Ketogenic diets have been shown to significantly help with depression, significantly help with anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, ADHD.
We're seeing some benefits here.
Today I sit down with Dr. Sean Baker, orthopedic surgeon, founder of Revero, and author of The Carnivore Diet.
I'll tell people I'm doing keto.
I mean, it's the only thing that works for me, actually.
But what happens when you take keto one step further?
I want you to convince me here that I should try carnivore.
It is basically a diet.
consisting of primarily just animal products.
So it would be meat, it would be fish, it would be eggs, it would be dairy products.
Dr. Baker emphasizes the simplicity of the carnivore diet and its potential health benefits.
They are uniquely satisfying.
Most people will notice better gastrointestinal function without the fiber.
For Dr. Baker, diet is only part of the larger picture as he challenges what he calls a flawed disease management system in modern medicine.
What does disease management mean?
Oh, you mean I'm supposed to put them on meds for the rest of their life?
I think if you treat the root cause of them, the disease is not a problem.
Urging people to take back control of their health through lifestyle changes.
I think food is critically important.
Sleep is important.
I think exercise and activity are important.
I think the sun is incredibly important.
Then I think also having a purpose in the community around you.
You can empower yourself to heal.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Sean Baker, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Hey, it's a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.
Thanks for having me.
And it's an amazing time, actually.
The food pyramid, the dietary guidelines have been updated for the first time in really time immemorial is perhaps a little bit too long, and they've changed.
And I think they've changed in a way that might actually work for you.
Why don't you tell me about that?
Yeah, well, as you guys know, RFK came in and he said he's going to flip the food pyramid upside down.
And you know, it's interesting when you look at the graphic that they submitted, you know, you see that upside-down pyramid.
That was done very intentionally, I believe.
And RFK has said he has been on a carnivore diet more or less for quite a while now.
He's really happy with that.
And as you read that, you know, in English we read, you know, left to right, top to bottom, the first thing you come to on that food pyramid now is a big old ribeye steak.
And it's not just any steak.
It's actually a ribeye steak, which I thought was quite, I think that was intentional.
And, you know, the main focus was to shift to greater emphasis on protein.
And, you know, we've demonized red meat in particular over the last really half century.
And so I think we've kind of shifted away from that.
And I think.
Oh, but why ribeye?
Well, you know.
Why is that intentional?
Well, I think because it's an acknowledgement that animal fat is actually not what's killing us, as we've been told for many, many years.
You know, we hear this sort of relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol and heart disease.
And there's a couple leaps that are being made that don't actually show endpoints.
You know, when we look at like randomized control trials on red meat, reducing red meat, increasing red meat, those don't show any real increase in cardiovascular.
So it's all these sort of intermediary biomarkers that they sort of make this argument on, or epidemiologic data, which is unfortunately what most of nutrition science is composed of, which is just weak data, unfortunately.
As someone who had a science background, there's pure sciences, math, physics, and so on and so forth.
And then there's more of the social science and nutrition science, which is, some people would say, almost a pseudoscience in many ways.
Tell me a little bit about this.
I take it you've looked through the dietary guidelines in some detail.
And of course, we know that meats and saturated fats are up.
But the biggest deal is, as they say, eat real food is the slogan, right?
How does that grab you?
Well, you know, I had commented several years ago because every five years we update the nutritional guidelines and they're hundreds of page long documents and they have these really sort of somewhat arbitrary rules that they go by.
It's based on the science they think they have.
And it's, you know, no one really goes to the grocery store carrying a dietary guidelines pack with them and no one's going to continue to do that.
I had commented several years ago, I think that we should probably align our doctor guidelines something like what Brazil had.
If you look at Brazil's dietary guidelines, it's very similar to what we have now.
It says cook at home, avoid hyper-processed, ultra-processed food, surround yourself with people you love, cook in a family environment, don't eat at restaurants as much, and avoid some of the marketing.
And I think that it's very basic.
It's very generalized.
It's not very specific, but I think that's all we really need.
I don't think we need these rigid rules, which we, unfortunately, that drives our policy.
Policy and the school systems, anything that takes federal money that feeds people has to abide by.
And so I think the sort of the overall message of let's just stop eating the, I like to call it human pet food.
So much of the grocery stores really, it just reminds me of that.
And if you look at like, remember when all these fake meats came out, you know, the Beyond Meat, who's, you know, if you've seen their stock price, like it went from $2.50 down to below a dollar now.
And if you look at the ingredients, it's hard to distinguish that from dog food.
It really is when you put the ingredients side by side.
And so we've been consuming this ultra-processed food, which, again, I call human pet food.
It acts kind of like a recreational drug.
And I think that's really what it is.
A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use and abuse them.
And that's something that I think getting away from that is undoubtedly going to, assuming people will do it.
Again, the guidelines are out there now, the execution.
That's the hard part.
How do we execute this?
And you probably know here in D.C., there's a lot of stuff that slows process down.
Sure.
And, you know, well, something you mentioned is really interesting because it's one thing, you know, you can have this food pyramid and you can look at it and say, roughly, I know what I should do according to these guidelines.
That's one thing.
But the letter, the small details all impact, for example, the massive amounts of funding that go towards school lunches, for example, and so forth, and what that will be.
To me, in a way, I wonder, like that almost feels like the biggest, the big game changer.
Because I remember looking at, you know, maybe years ago, looking at like some of the hospital food, I was like, I can't believe they give this to people.
I mean, I didn't even think about this stuff in detail, but I was like, really?
This is like what they give out of hospital?
Shouldn't it be like good food?
Because it's probably shouldn't have nutrition in it or something like that.
So there's this seemingly profound shift that should happen, right?
Or you tell me what you think.
Well, again, that food, upside-down food pyramid is a consumer-facing document.
The 10-page letter that was signed by Secretary Rollins and Secretary Kennedy basically said, this is how we think you should eat in general terms.
And that's what hopefully the average American will do, and they'll feed their family that way.
Now, the details of the guidelines, you know, really reduced added sugar.
They cut back on the grain recommendations.
They still leave a 10% saturated fat cap, which a lot of people in the low-carb keto sort of stratosphere are kind of like kind of grumbling about a little bit.
But overall, I think the changes are good if, again, the consumer population will actually adopt those.
And that's always a challenge.
Will people actually eat that?
Because people will argue before, hey, the guidelines before were reasonable, but no one would eat that way.
But I think folks like Nina Tychols have shown that the food industry has sort of tailored their products to meet the old guidelines.
Back in, I think it was 1990 when we had 11 servings of grain at the bottom.
That's the old food pyramid everybody's talking about.
It obviously shifted into my plate over the intervening years.
I mean, there has been a real de-emphasis of grain and a re-emphasis of meat, milk, you know, eggs and so on and so forth, seafood.
So I think that's an overall very good shift.
And there's something you mentioned about food being like a recreational drug.
And do you mean by that food has been intentionally made addictive?
And what do you know about that?
Actually, I've heard about this, but I've never really talked about it with anyone.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people know that, for instance, when the tobacco companies were broken up back, R.J. Reynolds and some of the other big companies, when we started to push back on the cigarettes, a lot of those companies end up buying some of these food companies.
Nabisco and some of the other ones were bought by these big tobacco companies.
And I actually had a woman who worked for one of those companies as a food scientist.
She was a chemist.
And she said her job was literally to design the food to be as addictive as possible.
And she had a tremendous amount of guilt about that.
She wanted to come work for our company because she just felt so guilty about the fact that she was in part responsible for addicting millions of us to this hyperpalatable, damaging food, which is what it's done.
It just sounds so unbelievable.
But the bottom line is, it has to be processed for you to be able to create that scenario, right, to make it addictive.
You can't just take a steak and make it addictive.
Yeah, there's a fellow by the name of Mosquitz back in the late 70s, early 80s, described something called the bliss point of food.
And so it was a special combination of salt, sugar, and fat that, you know, if you mix it together in a certain degree, it was irresistible for people.
Maybe you can make a steak addictive then.
You know, it's hard to get the sweet, sweet aspect in a steak.
But yeah, steak is, I would say I have, I probably suffer from steak addiction.
I would admit that, yeah.
And, you know, you mentioned ketosis.
Why don't you explain to me like how a keto diet works?
Like how is that and what's actually happening and how that's different from normal?
Yeah, so keto diets have been around for, gosh, I mean, they've been used therapeutically since the 1920s.
They were first shown to have significant impacts on epileptics.
And so you may be familiar with some of the origins of that story.
There's something called the Charlie Foundation where that was talking about that significantly.
That, diabetes, autism, I mean, a whole range of impacts.
Yeah, there's, you know, and this is some of the great work that's being done by the Bazuki Foundation, funding a lot of the science research around this.
We're showing that ketogenic diets have been shown to significantly help with depression, significantly help with anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obviously epilepsy, ADHD.
We're seeing some benefits in patients with dementia.
So it has this tremendously beneficial cognitive effects on ketosis seems to.
And this is something that, you know, five years ago, if you said that, people thought you were nuts because how can a diet impact my childhood trauma or whatever, whatever the whatever the issue might have been.
But our brain is an organ just like our liver is, just like our heart is.
And it is clearly influenced by what we put in, you know, what we feed it.
But ketosis, you know, again, babies are born in a ketogenic state.
This is sort of our natural state when we're born.
You know, obviously, humans are omnivores.
I write in my book, The Carnivore.humans are omnivores.
There's other people out there making the argument that humans are carnivores.
I approach it as this is a therapeutic tool that is incredibly beneficial and it helps for resetting things.
But as far as what is being in ketosis does, it regulates.
We have a more steady sense of energy.
You may have noticed that on a ketogenic diet, you don't have these ups and downs and the crashes.
And I think that impacts our mood lability.
We're more stable when we're kind of evened out.
A lot of people call it a keto calm or some people call it a zero carb zen where they're just kind of happy and chilled out.
They're not like, you know, bouncing around so much.
There are impacts on fat metabolism.
We know that being in ketosis sort of interacts with something called hormone-sensitive lipase to promote fat metabolism.
So there are clear benefits to ketosis for many, many people.
Yeah, and I mean, the bottom line is you're burning fat because there's no carbs to burn and that's the next thing that's burning.
Is that basically, yeah, that's kind of the hierarchy.
When we start to get low on stored sugar in the form of glycogen or blood glucose, ketones become more useful.
So we always have some glucose in our body.
We always have some ketones.
We always have some free fatty acid.
We always have some lactate floating around as different sort of energy substrates that we can metabolize.
And that just shifts it in one direction or the other.
And the question is, what is optimal for humans?
I think that's a debate that many people have.
There's a lot of people that they like the carbohydrates.
And for a lot of people, and I'm not here to tell you that everybody needs to be on a carnivore diet because I don't agree with that.
But I do think that many people, more people than you think, would benefit from it.
And it's educational.
If you do it for three months, you will learn a heck of a body.
You'll learn about how your body interacts, what foods cause problems.
My background is an orthopedic surgery.
So I spent years replacing people's knees and doing trauma surgery and hips and shoulder scopes and knee scopes.
And one thing that I remember a few people were telling me that, hey, Doc, whenever I eat bread, my knee hurts.
And I thought they were nuts.
I just thought they were some crazy person or whatever.
Let me look at your MRI, right?
But then years after years of doing this, one of the most common things I see, and I'm about to turn 60, and so I'm running, jumping, doing all these athletic activities because my knees don't hurt anymore.
My back doesn't hurt.
And that is in large part impacted by the foods I eat.
So the foods we consume, a lot of people, they'll wake up the next morning with a sore shoulder or a sore neck and they'll think they slept on it wrong.
It's probably maybe it was a chocolate cake you had last night.
So if you start thinking about it that way, you'll start to discover that food impacts you in ways you would never even attribute to that.
And most physicians are unaware of it because we have no training on that.
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And now back to the interview.
You know, the thing that I know you for and probably millions of people know you for is the carnivore diet.
And I'm quite interested.
I myself generally do keto.
Growing Out of Ice Age Diets00:03:59
I had a few years recently where I stopped doing keto.
I can tell you it was a bad idea.
I'm back to doing keto again.
And I'm pretty, when I do it, it's great.
It's simple.
It's not a lot of rules.
You just like keep the carbs down, whatever you do.
And once in a while, you can get some carbs.
That's fine.
But mostly keep them down, you know, at a very, very low level.
Now, but carnivore seems to be like a whole, like another, another step up.
And so in a way, I want you to convince me.
I want you to convince me here that I should try carnivore.
Well, you know, as I said, my background as a physician, my goal is to take people that are unhealthy and make them healthier.
And I think that is something that we're able to do through diets like a carnivore diet.
And we use ketogenic diets too as well.
But certainly for people that struggle with following routines, struggle with complexity, counting macros and trying to figure out if something hits a temporary.
Yeah, that's me.
That's me to the team.
So very much it simplifies that.
And you mentioned as your background in evolutionary biology that a lot of people will argue that a ketogenic state was essential to survival for a long period of time while humans were dealing with ice age conditions, particularly throughout southern Europe and other parts.
And so the only way to really reach a ketogenic state, given the resources they had at that time, would probably be from hunting animals.
I don't think there are a lot of mangoes and things like that growing in Europe during the ice age.
I think that would be, I think most people would agree with that.
So it is something that a lot of people, like I said, people that have struggled with food addiction and probably some people estimate about 14% of the population.
It kind of runs parallel to alcoholism, struggle with what we would consider food addiction.
And I think it's a real issue.
And a lot of people would readily admit they have problems with addiction types of food.
How do you define that entirely?
Because obviously you have to eat.
And so how much liking of eating makes an addiction?
Well, I think, you know, I think if we look at just addiction in general, what defines an addiction?
You know, it's like, are we addicted to breathing?
Well, yeah, we have to do it.
But, you know, I think if we knowingly are harming ourselves, and I think most of us know that if I sit down and eat chocolate chip cookies all day, it's not going to do anything good for me, but I can't stop it.
I'm compelled to do it because the flavor is so overwhelmingly, you know, it gives me this sort of reward system.
So I think in the face of the fact that you are, you know, gaining weight, becoming inflamed, developing, you know, chronic diseases, and you continue to do that, to me, that represents, you know, an addiction.
So I think that's how we define it with food.
And there are people that will literally, you know, people will say, well, it's not like they're out in the back alley prostituting themselves out for a hit of sugar.
That doesn't happen.
Oh, gosh.
But I will tell you, what do you think?
If we made sugar illegal and we made it exorbitantly expensive, and if we made it, you know, shunned by society like we did with heroin or something else like that or cocaine, you probably would have people that would be a good idea.
I am sure.
No, I mean, I know because I think I have a bit of that kind of reaction to sugar and frankly other things.
As you're telling me about this, I'm kind of wondering myself, am I a food addict?
I'm not sure.
Maybe with something like those really nicely roasted almonds, I can do some serious damage to a bag of those.
And not in a good way.
I mean, too much, right?
Yeah.
Well, like I said, we've designed food to be very addictive.
That was done expressly, intently, and it's been very effective.
It's gotten to the point, it was interesting.
I read a study a few years ago about the fact that a lot of it was, I think it might have been millennials, might have been Gen Z folks, were eating less and less breakfast cereals.
And we're thinking, well, that's probably a good thing because this bunch of sugary garbage most of the time.
But the reason was not because they were concerned about the health.
The reason was, is because it was too much work because they had to actually rinse a bowl and pour it in a dish where what they want is something they rip a package open, shove it in your mouth and throw it away.
The Impact of Fiber on Gut Health00:12:18
And so we've gotten to the point where the convenience food has also become such a problem for us.
Right.
Absolutely.
I think, and I, you know, that's the reason why I like meatsticks so much because I can just have them in my bag when I'm one of these people.
I get focused, work, you know, and then eight hours can pass.
And, you know, the meatsticks are.
It's interesting.
The meatsticks are actually becoming one of the more popular snipe food items.
They're one of the most rapidly growing markets right now for that.
So that's good news in my view.
Okay, good to hear that.
And I always try to get the grass-fed, you know, sort of sort of, I don't know if organic every time.
But listen, so, okay, carnivore diet.
It's not just red meat.
Can you just give me a picture of how it works broadly?
I know that people should do this in consultation with a professional and all this stuff.
But how does it look like?
So, prior to the carnivore diet being called the carnivore diet, and I was the guy that popularized that name when I wrote the book back, you know, seven or eight years ago.
And before it was called a zero-carb diet, so it was basically people avoiding all carbohydrates.
It kind of was a sort of a heretical outcast from the keto group.
They were kind of kicked out of keto because they were too extreme, right?
And I ended up like following some of these, you know, listening to some of these people on social media, and I thought they were absolutely crazy.
I said, You guys are crazy.
This is nuts.
Aren't you going to get scurvy?
What about fiber and all those types of things?
So, basically, it is basically a diet consisting of primarily just animal products.
So, it would be meat, it would be fish, it would be eggs, it would be dairy products, it would be anything that sort of comes from an animal for the most part.
So, most people tend to gravitate towards red meat probably because it tends to have a little more fat.
So, when you remove all the carbohydrates from your diet, you need energy, you need a source of energy.
And if you just try to eat lean protein, like if you had a diet where it was just pure chicken breasts and things like that, you would last about a week on that and then you would be starving.
So, the red meat seems to fill that niche for getting enough fat.
And I think if we go back again, you know, into a sort of an evolutionary look of hunters and gatherers, you know, if it's like if you have a spear, and I mean, there's good data that humans hunted with spears initially, where are you going to get your most calories from?
You're not going to get birds, they are going to be hard.
It's going to be hard to kill a bunch of birds with a spear.
So, we were hunting these big animals and these big, you know, woolly mammoths and mastodons and elephants.
And so, we were eating a lot of fat-based meat for a while.
Yeah, you know, and just a lot of gazelles, deer, all this, all this stuff.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, the gazelles and the deer are a little leaner.
And so, that's when we developed sort of the range technology, bow and arrow technology, you know, adelatls and those types of things.
But we started out, I think, you know, eating a lot of fat, and I think that was our default setting.
As the animals got leaner, we had to incorporate more carbohydrates into our diet.
And there's some interesting research.
You know, again, I know some people have different perspectives on evolution in human beings, and some are sort of a creationist model.
But I think there's some compelling data from that regard.
Meat is interesting in that, and maybe you've experienced it, it's very satiating.
You know, we now live in a time where we have all these weight loss drugs, which are based on making you feel full, these GLP-1s and the various different encretant hormones.
And meat does a very good job of doing that.
And I don't know if you've ever noticed, like, if you like, steak and eggs used to be a very popular breakfast, you know, in the 1950s, 1940s.
And again, NASA asked astronauts when they went to the moon, what did they eat for breakfast?
They had steak and eggs before they went to the moon.
Kind of tells you something interesting.
But that provides a tremendous level of not only satiation, which is the acute feeling of being full, but also satiety, which is long-term.
You know, you're not hungry for a while.
So a lot of people find that when they go on this type of diet, you know, they might have a big breakfast and they don't feel like lunch.
And then, you know, they may not be hungry until dinner.
So it's really, it really simplifies nutrition for a lot of people.
That's fascinating.
I mean, I do tend to naturally gravitate more towards the red meat in terms of like, you know, what I, what I like.
And I think the fat is a part of that.
I don't like the gristle, though.
I'm like really against that.
Well, I think that's why I invented cooking.
So it's tough to chew.
But yeah.
So, okay, so I have a picture now.
And so it's, you know, is it, it's, it sounds actually pretty simple because, you know, what, you just eat the amount of that that you want.
And yeah, I mean, you know, as far as the amounts go, I mean, I can give you, you know, sort of rough estimates.
You know, most, you know, like say someone your size probably would eat about two pounds of meat a day.
That would be, that would probably supply all your caloric needs, all your energy needs, all your protein needs.
You would probably be satiated, full, and probably pretty happy, quite honestly, with that.
Now, What most people end up doing is, as I said, eat about twice a day.
There are some things to be cognizant of.
As we go from a higher carb state, and you said you mentioned you went from a keto to a higher carb, back to keto, and you probably see shifts in fluid.
And we see changes in our physiology as our insulin levels come down, which most people would argue is generally a good thing.
We see less retention of salt, less retention of water.
We lose a lot of water weight initially.
So you have to just be cognizant of the fact that you might have to stay on top of your hydration.
Your bowel frequency is going to change.
Whenever I see some people talking about these whole food, plant-based diets, which eat lots and lots of organic fruits and vegetables, honestly, much of that nutrition just ends up going in the toilet.
So you're basically just spending a lot of money to feed your toilet.
When you go on a carnivore diet, you end up having less bowel movements.
I know it's kind of an interesting topic to talk about.
Well, you're saying more of the thing that you're putting into you goes into your body and less of it gets to be.
You basically absorb just about everything you consume when you consume it.
That's fascinating.
That's our anatomy set up, our anatomy and physiology.
We have a very robustly acidic environment in our stomach, and that was done for a reason.
It's very expensive energetically to maintain that significantly gastric acid pH of about 1.5 at rest.
And because of that, there's a purpose behind that.
Evolutionary biologists, I'm sure you're aware of the fact that things are there for a reason.
And the consequence of that is meat is largely what we're well designed to deal with.
And so all the extra fiber that we consume, we can't absorb it.
We have a microbiome that will, and there's been a lot of emphasis on healthy microbiomes and feeding our gut prebiotics and probiotics and dialing that in.
And with meat, that's a non-issue.
It's because you're getting the nutrition.
You don't have to rely on a microbiome to be dialed in perfectly so that the plants you feed that can maybe get absorbed better.
As you probably are aware, fiber we can't absorb.
We have no capacity for that.
Well, let's talk about that because that's one of the, I mean, you know, I went and looked at the things that people say, you know, the criticisms, right?
Like how are you going to hurt yourself?
I've heard fiber is necessary.
I don't never heard anyone argue it's not really.
So, but you don't get any fiber in this model.
Correct.
Yeah.
So I will say that in my view and my experience and have taken care of thousands of patients doing these types of diets, many, many, if not most of those people will notice better gastrointestinal function without the fiber.
I know it's kind of sort of heretical to talk about that, but that's the reality.
Now, the benefits of fiber, and there are some, I think it's a conditionally beneficial thing.
If you're going to eat a standard Western mixed diet, fiber makes a lot of sense because it's going to mitigate some of the glycemic excursions because when you eat, you know, I say, let's compare drinking a glass of apple juice versus eating an apple.
The fiber in the apple is going to slow down that release of glucose into the system.
So you don't have to choose some excursion.
So in my scenario, what I don't eat any carbohydrates is not an issue.
The other big issue that people talk about is the impact of fiber on the microbiome.
So we have these bacteria, these symbiotic, some people consider parasitic, but symbiotic organisms that will take fiber and convert it into something called a short-chain fatty acid.
And the short-chain fatty acid is protective to the gut lining.
It thickens the mucus, particularly in the colon.
However, you can get the same effect with protein.
You can get the same effect by consuming short-chain fatty acids.
Like, for instance, butter has something called butyric acid or butyrate, which was named because they discovered it in butter.
That provides the same level of effect.
More importantly, being in a state of ketosis, which you had familiarity with, the principal ketone body is beta-hydroxybutyrate, which sounds very similar to butyrate because it's got a hydroxyl molecule on the end of that.
That freely reverses.
So when you have a lot of ketones and ketone bodies in your bloodstream, you get the same effect as you would if you were consuming fiber.
And there's a nice paper that was written by Lucy Maling and Tommy Wood a few years ago at University of Washington looking at the metabolic flexibility of the gut.
And they basically say, look, fiber does all these good things, but you can get those same benefits from a higher fat, you know, animal-based diet.
You know, when it comes to the microbiome, I've had a number of people on the show talking about microbiome.
There's one particular specialist in this area.
She does, you know, fecal transplants for people and things like that.
What she noticed during COVID was that people who had basically advanced COVID had their gut biomes wiped out and the nobifidus and things like that.
Probably is it Simone Golden?
Sabine Hazan.
Simone Hazan.
I've met her yet.
I've never met her.
And no, but the really interesting thing about this, as you're talking about this, I suspect that as you change your, because this is like a, what's going on in there is just an ever-changing wonderland or something like this.
Like that's how I view it, right?
So I imagine as you're going to meet, there's just going to be other stuff that is in there that likes that type of a setup more than the stuff that likes the sugar and whatever else.
For sure.
There was a study done in Croatia last year looking at microbiomes on a bunch of long-term, when they looked at a couple of people on a long-term carnivore.
One particular fellow was in there six years on the diet and his gut microbiome diversity was in the top 10%.
And it had a lot of these fiber-loving bacteria despite not consuming fiber.
So it's kind of an interesting observation.
So they've looked at sort of alpha diversity in like Inuit Eskimos who used to consume a primarily animal-based diet, very low in fiber.
And they also showed tremendous diversity.
So I think, as you mentioned, the microbiome is so complicated.
It's so complex.
It's changing every 10 to 15 minutes.
These microorgums can just rapidly divide and multiply and shift around.
And so many things impact the temperature, the weather, the time of the year, what you eat.
All these things affect this.
And so I sort of pose sort of the question is, does a healthy person have a healthy microbiome rather than the other way around?
It's like, are we putting the cart before the horse when we try to optimize for a particular microbiome, saying this is what healthy people have?
When I think it's more healthy people have a healthy microbiome.
And how do you assess health?
And I think that's the real question here.
How do we define health?
Is it a collection of biomarkers and microscopic things?
Are we missing the forest for the trees?
Or as my friend Rob Wolf, who is an author of the paleo diet, used to like say, how do you look?
How do you feel?
How do you perform?
I think that's what most of us care about, honestly.
I could care less what my potassium is right now.
I care that I feel good.
I care that I can perform reasonably well and hopefully look halfway decent.
Well, so the first time I talked about the carnivore diet on this show, it's kind of come up a little bit here and there, but was with Michaela Peterson, one of the kind of famous adopters, right, who literally transformed her life in this foundational way with this diet.
So, and inflammation massively went down for her.
Excess Fat, Inflammation, and Joints00:04:56
That's what I understand.
And so why does that happen?
Yeah.
So I think a lot of inflammatory issues, a lot of autoimmune issues for that matter, seem to start in the gut.
You know, there's some people who say, you know, all disease starts in the gut.
I think there's a lot of truth to that because our gut, as you may or may not know, is our largest interface with the outside environment.
For our mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestines, all that is external to the body.
So we're like a giant donut wrapped around this little hole, which is our digestive tract, right?
And that area with all the villi and microvilli equates to about the size of a tennis court.
So that is a surface area external to our body that our digestive tract represents.
Not only that, our digestive tract, unlike our skin, is designed to bring things in, right?
And so what happens is by eating foods, certain foods, drugs, alcohol, things like that, we disrupt the integrity of that selectively semi-permeal membrane.
And so when that membrane is disturbed and we have this hyperpermeability, some people call it a leaky gut, we start to absorb all these things that aren't supposed to be there.
Bacterial lipopolysaccharides and other things get in there, and that leads to an inflammatory immune response.
And so we see this chronic inflammation occurring.
So when you fix that, amazing things happen.
So, you know, if you think about...
Like your knee, because you mentioned the knees.
I remember like she had some, like your knee was just done, right, man.
She had an ankle and a hip, hip replacement, and an ankle replacement.
Because when I first appeared on Rogan's podcast back in 2017, I think she saw me on there and started looking at some of this.
And then she adopted a few, I think six months later or something like that.
And then she got on there and got her dad to do it.
And, you know, the rest is kind of history in that regard.
But yeah, I mean, as an orthopedic surgeon, I was trained, you know, particularly for things like osteoarthritis, which is a common, most common arthritis.
We have these inflammatory arthropathies like rheumatoid arthritis or psoriatic arthritis, which are kind of a little bit different.
We recognize that as largely a biological inflammatory process.
But the reality is, even osteoarthritis is largely inflammatory.
It's largely biological.
It's less mechanical.
Yes, you can have knee trauma.
Yes, you can weigh too much.
Yes, those things will have a mechanical effect upon the knee joint or the ankle or the hip or whatever it might be.
But the reality is excess adiposity, like having extra belly fat, we liberate these inflammatory adipokines or cytokines, which will then in turn lead to inflammation in the effect of joints.
Explain this to me.
So because you're fatter, you somehow have more inflammatory arbitration.
Absolutely.
Really?
Yeah.
So how does that work?
Well, because there's something called adipokines, which are liberated from these fat cells.
And many of them are.
So just when you have more of it, you get more of those.
Correct, correct.
That's part of it.
There's also an interesting, so a couple studies came over.
University of Alabama a few years ago did a study looking at specifically knee osteoarthritis.
And they found that they compared a low fat versus a low carb group.
And by far, the low carb group was much better for our osteoarthritis in the ADA.
It's had better symptomatic relief.
There was also another study looking at insulin levels.
And people that had high circulating insulin levels activate something called a fibroblast-like synovia site.
So synovia sites are the cells that make the synovial fluid.
Synovial fluid is the liquid that's inside of our joint that lubricates.
It's a lubricant.
And so when those cells are exposed to high levels of insulin, and the biggest driver of insulin in the body is largely carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, right?
So when you're eating the sugars and the starches and refined grains and things like that, that drives high levels of insulin.
High levels of insulin then lead to an increase in these synovia sites secreting inflammatory cytokines, which will then damage the joints that they live in.
So we get this acceleration of arthritis.
I mean, that's truly interesting.
So it's almost like there's this compounding effect because you weigh more, joints are impacted more.
There's more of this, these cytokine, protocytokine substances.
Yeah, one of the most impactful things you can do, and I'm a fairly simplistic guy.
I mean, my job was to hit joints with hammers and saws, right, as a doctor, right?
But I think when it comes to like, how do we assess our health, you know, one of the most impactful things you can do is just lose the excess central fat.
You know, if you have extra belly fat, man or woman, that is driving inflammation.
It's driving all kinds of metabolic problems for you.
It's associated with dementia, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, you know, inflammatory issues, depression, everything associated with that.
So that's a critical importance to lose that extra extra body fat.
Now, so let's talk about carnivore or extreme keto, really, which is what it is.
Critical Importance of Fat Loss00:02:07
So now, let's say you convert to that, but you still eat a lot, you're still going to get fat.
Yep, for sure.
Yeah, there's a mythology.
And I, you know, again, carnivore has turned into this almost, there's almost a cult like following around.
There's a lot of just information that's out there where people say, well, you can just eat as much, you know, ribeye steaks as you want.
You'll never gain an ounce.
That's patently false.
I've proven it to myself.
I mean, you still have to dial things in with a reason.
But the nice thing is it's almost very easy to do so because I find that if I eat certain foods, you know, if you go to, you know, like 1967, who was the cowardly lion, remember the actor that played that from the Wizard of Oz from the 1930s?
Anyway, there's a commercial with him saying, you know, lays potato chips, but you can't eat just one.
You know, he's dressed up as a devil, right?
But you can't eat just one.
And he's right.
You can't.
So I know that anytime I start eating certain foods, I just can't stop.
I probably have this sort of food addiction.
You know, there's some people that can moderate things.
Oh, no, I'm not that.
That's why I'm thinking I'm a food advocate because I kind of get compulsive with it.
It's like, well, you know, there's only 10 of them left.
You might as well finish.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's only 10 Oreos left.
You count it.
Well, okay, I ate an X one now.
There's only two level.
I might as well finish that.
But come to think of it, I never overeat meatsticks.
I don't think I do anyway.
They are uniquely satisfying.
You know, when we start talking about some of these new drugs, the GLP-1 drugs, a lot of people are using right now, and they're the next trillion-dollar drug.
I'm sure you're aware of everybody on the Ozempics and all those other drugs.
And so they work on hormones.
It's not like, because when people say it's all about calories, but yet these drugs really don't have much to do with calories directly.
I mean, yeah, ultimately they impact how much we eat, but it's a hormonal effect.
So we are stimulating these hormones that suppress our appetite, GLP-1, GIP, and some of the other medications that are being used.
And food does that to a degree as well.
Not to the extent.
I mean, these are 100x.
But I mean, again, you're getting obviously side effects.
You're getting issues.
GLP-1 Drugs Controversy00:04:56
Exactly, because none of this is worry-free entirely.
Whenever you take one of these drugs, there's some portion of people that react to them.
Yeah, some people are going to have significantly negative outcomes.
Most people will do okay.
I think the data on that shows that most people don't tolerate it long-term.
Most people end up stopping, I think about 70%, at least in some of the studies that I've shown.
And the unfortunate thing is most people will rapidly regain most of the weight back.
So it is not a cure.
It's one of these drugs.
And this is the whole raison debt of the pharmaceutical industry.
Create drugs people have to take for the rest of their life.
So it's a never-ending profit model.
And it's not like anything on there.
And they're very open about that.
They say, look, if you have hypertension, you're going to take your beta block or your diuretic the rest of your life, whatever it might be.
That's just like that.
So they're posing this as just another market that says obesity is a disease.
You have it for the rest of your life.
And the only solution is to continuously inject yourself with these medications at infinitum.
I would contend there's other ways.
And there's probably better ways.
And there's ways that are unfortunately not as profitable.
But that's the reality.
You know, you just mentioned something.
I think as a general rule, right?
Let me throw this out there as an idea.
Whenever you're thinking about some sort of intervention, ask yourself, is there a massive profit potential for a company in this thing?
And if there is, look at it a little more closely.
Maybe that's a good, maybe that's a good relationship.
Well, I think the question a lot of people, you know, particularly when it comes to healthcare, because I think our healthcare, unfortunately, the incentives for the American healthcare system are really, you know, they're really kind of perverse, quite honestly.
And I think that the first question you ask is if you go to the doctor and you get diagnosed with, say, some autoimmune disease, you got Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, you ask, Doc, why?
Why do I have this?
You're not going to get a good answer.
You're going to get something like, maybe it's genetic.
We don't really know.
It's unlucky or something like you don't get these good answers of why.
And because we don't ask why anymore, we just sort of outsource everything to the pharmaceutical companies who will tell us how to treat it, how to manage those symptoms.
We went from a, I think initially medicine was about curing disease, it was about creating health to disease management, which I think was adopted somewhere in the 1990s or something like that.
We started talking about disease management.
I remember hearing that term for the first time at some point in my career.
What does disease management mean?
What does that mean to manage someone's disease?
Oh, you mean I'm supposed to put them on meds for the rest of their life?
That's what disease management is.
And I think, you know, I believe that you can cure a lot of these diseases.
I think you can if you treat the root cause, if you remove the insult, the problem, then the disease is not a problem as long as you continue not to indulge in that.
You know, it's just like if I, you know, if I have a patient there that's hitting himself over the head every day with a hammer, he comes in complaining of headaches, and I keep giving him aspirin.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like, hey, man, why don't you just quit hitting your head over the head with a hammer?
That might work too.
Yeah.
And then you just have to figure out what the hammer is.
Correct.
Because sometimes that's not obvious.
And it isn't.
And because we don't study this stuff, because we don't, you know, one of the things, you know, people will talk about, well, you know, most physicians will say, yeah, I talk to my patients about disease and lifestyle.
They'll say, hey, you know, you really should lose a few pounds.
Hey, maybe you should clean up your diet, stop eating all the garbage, and maybe walk a little more, right?
So they'll tell them to do this.
And then the patient will come back six months later.
They haven't lost any weight.
They're still complaining.
So after a few rounds of this, or maybe a few thousand patients they try this with and without success, they just say, people are never going to change.
Just give them the drugs.
So they've been sort of beaten down into this.
Now, the reality is, as an orthopedic surgeon, if I said, you know, Jan, I need to replace your knee, right?
I have literally millions of dollars of resources at my disposal to get that outcome.
I can, you know, I can send you to the lab, I can send you therapy, MRI imaging, x-ray imaging.
I've got pre-op or our suite, $200 a minute that I'm spending in the operating room, and I can get your knee down.
And then all the post-care, right?
So I've got millions of dollars of research.
But if I say, you know, it'd be a good idea if you were to change your diet, walk a little more, work on your sleep, I get effectively zero resource for that.
So I tell you to do it on your own, right?
So I don't provide you anything.
And it's not a surprise.
You're not successful at it because I didn't really do anything for you.
So that's why I think what we're doing with our company is we're providing those resources so people actually can be successful at lifestyle.
And I think if we change our healthcare system to allow for incentivizing physicians to actually get people healthy, to actually help them to make those lifestyle changes, we'll have a much better outcome.
What about, I don't know, I take magnesium, for example.
There's kind of a few things like that.
Do you get, you just assume you're going to get enough of everything you need?
Vitamins and Cholesterol Levels00:15:38
Maybe vitamin D is another thing people popularly take.
I don't know.
Or is this something you need to consider supplements?
Well, I think that, you know, Supplement industry is obviously a huge industry, I think, a hundred billion dollar industry or something like that.
I think most supplements over time have been proven to be ineffective, you know, worthless.
In some cases, harmful for many people.
I do think there are some supplements that actually have sort of shown that they're beneficial.
Magnesium probably being one of them.
Well, and I mean, you know, vitamin D levels, you know, would do a lot for you not to get COVID.
And this is one of the papers showing that.
The question about that is, you know, is it the underlying health that results in the higher vitamin D levels, or is it just a pure deficiency?
And I think it's probably a little combination of both or maybe more so of the underlying health because we see that, and we saw a lot of times that, you know, looking at outcomes, supplementing vitamin D didn't change the outcomes.
You know, it didn't change cardiovascular outcomes.
And they, you know, they played with the amounts and sort of got different results a little bit.
But in many cases, these are really signs of an underlying problem rather than the problem itself.
You know, it's like, there's an interesting anecdote back from the 1920s when they looked at vitamin D.
So they studied, again, these Inuit folks up, I think they're up in Greenland or up in Labrador, somewhere in Canada, somewhere from your homeland, right?
And they found there were two groups.
One group, and this is like 1920s, they had very low vitamin D levels because up there, you know, in the polar regions, not a lot of sunlight, you know, particularly in the wintertime.
So they all were low in vitamin D. One group developed what was called rickets, which is a childhood disease of low vitamin D, and one did not, even though they had the same vitamin D levels.
Well, it turned out that this group was eating their natural native, pure, you know, you know, marine mammal seafood diet.
These guys had incorporated flour, sugar, canned goods back in the 1920s.
So even with the same vitamin D levels, one group was symptomatic, one that was not.
So it's probably more than just the level itself.
So that's why.
So you're saying these processed foods somehow made the vitamin D less impactful?
Probably so.
Yeah, it probably either drove up the requirement.
So like for instance, even the USDA, RDA, formally recognizes.
So like we know that there's a zinc requirement, and I can't remember what the number is, but there's a number for zinc.
And if your diet includes X amount of phytic acid, where do you get phytic acid?
You get it from things like grains and legumes.
So if you have a lot of phytic acid in your diet, that zinc requirement basically doubles or triples, right?
So you've got to eat more zinc.
So again, depending on what your baseline diet is, these nutrients may have differential requirements.
You know, there's this, I'm just remembering something years ago that I think my parents were into.
Now we're talking about the 80s, basically, right?
Dr. Adamo, does this ring a bell?
I don't know.
Blood type.
Blood type.
Yeah, well, no, exactly.
Blood type guy.
And his argument was, if I recall, thinking back to the 80s, that certain blood types require dramatically different diets as ideal diets for that blood type.
So these types of people should actually eat a lot of meat and a lot of fat.
And these types of people actually are more, they're better eating plant-based or something like it, or a mix.
Is there anything like that?
Because there's, of course, quite considerable variation among people.
I think people's capacity to tolerate a variety of food is certainly impacted by their heritage, by their genetics.
I think that's true.
I think that, again, I can talk to data on people that have pursued a carnivore diet, and I've asked them specifically this question.
How many of you guys are typo?
How many guys are A, A, B, you know, B, O negative, and so on and so forth.
And I saw no pattern.
I mean, it was basically, it was basically the general population.
You know, the, like I'm an O negative guy, so I'm representing about 8% of the population.
Universal donor.
I'm the universal donor.
So right now, I'll give you some blood.
But yeah, I haven't seen that in carnivore.
However, what I would say is, you know, probably much of the world has problems with dairy.
You know, there's, I think, something, some estimates like 60% of the population is lactose, you know, intolerant.
And so we have, and probably certain people handle grains better and certain people handle other things better.
I think meat is one of those universal things.
I think that if you take a human being, a normal, healthy, young human being that hasn't been exposed to any kind of diseases, they will probably do fine on meat.
Again, I've not seen anything to indicate that there's a blood type specific for a meat-based diet.
So maybe you can tell me about this because I've been learning in the last few years that a lot of what I've known about cholesterol has been wrong.
I've kind of known that a lot of eggs isn't a problem, for example.
Where do things stand with that?
And of course, this is highly relevant to a carnivore diet.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So when we talk about heart disease, and this is what a lot of people are concerned about, carnivore diets, and we see the people that are critical of it, you know, we don't know what the long term is.
I think it's interesting to see how this has evolved.
When I first started talking about this 10 years ago, people were absolutely sure that you would drop dead within two or three months from scurvy or something.
Now, that didn't happen.
Then they were convinced there was no benefit to it.
Then we started to see thousands and thousands of people start putting disease in remission.
So then they're like, okay, now we'll accept that it can be useful as a therapeutic intervention, which I think is great.
But they're like, but if you do this long term, you're definitely going to die of heart disease too early.
You're going to get colon cancer, all these types of things.
And again, these are all very speculative.
And so, for instance, when it comes to, and this is where I think at the beginning of our conversation, we started talking about the food guide, more and more people are starting to realize that the data, the outcome data looking at things like red meat and heart disease and cancer have not been shown in high-level studies, particularly randomized control trials, to increase it in any way, shape, or form, any meaningful shape or form.
So for instance, there's a fellow by the name of Professor Gordon Guy, who is at McMaster's up in Canada.
He is considered the father of evidence-based medicine.
In fact, he coined that term back in 1991 in a single author paper about evidence-based medicine.
In 2019, he was a senior author on a panel called Nutrix who came out and said, and they did the largest extensive review on red meat ever done, like 15 scientists from around the world.
And they concluded that there is no strong evidence to say that red meat is linked to heart disease, to diabetes, to cancer, or anything else, and just continue to eat it, as you will.
Now, that, of course, was met with extreme anger and frustration.
They actually sued the FTC to try to get the journal, the Animals of Internal Medicine, to retract those studies.
They never did.
But this is the outrage.
But why would that be?
I mean, because it goes wrong with these people.
Because there are financial interests, obviously there's some financial interests involved in this.
But so it's all astroturfing or are people actually outraged?
Well, probably a little combination of both.
I mean, I think there's some people that have actually bought into it.
There are people that take it to heart that I've been told my grandmother told me I should eat lots of vegetables and eat low-fat.
And that's what I believe.
And this offends my sensibilities on that.
So we don't have high-level evidence, direct evidence, saying that red meat consumption leads to heart disease or really anything else.
It's all kind of circumstantial and weak at best.
But this study, bottom line, is there's no particular relationship to any of these problems with red meat.
Basically, that was the conclusion.
Basically, the outcome, and again, Gordon Guy, who founded something called the GRADE, which is used to sort of evaluate the strength of evidence base, he says any evidence that would point to red meat being problematic is extremely weak.
So there's at best a very, very weak effect.
Not enough even to change anyone's recommendations.
And so, but more to the point is that we do know that certain people on low-carb diets will see their cholesterol go up.
That is an absolute phenomenon that occurs.
It happens particularly as people get lean.
And it's kind of an interesting phenomenon because if you take, like, there's the first randomized control trial, and this is going to happen up in Canada.
Again, I'm talking to a lot of Canadian things are doing.
So, Canadians are doing some good things around this stuff lately.
And they're going to look at these obese patients that are pre-diabetic and put them on basically a beef-based diet with a small amount of carbohydrate, but it's mostly a carnivore diet.
And I suspect we'll see them lose weight.
Their glycemic numbers will improve.
Probably their cholesterol will go down in that group.
And the reason we say that is because in 2025, January, Adrian Sotomodo, who's a PhD from Oxford and also an MD, did a meta-analysis on 41 randomized control trials on low-carb diets.
And he found that the amount of saturated fat had minimal impact on cholesterol levels.
What really drove cholesterol levels high was when patients got lean.
So there is this concept called the lipid energy model that was put out by a guy named an engineer, surprisingly, named Dave Feldman, and now several PhDs and other MDs have now sort of co-opted that and have published several studies on this.
And what this says is as we draw down our carbohydrate storage areas, like our glycogen, liver glycogen, muscle glycogen, our body becomes increasingly reliant on fat traffic.
So we traffic more lipid in our bloodstream to meet those energy demands.
That is a different situation than if we just overconsume and we've got all this energy like, you know, sitting in our bloodstream.
And so the question is, are they identical?
If you just eat a bunch and you're overeating and you're obese and you have these high cholesterol levels, is that the same thing as a lean person eating a low-carb diet that had high cholesterol levels?
And the data thus far seems to indicate that, no, it's not the same situation.
That these people that are lean with higher cholesterol seem to, and again, this is, I don't want to be too definitive here because it's still evolving, seem to have less tendency towards developing heart disease.
Because really the issue is the plaque, right, in the arteries and so forth, because the cholesterol is supposed to lead to that.
Well, the cholesterol, I mean, again, the classic lipid model is that high cholesterol levels, you know, the more particles you have, the more likely you are to have plaque basically building up in the vessels.
It's a direct cause and effect situation.
But just you're saying this cholesterol might be different somehow.
So we do know that the cholesterol can differ qualitatively.
We can have oxidized cholesterol.
We can have cholesterol that's sort of big and less atherogenic, and there's different subtypes.
There's a lot of emphasis on what's called APOB now.
So they say there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.
Well, yeah, that's the HDL-LDL dichotomy, which is really kind of old.
That's kind of 1980 stuff.
The thinking has evolved quite a bit on that.
But the overall thing is that we know, and there's more data coming out all the time that shows that people that are metabolically healthy, that don't have diabetes, don't have hypertension, are not obese, that are not inflamed, that have high levels of cholesterol, may be protected against heart disease in that situation.
I'm putting the may in quotes because I can't say it definitively, but it's looking like more and more data is pointing in that direction.
So it's something that I tell people: if you are on a low-carb diet and it's doing you well, let's say you feel good, you've put a disease in remission, or you're on a carnivore diet and your Crohn's disease is in remission, and it's helping you.
You know, that's the benefit.
Now, if the cholesterol goes up in that situation, that is potential risk.
And so you still need to be cognizant of that.
Now, whether you need to do anything with this or not is unclear in my view.
I think we need more data on it.
So you just watch, but something you might want to watch.
Well, you can image.
So you can image.
You can get what's called a cardiac CAC, coronary artery calcium scan.
You can do some advanced imaging so you can kind of watch what's going on because we have the technology right now.
We can actually see disease in real time.
And we can watch, is it progressing?
Is it regressing?
Interestingly, I'll just share this one study that was put out last year where they took 100 people with ridiculously high cholesterol.
I'm talking about, you know, they want your LDL cholesterol below 100, right?
These people had LDL cholesterol of 500, five times the upper limit of normal for at least half a decade.
And they did CK angiography, high-level precise scanning of their arteries.
And they found that at baseline, they had less disease than some people with low cholesterol.
And it was like, well, that's an interesting finding.
And then they followed them for a year.
And this is a real controversial study.
And they've tracked them three or four different ways.
And most of the ways showed that there was very little to no progression.
There was one subset of that population where they had some increased progression.
But it's an evolving science.
And, you know, I think it's one of those things where we'll know more in a couple of years.
Hopefully the new administration will be more open to doing this type of research.
Because in the past, people say it was unethical.
We're not going to study it.
How dare you?
I remember Chris Gardner, who was at Sanford, he's a plant-based guy.
His lab is funded by Beyond Meat.
He was on the last iteration of the dietary guidelines, which had Trump had not been elected, we probably would have dietary guidelines that say everybody needs to eat basically a plant-based diet or something similar to that, which would be, in my view, a disaster.
I think we've covered the common things I've heard people talk about as being concerning when it comes to carnivore, carnivore-like things, right?
The initial one was everybody's going to get scurvy.
It's like you're going to get no vitamin C.
And there's not a lot of vitamin C in the diet, clearly.
I mean, you can get it from if you eat a lot of like certain organs, you can get it.
Are you suggesting you just shouldn't, couldn't you just do it and just do your supplements?
Of course you can.
Yeah, of course you can.
And that should work just as good.
Any deficiency that you feel that might be there, you could certainly take a multivitamin.
But that's not going to hurt the carnivore diet.
Probably not for most people.
For most people, probably not.
So you can always add to it.
And again, I'm not dogmatic about it.
Again, as a physician, I just like seeing people get healthy.
And I tell people constantly, let's try this for a while, see how it goes, and then we'll make adjustments as we need to.
And again, most of my patients don't do a carnivore diet.
It's the ones that struggle with keto, the ones that still don't get the benefits with, say, they have ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease or IBS or, you know, some autoimmune, you know, ankle-losing spinelitis or something like that.
Then we put them on carnivore, and that's where some of the magic seems to happen, which is kind of, it's fun to see.
It's just really interesting.
Because I remember back in the day when I first started doing keto, I got these like ketose strips, right?
Like you test your urine and it changes the color, right?
It's very simple.
I don't do that now, but it was, I found that the effect was significant when it was the ketone sort of color was coming up and not when you were, so you really had to kind of stick with it.
It would tell you if you're being a little bit too flexible, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, it'll certainly show up in your ketone levels.
And again, that's, again, that to me, I always try to talk to my patients about keeping the goal, the goal.
The goal isn't necessarily a deep level of ketosis, although I will say that in certain instances, there's a lot of people advocating for ketogenic diets in conjunction with cancer therapy.
They use it as an adjunct, and they use something called a glucose ketone index where they drive their glucose down low.
Mental Health and Ketosis00:09:18
They have their ketones very high.
And it seems to be beneficial.
There was a study published last year on brain tumors.
It was a small study.
It was about 20 patients.
And half of them did a ketogenic diet.
Half of them did not.
Over three years, 8% of the people that did not do the ketogenic diet survived, and 68% survived in the keto group.
So it was about an eight-fold increase in survival.
And you're kind of starving the cancer.
They like those carbohydrates.
Yeah, there's, you know, this goes back to Otto Warburg's data that he showed that cancer cells preferentially absorb a lot of glucose.
There's some other compounds like glutamate, which I'll also use.
There's a guy at Boston University, Thomas Safery, who's a cancer researcher, who's been a huge advocate for what he calls metabolic therapy for cancer.
And it's gaining some traction for sure.
Yeah.
Well, and so, I mean, there's this general sort of shift right now, right, towards thinking about a lot of diseases, metabolic disease, right?
I mean, in general.
Particularly, yeah, we're seeing a lot of funding for mental health because thanks to the folks from Jim Buzuki and her husband, they're the founder of the company Roblox, the big beautiful.
Absolutely.
And so they've put in millions and millions of dollars to see some of this metabolic therapy for mental health disorder because their son was suffering from bipolar disorder.
And it was devastating to his life, but he cured it with a ketogenic diet.
And so fortunately, and if we look at the current stats in the United States, it's something like one out of every four or five people has a mental health disorder.
And then when you see all those people coming together, there's a lot of strife.
So I think if we're going to heal this nation, I think we will have to start with feeding ourselves correctly.
Look, I mean, with that pyramid shift, right, the dietary guideline shift, I mean, I can't, I think it's, I mean, this is very rough, but I think it's like an order of magnitude more consequential than anything else they've done.
I mean, this is like, to me, it's like a sea change because of the impact on, you know, all the purchasing contracts, all this, basically, all the government money now has to use these guidelines as the well, yeah, certainly.
I mean, I think the biggest impact will be in the school systems because, you know, this is, you know, where people develop these habits.
You know, you kind of lay down your adult patterns in early adolescence, and that's what you kind of do the rest of your life unless something happens.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's the correct place to start.
Now, obviously, hopefully the consumers will adopt this.
And again, I think the Make America Healthy movement, which I'm all in favor of, has to start with Americans actually adopting this and doing this.
And so, I mean, the government can only do so much, but we've got to do it as individuals.
But food as medicine.
Yes.
What do you think when I say that?
I think that's spot on.
I think also food as poison in many ways.
And again, I'll refer to these recreational drug, human pet food type things that are in the grocery store.
So we have to eat a lot less of that, a lot more whole foods, whether it's carnivore or some other whole food-based diet.
I think that's going to stead many, many people.
We've got to get back to cooking and all the HOMAC and all that stuff that we did in the 1950s and 60s and teach those skills.
That's like if you've got children, I mean, don't give them, don't saddle them with chronic disease from feeding them.
It's definitely avoidable.
What conditions have you found that a carnivore diet has helped people with?
Yeah.
Okay.
Quite a few.
I will tell you the ones that I think that, you know, if I were to say there's a lot of ways to treat things with food, a ketogenic diet can be fine for diabetes, right?
Carnivore specific, I think that number one, inflammatory bowel disease.
That has been incredibly beneficial.
So that would be Crohn's disease and also colitis.
I think in general, autoimmune diseases like psoriasis, like rheumatoid arthritis, like multiple sclerosis, like anglosing spondylitis, those conditions seem to do quite well with carnivore.
Additionally, again, food addiction.
And I think that's a real issue for people.
I think the simplicity, the abstinence rather than the moderation, just like treating alcoholism with, you know, I just want a shot of tequila on the weekend.
You know, that doesn't work too well.
So I think those are really the big ones.
I do think that mental health is also dramatically impacted by this.
Now, it impacts, you know, cardiometabolic disease, diabetes, weight loss, all those things are also beneficial, but you don't need a carnivore diet for those things.
I think carnivore is particularly useful for autoimmunity.
The research has done a lot of work on gut hyperpermeability and autoimmunity and shows a really nice, clear relationship with that.
So I think that that would be my strongest because in fact, of the studies I'd like to see done, you know, there's just not a lot of money for this because nobody wants to fund food studies.
And I would really like to see an inflammatory bowel disease study done because we've had case reports.
We've got lots of case report write-up in the literature on this stuff.
But that's probably the main ones.
Now, again, it helps with, I mean, I've seen it help with, you know, some weird things.
I mean, some things that you would never believe.
There's a condition you may, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but something called Ehlers-Danilis syndrome.
So this is a, the first time I saw this, it really kind of blew my mind a little bit.
There was a physician, she was a 57-year-old ER physician.
She had this disease called Ehlers-Danilis syndrome.
And Ahlers-Danilis syndrome is a genetic connective tissue disorder.
So these people tend to show up with real stretchy skin and their joints are dislocating all the time.
It was kind of the bane of orthopedic surgery because you couldn't do anything.
You couldn't stabilize your joint.
As soon as you did surgery, they just fall apart.
So she was 57 years of age and she would wake up every morning with three or four joints completely dislocated because it's tossing and turning at night.
So she had to wake up, put her shoulder in, put her ankle back in place.
And she'd go to work, she'd go to the ER.
And about every other shift, like one of her joints would pop out of place.
She's like, hey guys, hang on a second, my shoulder's dislocated.
Years and years of this stuff, right?
And it was pretty minister.
And her joints were getting beat up because they're constantly dislocating and relocating.
And she went on a carnivore diet.
And within one month, she stopped having dislocations after decades of this stuff.
And I don't have no idea why this is occurring.
I just don't understand.
I still, to this day, can't fully understand that.
And, you know, she started, she again lost weight because she felt better, started exercising, started going to the gym, stopped having joint dislocation.
And I've seen that duplicated hundreds of times now with that particular disease.
And it's just this weird, like genetic, I've seen Tourette's syndrome.
I'm sure you're probably familiar with Tourette's syndrome.
Really?
I had this little vegan kid, this little vegan girl, 15, 16-year-old girl, a cute little red-headed girl.
She was, you know, raised in a vegan family, wanted to do track and field, but just felt like she wanted to eat meat.
She told her parents, hey, let me eat meat so I can do track and field.
I feel like I'm not strong enough.
So they agreed.
They said, okay, well, we're not going to support you.
We're not going to buy it.
We're not going to cook it for you.
You got to do it yourself.
She ends up going carnivore.
And, you know, she got a little stronger, but her Tourette's went in full remission.
And I was just like, that is really weird because there's not really any kind of like talks about curing Tourette's syndrome.
So there's all these really, really weird.
I mean, I literally, if you go to my website, carnivore.diet, I have over a thousand testimonies, testimonials, you know, interviews that I've done.
All kinds.
And it's all, it's searchable.
You can type in diabetes.
You can type in bipolar resort.
You can type in Crohn's disease.
And you'll just bring up 10, 20, 30 testimonials on these things.
So it is, I mean, I hate to say it's a panacea because you get looked at funny when you say it.
But certainly, you know, obviously common things, you know, obesity, diabetes, joint pain, gut issues, those are probably the most common things just because they're so prevalent.
But, you know, if I were to say, you know, where should we really, really push for this, it would be autoimmunity.
And that's what Michael Peepson had, by the way.
She has an autoimmune disease.
Right.
And that was, of course, connected with the joint, with the corrective correction.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
So this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.
Perhaps you have a final thought as we finish?
I do, absolutely.
You know, I think if you are out there and suffering with some form of chronic disease, number one, don't outsource your health to anyone else.
You know, the healthcare system tends to be very disempowering for patients because they're told they have this weird disease and they don't know why.
You're not told why you have it.
And the solution is often just, you know, take these drugs for the rest of your life.
That doesn't need to be the outcome for most people.
And I think you can empower yourself to heal.
It's possible through lifestyle.
I think food is critically important.
I think sleep is important.
I think exercise and activity are important.
I think the sun is incredibly important, how we mitigate stress.
And then I think also having a purpose in a community around you.
I think if you put those things together and you emphasize those and particularly dial in your food, more often than not, you can significantly improve your quality of life and often put diseases in remission.
Well, Sean Baker, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
All right.
Thanks again.
Hey, thanks a lot.
Thank you all for joining Sean Baker and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.