the use of supplements to supplement a diet. And I can get behind that. We do live in modern times, although people may argue that if you're eating a diet that requires supplements, maybe it's not the best one for you. But again, modern times, I would agree supplementing in many cases is probably beneficial. Now, next up, I wanted to ask him about his experience with his patients. And he works with gut health quite a bit. And I know he's worked with a lot of people. And when you work with a lot of people, like I've experienced as a trainer, you run into this huge individual variance. Some people respond great to one thing and other people not so much. So I wanted to ask him his personal experience as to whether or not he's ever run into anybody who just did not do well with a plant-based diet. It's an interesting question because I have to separate out the people that I actually see in my practice that are actually my patient versus the people that I see on the internet who are running into issues. And I have to separate that because in my own practice, and I'm going to be completely transparent with you, Sal, that I don't necessarily tell every single patient that they need to go 100% plant-based. And there are some patients. I'll give you an example. This week, I had a patient in my practice who has anorexia, like full-on eating disorder. And she was in an active flare. Now is not the time for me to be changing her diet and trying to remove food groups. So for her, I basically told her and she could use the caloric density of the meat. I told her to continue to eat the way that she was eating and actually that it was important for her to get her calories. But from my perspective, I've never had a patient that I can recall off the top of my head where I found that they became nutritionally incomplete under my care following a completely plant-based diet. And the people who do stuff on the internet, many times what I see, and this is just me as an outsider looking in at what they're putting out publicly and who knows what the truth is because I think that sometimes there's a difference between what they share publicly and what's really going on. But what I many times see is that they're doing these weird variant forms of veganism, like raw only or fruit only. And it's just like, what are you doing? Like just eat plants in diversity. Let's not be restricting it even further. So next up, I wanted to ask him about the studies that I've seen on creatine. Now creatine, you can only get from animal sources. And I've seen studies where they give vegans creatine to supplement and they get a notable cognitive boost. So there's some speculations around creatine in which they say maybe vegans need to eat some animal products to get the creatine. Otherwise, they wouldn't see such a big boost in cognitive function when they supplement it with it. So I asked him his comments on that. I actually believe in creatine and think that it is extremely helpful in terms of exercise performance. So thinking about these studies, you have to first start off with the original studies, which are more than 15 years old, where they basically had no comparison group. It was a bunch of vegetarians and vegans. And they supplemented them with creatine. This is, by the way, 2003. And they supplemented with creatine. And they did notice, using five grams of creatine per day, that there was improvement in their mental capacity. But it's important to have that comparison group. Otherwise, you don't really know whether or not other people would have had the same effect. And so there was this follow up study that they did in 2010. And they compared them to omnivores. And this time, the amount of creatine they took was an amount that I personally would never take, which was 20 grams of creatine every single day. I mean, to me, that's excessive. And what they found in this follow up study, looking at vegetarians and comparing them to omnivores, is that actually their memory was the same in the beginning, but that the vegetarians seemed to have an improvement with the creatine in their memory, more so than the meat eaters did. Now, I can't say that I can fully explain why that would be. Your point is well taken and acceptable. It is clear that there is no creatine naturally, if you are completely vegan, there is no creatine in that diet. Your body is capable of producing a gram of creatine per day. And most people who eat meat get an additional gram of creatine from their meat consumption. But there have been other additional studies that they've done since then, looking at the actual brain chemistry. Because creatine is important in two locations. It's important in the muscle and it's also important in our brain. And when they've actually analyzed the creatine content within our actual brain, there was a 2013 study. When they actually analyzed the creatine content within our brain, they found that they were actually the same between vegetarians and omnivores. There was no difference. And there was another study where they actually gave them supplements. And they again found that even with the supplements, there was no difference in brain creatine concentrations. I think it's one of these things that I don't think that there is a cognitive deficit. I kind of feel like sometimes these things can get blown out of proportion in the sense that I don't think that people who are on a plant-based diet are at a cognitive deficit. I mean, if anything, I would actually argue the opposite, which is that we have fairly strong epidemiology evidence to suggest that a plant-based diet protects us from dementia risk. And so I guess the bottom line with creatine from my perspective is that anyone who wants to use it, I'm really not opposed to people using it. I use it myself, but I don't feel like there's some deficit to creatine that's holding vegans back from optimal brain chemistry or performance. All right. So I wanted to find out if you knew of any studies that showed that meat on its own is inherently bad for us. In other words, when they control everything, you got healthy omnivore diet, healthy vegan diet. If they're both healthy, does meat by itself pose any health risks? Yeah. I mean, we have studies that suggest that animal protein puts you at increased risk for heart disease, for death from heart disease, for incidents of diabetes. We have randomized controlled studies that show improvements of blood pressure and cholesterol by removing animal protein from the diet. Of course, there's connections between animal protein. This is the nerdy stuff that is my world that I don't know how much you and your listeners know about TMAO, but TMAO is a marker in the blood that has been very strongly connected to coronary artery disease, stroke, and chronic kidney disease. And in order to get TMAO, you have to consume carnitine from red meat. And they have these studies sell where, first of all, they show, and it's kind of interesting because our microbiome plays a role in taking the red meat and the carnitine and transforming it into this TMAO. And what's interesting about it is because it involves the microbiome, they have studies where they showed that if you give a steak to a vegan, they don't produce TMAO. But if you continue to give basically carnitine supplements to the vegan for four weeks, then they will actually start to produce TMAO. The point being that we have evidence to connect animal protein or the consumption of animal products to heart disease, death from heart disease to cancer, including colorectal cancer, but that's not the only one, to diabetes, to high blood pressure, to stroke, to chronic kidney disease, very strongly connected to chronic kidney disease, by the way. Okay, so here he was talking about something called TMAO in its role in disease, but it also reminds me of other compounds in the body, other molecules that can be beneficial or bad depending on the context of what's going on. For example, mTOR, when that's elevated in a pro-inflammatory, pro-cancer state, it fuels cancer. If you're healthy, mTOR helps fuel muscle growth. Inflammation does this as well. Inflammation is a signaler for muscle growth and recovery, but in the wrong context, too much inflammation can cause some problems. So I wanted to ask him about that, and I also asked him about the studies that show that animal proteins are superior for muscle growth and performance when compared on a gram-for-gram basis to plant proteins. Yeah, I think this is where you have to look at the layers of evidence. This is the reason why one study by itself is not adequate to completely define a condition or a biomarker or anything of that variety that we need to say, okay, what's the deal with this TMAO? Let's look at some additional studies and find out what those are telling us, too. They have strong studies coming out of the Cleveland Clinic looking at TMAO as an independent risk factor, meaning that they have controlled for high blood pressure, for cholesterol, for all of these other traditional risk factors for heart disease. They've controlled for that, and they still identify TMAO as an independent risk factor. Then what they've done is they've taken TMAO, and they've actually injected it into animal models. When they do that, they form blood clots. To me, the evidence is that this isn't just a passenger along for the ride, that this is actually the one with the foot on the gas driving the car. With regard to TMAO, I certainly am concerned that this is legitimate. Now, transitioning into the conversation about different forms of protein and the effect on muscle building, I'm sure you would agree with me on this, that you really need to think about what your goals are and what trade-offs you're willing to take in order to accomplish those goals. In terms of fitness, in terms of muscle building, I mean, I'm sure you would agree with me that it's possible to build muscle on a plant-based diet. We have IFBB professionals, some of whom are not just vegan, but actually were born into families where they grew up, either vegan or vegetarian. Nimai Delgado has never had meat his entire life. Yeah. There's someone, her name is Jehena Malik. Jehena Malik is an IFBB pro-female bodybuilder who was born vegan. She's been vegan her entire life. It's possible. We need to break down where the truth lies and how we can adapt if we choose to have a plant-based lifestyle. You're 100% correct that on a gram-for-gram basis, if you give me 100 grams of steak and 100 grams of soybeans, the steak is going to have more branched chain amino acids. It's these branched chain amino acids, valine, isoleucine, and particularly leucine that have been shown to activate the protein synthesis mechanisms which you brought up, mTOR. As you know, it's this balance between protein synthesis and protein breakdown that we're constantly in. We want to get that ratio positive where protein synthesis is exceeding protein breakdown. Activation of mTOR through branched chain amino acids and through exercise is the way that we accomplish that. Gram-for-gram, you get more branched chain amino acids from animal products. That's indisputable. The studies are out there, but the issue is that we're not eating gram-for-gram. I've never counted grams of food in my life. We're eating to accomplish our goals. If the point is, can you eat a plant-based diet to accomplish your fitness goals and get just as big and get just as many branched chain amino acids as a person eating a steak? The answer is absolutely. You just have to eat a little bit more. To me, I don't truly believe that there is some sort of advantage that exists. I do think that there are different body types. Different people have different things that they can accomplish with their body. If you want to experiment with it to find what works best for you based upon your personal goals when it comes to fitness, I would completely understand that. For me, and I think we all have a mind that we would draw, I would never do steroids. I'm sure most people would probably say that because there's a trade-off. You can look great on the outside and be rotten to the core on the inside and die when you're less than 50. For me, I personally am not trying to be a competitive bodybuilder. I eat for fitness. I eat for optimal health, and it also has worked for me in the gym. I think that that's completely possible to accomplish that with a plant-based diet. From my final question, I asked Will about a recent meta-analysis that I had just read that linked veganism with higher rates of mental illness, anxiety in particular. I wanted to see what you thought about this big meta-analysis study. Yeah, that was a super recent meta-analysis. I think it was like June 9th. Let me just ask you a question to frame it. Would you expect Michael Greger to ever, from how not to die, who is vegan, would you expect him to ever come out with a study that says that eating plant-based is bad for you? This study that you're referring to, here's the key. Anytime that you review a study, you need to know what the conflicts of interest are. I hate that that is the truth. I think it's only fair for me to say that it goes both ways, but there's a conflict of interest with this particular study. It made the news, and you have to literally go past 100 references to the very bottom of the study. It's literally the last thing on the entire page to discover that this was sponsored by the Kettleman's Beef Association. I would never expect the Kettleman's Beef Association to publish a study that says that veganism is equal to eating meat in terms of mental health. I would never expect that. There are systematic reviews and meta-analyses that say the opposite for what that's worth. There was a 2014 study that suggested that higher intakes of fruits, vegetables, fish, and whole grains reduced depression risk. There also are randomized controlled trials. There was a 2015 randomized controlled trial which takes away a lot of this bias. They gave people a plant-based diet, and in this randomized controlled trial, which by the way was among people who were overweight, they had reduced depression and anxiety scores. To me, I think it's interesting, but the problem is that when I see that this is sponsored by the Kettleman's Beef Association, I'm like, okay, well of course that's what they found. That's what they paid for. It's effectively marketing. You can technically define the carnivore diet as a diet that's entirely composed of animal foods, though in my book and in my messaging, I've begun to expand the definition a little bit. The more broad definition of a carnivore diet in my opinion is a diet that appreciates two main key premises. Those are number one, that animal foods are the most healthy foods that humans can eat. We've been eating them throughout the entirety of human evolution. They formed this key, key, key portion of our evolutionary past by providing us with unique nutrients, fat-soluble vitamins, B vitamins, essential fatty acids, which were probably the spark, probably the main factor allowing our genetics and environment to lead to a bigger brain to make us human. Animal foods are this very, very key part of our evolution. Over the last five decades, they've been incorrectly vilified. They represent an indispensable part of optimal human nutrition and have been incorrectly vilified. That's premise number one. Premise number two is the opposite side of the coin, that plants and animals have co-evolved for 450 million years and that plants have defense chemicals. Plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity and can be triggering, can be harmful for some people. If we accept that plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity and that they can cause issues for people, whether it's things like gluten or other lectins, whether it's isothiocyanates, which we can talk about in brassica vegetables leading to issues with thyroid, whether it's other harmful toxins in plants potentially damaging the gut lining, plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity that can lead to issues in humans. Perhaps not all humans are affected by all plants equally, but if we accept those two pieces of the carnivore diet perspective, we're thinking, all right, animal foods are the best foods on the planet, incorrectly vilified, plant foods exist on a spectrum of toxicity. Let's marry those and think about creating an optimal diet for humans, which then looks like a diet, which is mostly animal foods with some plant foods, perhaps from the least toxic end of the spectrum or with some attention to the way that those plant foods may affect any individual human. Like I said in the beginning, the technical definition of a carnivore diet is all animal products and no plants, but I think that just accepting those two ideas gets us 98% of the way there and will result in 99% of the improvement for most people within the population. All right, so essentially Paul is saying that we should have a meat-based diet. Plants have defense mechanisms, toxins, and that meat is the most nutrient-dense, nutritious food on the planet, and it's essential essentially for humans. So I wanted to go a little deeper into these toxins or why plants, why he thinks plants may be bad for us. And you can imagine that those are necessary for plant and animal co-evolution. You ever seen that movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where they go, this is one of the best movies ever, Rawl Doll is an incredible author. Remember that scene where they go into the large room where everything is made of candy and there's a chocolate river and there's lollipop trees and you know you can eat everything and everything is sweet and I mean not withstanding all the effects of all the sugar in there, but imagine that that was the terrain that animals and insects and fungi and humans encountered for the last millions or hundreds of millions of years, but you just were in this Willy Wonka landscape of plants and you could eat anything you want anytime. Again, let's not get into the nuance of whether the sugar is good for you in that analogy, but you know there would be no plants left on the earth. Animals and plants have been in a arms race for the last 450 million years and plants have needed to co-evolve with animals and in order to do that they have had to develop defense chemicals. This really is not deniable. There are many plant defense chemicals that we're aware of and there are many frankly toxic plants that if you just went out into the woods and started eating things, most people realize that if you didn't have some appreciation for the plants you were eating, you would quickly get diarrhea or be vomiting. There are many foods in the wilderness that you could eat and they would potentially kill you. Everything from certain mushrooms to green plants to shrubs to roots, there's lots of toxic things in the wilderness and so if we accept that plants have toxins and that plants have needed those toxins to kind of do this gentle, this delicate dance with animals for the last hundreds of millions of years, then we say, okay, which plants are the most toxic? Are there some plants that are less toxic for us? And then we get into the nuance, but it's not really debatable that plants have toxins. And so with the carnivore diet, we're really kind of expanding that lens and looking with a microscope at plants and saying, well, of the plants that we generally eat today as humans, and we can draw a pretty clear delineation between fruit and the nuts or the, I should say, the seeds, leaves, stems and roots of plants. So let's draw that delineation at the beginning, but if we're talking about the non-reproductive parts of plants, meaning the non-fruit part of plants, that would include the seeds, the stems, the leaves, the roots, those are the parts of the plant that that organism isn't really excited about an animal eating. Those are the parts that are going to have defense chemicals. And those are the parts where we need to take a really sobering look at to say, are there defense chemicals in these parts of the plants that could be harmful for some humans, for all humans at varying levels? Are there some that are more harmful than others? And then we look at our current consumption of plants and we see that, you know, a lot of the plants that we eat, a lot of the plant foods that we eat fall into those categories, stems, leaves, roots and seeds, with seeds being a much broader definition, including nuts, seeds, grains and legumes, which are all really seeds. So again, fruit is different, we can talk about that too, but those are the types of plants, plant parts that are likely to have defense chemicals. Now, one of the interesting parts of a carnivore way of thinking or along this narrative is a lot of the chemicals that we are told are good for us about plants might actually be harmful for us. And that's the narrative that I'm changing. That's the paradigm shift that I'm thinking about with my book, the carnivore code with all of the work that I'm doing that all the chemicals were told are good for us about plants are actually defense chemicals when you get right down to it. That's again, not debatable. The question becomes, do we really use them as a benefit? Or are they really harming us? Do we have evidence to say either way? Do they serve indispensable roles? Do they have unique roles in humans? Or have we really just been wrong in our interpretation of things like polyphenols, isothiocyanates, et cetera, et cetera. I think most people would agree that lectins are either benign or harmful. I don't think anyone believes lectins are good for humans. And certainly, people are familiar with gluten as a lectin and other lectins from beans that are pretty clearly toxic. But there are all of these different types of plant toxins. And we can get into all of them individually and talk about how they may or may not be harmful for humans. Okay. So Paul's talking a lot about the co-evolution of plants and animals and how plants develop to all these toxins is defense mechanisms. And it makes sense. Animals have other defense mechanisms. They have sharp teeth, claws, they can run, they can escape. Plants just sit there. So the way that they evolved to protect themselves was by developing these indigestible toxins, for example. But when we eat them, typically, historically, we process them. We grind them down or we cook them or we boil them. We get around their toxins the same way we get around the defense mechanisms of animals by hunting them and killing them. Obviously, I'm not going to eat a buffalo while it's alive because it'll kill me. So I have to kill it first. So one of the questions I had for him was, doesn't processing vegetables or cooking vegetables get around a lot of these toxins so we can unlock their nutrients and they can become very edible? I think it does. But the key word there is some. And I think that most of the time when we study this, it's partial. So we get into these nuance discussions around how well can anyone tolerate them in those situations. But I do think that our ancestors knew about toxins and plants. And you're absolutely right that things like fermentation, cooking, they didn't really have pressure cooking, but we have pressure cooking now. These can get rid of some of the toxins and plants, but there are other toxins and plants that are not denatured when we do this. Phytic acid, for instance, is a chelating molecule that holds on to phosphorus and other divalent cations. These are minerals that have a positive two charge in plants. And phytic acid is really hard to get rid of with cooking or baking or pressure cooking. It can be denatured by fermenting, but you need the bacteria to make this enzyme phytase to get rid of phytic acid. So a lot of these things are persistent. Some of the lectins are probably denatured when we cook or when we pressure cook, but I think some still survive. And the intention of our ancestors is pretty clear here. And it goes back to what we were saying. They realized that there were toxins and you can make the plants into less toxic forms by cooking them. But the idea remains the same. And this is kind of one of the overarching questions of a carnivore diet is if you can get, and this is something we may have to unpack as well, what if we could get all of the nutrients that we need from animals? And plants are really just survival food. In that case, yeah, cooking, sprouting, fermenting, that would be the best thing to do with a food to make it more palatable as a survival food. But do we need them? And is it possible that there are some people who are quite sensitive and no matter what they do with the plants, we'll see this autoimmune injury or GI injury and have these symptoms? Certainly if there are people out there who are eating plants in their diet and they are just kicking butt and feeling great and are not having issues, then who am I to tell them to not eat plants? What's interesting for me about this whole question is, what about the people who have persistent autoimmunity? What about the people who have chronic smoldering inflammation? What about the people who have chronic skin issues or depression or psychiatric issues, who have tried everything and are not being told that, hey, maybe some of the plants that are still in your diet are causing you an issue. This is just another tool for people to realize, like, oh, maybe this is the last thing that I haven't thought of, because no one in the mainstream is going to recommend removing spinach from your diet. But for a lot of people, the oxalates in that spinach are pretty harmful. And maybe that's the key deciding factor here. And that's only viable if we realize that the animal foods can serve the majority or the entirety of the role in the human diet and entirely replace plants without any real negative consequences. Again, every single statement I'm making here requires tons of time to unpack, but I think you see where I'm going with all this. Paul's obviously coming across as not a zealot, which is why I appreciated talking to him. So I wanted him to kind of explain the plants that are on the less toxic side in his opinion and ones that are on the more toxic side, just so we get some context. Yeah. So in my book, The Carnivore Code, I laid out this plant toxicity spectrum. I'm writing a cookbook, which will be out in the fall. And the cookbook is going to be mostly carnivore-ish, which is what in my book, if people read it, they'll see a tier one carnivore diet, which is like the most basic carnivore diet and even says, hey, these are what I think of as the least toxic plants in the cookbook. I'm going to lay that out in much more detail. And the majority of the recipes are going to have the least toxic plants. Now, this is going to be individual, but as a general rule, just intuitively, we've kind of already touched on that. What are the parts of the plant that are less likely to have as many toxins and less likely to be immunogenic? Well, it would be the fruit. And a lot of things that we eat are fruit, but we don't think of them as fruit. So like an avocado, an avocado is a fruit. Olive is a fruit. Squash is a fruit. Cucumber is a fruit. So in the book, I talk about non-sweet fruits and even sweet fruits are probably the least likely just as a general rule, kind of intuitively, to be problematic for people, but some people will still have issues with them. So things like avocado, olives, squash, berries, and fruit in general, I think is less likely to have lots and lots of these toxins and lots and lots of these issues. Now, anytime you say fruit, people are going to say, what about fructose? And we can certainly unpack that too. I'm not as fearful of fructose in the fruit form as I am as a fructose in a processed form. And we can get into why that is. But those are what I think of as the least toxic plant foods. Now, anecdotally, I'll mention that for myself, the reason I got interested in the Carnivore diet was because of my own eczema. And I found that when I removed plants, the eczema that I had suffered from for a long time went away. Again, and of one, just my experiment. I incorporated some carbohydrates back into my diet recently as an experiment. We can certainly talk about that too. And when I put squash back into my diet, my eczema came back. And I thought, isn't that weird? I get like this eczema, I get this eczema at my low back. I joke that it's my eczema tramp stamp. I get this low back eczema. And it's pretty predictable. And it came back when I put in squash. And so, whether that's my own sensitivity to something in squash, salicylates or something, who knows? But then I remove the squash and it goes away. And I think, okay, I don't want to have my immune system activated in my skin. I'm going to avoid the squash. So that's my own anecdote. Even as food like squash triggered me. On the other end of the spectrum is the most toxic plant foods, which really fall into the categories I described earlier. I think a lot of these are leaves. And a lot of them are seeds. And some of them are roots. So we don't often think of seeds as toxic, but many of the foods that we know pretty well to be toxic are seeds. Beans are seeds. Again, I'm kind of mixing the words here, but let's just think a seed is a plant baby. It's something if you plant it, the seed will grow. Seeds, nuts, grains and legumes are just colloquial names that we've given to seeds of plants from different plant kingdoms or plant families. But legumes, if you eat a bean, raw off a plant, it's going to cause massive GI distress. You might be able to cook it and you're going to have to cook the heck out of it to detoxify it. But that is a very toxic thing. And beans contain lots of lectins. Grains have lots of lectins. People are familiar with gluten, et cetera. And there's a lot of talk about grains and how harmful grains are to many people. But I also think that nuts and seeds in the colloquial parlance cause a lot of GI issues that people may not be aware of. Again, anecdotally for myself, I had a period as a raw vegan. It's crazy. I know it's about seven or eight months. And personally, when I would eat almonds, which were a large part of my diet, I had massive GI problems. I had horrible gas, a lot of GI, pain and bloating. And a lot of people I work with, when they eliminate nuts and seeds, see significant improvements in sort of their gut function, just the way they feel. They don't get pain and bloating. So I do think that seeds of all types are particularly hard for people to digest, for humans to digest. And it makes sense. This is the plant baby. This is the plant reproductive part. It's putting it out into the world. It has to defend it. But also the leaves, the stems and the roots and the leaves of plants are probably where my ideas or these ideas are on the carnivore diet are most controversial. I don't know if there's anybody else out there telling you not to eat broccoli or not to eat your leafy greens. But I think that's a really key component of what we're looking at here in this line of thinking, that, hey, that's the leaf of a plant. It doesn't want it to get eaten. And I think when you really dig into the research, as I tried to show in my book, and as we can talk about more, there's a lot of harmful compounds in leaves for humans as well. All right. So now Paul's saying leaves, don't eat leaves and stems and those kinds of things. He said that a few times. So I wanted to ask him about fiber. I've seen studies, I've read studies that talk about the benefits of fiber. A lot of people in the nutrition space recommend fiber to everybody. In fact, some people say it's another macronutrient in fact, that we need it for good health. So I want to know what's up with fiber because you can't get that in animal products. Yeah, great question. There's a whole chapter in my book about this. So the studies, if you can think of a specific study, we can discuss it with regard to fiber. But I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my suspicion is that you're thinking of epidemiology studies with regard to fiber, because the interventional studies with regard to fiber are pretty abysmal. And with regard to fiber and cancer, specifically colon cancer or pre-calonic adenoma, pre-calonic pre-cancerous adenomas in the gut, which are the sort of the pre-cancerous lesion for colon cancer, fiber has failed miserably to prevent those. There's three studies I talk about in the book that are interventional studies, as opposed to epidemiology. So just so the listener knows, epidemiology is an associational survey-based study. There's no experiment. We're looking at a group of people, we're giving them a questionnaire, and we're looking to see how some aspect of their health has performed in the past or performs moving forward. This is an associational study, which can tell us about correlation, but it can't tell us about causation. It can only generate a hypothesis, which we then have to test with an interventional study. Well, there are epidemiology studies which associate consumption of fiber with better outcomes, but this doesn't mean that the fiber is responsible for that. As we know, there are many things that people who eat fiber, because that's been the mainstream health messaging, may also do that are beneficial. And this is kind of the same story over and over, and why misleading, why epidemiology can be so misleading for us when we're looking at medical science, and why we really need to counter that with interventional studies. In the case of fiber, when we look at studies where they gave people who had colonic adenomas, these pre-cancerous lesions, when they gave them fiber or fiber supplements and followed them for five years with colonoscopy surveillance, there was no change in the recurrence rate of that colonic cancer or that colonic pre-cancerous lesion with increased fruit and vegetables or a fiber supplement for five years. So fiber has really, really failed to show any benefit in the recurrence of colon cancer specifically, which is really the only one you could study it for. I believe there have been studies done with other cancers as well, but colon cancer is the main one we think of with fiber. And fiber has failed for that one, just hands down clearly nailing the coffin. There's no evidence that including fiber in your diet prevents colon cancer. Now, when we think about the other benefits of fiber, and again, I go through all this in the book, it's a very detailed chapter, we think about constipation. Well, looking at the medical literature, fiber also doesn't improve constipation. Fiber can increase the size of a bowel movement, or it can increase the frequency with which someone passes a bowel movement. But fiber has failed to improve the other symptoms of constipation, which are pain, bleeding with stool and use of laxatives. So it's almost like fiber is doing the reverse of what you want it to in someone with constipation generally. It's giving them more stool, which is harder to pass and causing more pain and difficulty passing the stool. So it's not to say that fiber won't bulk up your stool or give you a bigger poop, but for people that have constipation, the reverse is usually true. It makes the stools bigger, which is more pain, more bleeding, more use of laxatives. That's not solving the problem. Constipation is not the absence of fiber in the human diet. I'm a testament to that. I pooped this morning, it's beautiful. I've been pooping every day for the last two years without fiber. There are thousands of people now that prove this anecdotally, and there are actually interventional studies that show that the removal of fiber, the complete removal of fiber, this is a very widely known study in the American, in the World Journal of Gastroenterology, looking at patients that have idiopathic constipation, they divided them into three groups, one group fiber as usual, one group reduced fiber, one group zero fiber, and the zero fiber group was the only group in which 100% of people, I believe it was a, each group was about 20 people. So 20 out of 20 people in the zero fiber group removed gas, completely resolved gas bloating and constipation, 100% of people. So the removal of this fiber led to resolution of constipation in that group. It's crazy. I think the title of the study is stopping or reducing fiber leads to resolution of constipation in those with idiopathic disease, something like that. People can find that online. So fiber and constipation story is very different than what we are understanding in the mainstream literature. At this point, things started sounding like opposite land. I've never heard that not eating fiber would help with constipation. So I'm not sure how I felt about that, but you know, Paul does bring up some, some studies, I guess you could look up and read for yourself. The next question I asked him was revolved around vitamin C. You don't find it in animal products. And we've all heard the stories of, you know, people in ships, you know, hundreds of years ago, going across the Mediterranean, not having any fruits or vegetables of any sort, eating just dried meat and getting scurvy. So they had to get limes or lemons in order to fight this. So that was the question I asked them, what about vitamin C? Don't we all get scurvy or sick if we don't eat some vitamin C from plant sources? The amazing thing is that if you and I are in the wilderness together, not on a ship, and we can always hunt fresh meat, we will never get scurvy. Fresh meat is also an anti-scorbutic, which is just the fancy word meaning it cures scurvy. So there's vitamin C in animal foods. This has been proven time and time again, it's not even debatable. There were studies done in the 1930s and 1940s on conscientious objectors to the war, and they actually took people and made them scurbutic. They gave them scurvy, and then they looked to see how much vitamin C was necessary to reverse the clinical symptoms of scurvy. Now vitamin C has a number of roles in the human body. I'll just back up for a second. But the main one we're talking about here is involved in a hydroxylation step. So it's adding a hydroxyl group, which is an OH group, to one of the strands of a triple helix collagen molecule. Collagen is a long polymer of three amino acids, glycine, proline and hydroxyproline generally, and those all get twisted together, like braided like a rope into a collagen molecule. The symptoms of scurvy are bleeding of the gums, these patechiae, little red patches on the skin, and those are all happening because collagen isn't getting made properly when there's inadequate vitamin C because it can't do that hydroxylation step necessary to kind of wrap those three strands of collagen around each other. So what they found in these conscientious objector experiments was doses of vitamin C as low as 10 milligrams completely cured scurvy. They didn't even do a vitamin C dose less than 10 milligrams, and there was no clinical difference in the group that got 70 milligrams, 70 milligrams of vitamin C, or the group that got 10 milligrams of vitamin C to cure scurvy. So when it comes to scurvy, 10 milligrams a day of vitamin C appears to be plenty with no clinical difference between higher doses and lower doses. You could get 10 milligrams of vitamin C by eating maybe half a pound of meat per day, three quarters of a pound per meat per day, and that's not even including organ meats which are richer sources of vitamin C. So fresh meat has enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy. This is true. You can look it up. I did after this interview because I didn't believe it. In fact, they do treat scurvy, or they have treated scurvy with fresh meat in the past. So kind of weird, but also true. So the next question I asked them revolved around saturated fat, that evil nutrient that we've all been taught is bad for you, raises your bad cholesterol, clogs your arteries, causes inflammation. Now I know the science has changed a little bit since we demonize saturated fat, but still, for a lot of people, it's something that they've been told to reduce because of high cholesterol levels. So let's talk about saturated fat. What about that? Again, this is what's so interesting about a carnivore diet. It just raises all of these things. We just challenge the mainstream at every turn. It's amazing. It's so much fun to think about. I think that most of your listeners will know that mainstream dogma regarding saturated fat has been challenged massively in the last decade. I mean, Ty Colts has done a great way, has gone a great way toward beginning this. And I think that evolutionarily, let's just think about how much saturated fat our ancestors were eating. Animals are not entirely composed of saturated fat. The fat in a well-raised, well-raised ruminant, for instance, like a cow or a buffalo or an elk, is about 50% saturated and 50% mono-insaturated. There's a small amount of polyunsaturated fat, which we can get into there as well. But the majority of the fat in ruminants is mono-insaturated. It's about 50-50. So we can imagine, perhaps someone debate this, but if we really look at the anthropologic record, it's hard to make a case that humans have not been eating animals for our entirety of our evolution. It would be a pretty big evolutionary disconnect to have the main source of our food, perhaps one of the most important nutrients we were getting, specifically fat, be harmful for us. Don't we think that those genes, that genetic environmental mismatch, would have been selected out of the population long ago? But nevertheless, because of epidemiology, again, coming back to the E word and not in any small amount, the work of Ancel Keys in the 1960s, the seven-country study, which we now know to be pretty badly cherry-picked, there is epidemiology. Again, most of it is flawed and a lot of it is quite misleading to suggest that some countries with higher saturated fat consumption have worse outcomes. Now, what Ancel Keys left out of his seven-country study was all the countries in which saturated fat consumption is quite high that don't have those outcomes, but vilification of saturated fat is based almost entirely on epidemiology rather than interventional trials. Now, you bring up an important point here, which is the LDL specter. There's a whole chapter in my book about LDL, and I think that you're hinting at the fact that people are beginning to question the veracity of the notion that LDL in and of itself, this is low-density lipoprotein, is able to initiate and progress atherosclerosis in and of itself. This is the necessary but not sufficient paradox. Just because LDL may be involved in atherosclerosis doesn't mean that LDL is enough to initiate atherosclerosis. Again, this is a very, very deep rabbit hole and requires a lot of complex physiology around lipids, lipid dynamics, lipid kinetics, but LDL is also a valuable molecule in the human body. It serves immunologic roles. Right now with the whole coronavirus thing, there's a lot of re-interest or I should say reawakening of interest in LDL as an immunologic molecule. We know that in people who are suffering greatly with coronavirus, there does seem to be a lower level of LDL. Lipids are dropping in those people. Either they're more susceptible because the lipids are already lower or they're dropping in the face of the infection, but we do know that lipoproteins are involved in the immune response. And then there's a lot of evidence from, again, it's epidemiology studies, but we use what we can to associate those with higher levels of LDL and greater longevity. And there's, again, associational epidemiology to suggest that those with higher levels of LDL experience less sepsis. Now, before people say, oh, he's going to vilify epidemiology when he wants and then use it when it suits him, I'm always going to say that epidemiology is limited and we have to use it to generate a hypothesis. And so the associational epidemiology does suggest in humans that higher levels of LDL are protective against sepsis, which is a severe microbial infectious disease in the human body and is associated with longevity. So how could we test that? Well, the interventional studies that have been done have been done in mice and rats because we can't really do these interventional studies in humans. But in those rodent models, what we see is that when we inject mice and rats with human LDL, they are more resilient against infectious illness. They've actually done these experiments where they remove LDL, they remove these lipoprotein particles from mice and rats, and then they inject them with toxins from staph aureus or other gram-positive bacteria, or they inject them with gram-negative bacteria toxins like LPS, lipopolysaccharide, or also known as endotoxin, and the mice die very quickly when they don't have as much LDL. And then they can give the mice super LDL. They inject the mice with LDL from humans, and the survival gets much, much better. There's another correlate to this in humans with a condition called Smith-Lemley-Opitz syndrome. And this is a fascinating genetic condition in which there's a mutation in the enzyme that makes cholesterol in the human body. Now LDL and cholesterol are not the same thing, but LDL is a lipoprotein particle that carries cholesterol and triglycerides. So if you don't make cholesterol because you're taking a statin, or I should say if you're a formation of cholesterol is lower because you're taking a statin, or because you have a genetic predisposition to not making as much cholesterol, your LDL will be lower because you won't have as much cholesterol to be packaged into the low-density lipoprotein molecule. Well, these people with Smith-Lemley-Opitz syndrome often die in infancy, and if they make it to childhood, they suffer recurrent infections that are very severe. And the crazy thing is that we can rescue those children from those infections. We can improve their immune system at least transiently by giving them back cholesterol. So isn't that amazing that you can give someone back cholesterol, see the LDL go up in a human model, in a mouse or a rat model, and they do better from an infectious standpoint. So the whole paradigm starts to just look very shaky. Why would something that's good for us that's involved in the immune response be so critically and be the crux of atherosclerosis? There's got to be something else going on here. When we start to question that and understand that LDL can only be interpreted contextually, a rise in LDL with saturated fat starts to look a little differently. So the reason that LDL is so confusing is that in some people with diabetes, in some people with insulin resistance, you do see LDL go up a little bit, but that's really just a proxy for what we call metabolic dyslipidemia or metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance. So in some cases of insulin resistance, you can see LDL go up. Does that mean LDL is causing the problem? Probably not. It's probably the underlying insulin resistance that's causing the problem. This is what's so confusing, right? What is actually the crux of the issue? What is the spark that's lighting the fire? I think it's insulin resistance and I make that case strongly or fervently in my book and I say, hey, wait, let's not ignore LDL. Let's interpret LDL in context because what we know about ketogenic diets, low carb diets, which I'm not dogmatic about. Again, I talked about the possibility of having carbohydrates on a carnivore diet earlier and we can get into that, but in the setting of a carnivore diet, what we know is that everything goes in the right direction, quote, unquote, except LDL. Triglycerides usually go down, HDL goes up, inflammation goes down, fasting insulin goes down, but LDL goes up a little bit. Well, that's a completely different picture than what happens to someone with diabetes or prediabetes and insulin resistance. In prediabetes and insulin resistance, everything goes in the wrong direction, but most mainstream physicians are only looking at one marker and that's LDL. They're not interpreting it contextually. They're saying, oh, wait, your LDL is going up. Well, yeah, but what about the fasting insulin? What about the triglycerides? What about the HDL? Those are all going down, except in the case of the HDL, which goes up. But you understand what I'm saying here. They're all moving in the right direction, but in diabetes, everything goes in the wrong direction. Diabetes is high triglycerides, low HDL, high fasting insulin, high fasting glucose. So isn't it possible that it's a completely different picture to see LDL rise in the setting of metabolic health versus metabolic illness or disease or insulin resistance? So that's the case with saturated fat. Okay. So he broke down the saturated fat argument and I'll be honest, that was one that I've looked into myself. So a lot of what he said is stuff that I've also read. Very, very interesting points. Next, I wanted to talk to him about, you know, are there any societies or cultures of people where they eat mostly animal foods? I mean, we've heard a lot about places in the world where people live a long time. The world's blue zones and most of their diets are pretty much plant-based. So I want some examples. Give me some examples of places in the world where people eat a lot of meat or mostly meat and have long, healthy lives. Absolutely there are. So I sound like a broken record here, Sal. I'm sorry. I've got a whole section of the book where I debunk the blue zones. Dan Butner is in some ways the last generations, Ansel Keyes. He did a fantastic job of cherry picking those studies and didn't spend as much time with those cultures as he should have. The first point that I'll debate with you here is that a lot of the people in those countries, specifically Icaria, Greece, Sardinia, Loma Linda, California, we'll leave Loma Linda out. I'll talk about that one specifically in a second. But Okinawa, all of these in the Koya region of Costa Rica, if you really look at these countries, they have a predilection for eating meat. Let's just talk about Sardinia. Sardinia has a dish called Sardapig. One of their national sort of cultural dishes is pork. How anyone can claim that this is a plant-based culture is beyond me. And if you go to look at, I don't think that many people who read the blue zones have been to Sardinia. Animal foods are treasured there. They're an indispensable part of the diet. They're not eating a plant-based diet. Now, they're not eating a carnivore diet. They're probably eating some plants, but they're certainly not eating no animal foods. That's a misconception. The same thing is true in Icaria and Greece. And actually, the same thing is true in Okinawa. There have been some fascinating studies in Okinawa showing that among the centenarians, there were no vegetarians. The Okinawans eat a lot of pork as well. And generally, Okinawa has not been Buddhist like the rest of Japan, and they haven't shunned meat in the same way. So again, I present a lot of evidence in the book that really makes the foundations of a blue zone argument look pretty fricking shaky. In the Nikoya region of Costa Rica, it's only a blue zone for males. It's not a blue zone for females. That's a little bit strange in the first place. And the males in Nikoya, in fact, everyone in Nikoya, eat significantly more animal foods than the general Costa Rican population. And they eat way more animal fats than the general Costa Rican population. So you're like, okay, wait a minute, something isn't adding up here. This doesn't make any sense. There are lots of places in the world in answer to your question where people eat a lot of meat like Iceland or Hong Kong, where the longevity is equally good. Hong Kong has the third largest life expectancy in the world at 85 years. And they have the second or third largest per capita meat consumption anywhere. I think they eat over a pound and a half of meat per day on average in Hong Kong. Iceland is pretty similar. Not a lot of plants grown in Iceland most of the time. A lot of fish, a lot of seafood, they eat elk. The same or the same way in the Norwegian countries, mostly animal foods. So when you really do the research and you kind of stop, and I'm not saying you're doing this, but when Dan Butener stops cherry picking the data, you don't really see a clear correlation between what people are eating and the length of their life, other than perhaps the absence of insulin resistance. I think that the main thing you're going to see with people is overall metabolic health is going to correlate with life expectancy. Okay, so next up, I wanted to ask them about the role of carbohydrates and athletic performance. I've been training people for over 20 years of the managing gyms. I've been in the space for a long time and it's and the studies and evidence also prove that carbohydrates improve performance. If you have no carbohydrates in your diet, you're probably not going to be as strong or move as quickly. So I wanted to ask them about that. What about carbs and performance? So this has been an interesting thing for me to experiment with. I've been doing a carnivore and carnivore-ish diet myself, technically speaking for the last two years or so. And for the first year and a half, I didn't have any carbohydrates in my diet. And then in the last few months, I've incorporated them back. And I'm going to agree with you, Sal. I think that they do have a performance improvement. But what I've realized is that you don't have to eat plants per se to get carbohydrates. And what's been so interesting for me is that within the carnivore space, I think this is just how it happens. We're all kind of susceptible to dogma. And I never wanted to be in an echo chamber and I've tried to not be, but I'm sure that I'm susceptible to it and we all have our own bias. But I've noticed there's a lot of bias in the ketogenic community and low-carb communities. And I can't deny that ketogenic diets are beneficial for a lot of people. But I also can't deny, I can't state that carbohydrates are uniquely harmful for people. And I think that there's nuance in the type of carbohydrate that we use. And certainly this can go back to high fructose corn syrup, processed grains, processed flowers. I think those are pretty damaging for humans along with vegetable oils. But if someone is eating, you know, non-processed carbohydrates, I think that can be completely consistent with what I would call a carnivore-ish diet. And again, what we're trying to do here is not adhere to a dogma, or at least I'm not. I'm just trying to help people get well and realize there's different ways to look at the dietary sphere. But for the last couple of months, I've been eating carbohydrates in my diet almost every day and really enjoying it. And again, like I said, I incorporated squash, and my eczema came back, and I thought, okay, maybe that's not the carbohydrate for me. I did white rice. I didn't really like the way I felt. I was using a continuous glucose monitor. I was not using a continuous glucose monitor at that time, but I used a continuous glucose monitor after that. But I wish I'd been using a CGM during rice to see what my postprandial glucose levels were. But what I found or what I ended up with was honey. And most people would say, honey, you don't want to eat pure sugar. And what's interesting for me is that, number one, honey is not really a plant food. You could make an argument, oh, it's this, it's the pollen from flowers that then bees are fermenting and puking back up. Who knows? I mean, is it a bee product? Is it a plant product? But for me, honey has become the easiest and what I believe to be the least toxic way to get carbohydrates into my diet. And because it's such a simple carbohydrate, I wanted to do the CGM. And what I found was really intriguing. I could eat quite a bit of honey, 60, 75 grams of honey, 75 grams of carbohydrates in the morning. And that may not sound like a lot to somebody in your space. But to me, 75 grams of carbohydrates in a meal is like, that's a lot. And I could eat that much honey in the morning with my continuous glucose monitor. And I'm happy to publish these results. And I will do a whole podcast about it on my podcast really soon and only see a small bump in my blood sugar. And I can talk about what that is. But what I learned was that honey didn't really spike my blood sugar that much. It certainly didn't spike my blood sugar to a pathologic level. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. And I felt a little better eating honey. And so I guess my point here is, I don't think we need to be dogmatic about this. And I think that if somebody wants to include carbohydrates in their carnivore diet, they can totally do that. You can do it with honey, or you can be carnivore-ish. And I love that you started out the podcast with like, what is carnivore? Because it's like, look, we don't have to be dogmatic. What we want is just to move the idea forward that, hey, plants might not be all benign for all people. I don't think they're magical. And that animal foods are probably the central piece of every human diet if we really want to do well. But beyond that, I don't think we have to be dogmatic about which plants or how many carbs or any of those things. So those were great conversations, both with Paul and with Will. And I have to admit, I walked into them with some bias. Now, my bias wasn't necessarily in one direction or the other. I wasn't pro mostly meat diet or pro plant-based diet. My bias came from my experience training so many people over two decades in that I've never really worked... My experience training people showed me that people are so different in how they respond to diets. I've had clients that did excellent on plant-based diets and I've had clients that did excellent eating more meat. So going in there, I'm like, well, I've seen people do well with both things that I think you guys are gonna talk about. Yeah, I've seen like individually biodiverse, it's all across the spectrum. And to hear these ideas from two of like, polar opposite approaches was really fascinating. And I haven't heard really a good balanced version of the vegan, the plant-based diet. And I thought that was a really good presentation that we just heard. I think that both Will and Paul were great. I mean, both are extremely intelligent and very well read and neither dogmatic, which also I think speaks to how intelligent they are. You asked a couple of great questions to both of them that challenges their ideology a little bit. And both of them were very quick to agree with you. That's a very good point, Sal. And then went on to explain and then also say that neither of them ever said that they would tell every person, only eat vegetables, only eat meat. They made that point that there is cases that they have with both of them with clients that they helped where they would still recommend them to introduce meat or vegetables to begin to talk about. So that to me right away left me a lot more open-minded to hear the advice from both of them because you could tell neither one of them was dogmatic about. No, they weren't zealots. And I really appreciate that. Because again, my experience has taught me that there never is like a one answer for everybody. I've never experienced that training people. The opposite has always been proven true for me, which is that there's this huge variance from person to person. And what goes into that is everything from their psychology, their experiences, their microbiome, their own physiology, all in more factors, lots and lots of factors go into that. I will say this, after I was done talking to them, I was thinking a lot about just from a reactivity standpoint, like what types of foods in my experience do clients typically have reactions to? Are there more reactions to plant foods from an intolerance standpoint or to animal foods? And you know what's funny? It's kind of balanced. I've had lots of clients with issues with gluten and nuts and other types of plant products, even vegetables. I've had clients with issues with broccoli or cruciferous vegetables, peppers, onions, garlic. But I've also had lots of clients who've had issues with dairy and eggs in particular. I will say this, and maybe this is a little bit in favor of Paul. In my entire career of training clients, I've only ever had one client have an issue, like a reactive issue to meat, to red meat. Only one. I haven't had any. Never? No. How about you, Justin? Oh, for meat? No. Yeah. I haven't had any issues with that. I mean, dairy, of course. I think that's something to consider. But yeah, honestly, that would be one point that I would probably lean a little bit more on the meat side of the spectrum. After listening to both of them, I really think that ironically, they may not agree with each other, right? But I think they both agree with our philosophies, which we've been saying since day one on this podcast, is that it really is about finding out what works best for you and then also not allowing yourself just because maybe you switch to vegan or switch to carnivore, that adopting that, oh, it's the carnivore diet that's made me so great or it's veganism that's made me feel so great and actually looking into, well, what was it that you were doing before and maybe eliminating those foods is really what the problem was. And you don't have to go, and that's what I love about what Paul is doing right now, where he's calling it carnivore-ish, where he's allowing honey and he's starting to eat some carbohydrates before his workouts and fruit. Yeah, and the truth is, I don't know anybody that would really want to live in either one of those forever. Yeah, you got to consider that. What would it be like living in the modern world eliminating all animal products or eliminating all plant products? Well, and the truth is nobody really does, or at least 80% of the population that identifies with one of these groups, they live their only a portion of their life and then they fall off on a weekend. They're vegan for 28 days, but then two days, they miss that burger or whatever the case may be, and they go that direction or the opposite, the carnivore, eating all meat all the time, and then it's like, oh man, I missed that ice cream that I finally... Yeah, or some french fries. I need some bread. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a very good point, because you cannot cut out the psychological aspect of it, and that's an important part of quality of life. There is a couple of points that I want to address just with my own comments. Paul makes the argument that animals evolved teeth and they evolved claws and the ability to run, and that's their main way of preventing themselves from being eaten, but plants have evolved developing toxins because they can't run away, and yes, that makes perfect sense. However, we still, as humans, we're intelligent creatures, we're the greatest tool makers of all time, and we cook our meat. We don't eat it raw. Why do we cook our meat? It'd be very hard to digest a lot of meat that would meet your nutritional needs on a raw basis. Now, I do know there's some people that do this. Believe it or not, there are some people that only eat red meat, but I'm going to tell you right now, the vast majority of people, if they tried to eat only rare or excuse me, only raw meat, they'd have lots of digestive issues. So we did go through, we do have to process meat to unlock some of its nutrients, because cooking meat is a pre- digestive process. It's partially digesting it so you can consume more of it and unlocks its nutrients. The same is true for plants. We do process plants to a degree to make them consumable for a lot of human history, even before advanced processing techniques. We would grind the crap out of wheat. We would grind it in stone and we would boil and we would cook and we would do lots of ferment to make them easier to digest. So it's not clear cut. You know what I mean? It's not like, hey, we have to do all this stuff to plants, so that means that it's bad. Hey, we don't have to do that much to meat. That doesn't mean it's bad. And then my point with Will that I want to point out was when I brought up the evolutionary argument, his kind of rebuttal was, well, back in those days life was different and we don't want to go back to that. And I think that kind of skated over the dietary evolutionary argument. Of course, I don't think it's best for us to go live in caves again and do all that because that's a bad trade-off. But I think we can't ignore that our bodies can learn a lot from history. Yes. And we did evolve eating a particular way. And from a nutrient standpoint, here's where I think Paul is right. From a essential nutrient standpoint, modern society and shopping markets makes it possible to eat all plants, otherwise would be impossible. As a human, you would be very nutrient deficient in a natural environment. And so this is how we live for most of the human industry. You could not get all your nutrients just from plants without having access to this incredible wide variety. You could literally just kill animals and eat them and maybe not ideal, but you'd be okay. If you did that with plants, you would starve and die. Now, both of them had great points and I really enjoyed listening to both of them speak, but only one of them said something that actually kind of sparked something that made me want to do something different in my diet, just to experiment. And that was Paul. And to your point, you're talking about right now, when he started talking about plants, natural defense is for them to have toxins so they didn't get eaten all the time. And that there's different plants that are higher in toxins. And there are also parts of the plant that are higher in toxins like the stem and the root, for example, in comparison to the flower of it. And I never thought about that. And when I think about, I eat a lot of vegetables and I tend to lean towards things like asparagus and broccoli, where I'm eating the entire stem and everything of it. And so, and he talked about his eczema, and I have psoriasis, and that's a constant battle of things that I'm always trying to work on and trying to evaluate diet. And there's definitely offenders that I have found that I try to avoid. Most of the time, things like gluten that really bothered if like lots of sugar, even dairy, if I have a lot of it tends to flare it up. So I do notice those things in my diet, if I am. But I've never actually tried to eliminate like asparagus and broccoli for an extended period of time. And, you know, I'm very interested to see like, oh, I wonder if that could have been an offender. So, you know, of both the conversations, I enjoyed listening to them. I didn't feel like either one of them said anything that I wasn't familiar with or didn't really agree with. But I definitely think that Paul did kind of make me go, I wonder if I did this different if I would see something. Yeah, to speak kind of to that too, I was I was thinking about that quite a bit in terms of like how plants provide this offering, right? There's this fruit or there's this flower and it's almost like a survival mechanism, right? Here, eat this and then they can still survive, you know, and it's if you think about it like that and you're eating in, you know, in the stem and that might be where you're getting a lot more of these chemicals that might not be settling in you, right? Yeah. So the biggest thing that I like about this episode is that it all boils down to this. Listen to your body. I think sometimes things get pushed so hard on us that it and I know this because I've experienced this with client time and time and again, that something they believe in something so strongly because they're constantly being, you know, told this by media, by diet books by articles that they ignore their signals because but this is supposed to be healthy. You know, I've had people do that with keto diets. I've had people do that with vegan diets. I've had people do that with meat based diets where they come to me and they're like, hey, Sal, I'm doing this keto diet that everybody says is great, but I'm constipated and it's been like that for about, you know, 45 days should I wait longer? Is it my body adjusting like, no, it's not working for you. Like you're not listening to your body. I've had people go vegan who, you know, they become pale and weak and hormone imbalances, especially in female clients. And they're like, but you know, but I want to eat this way because it's healthy. This is what I keep hearing and I'm like, you are not listening to your body, which is that is the clearest best coach you could ever listen to. That is the coach that knows you the best is your body. So at the end of the day, listen to your body and I'm glad that we have smart people on both sides. I'm actually really glad that we have smart people on the meat side because we've had nobody on that side for a long time to offset the other message. To kind of throw a little bit of counter on the meat side. I was talking to Adam about this and I'm a big fan of like the naked and afraid show. And, you know, this is the clearest example of, you know, they're just out there to survive. They need to go find nutrients in any, you know, facet that they can. And so, you know, there's this guy that killed an antelope and, you know, they had provided them a lot of meat and he ate the meat and, you know, so basically got constipated and it impacted him so much that it got stuck. And so he had a real medical problem, medical emergency because of this. But again, dehydration could have been a factor to that, you know, a lot of factors going in, but you just don't know individually how you're going to respond to just, you know, sticking in one specific modality. Yeah, there's two truths here. Humans can eat a lot of foods. Obviously, look at the variety of things that we eat. And number two, there's a great variety between people and individuals and listen to your body. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on videos as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube. Also, you can find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug on there. By the way, if you want to learn about podcasting behind the scenes, the equipment used, the skills required, go follow Doug at Mind Pump Doug. And then you can find Justin Adam and I also on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump. Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. I'm like, listen, we don't want to get kicked out of this league because we're too good. So you guys just base hits. Don't just don't be swinging for the fence all the time. Take it, conservative. Yeah. Don't show off. For the first inning, it was like 15 to zero. Everyone was like, dude, I played one of those games before. Hey, if there's anybody not playing yet, we can fucking start playing now.