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Feb. 15, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:44
Why Red Meat is the Real Superfood: Dr. Berg - The Knowledge Doc
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They find these loopholes and they try to cheat the system and it's called organic, but is it really organic?
Eric Berg, popularly known as Dr. Berg and The Knowledge Doc, is a nutritionist and chiropractor specializing in healthy eating and alternative healthcare more broadly.
He has published over 6,000 videos and amassed 13 million followers on YouTube.
And has trained over 2,500 doctors and healthcare practitioners in how diet can impact your health.
When you reduce carbohydrates, it then forces your body to go after your own fat as fuel.
So for weight loss, it's great.
And for other things, it's good too.
In this episode, we discuss his approach to health, from superfoods to intermittent fasting, and get his thoughts on Bobby Kennedy as HHS secretary.
I think if we are going to make some changes, we have to, first of all, make people aware of these hidden ingredients and start to...
Well, I'm really happy to be here.
I've watched your show for many years, and so thank you for having me on.
Well, so let's talk about disease and health in America.
We spend here in America an incredible amount per capita on healthcare, but the outcomes compared to the amount that's actually being spent seem pretty low.
Now, why is that?
Yeah, you're right, because we spend $4.5 trillion and we have the worst health.
So, you know, I think that I'd like to just kind of give everyone a bird's eye view of what I think the situation is, because it's really kind of simple when you step back and look at it.
Big Pharma, okay?
They're helping provide the solutions to our medical problems.
And then on the other side, we have Big Food or the Junk Food.
And they're both kind of funneling down this way.
And right in the middle, you have the medical establishment, the system that we're operating off right now.
And the paradigm shift, or the paradigm that we're operating off of is basically, if you want to get healthy, you just take this pill for your symptom.
But if we look at the chronic disease, most of that comes from our diet and ultra-processed food calories.
It's the junk food, right?
That's the majority of the root cause of most of this problem.
So when you look at it, these medications are basically treating the symptom of the junk food.
And define for meaning junk food, because I actually think that might mean different things for different people.
It's not food.
It's something else.
And it's composed of mainly three things.
We have the refined sugars, the refined seed oils, and the refined starches, which is basically hidden sugars.
And of course, that's like the main three ingredients, but then there's food coloring, and then there's flavorings that you add onto it, and you have preservatives.
So if you look at the ingredients of a lot of these foods, it's the same ingredients with different flavors, different colorings, different packaging.
So if over 50% of the population is consuming junk food, adults, and over 63% of teenagers are consuming these ultra-processed foods, then how are we going to be able to create health?
You can't.
So this is really at the root of chronic disease.
We're not eating things to sustain life, and this is why we have the chronic illness.
Let's talk a little bit about these 30 years that you were in practice.
I understand you were a chiropractor primarily, but then, of course, you sort of branched out from there.
Can you give me a picture of that, please?
I had no intention of kind of getting into what I am to now because I was like the worst patient you ever could imagine as far as diet.
I would literally eat pure junk food.
All the way up until I was like 28 years old.
And I got away with it for so many years, but then it caught up with me.
But I stumbled on a book called Mastering the Zone.
And I didn't even read the whole book.
I just read the introduction.
And it said something about insulin and avoid carbs and eat high-quality protein.
So the next morning, I had a buffalo burger instead of my cereal, like red meat.
Which I thought was really bad for you at the time because it causes, you know, cancer, which is totally a lie.
So I ate that and it was almost like someone just literally took a helmet off my head and I could actually think clearly.
I was like, oh my goodness, this is amazing.
The way I was trying to solve my problems back then, instead of changing my diet, I would just be taking supplements, taking this supplement.
I would be doing colon cleansings and detoxes and we'd be driving down the street and I would tell my wife, hey, there's the health house, let's go in there and then come back with a A whole bunch of vitamins.
And it wasn't working because the foundation wasn't there.
So tell me about the ketogenic diet.
There's some people that, you know, even medical professionals who say it can become dangerous.
Explain to me how this works.
Yeah, in real simple terms, you're basically just eliminating the massive amount of carbs that people eat.
And so because when you reduce carbohydrates, it then forces your body to go after your own fat as fuel.
And so for weight loss, it's great.
And for other things, it's good too.
The average person that's not overweight has literally 100,000 calories of fat on their body.
So they have a lot more stored energy for running on fat than they do from the dietary source of calories.
So if you don't tap into your own fat, then you're going to be dependent on the next meal.
You're not going to be able to go long before you're hungry.
When you start shifting off to the ketogenic diet, which is basically the breakdown of fat into ketones as an alternative fuel, then you can go a lot longer because you're running off these calories that are just stored.
And that allows you to get rid of your cravings and your hunger and produce a whole bunch of health effects, especially for your brain and your heart, that you never could do if you're not in ketosis.
There is a certain condition.
But that's only with advanced diabetes type 1, which you have to inject the person with insulin, that if they forget their medication and they don't take insulin and their blood sugars go too high, then the body can develop a different type of ketosis, which is like a dangerous type of ketosis.
So that's a completely different thing.
Mix them together and say all of ketosis is bad, which is not true.
Our bodies were designed to not have to eat every hour and a half.
So our bodies were designed to be in ketosis.
Even when we're born, we're going through the ketosis.
So there's going to be some vested interest against that, and they're going to put out all sorts of things about ketosis.
Mainly, they'll say something like, well, yes, ketosis does work, and it does help you lose weight, but we don't know what's going to happen long term.
Just a little bit of doubt in people's mind, and then they're discouraged.
Bottom line is, anyone can jump on the keto diet and do it, and there's no health risk, really.
This is what you're saying here, right?
The risk is not doing it, especially since most people have what's called insulin resistance.
That's a condition where you've eaten carbs for so long, chronically, that your body is now having a It's almost like a pre-diabetic situation where you can't use insulin as well.
It's not working.
And so then you get all sorts of problems like a fatty liver and you're overweight and you're midsection and you start swelling and the heart suffers, the brain suffers.
So I think the dangers of not doing it are great.
I think there's also a dirty keto people go on.
They kind of like go to McDonald's and they'll just eat the meat without the bun.
And that's fine as a step up, but the way that I teach people to do it is to do it the healthy version.
And it's okay if someone goes off the ketogenic diet.
It's actually sometimes good to remind themselves of what they feel like.
Like for me, it took me a long time to change my diet because I love junk food, especially Doritos and chips.
And so I had to go back and forth and back and forth to the point where I'm like, you know what?
I don't want to feel bad anymore.
I'm just going to keep it consistent.
Rarely do I ever go off, just because I like the way I feel without it.
Why is a McDonald's burger with no bun dirty keto?
What does that even mean?
That means you're using the lower quality of calories on the ketogenic diet.
For example, keto diet is not necessarily high fat.
People think they can...
Eat more fat and go into ketosis?
No, no.
The way you get into ketosis is by lowering your carbohydrate.
Now, of course, you have to replace those carbohydrates with something, so that's fat.
Now, when people do seed oils, and you can go and fry something in corn oil, and it's still keto because it's low-carb, but is it the healthy version?
Maybe not.
So there's different levels of...
Quality of ingredients.
Like, you look at the Atkins bars, right?
It's just filled with soy protein isolates.
That's, like, pretty low-quality protein.
And, yeah, it's keto, but is it healthy?
I wouldn't think so.
So, to your point here about getting the healthy carbohydrates, you actually live on a farm, right?
Yeah.
And so you're growing these...
I guess carbohydrates and non-carbohydrates.
Just tell me about that.
I have the fortunate option to live on a farm.
I lived in Bethesda and actually Alexandria for many years.
And after a while, after 30 years, I was like, you know what?
We need to kind of move into a location where there's more space.
We actually live off the land.
I have gardens.
I have animals.
We eat the meat.
I'm lucky in that way I can actually have a freezer full of meat from my farm and control that.
But you don't necessarily have to live on a farm to be healthy.
You could get this high-quality protein anywhere.
But that's basically where I live, and I have a little studio that I'm in right now.
I do my videos, and I do basically one video every single day, and we have like 5,700 videos that I've done.
So yeah, that's pretty much what I'm up to lately.
Eric, just a quick sec.
We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with the knowledge doctor, Eric Burke.
How is it that we got to this place where, I guess, we forgot what good food was?
You know, I released a video today.
I interviewed my father, who's 87 years old, and I started interviewing him.
I'm like, what did they eat back then?
And how can we compare that to now?
Did they have food allergies?
No.
Did they have autism?
No.
Was there anyone that was overweight?
No.
Was there any diabetes?
No.
You didn't even have these problems.
And so one of the conclusions that I came up with is there has been a new category of food that was invented or created or manufactured by the food industry called the snack foods.
So we have the crackers, the chips, the little bars, the snack bars.
I mean, back then...
Your parents would tell you not to ruin your appetite.
And if they did have a snack, it was like an apple or something out of the garden.
Now, we snack not on that.
We snack on ultra-processed food calories.
So we're dealing with highly refined things that are just going to raise our insulin between the meals.
So now we have three meals, and then we add the snacks.
Now we get these spikes all day long, and we're creating a chronic...
Insulin situation, which is literally destroying our health at a very early age.
How is it that this actually happened, right?
Because it's not just the reality of the junk food, but it's the actual guidance to some extent, too, right?
You remember when tobacco was healthy?
I mean, people smoked, and so that went over a period of time.
And then there was a shift where smoking was bad.
Cigarette manufacturing companies.
Shifted gears, and they bought up some of the junk food industry, and then they started producing more food that was very profitable.
If you take, for example, one ingredient, corn, okay?
The type of corn they use in junk food is not sweet corn.
They use what's called dent corn or field corn.
It's inedible.
You can't even eat it.
But that's the corn that's in the chips.
It's in most of the products.
Because of the subsidies, they basically can buy a cubic ton of this corn for $198, okay?
Now think about how many boxes of cornflakes you can make for under $200.
So you have a super cheap food that gives you a lot of pleasure at the expense of no nutrition, very little protein.
So it's going to keep you eating it.
My problem was the Doritos.
Like I could just start and I would down the whole bag.
I mean, the large bag in one sitting without even thinking twice.
So we created this industry and it's created addictions.
And, you know, 40, 50 years later, here we are, you know, with the problem.
It's like, and unfortunately you as a taxpayer pays for most of the raw material in this junk food unknowingly through the subsidies.
That's something that has to be cleaned up by this new administration.
Let's talk about this new administration.
But before we go there, just to finish off the first question, somehow a high-carbohydrate diet became kind of what we were supposed to do.
And so is that just pure lobbying, or how did that happen?
It's pure profit, because you have to make profit on things that have no shelf life.
I mean, let's just take beef.
For example, the margins on beef is like 3%.
So why would you want to get into the beef business, right?
If you look at junk food, if you take a look at just profit, they make about $260 billion a year just on the starches.
And an average person consumes about 250 to 300 pounds of starch every single year.
Whereas the sugars, it's like 10 billion.
It doesn't even compare.
Yet people consume about 150. The other thing I noticed is that if there's these hidden,
basically farm subsidies in the system, If you're going to start taking apart the system, you're actually going to impact America's farmers.
Those farmers, I think, played a big role in getting this administration elected.
I think what we should do is reward the small farmer because they're being put out of business and support them and maybe subsidize the farmers that are doing it right with healthier foods rather than the large industrial farms that are just literally producing the lowest quality.
What about large farms that produce higher quality food?
Because there must be a range.
Yeah, there's a total range.
And Cornucopia is a great activist group that I support.
And they have a food scoring system that they'll look at these farms and they talk about who's doing right, who's not doing it right.
Because they find these loopholes and they try to...
Cheat the system and it's called organic, but is it really organic?
So they're really trying to keep the integrity, at least in the organic sphere.
There's going to have to be a lot more transparency because the largest privately owned company in the United States, I won't even say their name, that's the company that makes most of the starches and the seed oils.
And some of the sugars, too.
And they're a privately owned company, and so they don't have to disclose certain things.
So there's all sorts of mysteries in this area that I'm really interested in, and maybe someday we'll really find out what's going on.
What is the promise of this new administration, in your view?
RFK is a non-politician.
He's going to be a really good person to get in there to cut the umbilical cords between the...
Cozy relationships and the conflict of interest between industry and the government.
Right now, the food guidelines are associated between who has the strongest lobbyists.
And so there's too much influence from industry in our food system, in our medical system, in the research of drugs.
He's going to clean that up.
And of course, they're going to attack him for this, but it's going to be a really...
Vital change to remove this conflict of interest and have more transparency so we can actually focus more on the root causes of health and support the smaller farmer and make it possible for our generation to be healthy because right now it's getting worse.
I mean, we're not getting our product.
The food guidelines is so important because it trickles down into the school system.
The nursing home, the hospitals, the assisted living home.
So there's an individual I know who is in Arizona.
He owns four assisted living homes.
And what's really interesting about him is he changes the diet.
He doesn't allow junk food.
And these people are coming in from places like hospice, and his rate of reducing medications through the help of their online doctor or their doctor that's on site is like 47%.
So you go in there with certain medications, and then you're coming out with almost half of those medications, lesser than half medications.
So he told me this, and this is really fascinating, that the software that he uses to...
Coordinate between the medical doctor and the medications is owned by a CEO that I told him to contact the CEO. And I want to know, on average, what's the average number of medications that these patients are on?
So he did that for me.
And you're not going to believe what he said.
He took 100 people, random people, out of his database, and he works with people all over the United States in these assisted living homes.
And he found a range between 91 medications to 42 medications with an average of 48 medications.
He sent me a document with one patient on 48 medications.
I looked through this.
I almost vomited because I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
An average person?
Going to an assisted living home is on 48 medications.
I mean, this is like outrageous.
This is insane.
So why wouldn't we want someone like Bobby Kennedy to go in there and straighten this up to improve this, to get people to start eating real food all over the place, not just in schools, but assisting living homes, hospitals, in the military.
What about the superfoods?
What is the top superfood in your mind?
I think this is going to surprise you because when people think superfoods, they drink the green drinks, right?
But there's a much higher level of superfood that has virtually every nutrient and it's very bioavailable and it's actually red meat.
Red meat.
People are going to say, oh my gosh, I thought that was like, it's just like processed meat.
No, I'm talking about grass-fed red meat, whether it's beef or it's lamb.
I mean, it has so many nutrients, iron and B12, and plus the protein is the highest quality.
It's even better than eggs because it has better omega-3 ratios.
And so it's really a good healing food because I think people have gone into the plant proteins and they're not going to feel as good.
So it's high-quality protein.
Most of our body is protein.
And that would be something that a person would notice immediately a difference.
Eric, final thought as we finish?
I think my final thought on this would be, instead of this huge focus on treating disease and focusing on getting rid of disease, let's start to focus on creating our health.
It's a different question.
It's a different model.
Instead of waiting till you get a disease and treating it, let's prevent that by looking at common, simple things that you can do to lifestyle changes that involve, at the real essence of it, eating real food.
That's the most important thing you can do.
Well, Eric Berg, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you all for joining Eric Burgundy on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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