Full transcript: Shawn Baker on London Real
4:55 Sean, welcome to London Real in New York City. Brian, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s great having you here. I can’t wait to dive into all of this stuff.
5:04 I first wanted to ask you, how many death threats do you get a day from the vegans? Yeah, I get some. I mean, mostly it’s wishes. It’s not threats. It’s mostly, you know, we hope you die of cancer and heart disease and that sort of stuff.
5:19 But, I mean, honestly, probably 98% of what I receive is very positive, and so that’s a very small minority. I point it out just because it’s interesting and entertaining more than anything else. But you get those kind of comments. Right, sure. And, you know, Joe Rogan, who you originally on his show, that’s how I first heard about you, he recently posted a video.
5:39 He went carnivore for a month or is still doing it off and on, and he took his shirt off and he’s like, I lost weight and I feel pretty good. Obviously, Jordan Peterson has been doing this for quite a while as well and had a lot of success. A lot of his autoimmune stuff, you know, really went down. What do you make of when you see Joe and his success? And I know you’ve been talking to him as well.
5:59 Sure. Does that surprise you? No, it doesn’t surprise me at all because I see it all the time. His results are not atypical at all. This is what I see day in and day out, not from tens or twenties, but hundreds and thousands of people.
6:11 So I see that continuously. I mean, I really applaud Joe for actually doing it. I mean, this is a thing. There’s people that talk about it and there’s people that have done it. And I think there’s a big, you know, there’s a big difference there.
6:21 And I think what he is seeing with regards of decreased inflammation, joint pain. It’s kind of funny. He tells the same story that I did when I was on his show. I said, look, I did it for 30 days. I came off and ate a bunch of stuff, including an apple, which people somehow think it was all the apple.
6:36 But I said, I ate all kinds of foods. And some symptoms came back. And he kind of looked at me kind of like, you’re kind of crazy. And it’s kind of funny. It’s kind of ironic that, you know, two and a half years later, he does the same thing, basically has the exact same experience, which I thought was, you know, maybe a little bit of validation.
6:53 But, you know, good for him for trying it. And what are some of those things people experience when they go on meat only? And the same that you did and Joe did. Well, I think this is, let me just back up and frame things from the big picture, because I’m really a big picture type of guy. And so when we look at nutrition science in general, you know, and I will say, you know, a lot of us like to use the term evidence-based medicine.
7:14 We all talk about evidence-based medicine. But where did that term come from? That term was coined in 1991 by Professor Gordon Guy, who is a professor of medicine up at McMaster University in Canada. He’s actually invented that term. He’s been doing evidence-based medicine evaluation for 30-plus years.
7:32 And so I recently interviewed him and talked about this. And he basically says, our nutrition science, with regard to predicting how long we’re going to live, if we’re going to get heart disease or cancer, is so incredibly weak. You know, the data that we use to make those assumptions is almost completely worthless. And so, you know, his position is we, you know, we can’t even use nutritional guidelines because the evidence is so weak. And a lot of people, so when we debate about what diet is best, we’re really debating on extremely weak evidence.
7:59 As in they can’t find a correlation. Well, I mean, they do epidemiologic studies, which are notoriously awful. I mean, they’re like based on food frequency questionnaires or based on, what did I think I eat? What did I think I ate six months ago? You try to remember it.
8:13 We know that when we actually compare what they actually eat, when we do studies, people overestimate fruit and vegetable consumption by something like 82% or something like that. So, you know, some of these studies that show this. They don’t like to admit they haven’t eaten. Right, so the perceptions are, you know, they can’t remember these things. And then also they sometimes overestimate or underestimate because they want to answer the question correctly.
8:34 So we can’t rely on any of these things to tell us what, you know, I’m never going to say an all meat diet is going to make you live the longest because I don’t know. No one knows. But no one can tell you what any diet can make you live the longest. And so what we can, so what we can really do is we say we can take people that are sort of disease, you know, they’re overweight, they’re obese, they’re inflamed, they have diabetes, they have autoimmune disease, they have gastrointestinal problems, and we can take them from that situation and we can move them to the non-disease state.
9:03 That’s all we can realistically do. And so we make all this effort in trying to say, you need to eat this way so you can live longer. Well, we have no idea. We have no idea what diet’s going to do that. So I think we need to step back and say, how do I take sick people and make them healthy?
9:18 If we were just to do that, you know, in Western medicine in the United States, we would have a huge win. We would no longer be spending, what, $3.7 trillion on health care. You know, all we got to do is just change the goalposts a little bit. And then we can argue about how do you get there, what diet seems to work. But your original question was, you know, what are we seeing with the diet?
9:42 So the supposition is meat is unhealthy. We hear this all the time. We’ve been hearing it for 50 years, particularly red meat. Red meat is healthy. It’s going to give you heart disease.
9:50 It’s going to make you obese. It’s going to give you diabetes. It’s going to make you inflamed. And therefore, you know, if that were true, then you’d say, well, people that eat not just a little bit of meat, not just a little bit more than the average person, but people that eat 10, 15, 20 times the average American amount would be the sickest people on the planet, right? That’s what you would assume.
10:08 But what we see reliably is these people lose weight, they lose body fat, they get leaner, they put on muscle, they lose visceral fat. Their inflammatory markers go down both objectively and clinically. Their joint plane goes away, their autoimmune symptoms go away. The really exciting thing to me is a lot of the mental health symptoms get improved, whether it’s anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, even PTSD. I see these people improving, which is really, really surprising.
10:36 Really? And we can talk about why that may be going on. And why in small doses was it proven or was it not to be harmful? And then why in mega doses is it the opposite? Well, I don’t think it’s ever been proven.
10:51 If I were to ask you, we talk about how much red meter beef, in particular, the average American eats. And we make this wheat so much. But we eat, on average, about 2.4 ounces a day. That’s a tiny part of our diet. And to blame all of our ills on this tiny, tiny fraction of our calories, we eat more calories in soybean oil than we do beef today.
11:12 I mean, this is a shocking fact. As an average, you’re saying. As an average, right. I mean, obviously, I eat more than the average person as far as beef. You know, in mid-1970s, the average American was eating about 100 pounds of beef a year.
11:25 Now we eat about 56 pounds. And so we’ve got this 30%, 40% reduction in red meat consumption, particularly beef. And yet, what’s going on with our disease rates? They’re going up. You know, they’re going up, up, up, up, up.
11:37 Do you think everyone points a finger at red meat when, in fact, it’s all the saturated fats and the sugars and a lot of the carbs and the obesity? Well, I think here’s what I would say. You know, if we’re honest about this, you know, obviously, there are people that are doing whole-food plant-based diets that are improving. You experience that. You’ve got Dr. Michael Greger.
11:55 You’ve got Neil Bernard-Owl saying, look at the benefits. Look at the benefits. Undoubtedly, we see some benefits. But what is the commonality? None of those guys are eating a bunch of sugar.
12:03 None of those guys are eating a bunch of, you know, oils. None of those guys are eating a bunch of refined, you know, grains, you know, Twinkies, you know, garbage. So when you take that out of the diet, I think that’s the greatest offender. You know, we can argue, we can go back ancestral, and I can make an evolutionary plausible argument for eating a meat-based diet or a mostly meat-based diet. I think that’s fairly reasonable to do.
12:23 But we can always say, we don’t know for sure. Until somebody invents a time machine, we’re never going to know. But what I can tell you is they weren’t eating Twinkies. They weren’t eating Doritos. They weren’t eating Crisco.
12:33 I mean, there’s some things we know they didn’t eat for sure. And those things that have been introduced to the modern diet, the industrialized, you know, chemical slop basically is my view, what’s really causing most of the problems. And so the people that show success with plant-based, you’re saying it’s because maybe they’re cutting out a lot of the other things. So you’re okay with people doing plant-based diets because it could be a healthy option for them.
12:55 Certainly. You know, I, despite what people sort of want to say about me, I’m completely supportive. If somebody wants to do a plant-based diet and it works for them, good for them. You know, I’m all supportive for that. You know, same thing.
13:09 They should afford me and others like me the right to do a diet that’s, you know, mostly a meat-based diet or a completely meat-based diet if needed. You know, the standard American diet, as much as we malign, is 70% plant-based. I mean, you look at it from a caloric and a volume standpoint. You know, unfortunately, most of it is processed grain, sugar, soy, you know, seed oils and things like that. But those are still plant-based products.
13:32 You know, we were still eating a relatively small percentage of our food coming from meat. You know, if we look at it again, epidemiology is not that good. But, you know, we can find plenty of examples. I’ve used this example plenty of times, Hong Kong. I don’t know if you’ve been to Hong Kong, you might have, but they eat a lot of meat in Hong Kong.
13:45 If we look at the stats on this, Hong Kong reliably lives longer than almost anybody in the world. You know, if you just Google Hong Kong, life expectancy here, you see Hong Kong tops the life expectancy, you know, for the world for the second year in a row. And then you look at Hong Kong meat consumption, and they eat, on average, like 1.6 pounds of meat per day per person, which is far more than we eat here in the United States, way more than we eat in the UK.
14:08 It’s like four times what the UK eats. So these people live the longest, eat way more meat, and also they have the highest IQ on the planet, which, you know, is kind of an interesting observation. Well, some people come back and just say that’s a small sample size, or that’s that one. Well, I mean, it’s, you know, certainly it’s bigger than all the blue zones combined. There’s seven million people in Hong Kong, right?
14:25 I mean, so you’ve got a big sample size, you know? And, you know, you could say, and this is a point, life expectancy is not based on diet. I mean, it’s just a small component of that. You know, there’s so many things. Wealth is probably the biggest thing.
14:38 Access to, you know, fresh water, access to health care. You know, those types of things are going to drive life expectancy more than anything else. But at the same time, we could look at Monaco, we could look at Switzerland, we could look at Iceland, all these countries. You know, Iceland has some of the most centenarian males on the planet, and Iceland’s a frozen rock. You know, they don’t have mangoes and fresh fruits and vegetables growing there.
15:00 These guys traditionally grew up on dairy, you know, primarily lamb, seafood. You know, they had a little bit of uranium poured from Denmark, but that was traditionally their traditional diet, and those guys lived a long time as well. Yeah. You know, Michael Greger, I’ve had him on the show twice. I had Neil Barnard on this last year.
15:19 Obviously, I wanted a year plant-based after I met John Joseph. And John challenged me to do a half-Iron Man race on a plant-based diet. Now, I had kind of flirted with plant-based before, but I had never done it. And he said, Brian, you’re going to find you don’t have the injuries. And I was 47 when I did this, and all this other stuff.
15:39 I didn’t believe him. I went plant-based. I did struggle in the beginning to get enough calories. But once I started doing it, I did feel good on it. I didn’t have injuries, which kind of blew my mind.
15:49 But I, of course, didn’t do a test with meat only. And I kept it up for the whole year. I just thought, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to give this a try. But towards the end of the year, I said, Sean, I said, am I doing this because I’m being dogmatic, or am I doing this because it’s the right thing to do? And I have a whole history of taking things to the extreme in bad ways, sometimes with drugs, sometimes with money.
16:10 So I can just get in there and just do it to do it. And at the end of the year, I was like, I don’t know if this feels right. So I had a little bit of sushi. And my stomach was like, this is OK. And I had some red meat.
16:22 And my stomach was like, this is OK. And I just started thinking to myself, you know what? I’m going to bring these things back in my diet. And that was my experience. I’m sure I made a lot of enemies in that vegan community.
16:34 And in my movie, I had Charles Poliquin in the movie, Iron Mind. And Charles was the anti-vegan. He was laughing at me. He was saying, I trained. Like, he’s dead now.
16:45 But he trained hundreds and hundreds of Olympic athletes. He said none of them were vegan. And he was saying all these comments. And I’m telling you, Sean, I had vegans that came up to me at the movie premiere and said, Brian, I think he’s right. And I was like, what?
16:57 I mean, these are guys that would never come to my Thanksgiving meeting or would never come to my Thanksgiving meal. They’ve always been giving me pieces of fruit. And he changed some of their minds. And they kind of went back. And there’s one of my vegan friends, Timothy Sheef, who was the vegan prince for six years.
17:11 And now he’s like, Brian, you don’t understand all these vegan influencers. They cheat. They’re unhealthy. I mean, he’s really gone completely the other way. Yeah, I talked to Charles.
17:21 Charles called me up several months before he passed away and talked to me and said, you know, you’re doing the right thing. And this has been my experience. And he said, I’ve never felt better in my life compared to the time I was eating five, six pounds of meat a day. And he’s obviously a big guy, a bodybuilder type guy. And then, of course, I’ve talked with Tim as well because he obviously had that experience where he changed his mind significantly.
17:46 But at the end of the day, you’re going to do what’s right for you. I’ve seen thousands and thousands. In fact, I started a Facebook group for ex-vegans. And we’ve got thousands of members of folks that, you know, they tried it and it didn’t work for them. And that’s fine.
18:03 I mean, I honestly think you should try it both ways. Don’t get dogmatic because here’s a problem. You’re going to get tied up in the ideology. And they lose the purpose of why they may be doing it in the first place. You do it for your health, and if it doesn’t work for your health, then that’s a problem, I think.
18:19 I’ve talked to, you know, I used to engage with those folks online more and I just realized it was a waste of time. But the one question I would ask them, I said, look, if you needed to eat an animal product to either save your life or improve your health, would you do it? And invariably, they’d say no. And I said, well, then you’re just not rational. I can’t, you know, understand that position.
18:40 But I mean, you know, that’s their ideological belief and they’re entitled to it. Well, that’s the problem with veganism is it’s wrapped up in this, you know, ideology of I’m not going to harm other sentient beings, which is noble and it sounds like a great idea, but you get wrapped up into that. So then you start making choices based on that and not your health. And Tim said the same thing. He’s like, Brian, you know, at the end of the day, my health and my performance is more important.
19:03 If I, you know, if I have to drink some milk, I’m going to do it. And he made that change. Sure. But he had to walk away from a lot of stuff. Yeah, this is a good way to transition into like a sustainability argument because people talk about what’s sustainable.
19:16 I will tell you what’s clearly not sustainable is sick people. You know, if we look at it, if we just if we want to frame it in the frame of say greenhouse gas, which is, which is sort of a, you know, hot topic right now. Cows fears he went deep into that. Yeah. And they had some really weird numbers from the World Resource Institute.
19:31 They, that’s been totally debauched. The methane numbers. Well, the cows breathing CO2 out was a greenhouse gas pollutant. That’s that’s been completely dismissed. But when we talk about, you know, impact like, like we’re in New York right now.
19:45 We’re in the United States, you know, and this is what many, I’m sure many people who watch this show live in the United States. And we try to make an impact. Well, we look at the health care industry. The US health care sector puts out 10% of our greenhouse gases. And so if we want to make that argument, then we can say, well, what is, what is animal agriculture put out in the United States?
20:03 Well, it’s 4%. You know, this is all EPA data. So you’re like, well, and cows are 2%. So you’re like, well, what if I’m not sick anymore? I’ve just taken away from contributing to 10% of the greenhouse gases and I’m contributing to the 2%.
20:15 You know, and that’s just an easy metric to do. So people, again, when we myopically focus, and we see this with medicine, with cholesterol or any other biomarker, when we myopically focus on one area, we don’t step back and say, what’s the overall impact, the big picture? You know, we see time and time, again, these unintended consequences. Well, what if people decide they’re going to give up meat? And this is the interesting thing.
20:38 So let’s say we’ve got all this environmental cries about saving the planet and doing the right thing ethically. How did industry respond? That was a big response. And we see it. It’s beyond meat.
20:49 It’s impossible. But what is it? That’s just more chemical process garbage. And I know Neil Bernard was here saying, what’s perfect? Look at the ingredients.
20:57 I mean, it’s literally garbage for us. That has been the response. So the answer is, oh, we’re going to save the planet by feeding you more crap. I mean, that makes no sense. And so I think there’s other solutions.
21:07 Which makes you unhealthy and then taxes the health care system. Taxes the health care system. The financial cost. I mean, you were a doctor for many years. Yeah.
21:15 About 20% of GDP. That’s huge. And it’s going up. I mean, we spend $3.5 trillion in growing every year in health care. It’s ridiculous.
21:23 And what we have to show for it in the US, the fattest, sickest, weakest, disabled, depressed population on the planet, that’s what we’ve got for all this. Michael Gregor’s book How Not to Die goes through 12 different ailments from diabetes to heart disease to lung cancer and says all of them are reduced by a plant based diet. How do you say that’s not true? Because it’s evidence based and there’s not a specific clinical trial? Well, I would say to do this study is it would prove what he says.
21:57 To get the actual clinical endpoints. To say that I’m going to eat a certain way for 20 years and I’m not going to get lung cancer. We can’t do it. We just cannot do those studies. I go back to my original position.
22:09 We can take people that are currently sick and make them currently healthy. If we just limit the discussion of that, then we have a very different picture. Now when he says a plant based diet, what is he including? What is he not including? Certainly he’s not including people eating Oreo cookies and drinking Coca Cola and drinking Missoula corn oil.
22:28 Those are all plant based items. You just get rid of the garbage food and I think they ideologically lump in meat in there. They’re like, we don’t like red meat because we don’t like the way that animal has to die for this. They ignore all the animals that are dying anyway. They call it unintentional kills.
22:47 I’m like, well, they put pesticides. What’s the actual definition of a pesticide? It’s intentionally designed to kill bugs and other small animals. These are not unintentional things. You go to any talk to any rancher or farmer, they literally shoot animals that are eating their food.
23:05 The question is, well, how many of them? I’m guilt free because I can ignore that. I can go to the grocery store and buy a steak and say, well, I’m pretending those animals don’t get killed. It’s just what you want to ignore and what you don’t. To his point, I don’t doubt that cutting garbage out of your diet is going to make you healthier.
23:23 Clearly, you’re going to have people that are fat overweight sick vegans and what are they eating? They’re eating the Oreos and Doritos and all that crap. When you go to a whole food plant based diet, and obviously I would be supportive of that if that’s your choice. You can eat whatever you want. If you want to be fat and sick, that’s up to you.
23:42 That’s a difference from saying, I’ve taken out just meat from the diet because I’ve seen people that are eating a very otherwise clean diet and they remove vegetables and they get better. That really shocks people and that really upsets people because we have this belief that vegetables can do no wrong, the more we can eat of them. We’ve got people that just eat 10 cups a day and you’re going to be the healthiest person in the world. I’m here to say that maybe for some people, that’s not the best option.
24:14 I think we can explore that because I’ve seen it over and over again. People with particularly gut inflammatory issues, they just pound all this fiber and they just feel awful. They remove it and they feel better. We have to understand that. Why do we have these human biases where it’s like, oh, kale is natural and it’s right off the vine versus a steak that has to be slaughtered from a cow that’s bleeding and screaming.
24:35 Then we fry it up and it’s one color and naturally we think, oh, this is healthy. People think orange juice is healthy when the science says it’s a bunch of sugar. Well, orange juice, they store it in giant vats. It’s there for a year. They put basically chemicals in from cologne basically, the same sort of chemicals to make it taste like orange juice.
24:56 It’s kind of scary when you look at how that’s done. We’ve got this sort of belief, we all have the bias. We know what’s around us. I’m walking around New York. You can get any kind of food in the world.
25:06 I walk four miles from Central Park to get here and I’m looking at all the restaurants, all the great flavors and food and all the cultures. We have this belief that we’re supposed to eat a bunch of colors and all these beautiful things from the rainbow and then you just kind of think about it and you go back into our history. We don’t have to go back 50,000 years, we can go back 200 years and we’re like, how would that even have been plausible? I would have never been able to eat Indian food and African food and South American food in the same block.
25:35 I mean, this is stuff that doesn’t even grow on the same continent. There’s people like, we’ve got this sort of concept that this balanced diet, we have to have a balanced diet. Then you look at what’s on the balanced diet and you’re like, well, that doesn’t even grow on the same continent. How would I have ever done that before? How would I have done that before modern refrigeration and modern transportation, world wide transportation?
25:55 Wasn’t even plausible. Even if we say we eat just an omnivorous diet, which clearly we are omnivorous animals. I would say there’s some argument about being a faculty of carnivore, but if you think about the plausibility, and I mentioned this before, what food can we get in every continent all throughout the year, every season, and it’s not a plant. There’s no plant that grows everywhere on the planet that you can say, I must have that, but you can get animals everywhere and we’ve eaten every animal on the plant.
26:23 We are apex predators. We’ve eaten whales. We’ve eaten shark. We’ve eaten seal. We’ve eaten lion.
26:28 We’ve eaten cow. There’s no other animal that has done what we could do as far as being a predator. People say we don’t have fangs and claws and pointy teeth. We’ve got a big brain. That was our weapon.
26:39 Our brain is our weapon. Our brain developed because we had access to rich nutrition, high calorie food. You think about it from a foraging strategy. If you and I were to magically be transported back 200,000 years, we’ve got a spear and there’s all these food options and we’ve got these slow, big moving animals that don’t run away. You’ve been on safari.
27:00 Elephants don’t run from little animals because they’re so big. They don’t really have any natural predators. Maybe they’re babies from a lion, but they’re just so big they don’t run away. When humans kind of evolved a spear technology, it was just a killing field. There’s plenty of anthropologic evidence to indicate that.
27:17 The question would be, would I eat these leaves, which one, don’t provide any calories. There’s no calories. That’s one of the reasons plant-based diet works well because you’re eating all this food and there’s no calories in there. But two, they don’t taste particularly good. If you and I were to walk around, I guess maybe Central Park, there’s much vegetation where we’re at now, but start sampling random leaves or land, we would get sick.
27:38 We wouldn’t want to eat that. There’d be no real reason to us to eat that. I think if I were to say, what’s a natural human diet? It’s probably some fruit. It’s probably a lot of meat.
27:47 There’s probably maybe some starches, maybe some nuts, remember, underground potatoes and seeds and nuts. If you don’t prep them, you don’t process them meticulously, they’re very poisonous to us. Most people don’t know that a handful of raw cashews will kill you. Is that true? Absolutely.
28:03 Raw cashews will kill you if you eat them, maybe 10 of them. If you eat like five or six raw kidney beans, they’ll kill you. They literally will die. We had to figure this out. We had to figure out how to make those foods access their nutrition and reduce their toxicity and then their soaking and sprouting.
28:21 Cooking eventually helped us out in all those things. Prior to that, those things would not have been good food choices. All the roots and stuff like that were extremely fibrous. We’ve been on the breeding, so we make them more starches, so there’s more calories. But initially, it wasn’t a particularly good source of food.
28:38 That would not have been reliable to grow this big brain. So it would have had to have been meat, is what you’re saying. Well, look at this. There’s a lot of primates on earth that are still here, and there’s been a lot of primates before, and there’s been a lot of hominid attempts at evolution, and they’re not here. Humans are here still.
28:53 Look at all these primates that have been around for at least 25 million, maybe 40 million years. They’ve been eating fruit, and they’ve been eating a few ants and bugs for millions upon millions of years, and they still got that 300 cc brain. So if that would have been enough to grow our brain, then we would have done it that way. Has that been proven, though, that the high calorie food is what grew our brain? That is IELO and Wheeler’s expensive tissue hypothesis is what a lot of people use to show that, and there’s pretty good plausible evidence for that.
29:26 There’s some studies on mammalian development, looking at weaning. So an indigenous human will use breastfeed for about two and a half years, and we don’t do that normally. I mean, most women are six months or a year or something like that, but because they need that high calorie, high nutrient dense food. So what is breast milk? It’s a lot of saturated fat.
29:46 It’s a lot of cholesterol. And by the way, there’s carbohydrate in there. There’s lactose in there. So you need this high amounts of energy to grow that brain. And then we can compare when human brain development finishes relative to when we wean.
29:59 And when we look at that, the only way to make that happen is by providing continued high calorie nutrient dense food. And so in the natural world, that’s animal fat. Now we have ways to process grain, to make it highly, highly calorically dense, which we didn’t have, you know, 50,000, 100,000 years ago. So now we can supplement. Now we can give infants fruit juice and, you know, rice cereals and all those things that we wouldn’t have had possible back then.
30:26 So that’s, you know, that’s, I think, what shows that we had a big brain because of that. Yeah. You mentioned the ethical question earlier. I just want to address that again, because the vegans say we’re not hurting the animals. And then your point is, is that when you grow vegetables, you are going to be killing these things, bugs and rodents and all these other things.
30:46 I had Timothy Sheef say, Brian, I killed one cow and I could potentially eat for 200 days. I eat a few soybeans and there might have been 20 animals that died. I mean, that was his counter argument to that. What do you say when you say, when you hear the vegans talk to you about ethical, when they show you this lot of houses and say this is cruel and not fair? Sure.
31:06 Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think they have an, they have an point. There is certainly practices within industrial agriculture, which are not good. And we should, we should, you know, and I think most people in the industry, because I talk to ranchers and farmers all the time and they say, we don’t support this. We, that’s not the way we do it. So a lot of it is skewed.
31:24 I mean, obviously there’s propaganda. There’s probably, it’s a propaganda, you know, war and they’ll show some footage from a third world country, a guy in flip flops slaughtering a cow and saying, oh, this is how it’s done commonly. And then you go look at somebody like Temple Grandin, you know, who shows you this is how cows are killed in the United States. And you know, obviously they’re dying, you know, we just can’t get past that point. I mean, they’re dying.
31:44 I think their death is probably more humane than a lot of the way humans die. I’ve seen a lot of human beings die. And it’s a slow, often painful, awful process where these cows, you know, they’re happy, healthy one day and then boom, they’re within three milliseconds, their life is over. We can argue that that’s, you know, we should let them live out their natural life expectancy. Let’s talk about the natural life expectancy of a ruminant animal.
32:05 I mean, there’s studies on white tail deer population. This is a very similar analogous animal in the United States. And, you know, if we look at the average white tail deer life expectancy, something like 60% of them die before they reach like 30 weeks of age. And they don’t die nice. They don’t die in a pleasant fashion.
32:23 They’re ripped apart by a bear or a coyote. They freeze to death. They starve to death and they have some kind of infection. So their life is not, you know, wild animals, life is not better. I know people talk about, well, if these animals weren’t created, they wouldn’t exist and therefore they would have no suffering. But really, I mean, you know, and again, we have to talk the difference between chickens and pigs and cows.
32:44 There’s a lot of nuance there and there’s ways people raise this. So it’s not just a black and white, all, you know, large-scale farming is awful and all, you know, plant-based is wonderful. It’s just far more nuanced than that. So I would challenge people to go visit, go see a farm, go actually walk with a rancher, talk with them, go visit these places that you’re criticizing because most people have none. You know, people live in New York City and I don’t know how many million, eight million people in New York or something like that. I mean, they don’t live on a farm.
33:14 They have no idea. We’re totally disconnected from the food source and they were criticizing it. And, you know, we see these ranchers saying, look, here I am every day, you know, putting a back scratcher on my cow. You know, I just posted a video on my Instagram today. The guys, you know, cows getting his back scratch and his head patted and these are guys are doing it day to day.
33:30 So it’s really a different, different, the reality doesn’t match, you know, the presentation. And so, like I said, if you’re trying to make that decision based on ethics, go get firsthand experience. Don’t rely on it, on me or somebody else to tell you, go find a dump for yourself. One of my guys went back to his hometown in Spain and was like talking about, you know, oh, the vegan, I’m vegan now. And the farmer was like been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of years on this farm.
33:57 Pigs are eating the acorns, they’re growing the thing and they raise the they slaughter it and then they wrap it up and eat. And they’re just like, what are you talking about? We’ve been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s sustainable. It’s we’re living off the land.
34:10 Sure, we do some crops and sure we do this. And they’re like, this is an invention of some, you know, urban intellectuals of brains, human brains with too much time on their hands. And that was the feedback you got. We have, you know, we’re seeing this right now. There’s this push and I know I’ve talked about the sort of the plant based meat, the soy, soy, soy protein isolate and the pea protein isolate.
34:34 And then we’re the next sort of evolution is going to be the synthetically cell manufactured meat and people are really excited about that. And then beyond that, they’re talking about we’re going to take microbes and fix nitrogen from the air and make food out of air, basically. And there’s some technologies going on there. And so the assumption is that a scientist is going to be able to tell us this is exactly what human beings need to eat. And we’re going to, we’re going to perfect it.
34:56 We’re going to, you know, we’re going to have food as software. I’ve heard that term coming out. We better download the instructions for the microbes so they can produce the perfect human diet, you know, the pellets or whatever, you know, it’s like the Jetsons or Star Trek or whatever. That’s what they want to see coming. And, you know, the reason beyond that is not in my view, it’s not to make us all healthier.
35:17 It’s basically profit driven. It’s like we can make a lot of money on these cheap, low ingredient things. And as we’re seeing over and over, but the cell based meat, you know, when we look at the actual process to do that, I mean, they have to take a, you know, cow fetus, you know, they basically take a field bovine serum. They take a big needle, stick it in the cow’s heart, you know, after the mother has been slaughtered and the fetus is still kept alive. You know, we could have to get the blood and they can’t anesthetize the fetus because it would cause problems with the serum.
35:43 They draw the serum off, they stick the cells in that and they have to continuously provide that serum for these cells to live. And not only that, where do these cells get the protein? There’s not like a protein fairy that comes in and gives these things protein. They have to get proteins from somewhere. So they get it from soybean isolate, from pea protein isolate.
35:58 So you have to make these giant monocrops to support the cell race culture. And then the question is, well, these cells don’t have an immune system, right? They can’t fight disease. So what do they do? They bathe them in antibiotics.
36:09 You know, we hear all this, oh my gosh, there’s antibiotics in meat, but they’re bathing these things in antibiotics. And so, I mean, you think about how that process is gonna go out and then we look at a cow, which is powered by the sun. I mean, it’s solar powered. You don’t need fossil fuels to make a cow turn grass into meat. What you do on these big plants.
36:30 And so they’ve looked at the carbon footprint and say it’s probably in that negative. And so it’s, but again, it’s all marketing. We see this, even the big meat companies, and obviously some people could do, Dr. Baker’s a shill for the meat companies. I’m like, I wish they would support me.
36:48 I’m doing their job for them, basically, quite honestly, but the big meat companies, Cargill, Tyson, JBS, Marfrig, they’re rebranding themselves as protein companies. And what they do is, because they also see that this potentially $100 billion market of alternate protein is where they want to go. And so we’re seeing all this heavy investment. And so we’re seeing this don’t eat meat as good for the planet by the protein. I walked down 7th Avenue and I saw Beyond This, Beyond That, Impossible This.
37:14 It’s everywhere. There’s a huge marketing campaign. And again, what are you eating? What are you selling? You’re selling highly processed, plant-based, which is a euphemism for cheap and profitable.
37:26 I mean, this is what we’re being told, and it’s not gonna make us healthier. It probably won’t make us any unhealthier because we’re already so sick. It’s like you won’t even notice, right? Because we’re already metabolically demolished. I mean, there was a study that came out and said 88% of Americans are metabolically not healthy.
37:40 So we just add more slop to the mix. Man, no one’s gonna notice. These guys are gonna make their money. We’re all gonna feel better about saving the environment. And I think that’s a big problem.
37:51 You’re a doctor, I mean, and I remember my mom brought me up in the 70s and the thing then was skim milk, right? It was skim milk, because fat’s bad. So I was on skim milk all as a kid. And we see these funny fads. Eggs are bad, now eggs are good.
38:06 The cholesterol’s that, now maybe it’s something else. I mean, as humans, and you’ve seen this from the medical side, we had this funny way of going through these fads and cycles, like you said, by maybe being super myopic about focusing on one thing and not thinking about the holistic picture, when the old school people are like, what are you doing? We’ve been doing this for 100 years. Is this just another one of those iterations, this plant-based movement?
38:30 Well, I think that, again, whenever there’s a lot of money to be made, there’s gonna be a lot of push behind that. And for the foreseeable future, I think you’re gonna see that. Just to your point about one day eggs are good, one day eggs are bad, this is all this epidemiology. We’ll run some study, and this study of 50,000 people show that there is a 10% improvement in outcomes when you don’t eat eggs, and the other one shows 10% improvement when you do eat eggs.
38:56 That’s all garbage. You should just dismiss that stuff. If it doesn’t even show at least a doubling, tripling, quadrupling, even five-fold increase, you don’t even consider that stuff. And that’s what we should be doing. It’s just complete garbage.
39:08 Why don’t you do it? You wanna see an anomaly as to just go along. Well, you wanna see a real study. Let’s do an actual study. These people were sick or diabetic, and now they’re not.
39:17 I think I tend to be more in favor of that particular strategy. But there is a continued push for us to eat whatever food companies wanna make. I mean, this is what we’re seeing continuously. But yeah, to your point, 100 years ago, we have orders of magnitude more testing, procedures, knowledge than we had 100 years ago, and yet the people are sicker than they were before. Our grandparents didn’t need to have hundreds of tests.
39:51 My grandparent and father lived to be 95. He was a boxer. He fought undercard when Max Smelling fought Joe Louis back in Chicago. And he was healthy. He died at 95.
40:03 He was eating bacon and eggs and that stuff. My father was less healthy than him. My father, fortunately, is still alive. But as we see the food system shift, and then arguably until my 40s, in my early, because I’m 53 now, in my early 40s, I would’ve been less healthy than my father because I’m just eating the same garbage. And then once we get back to eating the real foods, the foods that we’ve had available 100 years ago, whether it’s plant-based, meat-based or whatever, I think that’s as simple as that.
40:30 Yeah. How’d you get into this? So I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I’ve been competitive. Obviously a surgeon, kind of an interesting background.
40:42 I was probably mid-40s, probably 42, 43. Just gone through a divorce, feeling crappy. I was 280, 290 pounds, working hard as a physician. And I was just kind of like, I just don’t feel so good. And I was starting to develop sleep apnea and hypertension and metabolic syndrome.
41:01 And I was training. I mean, I was training my ass off. I mean, I was running sprints, lifting weights. I just won a world championship in high-limb games, running around in kelp throwing cavers. On those big logs.
41:11 Right, yeah. So I was a big strong athletic guy training hard, but I was like, I gotta change my diet. And so I did almost a plant-based diet. I went lots of vegetables, big salads, a little bit of protein, really lean protein, chicken breast, fish. And I lost weight.
41:27 I mean, I did. And I cut my calories and I exercised more. And I went from like 285 to 230 in about three months. I’m gonna drop that off. I was just like super conscious about that.
41:41 The nurses hated me because they were like, you’re a cranky son of a bitch now. We like the fat Dr. Baker better because I mean, really I was hungry all the time. I was constantly fixated on food. You know, this is not sustainable for me.
41:54 And then I started adding some more animal fat in, paleo diet. Went in to start reading some of the low-carb literature books, started studying about this to the low-carb diet ketogenic diet. And then a little over three years ago, I started reading what these people do, it’s all meat diet. And I just kind of had an open up mind. I said, well, I’m gonna try it anyway just for athletic performance.
42:13 Cause I was still competing. I was in this rowing stuff. Now this concept too, CrossFit, you know, Olympic rowing type stuff. And I said, well, I’ll try that out. And I got reasonably good on that.
42:23 And a ketogenic diet, I’d set an American record. Then I wanted to- It’s just counterintuitive cause most people think you need carbs to do a race like that. Right. Yeah, I mean, depending on the distance. And I went on and started on an all meat diet.
42:35 And not only did I get stronger, but I got faster. I took several seconds off my already American record and set a world record, over 50. And I think the difference between a ketogenic diet and a meat-based diet is just a little more protein. And the protein, I think, it allows you to better restore glycogen so you can do these glycolytic type activities without the carbohydrates. And I think the carbohydrate, and again, this is another misconception.
43:02 I don’t think carbohydrates necessarily are bad at all. Glucose is essential. We need glucose. We definitely make it. If we don’t give ourselves it, we have ways to do that.
43:10 Call it gluconeogenesis through lactic acid rescheduling, recycling rather through conversion amino acids to glucose and then also some of the fats to glycerol. So we value glucose. It’s very important. And we’re doing these high intensity exercises. Our liver’s kicking out glucose if we don’t have it.
43:28 And so that is something we can do. The problem with carbohydrates, for some people, some people don’t tolerate them as well as others. Some people find that the food, the carbohydrate is wrapped in, not the carbohydrate itself, but some of the other, you can call them plant toxins or whatever. And I’m not out here saying that broccoli is toxic to people, but I’m just saying there are compounds that some people tolerate better than others. And if we can look into what some of the thought is on why we’re seeing people have success in a carnivore diet, a lot of it has to do with gut pathology or gut permeability issues.
44:06 We see very profound glucose stability. That’s one nice thing about gluconeogenesis. And Joe Rogan said, I was just calm. I’m just calm. I’m just stable.
44:15 Anxiety was down and he said he felt better, which I hadn’t heard that before. I hear it all the time. I literally hear it every single day. And I think what’s happening, there’s a couple of things happening there. So when our glucose levels are very stable, our mood is very stable.
44:30 And what we see is people are generally just kind of chilled out and happy. And this is just kind of the resting state. You still have to react to the stresses in the environment. You still get mad, you still get sad. But I mean, generally it’s pretty calm.
44:42 And I think that’s due to glucose stability. But the other thing we see is that our gut permeability is improving. There’s some researchers out of Hungary doing some great work on this and they’re looking at gut permeability and they can literally see when you eat certain foods, your gut permeability increases to a pathologic state. And when you eat basically a meat-based diet, you don’t see much at all. And I think there’s some interesting stuff I can talk about on that.
45:02 But when the gut permeability is increased, we also see things like, basically all of our membrane permeability increases, including our blood-brain barrier. So we have leaky gut, leaky brain. We have inflammatory stuff that’s coming in. The brain gets inflamed. And so when it comes to brain physiology, now you’ve stabilized your glucose.
45:21 You’ve cut back on some of these potentially irritating compounds. You’ve also provided good nutrition. We know for brain health, creatine is helpful, carnitine’s helpful, carnitine’s helpful, taurine’s helpful, zinc, iron, all these things that are rich in meat are also helpful for brain health. And so we’re seeing a number of mechanisms by that may work. Now, I was lecturing in Malaysia a couple months back and we had another lecture there from Cambridge.
45:46 He was talking about testing food sensitivities to the immune system and some of the gut markers that they’re using. He’s been doing it for 20 years. He does a quarter of a million people a year. And he said the only food that almost has no reactivity whatsoever is basically red meat. And so everything else, dairy, fish, shellfish, eggs, you know, and lots of plant compounds causes problems for some people.
46:10 But red meat seems to be uniquely very inert from a biologic sense. So I think that’s, again, I think that’s consistent with our evolutionary background. I mean, this was, in my view that was our food source. Can you imagine trying to kill a bird with a spear or killing a big elephant? I mean, what would you choose?
46:26 If you’re trying to get calories, you know, it just makes sense. And so how much of the carnivore diet is eating meat with all of these great compounds and how much is it not eating all those other things? I mean, it’s impossible to say. I think certainly both of those things contribute. You know, if we go back, I would say that not eating the other things is a huge component.
46:46 Because we can go back and look at population health 100 years ago. You know, if we can exclude infection and some of the other things people are exposed to, they’re generally healthier people, you know, compared to what we have today. I mean, obesity, a morbid obesity, 100 years ago did not exist. I mean, I showed a picture of the fattest family in the world, you know, 100 years ago. And you know, the dad’s, you know, 400 pounds, the mom’s 300, you know, the kids are 250.
47:11 That’s the average, you don’t have to go far to find that out now, right? So that didn’t exist before. And people weren’t only eating exclusively meat-based diets back then. So, I mean, my position has never been, you’ll never hear me say this, that everybody needs to do this, or it’s the only solution. But what I’m saying is, it is a valid and viable solution for many people.
47:30 And there’s people, I mean, I see it all the time. They’ve been kicked around from doctor to doctor to doctor to specialist to specialist. And you know, the end result is, ah, we don’t know, it’s genetics, bad luck. You’re taking another pill, we’ll shuffle your pills around. And they never get better and they get frustrated and they spend decades.
47:47 And I’m seeing these people, like they go on a meat-based diet and they’re like, holy cow. I mean, I came off all my meds, all my medical issues, well, it doesn’t happen for everybody. But I’m seeing it enough to where we should take this seriously and say, maybe there’s something there. Yeah, sure, Dr. Baker, it’s all anecdote, it doesn’t count.
48:03 But it drives hypothesis, just like an epidemiologic study. You can say, well, that’s a hypothesis. You know, we can say, Dr. Michael Greger can say, well, this study on 50,000 people, the Adventist Health Study shows this, and that’s a hypothesis. It doesn’t show any causality.
48:17 It’s no more valid than me saying, I’ve got 10,000 people that got better eating a meat-based diet. That’s still a hypothesis. Now, fortunately, as I mentioned before, what we started recording, we’ve got some studies coming up. David Ludwig out of Harvard is gonna be doing a big carver study, so we’ll get this into research, so maybe more. And I got a lot of physicians that follow me now, and they’re implementing it in their patients.
48:37 And it may be select patients, it may be people with autoimmune issues, or Crohn’s disease, or ulcerative colitis, but they’re having a good success. And quickly with the success sometimes. Many times, many times. They’re seeing it sometimes within days, typically weeks or months. But I mean, it’s happening.
48:51 And you’re saying, pay attention to that research when you can see someone do a quick turnaround as opposed to something that’s based on an epidemiological study which is over time based on polling of the people and then the symptoms they’re having without all of those other random factors in there that can’t be tracked. Right, I mean, again, it’s the same thing. Fix people that are sick today and make them healthy today. Don’t worry about if they’re gonna live 100 years.
49:17 I mean, because we never are gonna know that answer. So why waste time with that? Just take the sick people and make them not sick. And that’s as simple as that. And the people want that too.
49:26 If I go to the doctor and I’m like, my knee hurts, my back hurts, I’m depressed. I don’t want, here’s an answer that’s gonna make you live to 92. I wanna not be in pain right now. If we just listen to our patients, and this is a thing we’ve gotten away, and this is a general problem with the healthcare system in general. I mean, as a physician, I mean, I was literally having to see three patients in 15 minutes.
49:48 I mean, you can’t do good healthcare in that, but this is what the system wants. This is what the system demands now. The physicians are getting burned out. I mean, you’re like a hamster on a wheel and you’re coding, you’re doing billing, you’re doing the electronic medical records. You’re not even looking at your patient.
50:01 You’re typing. Your patient’s in the corner. And it’s like, well, how can I get this out of my exam room the quickest, because I got 30 other guys who are pissed off waiting to see. And we’ve got an administrator saying, hey, you need throughput, you need throughput. You need to justify your salary by seeing X amount of patients.
50:19 The medical care system, if we look at the number of physicians over the last 20, 30 years, it’s relatively flat, but the administrators have gone up hundreds of percent, 700% or something like that. And so we’ve gone from what used to be the art of medicine to now just the disease management industry. All we’re doing is managing disease. And I think it’s actually a shame. Like I said, this meter X thing I’ve done, I’m calling that a health creation system.
50:45 We’ve got a dichotomy there. People are gonna stay in the disease management model and all they’re gonna do is get their pills shuffled around and they’re never gonna get really better. Or maybe the market will dictate they’re gonna go somewhere else and they’re gonna actually not have to deal with pills and being miserable. What do you make of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s success on his meat diet?
51:06 Well, I think his big issue is anxiety and obviously loss of weight. I mean, the weight loss you can do on any diet, right? I mean, that happens all the time. And I think he did. He did auto-immune though as well.
51:15 I think he did, yeah. He was with his eyes and then sleeping. Yeah, yeah. So I know he’s had- He did glums I think too. I mean, he had a bunch of things.
51:23 Yeah, he had a number of things. I’ve been, again, the mental health thing I see day in and day out. I’ve seen some really bizarre things that I would have never thought would have gotten better with diet. And I’m gonna step away from Jordan Peterson. I had another physician who was an ER physician, I think in the Netherlands, maybe she’s in Denmark.
51:43 But she had a condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. This is genetic college and disease. And what happens in her situation, her joints would dislocate like every day. She would wake up every morning with three or four joints completely out of place. She’d have to start her day putting her ankle back in place, putting her shoulder back in place.
52:01 This is how she started every single day for a decade. And then she’d go to work as an ER physician. And some days her joint would pop out of place. She’d have to put it in the middle of her work day. She was gaining weight.
52:13 She was in pain. She was developing arthritis. She went on this crazy carnivore diet within a month. No more joint dislocations. Had none up to a year after I talked to her.
52:24 She started lifting weights. She’s in there doing squats, lost all the weight. I mean, this is a genetic disorder. And I’m like, this is pretty bizarre. And maybe some of these genetic disorders are actually displayed in the right environmental environment.
52:38 And maybe the diet causes them to show them more readily. But you’re a doctor and that surprised you. Absolutely. If you were to say, hey, it helps with diabetes, it helps with blood pressure, gut health, I’d say that makes sense. But this genetic stuff was really, really mind-blowing.
52:55 Okay, so there’s things that we don’t even know about this stuff. And any final comments on Jordan Peterson? Or his daughter, I know. I think she started it first because she was suffering from it. Yeah, I think Mikaela, I was on Rogan’s show and I think Mikaela said she saw me on there and some other folks.
53:11 And then she started and she got good relief. And then she talked her dad into doing that. And they both generally had really good results. I know Jordan had an episode recently where he’s had some issues where he’s in hospital, but he’s obviously not an unintelligent person. And I would argue that I’m not either.
53:30 I mean, I’ve put a lot of thought into this. I’m not doing this willy-nilly. There’s something I think unique there. I mean, if we just look at the diet in particular, and I know this is a very simplistic way to look at this, but if we go back even 800 million years ago, the very first animals that ever evolved, as animals started to evolve, we started out with these single cellular organs and they became multicellular. And what happened was a big multicellular organisms would eat the single cell organisms.
53:56 And it was basically a carnivory, basically. The like was eating like to get the fuel and the nutrition that were made out of. We saw that as a main evolutionary strategy for almost all animals that ever evolved. The herbivores came in later. It was a very specialized adaptation that occurred.
54:12 So about 80 to 90% of all animals that have ever been on the planet have been carnivorous. And it’s just easier. It’s just an easier way to assimilate nutrition. You think about it and I’ve operated on thousands of people and I’ve cut people open. You look at them, we’re made out of red meat.
54:26 You know, you cut humans. I mean, this is, I know there’s a little kind of growth here, but we’re made out of red meat. And when we’re rebuilding our tissues, you know, when we’re rebuilding animal cells, it’s more efficient to do this. And we are highly adept than other vegans. I think we’re herbivores.
54:40 I think that’s just nonsense. I mean, we are highly adapted, you know, to take on animal nutrition. I mean, we have all these gut transporters. It’s extremely well absorbed by our gastrointestinal tract. It’s in the ratios that we need.
54:55 There are compounds that are very helpful to human beings. And it’s a very efficient source of fuel for us. And so I think when you do that, you know, it’s just an easier way to get nutrition and it just makes sense. And you know, some of the plants, well, clearly there are people eating plant-based diets are mostly plant-based. In fact, most humans eat a mostly plant-based diet.
55:14 I mean, that’s just the way it is. If we go back 10,000 years ago, prior to the dawn of agriculture, and you may or may not know this, but humans, you know, 100,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, were much taller. They were much bigger. They had bigger brains. Our brain size went down.
55:29 And our brain shrunk by about 200 CCs. We went from chromium, which is about a 1500 CC to what we are today, which is about a 1300 CC brain. The reason we lost brain size, many people will postulate as just our nutritional quality went down when we adopted a grain-based diet because it’s just less efficient nutrition. And we also know that, you know, our access to that food was dependent upon, you know, there would be crop failures and we would go through a period of time where we’re starving.
55:55 You don’t grow a big brain when you’re starving all the time. This is another misconception. People think that, well, they look at modern hunter-gatherers and they try to conflate that with what was going on 100,000 years ago when we had mastodons and, you know, elephants and mammoths and all these other giant megafall animals everywhere. And we were very effective at killing them. I mean, that’s not a, it’s a misconception that humans couldn’t do that.
56:20 Humans were very deadly efficient at doing this. This goes back even into Homo erectus. And so we were so efficient. We had, it was basically a feast pretty much all the time because you kill a mammoth. You’ve got two, three months of meat.
56:31 It’s not hard to go look in the fridge and say, hey, Grok, we’re running out of meat. Go kill another mammoth. So we’re not starving. I don’t think humans were faminating much until crops. Then we started to run into famines.
56:43 And proven we were taller as well back then. Yeah, you can look at the Graffiti and there’s a population in central Europe. Their average height was estimated to be as much as six foot two average. To contrast the tallest population in the world right now are kind of the Dutch, you know, central European, some of the Nilotic Africans whose average height is about six foot. This is now, this is 30,000 years ago.
57:04 These guys were six foot two. So that means they had guys walking around. They were six nine, six 11, big strong people, bigger muscle attachments, you know, giant people literally with bigger brains. And so this, and we devolved from that. I can sense the vegans in the comment section right now, Sean.
57:19 What does your carnivore diet look like? Maybe when you first started and maybe now. So mine, it’s kind of, I’ve gone through a recent transition here, but I started out and this is what I tell most people to start, just eat what you enjoy. You know, make it, make it, make it a variety because there’s literally thousands and thousands of ways you can prepare meat and different types of meat that are available, you know, use spices if you need them. You know, dairy is kind of a plus minus.
57:45 Some people do better without it. You know, some people use it to transition. I did that and then for most of my time, I really, you tend to really gravitate towards red meat and particularly a little bit of fat because you, you know, you don’t have carbs. You need some energy from somewhere. So a lot of people like to eat a lot of ribeyes, briskets, things that are convenient, that are common.
58:04 So I do that mostly. I still include some eggs from time to time. I include a little bit of fish, you know, some dairy occasionally. I’ve had a few times where I’ve had food that wasn’t meat-based. Oh my gosh, hopefully no one’s gonna hate me, but my kid had a birthday, had a piece of birthday cake.
58:19 You know, I’m like, you know, I’m not, I’m not doing it for ideological reasons. I’m not, I’m not as jealous about this. And so I get- Do you feel different when you have that? It was kind of fun. I had one, one daughter had a birthday and one, my son had a birthday.
58:30 I had my son’s birthday cake and I felt awful. My daughter had a piece of cheesecake and I felt fine. So I mean, it’s, you know, like I said, I’m never gonna tell people I’m only gonna eat meat the rest of my life. I just, I don’t know. I mean, and I certainly am not gonna take off the table and I’m gonna have a piece of fruit here and there.
58:46 I mean, it just doesn’t, you know, there are people that need to do that. I mean, honestly, I’ve seen that. And they don’t have either the physiologic reserve to eat other foods. And there are people that don’t have the discipline to do that, you know, because a lot of this is, you know, I believe there’s people that have problems with food addictions. I mean, they clearly, just like drug addiction and alcohol addiction.
59:09 They say a lot of vegans have issues with food. Well, I mean, they’re just, you know. Well, because, you know, they have, you know, weird relationships where now restricting it kind of gives you something to process in your head. Right, sure, sure. And maybe they say that about carnivore diet.
59:21 Yeah, and there are people, I mean, clearly there are people that become zealous and, you know, ideologues and dogmatic. And I think that’s not helpful. I think this is what I’m dogmatic about. I’m dogmatic about finding something that’s gonna make you healthy, you know. And you can make a decision, you know.
59:35 I can say, I’m gonna have, I’m gonna go down, I can walk down to that Italian restaurant and go have a piece of pizza. And I don’t care. I mean, will it help my health? Maybe not. Maybe, will it be any negative effect?
59:46 Maybe not at all. So I could do that and say, what’s in that effect? And if I continue to do that over and over again, I get fat and tired and my joints hurt. I mean, the nice thing about being old, you know, and going through the years beat up is, you know, you’ve got some injuries and you’ve got some chronic, you know, things that bother you. And you know, pretty quickly your body will tell you, hey, that’s the wrong thing.
1:00:06 So like, I found, like I recently, I was like, I’m gonna try to put some fruit back in the diet. And I ate a bunch of raspberries. And I just had a little more knee pain than I normally have. And I normally don’t have any. I was just like, that’s curious.
1:00:19 You know, curious enough to say that I probably don’t need to eat much of that. And it’s just something that kind of keeps me in check. And yeah, like I said, there may be benefits. People are talking about from athletic performance, maybe you should carb load and see what happens. And I’ve done those experiments.
1:00:33 And I know what happens. My guts don’t feel very good. My performance is maybe marginally better. And I have joint pain. And I’m like, for an athlete over the long haul, you know, and I want to produce six months from now, having days where, you know, my joints hurt and I don’t feel like training is not conducive to good performance.
1:00:50 And I’ve got, interestingly, I’ve got a lot of high level athletes now that are trying this diet. And they talk to me about how to implement it. We talk about, should you use carbohydrates? You know, one of the ways you can do that. And we’re getting some pretty good results.
1:01:03 Interestingly, I think we’ll find more and more people are, you know, just like Rogan was saying, you know, look, I feel great. You know, nothing hurts. And that’s a big benefit when you’re an athlete. You know, even 30 year olds, I mean, they’re not that old, but a lot of them have gone through the ringer and they can prolong their career, maybe periods of current every, I know my buddy, Zach Bitter, who’s my podcast host. And he’s got the world record in the 100 miles in both trail and track.
1:01:28 And he does, whenever he’s recovering from his races, he always goes carnivore now. And he says, I have no inflammation anymore. I mean, it’s just like before he couldn’t walk for two or three days after 100 mile run. Now it’s like, I’m doing squats the next day. Wow, what about a UFC fighter with that serious need of anaerobic cardio and all that?
1:01:44 Could they get by on a red meat only diet? I think some of them can. I mean, I think it depends on how long you adapt. In fact, I’ve got boxers in UFC guys that are actually I’m working with some of these guys. I think, certainly, many of them could do it and many of them, some of them are doing it.
1:02:03 Some of them find that just adding a little bit of carbohydrates for particular workouts seems to help as well. And I think, whatever works for them. Okay. And, but the strict carnivore diet is red meat only. Is that when you tell people like?
1:02:16 Well, if we’ve got somebody that’s got like an auto, like a serious medical problem and we want to try to figure it out. I use this analogy a lot. Let’s say we’re playing the game of Clue. You remember Clue where you have Colonel Mustard and the library with the candlestick. And we’ve got 500 Clue characters and we’re trying to figure out who did it.
1:02:32 And you’re like, it’s going to take us forever, right? Cause we got to do all the machinations of going through the rounds. But if you eliminate everything, you just make, hey, we’re going to eat one food, basically. And then we’re going to see how you feel. This is your baseline, maybe.
1:02:45 Then add stuff back in. And that’s how I deal with like people with autoimmune diseases, things where it’s going to take a long time to solve. And it seems to be, it just seems to be a baseline diet. You think about what do we start out eating? You know, you and I, we started out eating breast milk, which is, you know, it’s an animal product, right?
1:03:01 You know, it’s saturated fat, cholesterol. Again, we talked about a little bit of lactose in there, but we, you know, we start out on that diet and then we add things in there. And some of us tolerate it, some of us don’t. Some things accumulate over years, why people are having more issues than they used to. Why is leaky gut?
1:03:16 Why is irritable bowel syndrome becoming more prevalent toward now 20% of Americans and 40% of people in Mexico have this? I think it’s just this exposure to this chemical, food-like stuff for being fed and we’re becoming more sensitive to things and otherwise we might’ve had defenses against them. One of the other things I see is people go on a carnivore diet and I’ve had people that were lactose intolerant, now they can tolerate lactose. I’ve seen people that were like anaphylactically allergic to shellfish and now they can tolerate shellfish.
1:03:44 So I think there’s something that goes on with our immune system, with our gut defenses. Most of our immune system is in our gut. We’ve got all these immune things that are housed there. So I think there’s, you know, it’s just a very efficient way and I know people talk it as a last resort. You know, this should be the last resort.
1:04:01 I’m like, why? Why not just do the easy thing first? You know, it’s so simple and it’s not hard to figure out. It’s such an easy, you know, they’ve got all these complicated dietary schemes and I tell people, just go eat a bunch of meat and you know, you eat until you’re full and you stop eating when you’re, you know, you start eating when you’re hungry again. It’s like every animal on the planet does not need a calculator, an app, you know, fitness tracker to tell them how to eat and live.
1:04:26 And it’s gone eat and you should be, humans should have the same, a dietary strategy that works that way. And I’m finding with this diet, it works pretty well that way because people are just, they don’t think about it and they like that. It’s like, I don’t need to constantly worry and have anxiety about it. It’s like, how much, you know, how hungry I am. I walked into the diner last night and I was like, take a steak, a dozen eggs and a bunch of bacon.
1:04:48 You know, it was just, it was a simple. What did they say? They were just laughing. You know, the guys go back, you can hear the cooks, you know, hey, I got this crazy order, you know, but I just, you know, it’s fine. Is it almost impossible to overeat when you’re just on a carnival diet?
1:05:02 It’s hard. It’s not impossible because I have seen people put on weight and body fat. And I think that has to, I would say what it would be really impossible to do is to take a relatively healthy young human being and make them obese feeding meat. I think that’s probably close to impossible. But I think we have a lot of people whose appetite signaling mechanisms are so messed up.
1:05:23 They just don’t know how to stop eating. You know, I think that happens. I think in quite honestly, I’ve not seen anybody gain significant weight on that. The majority of the people tend to lose, particularly males more than females for whatever reason. I think there’s hormonal reasons for that.
1:05:36 But males, they love it because they’re like, just tell me to eat a bunch of steak and I lose 50 pounds. I leave my big beer belly and I become lean. I mean, that’s pretty easy. But you know, I think I don’t dismiss cowards. I know there’s people that say the cowards don’t matter.
1:05:50 I think, you know, clearly they do. But I think what also matters is your appetite and how it’s regulated and what compels you to eat. Because this is the one thing, I do a lot of consultations with people and I say, look, the first issue we have to do is we change the relationship with food. And if you can’t stop, they ask me how much to eat. I say, eat enough meat so you don’t end up eating cupcakes.
1:06:13 And I mean, that makes sense to people, right? Just eat enough until you break this compulsion, you know, these sort of addictive behaviors. And then the other things you might be interested in is that many, many people that do this diet that are alcoholic, drug addicts, smokers, you know, prescription pain addicts end up saying they don’t need it anymore, which I think is profoundly interesting. Again, it may have to do with, you know, glucose stabilization, some of these other things.
1:06:40 But I think that’s particularly, particularly powerful. Really interesting. I know, you know, the bulletproof, you know, executive used to do the butter and the coffee and things like that, but reported that, you know, people weren’t craving sugars as much. And a lot of that would happen when they would go on a high fat diet. So, downsides that you’ve seen when people go meat only, I know Rogan complained of some- Yeah, sure.
1:07:04 So, that’s one of the extra intestinal issues. Is that common, and have you had people that go on it and can’t handle it, or they have other side effects? Absolutely, absolutely. So, certainly we see, the big things we talk, we see often is a lot of people have a difficult time eating enough so they get really fatigued, they run out of energy, they just don’t feel, they feel very flat. And so, that’s an issue.
1:07:25 And the answer is you just try to make yourself eat enough because we’re going from this, you know, more glucose-based metabolism and more rapidly I think glucose to sort of a slower system with the fat and it takes a lot of transition. So, some people just don’t, can’t get through the transition period. You know, they’ll have the same thing they do with going on a ketogenic diet. So, we’ll have headaches, we’ll be a fluid electrolyte, shifts that go on. We’ll see people, to the point, you know, some people will, you know, get dehydrated, they may feel their pulse beating more, some people even have irregularities which is something that can be serious, I need to get that looked at.
1:07:59 But that’s pretty, pretty mint, pretty uncommon. The gastrointestinal stuff, certainly, many people will say, well, I’m just going to the bathroom as much. And so, they’re worried, they’re constipated. What’s actually happening in that situation is because meat is just so well absorbed, there’s really nothing going into your colon, you know. And so, when you don’t have that fiber in there, you just have less bowel movements.
1:08:17 And, you know, there’s really no prize at the end of life for having the most bowel movements. I mean, there’s, the people that think you need to have three a day or two a day or one a day, it’s, there’s no science behind that that backs up that as being helpful in any way whatsoever. So, people just have less bowel movements. It’s nice, my dogs are on a carnivore diet, and they, I don’t have as much stuff to clean up, which is kind of a nice thing for the dogs, and they’re happy, healthy dogs.
1:08:36 But- And your dogs are on the carnivore diet? Oh, yeah. Just cause? Well, because dogs are, I mean, they’re bred down wolves. I mean, you think about it.
1:08:43 This is what a dog is. It’s just an evolved wolf that’s been, you know, kind of dumbed down and made domestic for us. But their diet journeys didn’t change. A wolf doesn’t need, you know, grain or pea protein dog food. I mean, they go out and kill an animal and eat it.
1:08:56 Some people say, well, they’ll eat the stomach contents. Yeah, maybe. And then, but so the dogs- So you put them on that to test it, or just cause you think it’s better for them? No, I think it’s, I’ve talked to Vets degree. I mean, that’s their natural diet.
1:09:08 And this is a really easy test. If you’re questioning it and you’ve got a dog that’s scratching his coats, you know, coat doesn’t look shiny and he’s acting old and he’s arthritic and he’s, you know, he has bad gas. And, you know, you put him on a carnivore diet and you watch what happens to that dog within three months. It’s amazing. I mean, literally you see dogs with gray faces turned back to black and all this stuff is really, really impressive.
1:09:30 But, you know, back to the human stuff, you know, the GI stuff, the diarrhea that Joe had, about 20% of the time, 20, 25% of the time. That’s really, part has to do with just, you know, now we have a fluid, a bolus of fluid coming out in a small intestine instead of a fibrous thing. So the colon has to get used to that. There’s some bile that it may have to get used to reabsorbing. You know, it’s usually a couple of week transition for those people.
1:09:53 Some people find that too much fat can be a problem. They’re not used to handling fats and they get fat malabsorption and they’ll have what’s called steatoria, which is fat in their fecal material. But those things happen. Some people get a rash, you know, and that may be due to ketones. There’s a phenomenon called oxalate dumping and so there’s these compounds that are found in a lot of foods called oxalates, which can kind of crystallize in different areas in the body and then when we no longer are taking them in, they go back into solute and then they recrystallize somewhere else and they kind of move around a little bit and that can happen.
1:10:26 They come out in the skin, they rest. Some people have joint pain initially. Some people have gout, will have a gout flare up because of uric acid levels go up. Those tend to be transitory. You know, those things tend to go away.
1:10:36 I think gout is largely an issue with metabolic disease in general. So as we see the metabolic syndrome or the metabolic dysregulation improve over time and it can take, you know, months for that to occur, we see all these kind of chronic things grow away. But in the acute phase, sometimes it can get worse. Okay, so just be aware of that if you’re trying this. Now, if I wanna go on the carnivore diet, I’m gonna go in, why are you laughing to me?
1:10:59 See if you’re gonna do it. Yeah, I’m thinking about it. You know, I eat a decent amount of red meat these days. I mean, I found that it depends. Also, I found that when I combine it with certain things, I feel better and when I combine it with the typical, let’s go out and get a big steak with the carbs and all that, I feel horrible the next day.
1:11:17 Yeah, this is an unrelated topic but I think it’s interesting, the saturated fat. One of the misconceptions about red meat is it’s all saturated fat. In fact, the main fat in beef is actually monounsaturated fat, which most people don’t know. Saturated fat’s a little bit less like monounsaturated, it’s like 48% and saturated is like 47, 6% and then polyunsaturated is a tiny amount. But saturated fat is interesting, like when you drink wine or alcohol, it actually protects the liver from ethanol induced alcohol damage to the liver.
1:11:49 So it’s kind of interesting that, you know, if you have a glass of wine, have a steak with that to kind of mitigate that damage potentially, which I’m not advocating everybody got drinking but you know, it’s one of those benefits for that, yeah. And so if I went on carnivore, you would start me off in saying, look, have some steaks, have some red meat but also you’re saying, you know, it’s okay to have some cheese and some ham and other things like that. So here’s how, if I were to tell you, like say, Brian, I’m gonna say, say, I’m gonna be brave and do a 60 day challenge.
1:12:18 What is the right amount of time to give this a try? I think somewhere between 60 and 90 days is fair. I mean, a shorter would not be fair. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people take about two months to adapt. Most people buy a month, that’s why the 30 day things are easier for people to put in their mind, but really about 90 days is a real fair assessment.
1:12:34 What I would say for you or anybody else who wanted to do it, you know, there’s some things you can do to make the transition easier. So go from fiber, try to slowly taper that down to where you get to zero because then you’ll have less potential for GI issues, you know, the carbs, same thing, kind of taper down the carbs. So the fiber’s all the fruits and vegetables. Yeah, all the stuff that has that in there. And then when you get on the diet, you know, you just, you know, first of all, eat enough.
1:12:57 That’s the biggest thing. And so it might, and many people fall into this eating pattern about twice a day. That’s what I do typically what most people end up doing is because your appetite becomes very well regulated. And so you eat enough, you know, it may be steak, it may be a breakfast might look like a 12 out steak and, you know, three or four eggs or something like that potential. Because eggs are part of common.
1:13:16 Eggs can be. You know, some people will have a reaction to eggs, most people do pretty well, pretty good with that. Did you eat all 12 eggs and the bacon and the steak? Yeah, of course. I wouldn’t order it.
1:13:25 You’re not a small guy, are you? Yeah, no, you see, I’m not like 240 right now. But yeah, that’s, and I had like 28 ounce hamburger patties earlier in the day. So I ate about. 20 eight ounce hamburger patties?
1:13:37 No, not eight, eighth of an ounce, sorry. So it was like two and a half pounds. Okay, and they just cook them up just patty, patty, patty, patty, patty. And you eat them straight. Yeah, I had a little bit of cheese on those particular ones.
1:13:48 I mean, yesterday was kind of a weird day because I was traveling, and it’s not what I would normally do, but I do, and it kind of pisses people off when I go grab a fast food burger, they get, oh, you’re killing the planet, and so on and so forth. When you order a burger, you’re killing the planet. Well, you know, that’s sort of the belief there that some people think that we gotta, our beef has to be perfectly risen. This is another, I think, as we look for a solution for climate issues, and it’s not that we should ignore that, I think we should continue to improve agriculture.
1:14:17 There are ranchers now that are actually putting carbon back in the soil. I mean, this is actually demonstrated, and the interesting thing is, not only are they doing that, and I just talked to a rancher out of Idaho, his name’s Glenn Ozinga at Alderspring Ranch. He actually has cattle up in the mountains of Idaho, and he feeds them this really, he has this diverse plant diversity. I mean, it’s like, it’s not just grass, it’s all this stuff, and they eat wildflowers, and he goes by and he samples them and sees what, he tastes the food that they’re eating, it’s kind of funny.
1:14:45 He’s like a plant botanist or something like that, and his wife does the same thing, and they’re finding that these cows preferentially choose this wide variety of food they like to eat, and the interesting thing is they get big on this, because they choose a higher energy food, kind of like what they do in a feed lot, but they’re doing it naturally in the food they care to select, and they’re putting on just as much weight as they do in a feed lot. Not only that, he has a past, an area of land where he used to can only run 200 head of cattle, he now can hold 500 in the same area. So that means we potentially have the capacity to increase our cattle herd, provide more beef, put carbon back in the soil, and feed people and make them potentially healthy, and I know this is not what people wanna hear, and they say it’s not scalable, but the study that showed it wasn’t scalable was assuming standard grass ranging production, which is not what these guys are doing, so these guys are showing again, there is another option for it, so this is a viable potential solution.
1:15:41 What do you say about the climate change? I mean, obviously, the methane and the conspiracy are big on that. Well, I mean, first of all, when we look at greenhouse gases, and I know there are people that say, there’s no such thing as climate change, and not matters how to do it, I’m not one of those people, I don’t know, I’m not a climate scientist, but what I do know, and I’ve looked into this pretty extensively, so when we look at methane in the atmosphere, there’s a couple ways to measure it, there’s something called top-down, so we can say, what’s actually in the atmosphere?
1:16:05 Where did that methane come from? And we can tell that, because we can look at isotope signatures, we can say methane from fossil fuels has this isotope signature, methane from cows, and this isotope signature from rice paddies, from the ocean, from natural gas fracking and stuff like that, they can tell where it comes from, and when they look at that stuff, there’s no real increase coming from cattle. In fact, the world cattle population, most people don’t know that, we’ve lost 100 million cattle over what we had like 30 years ago.
1:16:33 Our cattle size has gone down, yet methane in the atmosphere has gone up, so it’s clearly not coming from the cattle, but what we do is these bottom-up assessments, and we say, this cattle is gonna make this much methane, and we know how many cattle there are, there’s 1.4 billion cattle, so we just do this number. What we don’t know is where all the other methane’s coming from, we have no idea. So we’re only measuring what we think we can measure, and then we’re saying, the cows contribute to this percentage, when in fact, we don’t really know where it’s all coming from.
1:16:58 But when we do the top-down assessments, we know it’s not coming from the cattle. It’s not that we shouldn’t better manage these things, I mean, we clearly, it’s something we can do, but it’s nowhere near the impact. Any climate scientists, you talk to guys like Michael Mann, or the hockey stick guy, says it’s not cattle, it’s not cows, that’s not the issue, it’s fossil fuels, if anything. So we have to say, where do we really need to put our resources? And there’s some people in the conspiracy who say, well, the fossil fuel company’s trying to make the cows escape goat.
1:17:26 Of course, animal activists, of course, are gonna say that. And then, these protein companies are gonna kind of buy into that, because now we’ve got this other market. And guess what? It’s a lot cheaper for us to make beyond meat burger than it is for us to raise cattle. It’s just more profitable.
1:17:43 So it’s better for them as well. And just back to my diet, so I’m gonna go down, tape it down on the carbs, tape it down on the fiber, and then beef, eggs. Whatever you like. I mean, this is what I would do. I would start out, whatever you feel like, just animal products, you can use some spices.
1:17:58 If you need spices to make it fun, I mean, I would never tell anybody, go just eat a bowl of ground beef and do that every day for the rest of your life. That would be miserable. And you don’t approach it as, I’m gonna do it the rest of my life. You’re gonna do it, I’m gonna do it for 90 days. I don’t know if you have any health issues at all.
1:18:14 I don’t know how old you are now, Brian, but 48. 48. So you’re good. So maybe you’ll find that I feel a little better. I have a little better cognition.
1:18:22 My energy’s better. Maybe some minor aches and pains go away. My digestion feels better. Those things you might notice. And then you can say, is it worth it or not?
1:18:29 But I would say, you do it for a period of time. You eat enough. Dairy is one of those things where a lot of people use it as a transition type food. And then, you know, you can kind of say, is it helping me or not? And you’ll find, like Joe Rogan told me, he goes, man, all I want to do is eat steak.
1:18:46 Your body kind of tells you. And it’s kind of funny because before, you know. Like pregnant woman, it kind of tells you what it’s like. Yeah, it kind of tells you what it’s like. Things like chicken, which is surprising.
1:18:53 People will say, well, what about chicken? I’m like, that’s fine if you want to do it. I know he wants it. But after about a month or two, you’re like, eh. It’s like the salad or the appetizer.
1:19:01 Where’s the real food? And you’ll find out pretty quickly what your body’s asking for. You can be intuitive and listen to it. And some days you’ll eat once a day. Some days you’ll eat three or four times a day.
1:19:10 And you just, you know, like I said, the nice thing is you shouldn’t have to think about it. All you gotta do is listen to your appetite and you’ll find it very easy. What do I do if I’m on a plane in an airport or hanging out in a place where a restaurant can’t make me custom stuff? Well, I mean, every airport I’ve ever gone to has a place that has a burger patty, right? And you just say, give me a burger patty and throw an egg on there.
1:19:36 Well, I mean, I’m a big guy. I eat a lot more. But I mean, you know, so you might say, hey, give me two burger patties with some egg cheese and a little bit of bacon, if you like that. Throw it on there. And that’s fine.
1:19:46 And you can do that. Or, you know, if it’s, you know, flying, how far is it from New York to London? Is it about a four or five hour flight? Something like that? Six hours.
1:19:53 Okay, whatever it is. Eat before you, you don’t have to eat on the plane. I mean, you know, they’re not gonna serve you a steak on the plane. At least, maybe. I know what airlines you’re flying on.
1:20:02 They used to do that, you know, back in the day when they were flying. But I could bring, like, 12 boiled eggs if I wanted. If you wanted. You know, you’re gonna find, probably you’re gonna find it. One thing that’s nice is something called biltong.
1:20:13 You might be able to get that in London. Yeah, that’s good, man. Have you had it? Yeah, it’s basically beef jerky, but in more pure flavor. More fattier.
1:20:19 Yeah, it’s a South African type of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s right, yeah. Biltong’s great. And it doesn’t have all the sugar and stuff sticking in it.
1:20:25 Right, yeah, you take that on the plane and if they don’t confiscate it, maybe the TSA will take it. I don’t know. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but it’s not practical for everyone on this earth to eat carnivore, is it? No, no one’s suggesting we should. I mean, that’s a strong and ridiculous argument.
1:20:42 No one’s gonna all eat vegan. No one’s gonna all eat the Mediterranean diet. It’s just an option for people to choose to do it. I think it is definitely, we could definitely increase our meat production and help the planet. I think it’s doable.
1:20:57 I know if we look at worldwide cattle practices like so, the second biggest herd on the planet is in India. They’ve got 215 million cattle, right? One of the big, the United States has 95. So they got more than double what we do. And they don’t kill them there.
1:21:10 Well, they do some. They do actually kill some when they export them, but their animals are all sick. They’re all infested with parasites. They’re very poorly managed genetically, breeding wise. If that herd in India were just to be managed with the technology we had in the 1960s in the US, they would double or triple their output just there alone.
1:21:30 So we have about 80, 70, 80% of the agricultural practices when it comes to animal agriculture around the world are like, I mean, they’re like 500 years old. I mean, they’re so far back from efficiency. I’m not talking about putting everybody in a feed lot. I’m talking about breeding the animals appropriately, taking care of their health appropriately. There’s a lot of things that you could do to do that.
1:21:52 So we could definitely do that. Then if we did a regenerative agriculture type thing, we could increase the yield by even double, triple, three, four, five, even up to eight times more than we do now. Okay, so we have the capacity to get 20% of the population on carnivore. Maybe not that much. Yeah, I’d say we would.
1:22:10 I don’t think it’ll ever come to that. I think for most people in this world- They’re the discipline? Or they’re not going to be- I don’t think it’s necessary. I think for many people, you can use it as a tool. And I say, that’s why I say do 90 days, assess it.
1:22:25 And then most people, what they’ll do is they’ll end up with carnivore adjacent. They’ll no longer be scared of meat in particular, even red meat. They’ll eat it regularly, and then they’ll find one of their foods go in there. And that’s perfectly fine too. Like I said, we’re 70% plant-based right now in the US, but to be fair, it’s 70% junk-based, is what we should really say.
1:22:45 And if we get rid of that, and we just kind of, this is a real thing. If we were really serious about this stuff, we would really be going after meat. We would be going after the junk food. We would just say, get rid of the junk food, stop producing your stuff, stop buying it, stop eating it. I mean, the problem is it’s cheap, it tastes good.
1:23:04 It’s designed, it’s marketed to us. And people just, they don’t care. I mean, it’s just a lot of, put whatever in my mouth. Yeah, it gives them a temporary reprieve from their day. And that’s the thing.
1:23:14 A lot of people, unfortunately, a lot of people, their entire joy in life is eating. And that’s kind of a sad situation, to be honest, because there’s so much more things you can do. And the nice thing about this diet is, I really, the fact that people ask me constantly, but I don’t really think about food in my own life. I’m just, what I want, I’ll have two steaks for one, I’ll eat them and I’m done. That’s my thought plan for the whole day.
1:23:36 And then the rest of it is, doing all the other things that are fun about life. So in a way, maybe the carnivore diet is a gateway drug to cutting out all the garbage, potentially. It can be, it’s one of the unique and most effective tools for getting the garbage out of your diet. During a reset. Because there’s no products.
1:23:56 I mean, you’re not going to see, with keto and paleo, you get the bars and the processed crap. I mean, outside of some built on and some jerky, you’re really not going to see that. There’s people that are trying, it’s not going to go anywhere. So I mean, it really just gets the garbage out of your diet. And it’s unique in the fact that people will say, I have no more cravings for this stuff.
1:24:16 Because I think what happens is, and I think this is a problem, even with obese people, obesity is a problem of malnourishment. These people, they’re calorically replete. They got plenty of calories, but they got no nutrition. They got no protein. They got no vitamins and minerals.
1:24:29 They’re just eating this constant food and they’re always hungry. They’re just like, well, you know, what is it? The Lay’s potato chip, but you can’t eat just one. You know, because you can’t. Because it’s like, you get it and you keep eating and eating and eating.
1:24:39 It tastes good and it’s giving you no nutrition. It’s a great technology. But with this, you get so much nutrition, you’ll find it, you know, you can sit down for breakfast. You don’t even have to be in a car. Go down for breakfast, have a 16 ounce steak and six eggs.
1:24:50 You’re not going to want to eat for the rest of the day. You’re not going to care about anything else for the most part. And that’s what happens over and over again. If you do that, if you do something like that for, you know, six weeks, two months, all of a sudden, the pizza, the bagels, the cupcakes, they don’t interest you that much. Not as attractive.
1:25:05 And the nice thing about that is it’s not that you could never eat those things again, but you have the control. You know, you have the sort of the physiology and the psychology to say, I don’t really need that. I can choose to have it if I want it, but it’s not a compulsion. Because I know it used to be, I’d be a little bit hungry and there’d be a plate of cookies at the hospital or something. Some patient would bring in something and there’d be a donut.
1:25:26 And I’d say, I’d walk by three or four times. And then I’d say, I’d have one. And I’m a big guy. I’d eat one. And then all of a sudden, I got six of them in me.
1:25:34 You know, it’s like, you know, it just happens. You can’t stop once you do that. But now it’s like, I could be literally starving and that stuff’s sitting in there. Like, I can wait. I can wait two, three hours.
1:25:43 So I can get a steak. I can get a steak and something that’s really tasty. Yeah. One thing Robin kept asking about was your own blood work. And you were like, I haven’t actually done it.
1:25:51 Right, sure. Have you done it? Or do you not care? Well, it’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I haven’t done it.
1:25:57 I mean, it’s something that, I think that one of the problems we have as physicians is assessing health. You know, and I think that we can use cholesterol as an example. It’s not that I think cholesterol is irrelevant and we shouldn’t worry about that. But I think we have to put it in context. And so there are a lot of people, I get people sending me their blood work every single day.
1:26:17 What do you think about this doc? I don’t know. I don’t know what your situation, I don’t know what your clinical situation is. So you have to be able to put this in the overall package. You know, with heart disease, for instance, we know that LDL cholesterol has been identified as a risk factor.
1:26:31 There’s people up and down and swear it’s the most important thing we should ever treat. And I don’t say that, but I don’t, there’s other people say it has no bearing whatsoever. And I say, I think it depends on who we’re looking at. Now we know that, according to this one study, 88% of us in America are metabolically unhealthy. So when you put an elevated cholesterol in that population, probably it’s a problem.
1:26:53 The problem is most physicians think every, it’s just like, well, 80% of the people are that way and we’re gonna treat everybody the same way. And it’s not the case. And if we look at risk factors for cardiovascular disease, there’s a whole bunch of things, some of which are our sex, our age, genetic history, we can’t change, but smoking, what we’re doing as far as like glucose stability, hyperinsulinemia, inflammatory markers, visceral fat, all these other things, carotid, intermediate thickness scores, coronary artery calcium tests, all of those things play a role.
1:27:23 And so when you look at the whole big picture, and there’s some neat calculators where you can plug this stuff in there, we can see that there are a lot of things that can make an impact. And I think we’re seeing a sort of a unique subset in the low carb population, ketogenic populations, and now in the carnivore populations where some people have elevated cholesterol in yet every single marker of disease, otherwise looks great. And so you got to question yourself, is that marker valid in that population?
1:27:51 Is it an anomaly? Or are these people truly sick? And there’s people that are literally diabetics, 50, 100 pounds overweight, visceral fat everywhere, super high insulin, super high inflammation, all that goes away. And now you’re telling me that person has increased his risk for cardiovascular disease? I’m saying that doesn’t comport, just doesn’t make sense.
1:28:11 Just looking at it by an actual number of words. So I had my coronary artery calcium scan tested. I had this two years end of the diet and I’ve been on a high fat ketogenic diet for three years before on a paleo diet and I’ve eaten meat all my life and perfect zero. Not a scrap of calcium. So it’s like one of the better indicators for cardiovascular disease.
1:28:28 And I like, the problem with blood work is that it changes so quickly. I mean, you can literally get your cholesterol or your vitamin D measured on Tuesday and by Friday it can be changed by 50, 70%. So it’s so dynamic. I get less concerned about that. But when we have something that’s more, it’s sort of a more chronic indicator like what’s going on with the calcium in my heart, what’s going on with my carotid blood vessels, what’s going on with my visceral fat, simply waist to height ratio.
1:28:55 Those things are markers. Those things tell us what’s going on long-term. Those things are more important to me. Okay, all right. What’d you think of the movie Game Changers?
1:29:05 Well, I mean, obviously James Cameron produced a lot of money into it. It was a bit well-produced film. It’s compelling. It’s basically an emotional story. I think some of the sort of the science behind that is very suspect.
1:29:19 Again, I use a lot of these associational data. There’s epidemiologic stuff which really has no real bearing on anything. Some of the contrived experiments they did with the cloudy blood and the erection stuff is just nonsense. I mean, it’s just not- I mean, you’re a doctor. What did you see when they’re presenting that stuff?
1:29:35 Well, I saw it as just basically propaganda. I mean, the interesting thing is when they looked at the athletes that were profiled and you go follow them up two or three years after the movie, because I think most of it was shot in 2017, Tim Sheef dropped out of the movie and you look at most of the athletes and almost all of them were retired, injured, or no longer playing. So I’m like, what’s the long-term consequence? And what I’ve seen, and again, obviously I have a very biased view, but many athletes that try a vegan diet, they may feel better like you did for a few months, but then we see a decline in performance for many of them.
1:30:09 We’ve got guys like Cam Newton in the NFL and Kyrie Irving. All these guys are constantly getting hurt and they’re not healing as well. I mean, I’ve had, there was a neat gal that I interviewed, her name was Ky for No. She was on the Naked and Afraid show. She went on as a vegetarian, you know, first time, and she ended up eating meat to survive and she made it through.
1:30:29 But she said she went back to her vegetarian diet after that. It took her two years to recover from, she lost like 27 pounds, took her two years to recover. And then she went on again on that show as a carnivore. I think that show has yet to be released, but I interviewed her. And she said within two or three days, she was back working out in the gym, feeling great, you know, because she started eating meat right away.
1:30:48 So I think there’s a difference in recovery. I think, you know, obviously there’s a bias there. James Cameron is heavily invested in pea protein manufacturing. So it’s kind of like an ad for pea protein, quite honestly. You got Arnold in there, just basically.
1:31:01 Why is Arnold in there? Well, I mean, I think he’s buddies with James Cameron. I think that’s it. He’s not vegan. No, of course not.
1:31:07 I mean, I don’t know what he was thinking, what he was saying lines about, you’ve got pictures of him eating all his steak as he was a body. First, there’s no way on earth, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be who he was had he not eaten meat, you know, back then. I mean, he would not have done that as a vegan. I mean, just not that there’s anything against a vegan doing athletic stuff. And many of them do, you know, reasonably well for them, I would say despite of veganism.
1:31:30 And I think, honestly, I think if they were just to get rid of the junk food, you know, eat a whole food diet with meat and plants, they would probably do better than they are now. I mean, I think that’s what we would see. So Schwarzenegger couldn’t have got there without meat, not that size. No, I don’t think he could. And there’s drugs in there as well.
1:31:48 But I think that what we see, you know, we look at a lot of these NFL athletes and I mean, they’re gifted. I mean, they’re genetically, I mean, they look like perfect specimens. They look ripped, they’re like, they’re carved out of stone. And you look at what they’re eating, a lot of them are eating McDonald’s and just crap French fries and drinking, you know, Pepsi’s and stuff like that. And you see these guys and you’re like, look how genetically gifted you are.
1:32:10 And then they go vegan. So they feel better because they’ve given up the shakes and the coke and the fries, you know, and they just, they feel better. But I mean, that’s, I don’t think that’s, I think that’s the genetic potential that they have is not the veganism. You know, for some of it, it’s like, some of these guys are taking drugs. I’m like, well, that’s a testament to how good drugs are, you know, not your diet.
1:32:29 Yeah, were you surprised by the athletes they actually had in that movie? Have you heard of them before? I’d heard of many of them, you know, I mean, you know, we go through that. I mean, there’s guys like Kendrick Faris, you know, who’s Olympic lifter. But you know, you look at his career, he went to the 2016 Olympics and he actually had his worth performance of his career there.
1:32:50 I mean, he gained weight, he was in a higher weight class and he totaled lower than he did at a lower weight class. You know, he got weaker and fatter basically. You know, so I mean, that’s, I mean, hats off for him for still making it there. That’s a huge achievement. He built up all of his strength, power, and, you know, his Olympic capacity as an omnivore, you know, eating meat and doing all those things.
1:33:13 And so… What do you think of the strong man? Patrick Baboumian? Well, I mean, again, I know he’d been questioned about using drug usage and I think he’s basically admitted to using drug usage. He had built up all, much of his muscle early on as a meat eater.
1:33:35 He’s, you know, strong relative to many people, but he’s not nowhere near the world’s strongest man. And when we talk about guys that are actually competing at the world’s strongest man, you know, he wouldn’t get an invite. He’s just not that good. So I mean, again, I, again, despite his diet, he’s done reasonably well. I think if he included meat and drugs in his diet, he would be even, you know, even better.
1:33:58 I mean, I think, anyway, I think he’s already there on some of that. And what’s your life like these days? You no longer are orthopedic surgeon. So yeah, I had, you know, it was kind of interesting, you know, I, if we go into this story real quickly, I was practicing as an orthopedic, very busy, head of the practice, you know, seeing tons of patients, very, very successful guy, got into convincing people to change your diet, started canceling surgeries. Hospital didn’t like that because they lose revenue.
1:34:25 I mean, hospitals run on thin margins and they depend on a lot of surgeries. And so I ended up. So the diet was getting people off surgeries. The diet was making me cancel surgeries. What kind of surgeries?
1:34:34 Like joint replacements. Really? Because the inflammation was dying. Because the inflammation, and I see this still to this day to day. I mean, every day I see people with bone on bone arthritis and they’re like, my knee has completely stopped hurting.
1:34:45 And so we’re like, well, once there’s no point in doing a surgery on a knee that doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t make sense. So I ended up, you know, going away from that, you know, I went through a long legal battle about that. With the hospital. With the hospital.
1:34:59 And I surrendered my license at state level. They said, go get independently evaluated. They did. And they said, you’re fine, go back to practice. They gave me my license back.
1:35:07 And I’ve gotten so far away from that and so much into what I’m doing now. I’m like, I don’t want to hassle right now. I’d have to do it. I’d have to do part time anyway. And so my life is busy, busy, busy, busy with, you know, just talking to people all day long.
1:35:20 Everybody’s got, you know, everybody wants to talk to you about something. He’s got an idea. I want you to do this and that. And I try to- With the diet, with the carnivore diet. With diet and other things, you know, like I said, we founded this company, you know, I’ve got my founder, my co-founders, a just brilliant technical person out of Silicon Valley.
1:35:37 And so we’re trying to, we’re really trying to, like I said, promote this health creation type model. And so I think people are getting fed up. I mean, I think there’s a lot of people out there that are just tired of the disease management industries, which I think we do. I mean, we do acute care pretty good. I mean, there’s no, and then I think most doctors are in it for the right reasons, but I think the system is, I think the healthcare system is sick, basically.
1:35:58 I think it really is. And I think I’m trying to provide an alternative option. You know, right now with meat base, we’ll probably go into lifestyle because there’s a lot of things. And you know, you’ve interviewed people that talk about sleep and, you know, Wim Hof and his cold and, you know, all those things that I think are important parts of being healthy. And so we can kind of bring that whole package to the people and see if that makes a difference.
1:36:21 I think it will. I think our results in the end of the day are gonna be better for chronic disease than some of these other things. Yeah, you’re kind of an anomaly of a guy, you know, with the medical degree, you still, you know, compete in rowing. You know, you’re 53, you’re in pretty good shape and now you’re the carnivore diet guy. Yeah, I’m kind of a, I guess an interesting person.
1:36:43 I mean, I would’ve, you know, five years ago, obviously I would’ve never thought, I thought this was totally crazy. But I mean, it’s- Were you in the spotlight five years ago? No, no, no, I was, you know, I mean, I was coming locally in town, I was a surgeon, you know, people kind of know you there. But I mean, now it’s like, you know, you kind of get a lot of people that, you know, interact with you and know you. You know, you get recognized now.
1:37:05 I mean, so far I’ve never had a vegan come up to me, you know, never. I mean, I’m sure some of them know who I am, but I mean, I’ve had a lot of people that have been impacted by the diet come up to me and want to talk and you know, tell me that they have felt better because that’s rewarding, it’s fun. What’s the daily practice for you that’s just non-negotiable?
1:37:27 You know, I’m a bit of an obsessive exercise person. I mean, I don’t feel good if I don’t do something physical. You’ve been an athlete all your life. Yeah, I mean, I started goodness, you know, when I was about 12, 13 years old, you know, training with weights and competing in sport after sport, you know, I won world championships in different sports. Which one’s rugby?
1:37:47 So, I mean, I played high level rugby, I played in New Zealand at a very high level and a lot of the international top athletes in their Premier League. Are they the best? Are the All Blacks the best? Well, not this year, they weren’t, you know, South Africa beat them, so. But I, you know, I got to play with those guys, you know, with some of the All Blacks in the league I was in, so I won’t say I was, you know, so I got to play at that level against these guys.
1:38:11 I did, you know, powerlifting, you know, as a drug-free athlete, I did lift in almost 800 pounds, you know, back, you know, when I was in my early 30s. I went into strongman stuff, so I did all the strongman, carrying the Atlas Stones and pulling the trucks. What’s that like? I really liked it, I really had fun, it was a fun way to train. Again, this was in my early, early to mid 30s.
1:38:34 The problem with that is I realized, I mean, there was the first ever national championships in the United States, I think it took fifth in, which way back then wasn’t bad, but I realized that if I was gonna be successful at sport, I would have to take drugs and I just did one, that was something I just made a decision, I was never gonna do that. Why? One, I just felt I didn’t need to, and two, I just, the risk to benefits I didn’t see would be positive. I mean, it wasn’t, I mean, by that point, you know, I’m not gonna make a career out of it, you know, I was gonna make a lot of money doing that, you know, unless you’re a 20 year old, you know, maybe a baseball player, NFL guy, it’s probably not worth it for most people.
1:39:12 I, you know, and so I kind of fought that, I kind of got, I kind of became a drug-free zealot, I remember I used to argue with these guys taking drugs, and they used to piss me off when guys would, and our competition was supposed to be drug-tested and drug-free and they were cheating, and that, I didn’t care if people did it on their own, but when they did that and I’m competing against them, you know, I used to kind of get me a little bit irked. So I went from that power-lifting, I got into the strong man, then I got into the throwing, you know, the Highland games, I remember I was in my office and my physician assistants came in wearing a kilt, and I’m like, what the hell are you doing? He was telling me, this is his day, and they have a Highland games contest, and you throw all these things, and I went out there and got borrowed a kilt and fell in love with it, it was just a lot of fun throwing stuff, and then I trained for a while, trained with a couple of world champions, and ended up winning a master’s world championship and set a world record in that one, did that for about four or five years, and then, and that’s when I got tired of being 290 pounds, and then I got into this rowing stuff, and then I just kind of hopped on there, and had fun, I won the world championships last year in that, so that’s- In the Highland games?
1:40:21 No, in the rowing. In the rowing, okay. So, yeah. What, did they stick you on an erg, and you go head to head? Yeah, you go on an erg, and you go, the distance I’m doing is 500 meters, and so it’s like- How long does that take you?
1:40:32 My best time was a minute, 14, and so that was the world record, when I said it was 118, so I took four seconds off the world record, you know, as an all-meet, completely meet-based athlete, which is interesting, because it is a highly glycolytic activity, as far as what system you’re using, energy system, so a lot of people would say, you can’t do it without carbs, and I would say, look, I broke the world record without them, and again, I would say that glucose, it’s not carbs, it’s glucose, and glucose, I think on a carnivore diet, as an athlete, you’ve got plenty. Okay, and along the way, you launched some nuclear missiles, or didn’t launch them at home? Well, we would have heard about them if we did.
1:41:06 No, I mean, I was trained to do that, and we would do simulations, they would do launches, I don’t know if it’s probably still classified, or what I can say, but they would do launches to test the accuracy, and stuff like that, so we would do that, and it was kind of, it was a good job for, I was a mid-20s lieutenant in the Air Force, and we’d work every fourth day, 24 hours in an underground launch control facility, and the rest of the time, we’re off, so we’re running around, just having fun skiing, I was up in Wyoming, going skiing in Colorado, and it was a pretty good job, but I mean, it was very stressful when we would do tests, because we would do simulations, and the NSA would come in, test our reliability, and I remember one time, we had a guy who made one spelling error, and it made the whole entire base fail on one spelling error, so it was kind of really a very stressful type time, and generals would lose their jobs, and everybody, so it would go from being pretty chilled out to being very stressful pretty quickly.
1:42:05 Did you always know it was a simulation, or sometimes? No, not always, but I mean, you had some routine maintenance, and stuff we knew would do routine, and there would be things that would be tests, and we would have to, maybe it would be the way it was. I mean, in the real world, if you know what’s going on in the real world, you kind of get an idea of where it heightened threat, and there were times when we were a little heightened, more heightened threat, but I was doing it back in the, I guess early 90s, and there wasn’t much going on in the world, so it was pretty unlikely.
1:42:33 Should we be worried about these big nuclear arsenals or not? Probably not, you know. I mean, I mean, I know we talk about Iran, and North Korea, and stuff like that, but I, I mean, I think in the US, we’re pretty protected from that. Yeah, I went probably to, yeah. They’re not gonna hit their own button on us.
1:42:52 Probably not, no, it probably doesn’t make sense. I mean, that’s the whole reason between that mutually assured destruction doctrine, that if you blow us up, everybody’s dead, so I don’t think anybody’s that crazy yet. There’s a great movie called Fog of War by Robert McNamara, and he just says, you know, he was on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he spoke with Castro afterwards, and he said, you knew that if you had pushed that button, we were all gonna be destroyed, and he said, you still were gonna do it, and he said, yeah, I was.
1:43:18 And he said, that boggles my mind, and it’s something that I worry about for the next 100 years of humanity, is that men will act irrational in certain situations, even though it seems obvious not to do something like that. That was his last warning before he died. Interesting. Yeah, again, I think,
1:43:38 I guess you could see one of these rogue states doing something like that, but I don’t think it would be a World War III scenario. I mean, you could see, you know, say Iran gets one and launches one, and makes it into Western Europe. I mean, probably what would happen is Iran would be quickly taken over, destroyed. You’d kill 20, 30 million people, and that would be the end of it. It’s still terrifying to think about, sure.
1:44:02 Yeah, yeah. What does MeetRX look like in 10 years if it’s all going the way you want it to, or even your life? Well, if I’m successful, you know, and I don’t know what that means financially or personally or whatever, if I’m successful, I’ve helped millions of people. I mean, that ultimately is what I want. And you know, whether it’s through a carnivore diet or some other, other, other.
1:44:22 Why does that matter to you? Why does it matter? Yeah, is it the Socratic oath? You know, I think, you know, I went into medicine to help people, and I mean, honestly, it gives me great joy. I mean, there’s nothing better in life to be happy and to have other people let you know that you’ve helped them.
1:44:39 I think that’s, you can’t put a number on that. So the number is more. And if it gets to, you know, right now it’s at tens, maybe even up to 100,000. If that gets to 10 million, 100 million, which I think, you know, the potential’s there. I mean, in some shape or fashion, it may not be a carnivore diet, but I think, you know, we go from this, this is a thing, it’s political season, right?
1:44:59 We got Trump and we got the Democrats, and they’re all yapping and screaming about how we’re gonna pay for healthcare and giving us access. I’m like, what are you giving them access to? You’re giving, this is the analogy I use. We’re sitting there, we’re on the Titanic, and this is a healthcare system, and there’s an iceberg right there, and we’re screaming about the deck chairs, how to rearrange them. I mean, we need to be on a different ship, and I think that’s a problem with our healthcare system.
1:45:20 We need to do a huge overhaul on, and it may not even be fixable. It may just be, we just need a separate system, and we need this, what I like to say, the disease management, or the health creation system, and I think that’s, like I said, we’ll see what the market supports. I think it will. I think people will be happy to be healthy. I think we’re building it a little bit right now, talking about it, you know?
1:45:44 I mean, this is some of my most watched episodes. We’ve been talking about diet, or breathing, or cold therapy. Sure, absolutely. And people are- Yeah, you’re part of it. I mean, you’re part of it, and this is a nice thing about where we are today versus guys like, you know, you can use Atkins, or Pritikin, or whoever.
1:46:00 Whoever the dietary guru was back in the day. We now have this huge social media platform. Thousands, millions of people are watching it. People are on social media are saying, hey, I saw you, and I did the same thing you do, and I got the same results you did. So now we don’t have to wait on some Harvard study.
1:46:17 We can just say, look, this is what’s working. This is all I really care about at the end of the day. Anyway, I don’t care who agrees with me, because again, you only get one body. You got to live in it. You’re not there to make your doctor happy, or your mom happy.
1:46:31 You’re here to make yourself feel good, and perform good, and be objective about it. I think that’s at the end of the day, whatever we want. Yeah, for sure. What scares you? I think we’re seeing some degree of censorship occurring.
1:46:50 I mean, we’re seeing platforms being shut down. We’re seeing discussion being stifled. We’re seeing some of the, like I said, there’s a lot of capital. I mean, some people have estimated that the companies that want to see this, what I call, human pet food future. We’re going to have this human-designed food that’s highly profitable.
1:47:10 There’s something like $5.7 trillion of capital behind creating these industries, and I think they control the market. They control the media. They control our perceptions. They control the SEO for Google and all this stuff, and I think that is something that we’re going to see this increasingly happening. Right now, it’s very subtle.
1:47:29 I think, I don’t know where it goes. Do we get to book burnings, and banings, and restrictions, and that type of thing, taking away freedom of choice? Food sovereignty is an issue. They want to centralize all the food supply and control that, whereas we’re saying, hey, let the little small rancher produce this product, and if we want to support it, we can do that. That’s increasingly harder and harder for these people to do, and our policies are increasingly in favor of corporatization and decentralization of a lot of the commodities, and I think that’s scary.
1:48:02 Something like 10 companies control all the food on the planet. I mean, that’s a scary proposition. You think about it, because they can do whatever they want, and food is, we can’t live without it, right? It’s essential to us. Yeah.
1:48:14 What would we be surprised to learn about Sean Baker? Something you knew, maybe, is it uncarnivore, unathletic, or? Unathletic. I don’t know. Gosh, I’ve got so many things I’m awful at.
1:48:26 Music is awful. My kids tell me, don’t sing, Dad. You’re an awful singer. I mean, I truly care about animals. I mean, I do.
1:48:34 I mean, I have pets. I have animals. People think I’m this horrible guy that suggests you should eat an animal, but I mean, I have compassion for people. I mean, I put people above animals. I’m sorry, that’s just the way I am, but I mean, I’ve seen too much, you know, too many suffering people to not want to do that, and I certainly emphasize with people that feel that they want to make no animals die.
1:49:03 I mean, obviously, that’s not practical at all. Is it ridiculous to put animals above humans? Do you think that’s something inherently wrong? Yeah, I mean, I do. I mean, I understand the sort of thought that we should allow all the species to live in peace, and they should live out their natural life.
1:49:20 So that’s not consistent with anything in the natural world at all. People talk about being, I know Joaquin Phoenix gave his Oscar presentation talking about how we become distanced from the natural world. I’m like, the vegan diet is the most unnatural diet on the planet, if you ask my opinion. But I mean, there’s animals that will sit there and eat their own offspring. I mean, that occurs, and we are probably the most humane, not all humans, but I mean, our practice for obtaining food in the most humane way of all species on the planet, as far as how we kill those animals.
1:49:54 Now, we can argue about how they’re raised, and again, I think it’s very different between which country you’re in and which animal you’re talking about. I think things like battery chicken farms, in my view, are probably something that’s not great. It’s one of the reasons, the reason I don’t eat chicken is just because it’s not a very nutritious food, but I think there’s a lot of different nuance in there, and I think, particularly with the big ruminant animals, which I think we’re better suited towards, they generally have a pretty good life overall.
1:50:22 What about hunting? I mean, we were talking about the deer earlier, but do you hunt, and do you think hunting is a humane way of killing animals? I mean, there’s some good arguments for hunting. I mean, we can’t do hunting on a mass population. I mean, there’s just not enough animals.
1:50:36 I mean, we have 15 million registered hunters in the United States. That’s not even 10% of the males, and there’s females that hunt, obviously, but if we were to all hunt, we would go through the deer population and the elk population within a year, probably, so we can’t do that. We have to have a way to sustain ourselves, and it’s gotta be through animal agriculture, or the other people would argue we can just do away with that and all eat plants, and I think that scenario’s already been calculated.
1:51:06 Don Lehman, excellent researchers, done research on that, and saying if we all went plant-based, we could generate some more cowries, but we would all end up with critical deficiencies and things like zinc and lysine and some of these other nutrients, and so, again, this is the other problem. We frame arguments. I remember at the beginning I talked about framing, you know, the healthcare sector is 10% of our greenhouse gases, you know, but if we frame nutrition and we say, what is our metric, and we just say calories, well, then the best crop to grow from an input basis, you know, to feed the people of most cowries is basically sugar.
1:51:40 Sugar is the most calorie-dense food you can grow, and we can just argue that we should know that we should be eating sugar. Obviously, that’s not a good solution, so when we look at actual nutrition, you know, animal products become much more important. We look at, you know, indispensable amino acids, you know, leucine, lysine, some of these others, we see that, you know, the greenhouse gas versus nutrition argument starts to really even out, so it’s, again, where you draw the line and who frames the argument, and this is the deal.
1:52:09 Right now the vegans are framing the argument with the metrics they want to measure, and we’re saying, let’s talk about nutrition. Let’s talk about overall impact of diet on everything, and not just, you know, one specific thing. Again, getting away from the myopic stuff, stepping back, taking a big picture view, and saying, where are the unintended consequences in different sectors, and have we thought that out? And I think the answer largely is no, and it’s mostly an emotional appeal, appeal to emotion.
1:52:34 Yeah, it’s big, though. What keeps you awake at night? You know, I would love to say that, you know,
1:52:46 I have just been wildly successful in what I’ve done so far, and it’s still very tenuous. I mean, everything I’m doing could just get taken away in a moment. You know, some of what I do is based on social media, that can be wiped out in a second. This business I’ve started, we’re still all just launched just off the ground, it could fail miserably. I mean, I can be, you know, without a source of income, those things, you know, those things worry you.
1:53:09 And it’s one of those things you just never know. I don’t worry about my health or any of those things. I’m pretty happy in decisions I’ve made with that. You know, obviously family, you wanna make sure your family’s doing well and taking care of, but I, you know, I put a lot of thought into this stuff, and I think I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, what can I do to continue to make an impact? And it’s, I mean, a lot of it’s fun, you know, just thinking about, I mean, I’m really, I really enjoy what I do.
1:53:41 I really have a lot of fun, and I know it seems like some people think I’m mad and angry, but I’m just passionate about it. I mean, I think we have, you know, we’ve been told one message, and I think there’s a lot of different options that we are not, you know, willing to look at. I’m trying to get that out there to as many people as possible. Yeah, you’re not a mad guy at all, but you look like an intimidating, tough guy. Maybe that’s why.
1:54:04 Sean, I always ask a couple questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you if you could pick up a phone and call up a 20-year-old Sean Baker and give that young man some advice. What would you tell him? Probably, probably to, you know, just. The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real Tribe, where you get exclusive access and insights from our high-performance guests on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health, and well-being.
1:54:33 To join our tribe community, go to londonreal.tv forward slash tribe. Now, let’s continue with the show. Thanks for sitting down. I appreciate this. I’m gonna be thinking about the carnivore diet.
1:54:47 I’m gonna be even more open-minded to red meats. And keep doing what you’re doing. I really appreciate it. Absolutely, appreciate it. No, thank you.
