 In many cases, when people start following a ketogenic or carnivore diet, they realize that certain vitamins and minerals can only be obtained from animal foods. Then they start questioning, should I be consuming plant foods in general? Is it okay for me to eat this? The first thing to understand is that the only source of considerable vitamin nutrition is from animal foods. That is why all of our hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed the majority of their calories from animal foods, with a variance in plant foods. 45-65% of their calories came from animal foods, and there was a plant food variance. The more animal foods they consumed, the healthier they were physically, and if there's one group of hunter-gatherers consuming very little to no plant foods, then there's a second group that's consuming wild fruits and vegetables, and there's a third group consuming predominantly grains. How can we say that we're obtaining our nutrition from plant foods if there was such a variance and that some indigenous groups didn't consume plant foods at all? This leads to the purpose of plant foods throughout our history, energy, enjoyment, and medicinal value. Energy for calories, for macronutrient energy, for survival. In the recent few thousand years, a lot of native people that are still living off of the land have used grain to replace the wild plant fruits, vegetables that we used to forage. Thousands and thousands of years ago, and even presently in some Australian Aborigines groups still, they incorporate thousands of wild plant foods into their diet to get some energy calories. Enjoyment, culinary perspective. As you can imagine, indigenous groups had a job. Their job was to survive. Part of survival and the majority of survival is procuring enough calories, and as you can imagine, when you spend your entire life procuring calories and food and preparing that food, some culinary aspects are intertwined here. Indigenous groups had specific preparations that they liked and human intelligence and ingenuity and us being incredibly good hunters has allowed us to procure food in excess and even have leisure time to prepare foods in ways we enjoy them more. So there is medicinal value in certain herbs and roots and even various animal foods that indigenous people believed in from eating liver to make your liver healthy. They believed that eating the heart of your enemy would make you braver and stronger. And there is some truth. There are nutrients contained in certain foods that do have mechanisms in the body that can fix certain issues. A lot of these medicinal values were kind of lost through modern culture. It's like ancient wisdom that was with the tribe. These people would be able to walk into a forest and identify thousands of different plants, say what it was for, say what it was good for, identify which ones are poisonous. Definitely interesting, but for the purpose of this video, we're not really going to touch on it too much. None of the food that we consume now is similar to what our ancestors consumed in the past. Fruits and vegetables are nothing like wild plants and animals are no longer being fed their wild diets, drastically altering the nutritional profile of foods. It's crazy to think that if you walk into a supermarket, there is literally not one food that is considered part of a natural human diet. The problem isn't the plant foods from our past and plant foods in general per se. It's our modern version and it's also why I base my diet around animal foods as I can obtain meat that was raised in a natural way much easier than plant foods. Stocked plant foods are lower in calories than modern plant foods that are artificially high in calories, especially fruits and starches that have a lot of sugar and carbohydrates. They are much higher in nutrients and we're not talking about several times higher in nutrients. We're talking hundreds to thousands of times higher in nutrients and modern foods might even have zero nutrition depending on the soil they were grown in. The pollution is very high in modern fruits and vegetables where it didn't really exist back then. That can cause excess oxidative stress and cause issues. Is consuming a lot of plant foods harmful in general? Likely not, but when you're compounding all of these negative aspects of a modern lifestyle, it can cause oxidative stress and inflammation in the body. Determining what plant foods to consume is very subjective and they need to be addressed on an individual basis. A very good question to ask yourself is can it be obtained in nature? Is it in its original form? And this might not necessarily be a bad thing, sometimes through a lot of modern innovation we make foods much higher sources of calories than their past, but the question is, is altering that version of the food compromising its nutritional value or harming your health? The amount. How much of that food would we practically be able to obtain in nature? Is it a nut or a seed? Is it a fruit that was in season one day out of the year? This is incredibly important for determining how much of the food we should be incorporating into our diet. There are foods that people eat day in and day out that it's safe to say we should be only having them once a week, once a month, maybe even several times a year or not at all. In competition, are we using modern technology to obtain foods in an unrealistic way? Would some other animal have gotten to that fruit or whatever it is vegetable root before us? In a lot of cases, yes. I don't know how many of you guys are gardeners, but you know how difficult it is to keep animals away from your fruits and vegetables before they're ready to harvest. Location. Geography. Where is the food located in the world? Is it something indigenous to your ancestry? Is it something you should be eating every day? It's really interesting how a lot of foods originated in a certain place and now they're being consumed throughout the entire world. Expenditure. This is a big one. How much energy does it take for you to obtain that food? If it's a mango that's 50 feet up in a tree, you might as well say that you shouldn't be eating it. How easy a food is to procure from a perspective of how much energy do I have to put into creating it? In the case of grains, there is a lot of engineering and a lot of people involved in order to harvest the grains from the field and produce it. Obviously, it would be unrealistic if not impossible to harvest grains yourself. The thing about foraging for fruits or vegetables or tubers, you would actually starve to death in the wild, essentially. They can be used and these plant foods can be used to supplement a diet, but if you were stuck in a survival setting, you would not survive on plant foods regardless of how much access to them you have. Now, unfortunately, the answer to most of these things really is no. It's not the original form. You can't get it in a realistic amount. There's a lot of competition. It's not indigenous to your location. It's not local and the expenditure is incredibly high, but hey, you can go into a supermarket and obtain it. Since the answer to all of these things is no, you guys understand why I follow a carnivore diet, but we actually, in this case, need to analyze these foods from a realistic objective perspective and see if they're actually harmful. What are the negatives and positives of plant foods? The three main negatives are anti-nutrients and this is a very broad topic. I have a video on anti-nutrients that's about half an hour long that I did that I will link at the end here. This video will explain what foods have what anti-nutrients, what you should be worried about, but we will cover them briefly in this. Anti-nutrients are alleviated by preparation. High omega-6. All plant foods are very high in omega-6 fatty acids if they contain fat and this is a testament to the amount. Our access to high omega-6 plant foods has always been limited throughout history, so the solution is to limit them. There's no real way to alleviate this. Pollutants. This is tough. This is a modern issue that hasn't really been a problem for our past ancestors and the solution to this is go local, buy high quality, grow them in your backyard, be a gardener, do things like that. By using these three things we can determine whether or not a food is safe to consume from a negative standpoint and by using these three purposes we can warrant whether or not we want to consume foods. So I'm going to go further in depth on food categories just to explain this a little more but reality is using this, this and this you guys should be able to figure out okay should I be consuming this plant food. Of course there's a lot of information in each of these aspects. There's hours and hours of information on anti-nutrients, there's hours of information on omega fatty acids and also preparation methods of indigenous foods. There's literally encyclopedias on that type of stuff. Before we go and say what plant foods can we stuff our faces with we have to establish a base of animal nutrition. If you are deficient in nutrients, if you are not functioning optimally it's hard to really justify consuming plant foods if you know the base nutrition of your diet isn't there. Problems can be exacerbated by nutrient deficiencies. The vegan diet is a testament to this. Essentially every single vegan's health falls apart within several years of following a vegan diet. This is an example of you know plant foods not being adequate in nutrition and especially animal nutrition not being present in the diet. The real important thing to understand about this is indigenous people consumed plant foods that we might consider inflammatory after we analyze them but they were in perfect health. This is because they had the animal nutrition in their diet. There was a lack of pollution in their environment and they were able to handle the mild stressors of these wild plant foods plus they've been eating those wild plant foods their whole lives. There were literally thousands and thousands of plant foods that indigenous people would have consumed and by changing your plant foods and not consuming too much of one source you're minimizing the risk of certain issues particularly pollutants. So if you buy an apple from one source and eat an apple every single day if that source of apples is polluted or maybe it wasn't grown in the best soil maybe it's not an heirloom variety it's some genetically modified apple that's super high in sugar that is much worse than you know having an apple once or twice a week that's from a different source maybe from your neighbor's backyard those are two drastically different things and if you do incorporate several dozen plant foods into your diet and you're capable of having very high quality sources and varying them so that you minimize pollution risk that's the way to go about this and as with everything in nutrition science guys it is subjective and anecdotal personal experimenting will allow you to gauge your tolerance to various foods and granted you have adequate nutrition from animal foods in your diet and you have a high variance of plant foods there is most likely little to nothing to worry about unless you have previous damage to your health that you're trying to fix by removing plant foods let's touch on the general food categories most people consider fruit a pretty safe bet but that's far from the truth fruit has many negatives from anti-nutrients such as oxalates causing inflammation it has fructose and regardless of the source of fructose it is not good for your body your liver can only process so much it does contribute to fatty liver disease modern fruits are higher in sugar and lower in vitamin C vitamin C really being the only speculative nutritional benefit there is to consuming fruit I mean there's fruits like the cacodouplom acerola cherries that are dozens to hundreds of times higher in vitamin C than modern fruit we consume now so the wild plant foods we used to consume were much higher in vitamin C and it's hard to justify a high caloric consumption from fruit when the access is seasonal and they're really only an energy source there's no considerable source of nutrition in most fruits from a vitamin perspective and the expenditure and the geography these are all things to consider here how are you going to gather that fruit in nature would it have been practical so to say that you would consume more than a very small percentage I would say more than two to three percent of your calories from fruit is pretty unrealistic as long as you limit your sugar consumption from fruit to less than 25 30 grams per day I think you're better off than most people fruit is purely for enjoyment adding power to ability to food maybe you want to throw some berries in some rock cream from a farm by no means is fruit supposed to be the main energy source or the main component of a meal when bringing up vegetables it's important to understand that all modern vegetables are man-made they are lower nutrient higher calorie versions of past wild plant foods the main anti-nutrient effects to be concerned about are inhibiting thyroid function in the cruciferous family most leafy greens and inflammation from the nightshade family eggplant tomato there's so many anti-nutrients and vegetables and there's so many different vegetables that can cause individual issues that's something you guys can explore on your own the main purpose of vegetables is actually all three things enjoyment energy and some of them might have some medicinal value the main function to my understanding a tribal resource to replace fat higher carbohydrate starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes various roots would have been a good energy source if the hunter-gatherers were not able to procure enough energy from animal fat and gene conversions also play a big factor how capable are you of converting the plant form of the vitamin to the animal form of the vitamin so there is a pretty large percentage of the population that do not convert any plant nutrition into vitamins in their body but some people can so that's definitely a consideration here in most modern cases we really are talking about culinary uses caramelizing some onions and mixing them into a liver pate you know roasting a sweet potato in the oven and adding some butter to it of course sauteing some broccoli and some garlic and olive oil when combining animal foods with plant foods in certain contexts it creates something incredibly enjoyable that can still be healthy for you there are so many different types of grains that have existed it would be too hard to list them all I mean I could probably name 10 different types of just wheat off the top of my head you have hard red winter wheat which is most modern wheat you have soft red winter wheat you have hard white spring wheat you have soft white spring wheat you have coruscant wheat durum wheat iron corn wheat I believe spelt is also wheat there's coruscant wheat there's so many different types of just wheat let alone rye let alone barley cane while there's so many grains and the main purpose of grains in our past has been to replace the energy we've obtained from wild plant foods you know the scottish used to use oats as a primary source of energy there's a great reed grains a double-edged sword explaining how on one hand grains have given us caloric nutrition and able to sustain a large population base on the other hand they have kind of ruined our health to some degree although one anecdote I frequently bring up is the swiss people in western prices book western price was a dentist who explored people that were still living off the land in the early 1900s and he found these swiss people to be in excellent health despite consuming a large percentage of their calories from rye bread upwards of like 40 to 50 percent and the answer here really is to consume heirloom varieties of grains grown in higher quality soils without the use of pesticides and herbicides if possible heirloom varieties of grains are essentially versions that have not been hybridized for example iron corn wheat has 14 chromosomes where modern wheat has 42 now there are anti-nutrients specific to grains that can cause inflammation and stomach issues like leaky gut but with proper preparation through fermenting and indigenous methods you can alleviate this to some degree things like sourdough bread the scots fermenting oats I have videos on both of these that I will refer to later but the problem with this and as well as an overarching problem with a lot of these plant foods is that in order to get super high quality versions of them you would end up spending more than you would on animal foods especially from a caloric standpoint and you know if I could choose to spend four hours making sourdough bread or eating some meat come on guys and our ancestors would have always chosen the animal foods the reason our ancestors ate these plant foods in many cases was because of survival because they had to legumes are similar to grains in the sense that they are used for energy they have specific anti-nutrient properties that cause issues specific to legumes and they need to be prepared in certain ways just like grains do to aid in absorption and not cause issues the most popular legumes are peanuts soybeans and lentils but I think a lot of foods that people consider legumes are actually in other families seeds are a very big topic because people don't realize that a lot of the foods we consume now are actually seeds this includes grains this includes beans which are the seeds of legumes nuts which are the seeds of trees and wealth seeds which can be seeds from anything really they are super high in anti-nutrients super high in omega-6 and also mold and mycotoxins the pollution issues that we didn't really touch on but certain grains and seeds and nuts that are stored for long periods of time months and months and months can have mold and mycotoxins that cause obviously inflammation in the body and can lead to further issues the reason seeds are so high in anti-nutrients is because their goal is to survive the digestive system that's why they have high amounts of things like phytates phytic acid which bind to minerals and take them out of your body animals actually have certain digestive adaptations to these foods the animals that consume these seeds will have specific enzymes and fermentative stomachs unique physiological adaptations to consume these foods that humans don't have the high omega-6 content is simply these foods were never really meant to be consumed in large amounts especially by humans and the mold and the mycotoxin issue has to do with our modern agriculture and how we're harvesting these foods so realistically speaking the only way you should be consuming any of these things including grains is if they are of the highest quality and as we said high quality tends to be more expensive than meat if you are preparing them in proper ways and if vegans actually prepared these plant foods properly they would spend half their day soaking fermenting preparing food it's very laborious and then another thing is the omega-6 intake even if we do prepare these foods properly they're still high in omega-6 and they should be limited and the mold and the mycotoxin thing I mean coffee and chocolate are examples of two seeds that have this issue you want to limit them is this a super big issue it's hard to say when you consume them on a daily basis definitely I've done videos on coffee in the past and I will redo that soon as well as a video on chocolate but these are foods you should definitely eliminate from your diet and reintroduce them to see how you tolerate them because they are by far the worst on paper if I had to rank these from best to worst I would probably say you know fruits and vegetables are pretty close to each other grains are bad legumes are bad and seeds are really the worst of all of them so if you guys have a hard time eliminating plant foods from your diet definitely try some elimination protocols remove a food from your diet introduce it back in see how you react especially for these seeds so herbs and seasoning I don't think it's too much of an issue unless you have an extreme sensitivity to something or it's a very processed food uh the biggest issue here is the increased palatability of the food if you're putting a lot of seasoning on a food and maybe you're over consuming it that can be an issue or you know why are you seasoning a food so much maybe your food quality isn't high enough to really warrant nutrient density so the food sourcing is really an issue here by all means you know salt and pepper is one thing but slathering it in barbecue sauce and using 10 to 15 different herbs and spices that's where I start to question okay what type of meat is this person buying is their diet adequate and nutrition why do they need to season their food so much to make it taste good and I'm sure you guys have noticed that there's no processed or refined foods on here this is because I don't think these foods should be consumed under any circumstance if you do consume them just get back to a normal diet as soon as possible those foods are very hard to assess on an individualistic standpoint you would have to say okay what of these foods are in the processed and refined foods and then look at it from that perspective overall the goal is to get as close to the wild plant foods our ancestors consumed as possible by both reducing inflammation and increasing the nutrient density we can do this by sourcing heirloom varieties that are predisposed to having a higher nutrient content going to local farms ensuring the soil is fertile maybe even growing things in our own backyards a great way to look at this is from an inflammatory perspective we need to separate animal foods from plant foods animal foods although any input you put in your body is inflammatory this is very important anything you put in your body is inflammatory to some degree what dictates whether or not it's a net positive or a net negative is whether really it has nutrients in it if you consume an animal food that has a lot of vitamins and minerals it's a net positive because your body needed those vitamins and minerals to build tissue whenever you consume a plant food it's always a negative so the initial input is always negative it's always inflammatory but the result of consuming that food in the case of animal foods can be positive in the case of plant foods it's always negative so what we are arguing here is essentially which plant food is the least bad for us using the term healthy is misguided but technically there are groups of people that consumed plant foods that were in perfect health so there is a lot of truth to that i put a bunch of words here that really resonate to me with plant foods and how to determine plant food quality and just some other popular things you guys might be interested in of course quality is the overarching thing what quality means is you know it's free of pollutants it's high in vitamins and minerals it was grown in good soil it's an heirloom variety it tastes good it makes you feel good that's what we mean by quality and this applies to animal foods as well i mean expensive means hey why would i spend five dollars a pound on heirloom flour to make bread when i can just buy animal foods that's a tough justification elimination and reintroduction that we touched on remove a food from your diet reintroduce it see how you tolerate the plant food a lot of this stuff is seasonal and that also ties into preservation of food so keep in mind you know are you consuming foods realistically based on the season in winter you can only really justify consuming preserved foods as well as grains in some cases subjective and anecdotal this varies greatly from person to person some people have allergies some people have past stomach issues a lot of this subjective and anecdotal stuff can be alleviated with certain protocols ranging from allergy protocols to ensuring your food sourcing is good we've mentioned heirloom a lot of times you know having that original form of the food the heirloom varieties again are higher in nutrients smaller usually less calories going local very important local is not necessarily an indicator of a good quality food but local farms biodynamic farms that are not using pesticides or besides growing food in a natural way are what we mean by local forage you can forage your own fruits and vegetables unfortunately most people don't really have access to this even if they did they don't exactly have indigenous food knowledge and know what to forage for very it's very important to have variants in your diet especially with plant foods and even animal foods to ensure that the source isn't contaminated or polluted or maybe the vitamin content in that specific source isn't too great fermentation and preparation methods of plant foods are key every indigenous group prepared certain foods in certain ways and that could be the difference between your teeth rotting out or you having a perfectly healthy smile you know certain grains and nuts and seeds literally had to be fermented otherwise it would cause health issues become a gardener if you have land it doesn't have to be a lot of land and I would you know love if people started growing their own fruits vegetables herbs and seasonings a honey is a popular food that gets brought up a lot I would say limit honey to two to three teaspoons per day you want raw unheated honey use it as a seasoning maybe make a low sugar ice cream just be careful about the amount of it you eat and ideally you get it in a form like maybe even in the honeycomb with some of the larvae I mean that's a bit crazy wacko-dacko stuff but as close to wild form as possible and for most people that's simply raw unheated honey seaweed is tough because there's pollution in seaweed the iodine content varies drastically and there are substances in seaweed that inhibit thyroid function so you're trying to consume iodine to fix your thyroid but the seaweed's inhibiting it gets a little tricky seaweed is a great source of certain minerals like potassium and magnesium so it's worth exploring chocolate and coffee are two things people are in love with I have a video on coffee that you can watch I will do a video on chocolate in the future but coffee and chocolate are literally about as inflammatory as of a plant food you can get as they are seeds you know they have a high anti-nutrient content they're high in omega six they're high in histamines they're high in mole toxins they're roasted they're oxidized we'll touch on that another time plantains uh potatoes starchy vegetables all of these do contain anti-nutrients to some degree you have to see how you tolerate them as an energy source and really see how you feel consuming these starchy vegetables or fruits as opposed to a high fat animal based energy diet apples bananas the higher sugar fruits one a day max I would say and then definitely don't have any other sugar these are definitely extreme versions of wilds plant foods and I personally wouldn't consume them at all but it's not the end of the world leafy greens there's no justification for consuming leafy greens from a health perspective maybe if you enjoy them but then you're a liar uh juices to me juices are an example of modern abundance if we had truly high quality plant foods we would not be throwing them into a juicer we would be preparing them with the utmost care I think juicing is a great way to get your daily dose of anti-nutrients sugar as well as pesticides herbicides and toxins uh from the modern plant foods that we deem as healthy so juicing is definitely interesting in the sense that people think it's healthy but it's literally killing you in a way so there are a lot of videos I've done in the past on this guys I have a video on anti-nutrients plant versus animal vitamins our fruits and vegetables healthy our healthiest plant foods oats sourdough bread coffee honey omega fatty acids I will put all of those down in the description I have hours and hours of information and honestly almost all of my videos touch on elements of this to some degree but this is a great starting point I think even just the first 10 minutes of this video will give you enough of a base to understand how to determine what plant foods are actually good for you and well as we said what are the least bad for you so thank you guys for watching let me know how you like this and what plant foods you want to see me touch on in the future I will be doing coffee as well as maybe chocolate in the near future maybe I'll do spinach as well of course we have to do a video on grains touching on them a little more in depth but nevertheless the most important thing is that base of animal foods in your diet and then seeing how you tolerate certain plant foods so please like subscribe hit that bell icon it's right next to the subscribe button and share the video if you can if you guys do want to support me check out those videos I just mentioned we recently launched Frankie's free range meat our goal is to provide high quality nutrient dense animal foods to everyone there is in the future we do want to have these wild plant foods I mean it would be great to call up a farmer in Hawaii and have him grow Kakadu plums for me or you know one of the highest vitamin C foods there is so the future of Frankie's free range meat also will include you know high quality plant foods of course it might be a derivative of Frankie's free range meat but I am looking to source high quality nutrient dense healthy foods in all aspects of you know human nutrition not specifically animal foods so if you guys do want to support that vision check out the website Frankie's free range meat dot com where you can pre-order animal products that will be delivered straight to your door outside of that you guys enjoy the rest of your week