July 1, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| There are multiple different types of cooking oils, and I think seed oils are probably the worst thing that we could use. | ||
| So these are things like corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean. | ||
| The oils that we were sometimes told were healthy when we were children and are often still told are healthy by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, Harvard, Mayo. | ||
| On the websites, the U.S. | ||
| Dietary Guidelines will say Vegetable oils are healthy, but vegetable oil is kind of a euphemism. | ||
| It's a seed oil that must be refined, bleached, deodorized, and ultra-processed. | ||
| So if you've seen the videos online, there's a great video of like how they make canola oil. | ||
| It's just, it's insane what happens. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's many things in there, right? | ||
| Because canola itself is not a thing, right? | ||
| It's not, yeah. | ||
| It's from a plant called a rape plant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they, Canada, there's a whole history here, but I think in World War II they used canola oil to lubricate ships because it stays, there's less friction even when it's wet. | ||
| And then after the war, there was all this extra canola oil and they had to figure out like, what do we do with this? | ||
| Joining me today is a double board certified physician, an animal based diet advocate and | ||
| author of the carnivore code, unlocking the secrets to optimal health by returning to | ||
| our ancestral diet. | ||
| Dr. Paul Saladino, I am glad to have you in studio. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| So we only met a minute ago and already we've figured out that our birthdays are within days of each other. | ||
| I've got one year on you. | ||
| I'm going to be 48 in two days. | ||
| You're going to be 47 in how many days? | ||
| Three, four, five days. | ||
| My birthday is the 29th. | ||
| 29th and I'm 26. | ||
| So we have one year and three days between us. | ||
| I have to say, I think it'll be an interesting way to start this, that I'm probably feeling the best I have felt since I was in my early 20s, and it's largely because of the things that you write about that my whole team have been pushing on me for the last two years. | ||
| So that's just a compliment to start. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| I'm humbled. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Okay, so for people that know nothing, and then we'll get into some of my health issues and what I change and things of that nature, because they really are the things that you write and talk about. | ||
| Tell people just a little bit for someone that does not know you at all, just sort of how you got into this space, the origin story, and then we'll get into some of the cool specifics. | ||
| Yeah, I grew up in a traditional household in Northern Virginia. | ||
| My dad is an internist, my mom is a nurse practitioner. | ||
| So many nights at the dinner table, conversations about medicine, about aunts and uncles that had medical issues, about, you know, family's medical issues, friends' medical issues. | ||
| So medicine was like a part of my life. | ||
| I went to the hospital with my dad when I was probably 10 or 11 and like saw patients with him. | ||
| And I think that early on I was really curious about why people are healthy and why people are sick. | ||
| Really early on I wanted to understand these things. | ||
| I remember asking my dad when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, what causes heart attacks? | ||
| Because even at an early age, that was like the center of the world for me. | ||
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Like, that's like the scary thing is a heart, what causes heart attacks? | |
| And my dad goes, we don't know. | ||
| And I thought, that's a very unsatisfying answer. | ||
| You're a doctor, man. | ||
| You're supposed to know what causes heart attacks. | ||
| So I think that I've always thought about health throughout my life and kind of been borderline obsessed with it. | ||
| I haven't always thought about it in the same way. | ||
| When I was in college, I thought I was going to go to medical school. | ||
| I studied chemistry and biology. | ||
| And then I ended up taking a lot of time off after college. | ||
| I had like six years off after college where I was kind of a vagabond. | ||
| It was a ski bomb. | ||
| I hiked this trail that goes from Mexico to Canada called the Pacific Crest Trail. | ||
| So one summer I walked 2,700 miles in the backcountry. | ||
| These were probably all things... How long did that take? | ||
| Three and a half months. | ||
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Wow. | |
| It's a continuous trail in the wilderness that goes from Mexico to Canada. | ||
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Wow. | |
| And then eventually after six years of kind of working in bike shops and in restaurants, I thought, you know, I should go back to medical school. | ||
| I'd seen my dad really work too hard. | ||
| He never was able to achieve balance with work and life. | ||
| I never saw him enough growing up. | ||
| I remember him coming home very late at night so much, and I thought, I don't wanna be a doctor. | ||
| That's way too much work. | ||
| I'm gonna go to medical school to become a physician assistant, | ||
| which is kind of between a doctor and a nurse. | ||
| So I went to PA school at George Washington, and that was my first kind of foray into medicine, | ||
| and I didn't really know what medicine was about. | ||
| I just knew, oh, it's fun learning about these drugs and these medical conditions and how we treat them. | ||
| And then I worked in a cardiology practice as a PA for four years, | ||
| and very quickly, I became disillusioned. | ||
| Because what I saw was just, here's a medication, here's a medication, and the cardiologists, really smart, really well-intentioned guys, would literally mime to me a box around the heart and say, think here. | ||
| Don't think outside the box. | ||
| Your job, Paul, is to think in the heart box. | ||
| And I thought, well, what if the thyroid is affecting the heart? | ||
| What if they have diabetes or the gut is affecting the heart? | ||
| This doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| So quickly, I realized I wanted to go back to medical school, and I went to medical school at the University of Arizona. | ||
| I got my MD, and then I did residency at the University of Washington. | ||
| I did my residency in psychiatry. | ||
| At that time, I was really interested in mental health, suicide, depression, anxiety, which are rampant, and I was kind of interested in the way that the way we ate and the gut and sort of inflammation in the body | ||
| affected the mind. | ||
| Very quickly within medical school and residency, I realized that it was kind of like | ||
| the same paradigm as cardiology. | ||
| Everybody's saying, just think about the brain. | ||
| Like you're basically just not taught about any of that stuff | ||
| as it pertains to nutrition affecting these things. | ||
| In any specialty, in any specialty, whether you're doing, you know, | ||
| whether you're doing internal medicine, whether you're doing bariatric surgery for obesity, | ||
| whether you're doing orthopedics, even if you're doing rheumatology or dermatology, | ||
| rheumatology is kind of the study of autoimmune diseases, dermatology is the study of skin diseases, | ||
| which many of which are autoimmune, things that clearly are related to the diet potentially, | ||
| or if you do gastroenterology, it's your gut, it's where all the food you eat goes. | ||
| Right, you think maybe There's no discussion of nutrition, or very little discussion of nutrition, so I quickly realized in my residency that, again, this wasn't quite what I'd hoped for and started thinking more broadly. | ||
| And what I realized, the more I began to do my own research and think about things from the medical sphere with my training, was, oh wow, the things that cause psychiatric illness are probably the same things that cause autoimmune illness of the skin, or thyroid, or gut, or could the same things that affect depression and anxiety, meaning our diet and our lifestyle, also be causing heart disease and atherosclerosis, or even osteoarthritis, or inflammatory arthropathies, and that was really the way that I have thought about things ever since, that there is a lot of complexity in medicine. | ||
| Western medicine likes to create, I think it's over 10,000 diagnoses now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| We like to sort of think of ourselves, and look, doctors are incredibly intelligent human men and women. | ||
| 10,000 diagnoses, how could anyone know all that, right? | ||
| But when I think about it, I think, no, there's probably only a few things. | ||
| It's like three or four things that really affect most humans, and most of them are correctable, and then they manifest differently in you versus me versus someone else. | ||
| And so this is an overcomplication of what makes us sick, and who knows why it's happening, we can talk about that. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love that intro because I try, even when I'm doing the political version of my show, and I'm very happy not to be doing politics today, actually, and doing this, is that I try to take sort of complex political things and make them as simple as possible for people. | ||
| And I see that that's what you're clearly doing with the diet. | ||
| So what was sort of the first thing, when you started looking at medicine differently, what was the first thing that you saw in people's diets that you were like, this is really out of whack and could be one of those four things that's leading to all the other things? | ||
| So I think that the biggest thing for humans today is ultra-processed food. | ||
| And I'm not the first to say that. | ||
| Many have gone before me and said that. | ||
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But I think it's important to say that today. | |
| At this point, we're recording in June of 2024. | ||
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The U.S. | |
| Dietary Guidelines Committee, they make the dietary guidelines 2020 to 2025. | ||
| They're about to release the 2025 to 2030 guidelines. | ||
| These guidelines shape school lunches, they shape food stamps, they shape a lot of policy in the United States. | ||
| A lot of Americans don't necessarily go by the guidelines, but this is the same committee that gave us the all-knowing food pyramid and all these wonderfully wisdom, you know, full recommendations for food. | ||
| I send sarcasm. | ||
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Yes, yes. | |
| But they came out recently in a tweet and they said, we're not convinced that ultra-processed foods contribute to obesity. | ||
| We need more research. | ||
| And I thought, are you kidding me? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| And I think that this is the major problem is that As Americans, as Westerners in general, we've become so confused about our food, and there's so many different voices, and you can see it in our history, predominantly with Lobby. | ||
| I am sorry, we'll probably have to get into some politics today. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I don't really want to, it's not my forte, but I think that ultra-processed foods are the main problem for humans. | ||
| But if you ask me as a physician or any of my colleagues, we're never taught about nutrition, right? | ||
| We're never taught about nutrition. | ||
| And so what are we going to tell a patient when a patient says, what should I eat, doctor? | ||
| And we say, I don't know what to eat. | ||
| Like I'm a doctor. | ||
| I'm not a nutritionist. | ||
| Like go see the dietician, go see the nutritionist. | ||
| They'll tell you what to eat. | ||
| But Dieticians and nutritionists, again, super intelligent, well-intentioned humans, are inculcated in a paradigm, and that's almost religious in some ways, right? | ||
| They're taught something, and it's hard for them to go outside of what they're taught. | ||
| In medicine, we're never encouraged to be curious. | ||
| We're never encouraged to sort of think outside the box. | ||
| You can get sued for that, man. | ||
| You can't go outside the box. | ||
| You are given a set of rules, and your performance as a doctor has to do with how well you follow those rules. | ||
| And after a couple years of COVID, I mean, look at what happened to many doctors and scientists who questioned a lot of the stuff that became mainstream orthodoxy. | ||
| So when you talk about ultra processed foods, let's just really kind of like take it to the base level. | ||
| You're basically talking about pretty much all of the box stuff that's in our grocery store. | ||
| Anything in the center of the grocery store, most groceries, anything in the center of most grocery stores. | ||
| And this is oversimplification, but I think it's a simple rule that other people have talked about. | ||
| If you shop on the outside of the grocery store, you do much better than if you shop on the inside. | ||
| What's on the inside? | ||
| Boxed, packaged foods, whether it's sauces, dressings, cakes, cookies, candies, pastas, it's ultra-processed in some way. | ||
| And there are all sorts of problems with ultra-processed foods, but I think that as a simple rule for people listening to this, Because we're going to get probably granular at some point in this podcast. | ||
| But a very high-level idea that I've come to, and again, this was never taught to me in medical school, it's not that complicated. | ||
| If humans, homo sapiens, just eat minimally or unprocessed plant and animal foods, we do really well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the more of the processed or ultra-processed foods we eat, the less well we do. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| So all of this, whether we're talking about a carnivore diet or an animal-based diet or certain specific foods, that's very granular. | ||
| The first level is just understand, and we can talk about this, that when you're thinking about calories, I strongly believe that not all calories are created equally. | ||
| If we have a donut here that's 250 calories, and we have 250 calories of steak, those do not have the same effects on the human body, but they both have 250 calories. | ||
| So a lot of doctors might look at this and say, well they're both 250 calories, so if you want to lose weight, you can either eat 250 calories of a donut, or 250 calories of a steak. | ||
| But you and I both know, intuitively, that if you eat the steak, you're going to feel differently | ||
| than the donut, but they have the same calories, Dave. And so this is, I think, where this tweet | ||
| from the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Committee starts to kind of set my alarm bells off and make | ||
| me think there's something going on here that's not not copacetic. Because it's like, if humans, if | ||
| Westerners are led to believe that all I have to do is limit calories and I don't have to | ||
| think about food quality, we're doomed. | ||
| Right, so is that the crazy part? | ||
| That we basically had like 50 or 60 years of being pushed processed foods, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. | ||
| I don't think they were all nefarious necessarily, but you know, TB dinners came in and all the rest of it. | ||
| I remember it. | ||
| And then basically what we've seen is now obesity rates go through the roof, and then a whole bunch of doctors go on TV and say, cut calories, and then people are looking at your steak donut comparison being like, oh, they're both the same calorie. | ||
| Weight watchers, you know, programs that only restrict calories or Ozempic, right? | ||
| Here's your answer now. | ||
| And the problem with ultra processed foods, and this is where Ozempic comes in, | ||
| is that I think there's ample evidence now, and this is why I think the US Dietary Guidelines Committee | ||
| is just a coward, there's ample evidence that they make us hungrier. | ||
| So that 250 calories of donut, what I worry about is that the ingredients of that, whether it's a seed oil | ||
| or a processed grain or the pesticides or whatever is in there, and we can talk about some of the things | ||
| that I think are most problematic in processed foods, they're going to accumulate in our bodies | ||
| and affect our ability to burn calories, so our metabolism, and they're going to make us hungrier | ||
| long term, so it has this kind of ripple effect that we don't think about. | ||
| Right, and we also know now that they are putting things in to make us hungrier and want things more like | ||
| the Dorito effect or whatever. | ||
| Yes, this Bliss Point, and some of the food additives, and probably the balance of processed carbohydrates, and processed sugars, and processed salt. | ||
| I mean, it's blatant, it's in marketing. | ||
| Like, I bet you can't just eat one Pringle. | ||
| I haven't had one in a while, but probably not. | ||
| You probably can't, and you feel it, and you have probably had this experience. | ||
| The more you clean up your diet, quote unquote, the more you move your diet toward unprocessed animal and plant foods, You notice the way that these processed foods affect you. | ||
| They affect me at a psychological level. | ||
| So I kid you not, I just mentioned it's my birthday coming up, so we went out to dinner on Saturday. | ||
| I basically don't eat sugar anymore at all, but I had a donut. | ||
| It was a Japanese place. | ||
| I had a donut dipped in a couple dips there. | ||
| I was awake from about 3 to 5 a.m. | ||
| and I was like, that's got to be the donut. | ||
| I didn't do anything else differently. | ||
| Yeah, there's some proof in the pudding, so to speak. | ||
| All calories are equal, Dave, it's okay. | ||
| All you have to do is work out more the next day to burn that donut off, man. | ||
| That's what people will tell you, right? | ||
| And that's, to me, I think, this is why Americans, especially, if we don't understand the importance of food quality, we're doomed. | ||
| People are not going to be able to lose weight and get healthier. | ||
| And obesity is just a marker for so many of these other chronic diseases, which associate with obesity. | ||
| But we can think of obesity, everybody knows what it's like to gain weight and lose weight. | ||
| And then, you know, I think that as we are gaining and losing weight as Americans, we're also seeing rates of diabetes, cancer, dementia, every single autoimmune disease, whether it's a skin condition, a thyroid condition, a gut condition rise. | ||
| And so there's a big problem here. | ||
| So I mentioned to you, I toured with Jordan Peterson in 2018. | ||
| He was very famous for the carnivore diet, which I guess now they're calling the lion diet, something to that effect. | ||
| Obviously you've got this book here. | ||
| It's not exactly what you do anymore, which I do want to get into. | ||
| But I saw this guy in real time having a ribeye for breakfast, a ribeye for lunch, a tomahawk for dinner. | ||
| You know, tomahawk that could usually be for four people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And traveling with bags of steak and everything else. | ||
| But I saw literally his skin get better. | ||
| His teeth looked better, his hair looked thicker, he had sort of a more brightness to him. | ||
| He says he has conquered several autoimmune diseases, and that was just a kind of test run. | ||
| I don't think he was doing that at first under any kind of medical advisement. | ||
| I think most medical advisory would be against that. | ||
| I guess that's the point. | ||
| They would advise against it, yeah. | ||
| So the carnivore diet is really interesting, and I experimented with the carnivore diet. | ||
| I wrote a book about the carnivore diet, and this gets to like the next level. | ||
| So first level, For listeners, for the audience, just minimize or cut out ultra-processed foods, you will be healthier. | ||
| Meat, plants, you're gonna be so much better. | ||
| We can skip a few levels down here and we'll probably get back to the middle. | ||
| In individuals who have autoimmune conditions, I think, and again, this is very granular, we're zooming in with a microscope here, in individuals with autoimmune conditions, so I had eczema and asthma, these associate. | ||
| I think Jordan Peterson and his daughter and his family tend to have this kind of autoimmune, arthritis, you know, whether it's a juvenile rheumatoid | ||
| arthritis, it's some sort of inflammatory arthropathy, meaning the immune system is attacking the | ||
| joints. Again, Western Medicine wants to put a name on it. It's an autoimmune condition | ||
| that manifests in their family a certain way. And I should tell you that while he was doing | ||
| that, I was dealing with alopecia areata and had lost huge portions of my hair and the | ||
| medications that I got were far worse than losing the hair. And it's so this is a perfect example. | ||
| This is an autoimmune condition, and Western medicine says your alopecia areata is different than Jordan Peterson's rheumatoid arthritis, but I would say no. | ||
| That's just your body manifests this autoimmune inflammation here, his does it here. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so the solution could be the same for both of you is what I'm saying, because the problem with Western medicine saying there's 10,000 diseases is, well, we need 10,000 drugs or 30,000 drugs. | ||
| And we have to have specialists that become balkanized and only think about this, right? | ||
| This is the problem for people. | ||
| Only think about their specific realm. | ||
| You know, you're going to go see a specialist and he's only going to think like, oh, he's losing his hair. | ||
| I'm thinking about this, but Jordan's going to go see a specialist. | ||
| That's really what I did. | ||
| You know, like, yeah, an autoimmune specialist who's only thinking about the knee. | ||
| So I think that there are some foods that many people consider healthy, | ||
| and again, we're drilling down, we're very zoomed in here, some foods that many people consider healthy | ||
| that do trigger immune activation in some individuals, not everyone. | ||
| And this is kind of the genesis of the carnivore code, and an animal-based diet is maybe a less intense version | ||
| of the same thing. | ||
| These are interventions mostly, I think, that are effective for people with autoimmune conditions. | ||
| I had eczema, you had alopecia areata. | ||
| And so if, what I have begun to say to people, I think, which is a better framing, | ||
| is if you're thriving, don't change a thing, you know? | ||
| But if you're not thriving, if you have alopecia or an autoimmune thyroid condition | ||
| or inflammatory bowel disease or a skin condition, look at your diet. | ||
| Start with ultra-processed foods. | ||
| Get those out and improve the quality of the foods in your diet. | ||
| And if you get to a point where you're eating unprocessed animal foods and unprocessed plant foods, | ||
| and you're still having this condition, okay, this is where we get to this idea | ||
| that some foods, some plant foods, for some people like Jordan, | ||
| that a lot of people think of as healthy might still trigger the immune system in some people. | ||
| So what happens with him, evidently, is he cuts out salads, things we think of as healthy, | ||
| whole grains, they're supposed to be healthy, right? | ||
| And his autoimmune condition gets better. | ||
| So that's a fascinating thing. | ||
| Is the crazy part of this that much of it really is common sense that just sort of became uncommon? | ||
| Because when you basically say to me, oh, so just eat meat and, you know, vegetables or you can have some fruits, it's like, oh, that that's basically what I've been doing. | ||
| I don't I actually don't think about it that much, but I've gone very hardcore on red meat and vegetables and pretty much cut out sugar. | ||
| And then you just see the results like it's not rocket science to to a certain extent. | ||
| I mean, back to the food pyramid, right? | ||
| We were told for so long that 12, is it 12 servings of whole grains? | ||
| I forget the number. | ||
| You need 12 servings, you have to eat pasta, Dave. | ||
| As if we're all wired exactly the same. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We come from different places. | ||
| And our genetics are individual, and I think that some people react to different foods differently, because for me, I even know, and this is where you get to sort of the carnivore, which is extreme in many lights, I think a lot of vegetables don't play well with my body, and I think a lot of vegetables don't play well with Jordan or his daughter Michaela. | ||
| You might be able to eat vegetables, that's great, and I think that that's where people can kind of figure it out for themselves, and I think that, so the framework that I think of in terms of diet is like this. | ||
| This is how animal-based diet and carnivore diet lays out. | ||
| We think about animals. | ||
| Animals can run away from you. | ||
| They can bite you. | ||
| They can defend themselves. | ||
| They're mobile. | ||
| You know, if you've ever tried to hunt a deer, those are fast, you know? | ||
| And we hunt deer respectfully and every time I've hunted a deer, I'm grateful for the life that it's given and it nourishes me, my friends. | ||
| And so hunting is an interesting thing. | ||
| It's a really, I would say, almost a sacrament to connect with nature that way. | ||
| But plants are stuck in the ground, right? | ||
| They can't move away from us. | ||
| So millions of years of evolution, I mean hundreds of millions of years of history between plants and animals have seen this chemical warfare. | ||
| Animals eat plants, plants evolve defense chemicals, animals evolve mechanisms to detoxify the defense chemicals, back and forth, back and forth. | ||
| And so what we end up with today is there's no question that plants, especially the non-fruit part of plants, contain defense chemicals. | ||
| Whether it's digestive enzyme inhibitors or things like oxalates, which we can talk about, or phytic acid, which is a large molecule that binds minerals. | ||
| The only question is how good are we, you, I, Jordan, Michaela, whoever, at detoxifying these defense chemicals? | ||
| And how susceptible are we to these defense chemicals at a gut level, at a nutritional level? | ||
| So for me, my history is that When I used to eat lots of grains, I was a runner. | ||
| I was never a very fast runner, but I got into running in college and I had recurrent stress fractures of my femur. | ||
| You know, I had to go to a doctor. | ||
| My family doctors were concerned for a 19-year-old to get a stress fracture of the femur could be a bone cancer. | ||
| You know, my dad was very worried. | ||
| He didn't know, it was just the fact that I was eating mostly oatmeal as a college kid. | ||
| And why is oatmeal a problem? | ||
| Well, because oats are very high in phytic acid. | ||
| It's a compound, it's a molecule, it chelates, it bites onto minerals. | ||
| And it's very hard to denature phytic acid. | ||
| You can ferment the oats for five days at 78 degrees and a pH of four, | ||
| but if you just cook the oats, about 60% of the phytic acid remains. | ||
| So here I am in college thinking this is easy, it's cheap, and oats are healthy, right? | ||
| I'm eating tons of oatmeal and pasta and grains and I think that that really depleted my minerals and my ability of my bones to repair as I was running. | ||
| So there are these defense chemicals. | ||
| Oxalates are very high in spinach. | ||
| And yet, very few of us, especially those of us, I don't have kidney stones, but kidney stones are mostly calcium oxalate. | ||
| If you have calcium oxalate kidney stones, your kidney doctor and nephrologist might tell you to avoid spinach, but most people are not even aware that some of the foods we eat contain compounds that can accumulate in our bodies, like oxalates or phytic acid or digestive enzyme inhibitors. | ||
| I'll just back up one more step. | ||
| So we have vegetables, which are really leaves, stems, seeds, and roots of plants. | ||
| It's the non-fruit part of plants. | ||
| Plants use energy from the sun to put that energy into the plants to move their seeds. | ||
| A lot of times when you have a fruit, it's the seeds packaged in a fruit. | ||
| Fruit is colorful and it's sweet. | ||
| The plant's kind of saying, hey, eat this, move my seeds around, do me a favor. | ||
| But if you go and eat a plant leaf, the plant is saying, hey, I use that to make photosynthesis. | ||
| Those are my solar panels, man. | ||
| Don't eat my solar panels! | ||
| And so there are some individuals who are uniquely sensitive to defense chemicals in leaves, in stems, in roots, in seeds of plants. | ||
| And that's just something I want people to understand. | ||
| Again, not everyone needs to do that, but if you have an autoimmune condition that's unresolved, then thinking about that and cutting those out and seeing if it improves, that's powerful for people. | ||
| So a lot of this really was based on what you were going through yourself, right? | ||
| So you went very hardcore carnivore, and then you found out that that didn't quite work for you the way, I guess, that you expected, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I had eczema and asthma my whole life. | ||
| I remember being over-medicated as a kid, forced to take albuterol inhalers as a kid. | ||
| I put steroid cream on my hands. | ||
| I used to have it on my fingers, my wrists, my elbows, and my knees. | ||
| In medical school, I did jujitsu, and I would get eczema flares on my knees and my elbows. | ||
| At times, they would get infected because I'm on the mats, like, wrestling. | ||
| In college, I had a very bad eczema flare. | ||
| So, I had this eczema that was kind of hard for me. | ||
| At one time, when I was in Colorado, I had a very bad asthma flare. | ||
| So, I had this autoimmune condition, and I'd been to see multiple doctors. | ||
| Nobody ever says, it could be your diet. | ||
| They just say, here's a corticosteroid, here's a steroid inhaler, here's an albuterol inhaler. | ||
| And when I was in my residency at the University of Washington, I just got fed up. | ||
| I actually heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast, and they were talking about, you know, | ||
| Jordan's kind of like biblical stuff, and at the end he talks about his diet, | ||
| and I was like, this is cool. | ||
| Because as a doctor, and at the end of my training, I was really interested in autoimmune conditions, | ||
| and beginning to see that autoimmunity and this reaction of the immune system | ||
| against the human body is something common with many chronic diseases. | ||
| And I thought, what is causing this? | ||
| And so this hypothesis that some people are uniquely sensitive to plant foods, that was fascinating. | ||
| I thought, well, I want to try it. | ||
| Let me see if it helps. | ||
| So I was on my way. | ||
| I was driving to the Washington coast to go surfing. | ||
| It was, I'm sure, a rainy, cold surf. | ||
| But on the way back, I stopped at the grocery store and just bought a bunch of steaks. | ||
| And that was all I ate for a year and a half was meat, organs, so a little bit of liver, animal fat, and salt. | ||
| That's all I ate. | ||
| That was strictly a carnivore diet. | ||
| Maybe a few eggs here and there. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| My eczema got better. | ||
| Okay, this is cool. | ||
| There's something going on here. | ||
| And at the time, I had a very bad eczema flare, so I saw it resolve and not return. | ||
| There's something going on here. | ||
| Now, as is often the case, we're humbled again, and I realized that for me, apparently, I think for some people, they can do okay with a carnivore diet. | ||
| Having carbohydrates in my diet made me feel better, and I ran into some issues with long-term ketosis, and so I had to think, Carbohydrates would I include in my diet? | ||
| Do I want to include grains? | ||
| Do I want to include starches? | ||
| Or do I want to include fruit? | ||
| And I thought, well, when I think about these plant toxins, the plant is trying to get me to eat the fruit. | ||
| It's colorful. | ||
| Let me try and reincorporate fruit. | ||
| And I thought, I'll incorporate some honey, because bees make honey, and I was aware of some studies showing benefits to honey. | ||
| So I reincorporated. | ||
| I started with fruit and honey to the meat, and that really helped. | ||
| So in terms of the long-term side effects of keto, I had kind of like like electrolyte issues, muscle cramps, | ||
| heart palpitations, sleep disturbance from not having enough carbohydrates long-term. | ||
| But adding the fruit back and the honey really helped that and it kinda was this interesting middle ground | ||
| where eczema doesn't come back, but I feel good and I have carbohydrates in my diet. | ||
| So that's kinda the beginning of the idea of, all right, carnivore is here, | ||
| it's one end of the spectrum, omnivore diet is here eating everything. | ||
| Is there something in the middle that can help people with an autoimmune disease or an autoimmune issue kind of navigate as a good starting point? | ||
| And that's what I termed an animal-based diet. | ||
| So let's try to apply that to kind of the average person watching this. | ||
| So someone that maybe has some autoimmune stuff but maybe not. | ||
| Like can we kind of go through like what you think a sensible day of food sort of looks like? | ||
| Like I can tell you for me I have a couple eggs in the morning with some grass-fed butter. | ||
| I'm doing a steak for lunch with some broccoli, and then usually some kind of steak, and maybe some arugula for dinner. | ||
| And that pretty much is it. | ||
| It's not, I do have pasta maybe once a week. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Like, you know, I had veal parm the other night, like, so it's not, I'm not like religious in that sense of it, but basically doing what's right as much of the time as I possibly can. | ||
| That seems to be working for me, and it's all my hair back, so. | ||
| That's great! | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, I think that There's a couple of different ways to start, right? | ||
| And it depends on the individual. | ||
| So I'm trying to go as wide net as possible. | ||
| I'll lay out a few cases. | ||
| So if somebody is listening to this and you don't have an autoimmune condition, you maybe just want to improve your diet or you want to lose weight, I would say meat, plants, As simple as possible. | ||
| Kind of like you're doing. | ||
| Eat some meat, eat some vegetables, eat some fruit. | ||
| Think about the oils. | ||
| Where do eggs fall into that? | ||
| Because you said a couple eggs now and again. | ||
| But I'm very big on eggs. | ||
| I think eggs are great. | ||
| The quality of the eggs matters. | ||
| What the chickens are eating matters. | ||
| So I think the best eggs that you can mostly get in an average grocery store are going to be pasture raised, organic. | ||
| Pasture-raised means that the chickens have 108 square feet per chicken to roam. | ||
| Cage-free is like six square feet, so they're much more crowded. | ||
| And a regular egg is in a henhouse indoors, so they're not even getting outside. | ||
| So a pasture-raised egg, at least the chicken goes outside and there's a chance it's going to find a bug or a worm and it's going to eat less of the grains. | ||
| It's because chickens are not really meant to eat just corn and soy, which is what most traditional chickens eat. | ||
| So the higher the quality of the meat, the higher the quality of the egg, the better. | ||
| But I think, yeah, eggs, fish, chicken, that's all fine at the highest level. | ||
| Again, if you're thriving, don't change anything. | ||
| Just keep it simple. | ||
| And the other thing I'd say for that highest level, if you don't have an autoimmune condition, is think about the oils you're cooking with. | ||
| And this is important. | ||
| We'll just talk about seed oils for a minute. | ||
| There are multiple different types of cooking oils, and I think seed oils are probably the worst thing that we could use. | ||
| So these are things like corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean. | ||
| The oils that we were sometimes told were healthy when we were children and are often still told are healthy by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, Harvard, Mayo. | ||
| On the websites, the U.S. | ||
| Dietary Guidelines will say Vegetable oils are healthy, but vegetable oil is kind of a euphemism. | ||
| It's a seed oil that must be refined, bleached, deodorized, and ultra processed. | ||
| So if you've seen the videos online, there's a great video of like how they make canola oil. | ||
| It's just, it's insane what happens. | ||
| Well, it's many things in there, right? | ||
| Because canola itself is not a thing. | ||
| It's from a plant called a rape plant. | ||
| Canada, there's a whole history here, but I think in World War II they used canola oil to lubricate ships because there's less friction even when it's wet. | ||
| And then after the war there was all this extra canola oil and they had to figure out, like, what do we do with this? | ||
| The problem was that, because Canada had increased their production of the rape plant, the problem is that rape plants, you can't eat the oil from a rape seed because it's too high in this monounsaturated fat called erucic acid, which we have strong suspicions are connected with heart lesions in humans, Keshen's disease. | ||
| And so I think in the 1980s, chemists figured out a way to either genetically modify it or breed these seeds to be low erucic acid. | ||
| So canola oil is an acronym that stands for Canadian oil low acid. | ||
| So they've basically taken this plant that was never a food, made it into a food by taking this harmful oil out, which is still in there in small amounts. | ||
| So there's still about one to 2% erucic acid in canola oil. | ||
| If it's not a low erucic acid canola oil, it's about 40%. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| So they took something that wasn't a food, but in order to make that into a food, rapeseeds are just little seeds. | ||
| They have to grind it. | ||
| They have to de-gum it. | ||
| They have to deodorize it. | ||
| They heat it. | ||
| They use sodium hydroxide to extract it. | ||
| The oil is incredibly fragile, and it's massively damaged, oxidized, or rusted, essentially. | ||
| So what you're getting in the grocery store, it looks like this clear oil, but it's been deodorized. | ||
| I mean, if it hadn't been deodorized, you would smell it. | ||
| That smells horrible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These oils are fragile. | ||
| They're not meant to be rushed and extracted out of seeds. | ||
| Humans have never done this. | ||
| Okay, so basically in terms of oils, everything you're saying, basically olive oil, coconut oil, and I assume grass-fed butter or tallow. | ||
| Those are much better, because those are fruit oils. | ||
| So when you make an olive oil, you're not making it from an olive seed, you're pressing the olive. | ||
| And if it's an olive oil, you want extra virgin, cold-pressed, organic, preferably single source. | ||
| Because a lot of olive and avocado oil, which is a common fruit oil today, are cut with seed oils. | ||
| It's kind of like honey. | ||
| There's a lot of honey that's cut with high fructose corn syrup because it's an expensive commodity and they're putting garbage ingredients. | ||
| The studies I've seen suggest 70% of olive oil is cut with seed oils. | ||
| So you don't want that because the seed oils are these refined industrial oils that are harmful for humans. | ||
| Essentially oxidized when you get them, they're rancid in some ways, and they're problematic. | ||
| So olive oil is great on a salad, but again, don't heat it because it's not meant to be heated. | ||
| It has too many fragile fats. | ||
| As you go to the fats that are solid at room temperature, the fats that we were told for a long time were bad for us, but we're now pretty clearly learning are just great for us, like butter or tallow, which is refined beef fat. | ||
| Those are better to cook with if you need to cook because they're more stable. | ||
| So those are the fats that I would cook with, would be butter or tallow or ghee, which is clarified butter. | ||
| Don't cook with olive oil. | ||
| Olive oil is great for salad, but again, single source, organic. | ||
| Think about the quality of the oils that you're using. | ||
|
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Getting rid of the seed oils, hugely important. | |
| When you go to a baseball game or something and you see what they're frying stuff in at the concession stand, it must just blow your mind. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think that there's a lot of reasons. | ||
| The pervasiveness of seed oils, I think, is a very likely driving factor of our chronic disease epidemic in the United States. | ||
| I'm friends with Nicole Shanahan and Bobby Kennedy by proxy, and I would love to connect with Trump or anybody in politics, because whoever gets into office, I think it's important that we think about these oils and how they're affecting human health, and we actually are making decisions like, Why are we doing this? | ||
| And why are we allowing this to happen? | ||
| And should we be talking about this? | ||
| Because I've seen a lot of people in these, in the political races, and I apologize to make it political, talking about, oh, I could do political nutrition. | ||
| We're going to use big data to figure out what's causing chronic disease in humans. | ||
| And I think we don't need big data, man. | ||
| Like just go look at what humans are eating. | ||
|
unidentified
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Seed oils are pervasive. | |
| They're pervasive, they're everywhere, and so you go to a restaurant, you go to a ball game, I mean any fast food place, Panda Express, I don't even know the names of them anymore, Panda Express, I don't even know where people are eating, like McDonald's, obviously Burger King, they're all frying their fries in seed oils, Panda Express is using tons of it, it's in a lot of foods, it's Subway, it's in every single fast food, because it's cheap and it kind of acts as a preservative. | ||
| So you'll be very happy to hear that the last, I think, probably really bad thing I was doing was I was still doing almond milk or oat milk in my coffee until about two months ago. | ||
| And then these guys saw it and they brought you up and they were like, Dave, you got it. | ||
| So now it's just whole, it's grass fed whole milk. | ||
| Did you get raw milk? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So this has been like this nonstop thing with everybody. | ||
| It's very hard to get just raw, You know, raw milk just like that. | ||
| You can't get it at supermarkets, at least here you can't. | ||
| So you have to get it from like an Amish farmer or at a farmer's market and they have to sell it as pet food basically and all that. | ||
| But yes, I don't know if I have any in the fridge right now, but yeah. | ||
| And butter and everything else. | ||
|
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I'll give them a shout out. | |
| Here in Miami, there's a place called Southwest Ranches. | ||
| I have no affiliation. | ||
| I think it's just a local family farm. | ||
| But I was staying with a friend here and man, they sent us some stuff and it is so good. | ||
| But again, so we can just talk about raw milk for a minute. | ||
| The problem I have with oat milk is a lot of oat milk has seed oils. | ||
| So, Oatly got into a lot of heat. | ||
| I called them out on this, other people. | ||
| If you look on the package of Oatly, it says low erucic acid rapeseed oil. | ||
| We talked about it. | ||
| It's canola oil. | ||
| There's canola oil in Oatly. | ||
| They're putting seed oils in Oatly for mouthfeel because whole milk tastes good. | ||
| It has normal, healthy fats. | ||
| Almond milk. | ||
| I mean, look, if you just make almonds and water, it's better than Oatly, or if you just made oats and water. | ||
| But again, you're eating oats and you're eating almonds, and why would you do that if you could get... There's more nutrition in an animal food. | ||
| Right, so some of them, when they say, okay, four ingredients, and it's usually like almonds, water, salt, and maybe something else. | ||
| I was like, okay, that's kind of okay, but... Again, yeah, the problem is if the fourth ingredient is not carrageenan, Which is, you know, problematic for human guts, likely. | ||
| But yeah, it's like, I think that a lot of us, myself included, fear milk because we've been told, I'm lactose intolerant or dairy isn't good for you. | ||
| And I think that pasteurized dairy was probably something that triggered my eczema in the past. | ||
| And I've just, you know, in the last few years been thinking about raw milk. | ||
| I visited the largest raw milk producer in the world in California, Raw Farm. | ||
| Great people doing amazing stuff with their farm there. | ||
| And I've learned a lot about the dairy industry that I never had understood before. | ||
| And basically there are two different types of farms. | ||
| There's milk that's made to be pasteurized, and that's milk made in, like, not the most sanitary conditions. | ||
| I mean, if you've ever seen how cows are milked, the udders are kind of close to the poop, you know? | ||
| Like, they can poop on, and it's just, it's not super sanitary. | ||
| And they know that milk is going to be pasteurized, so they don't really care if it gets contaminated. | ||
| But the raw milk at Raw Farm or at other farms where they do it right, the udders are clean. | ||
| The folks at Raw Farm built a special barn so the cows have like multiple showers. | ||
| They get the opportunity to poop and pee like multiple times before they go to get milked and their udders are cleaned. | ||
| It's like very carefully monitored. | ||
| They test every single batch for contaminants, right? | ||
| And even with those safeguards, they've still been like hassled by the U.S. | ||
| government so many times. | ||
| They've never had a problem. | ||
| They've never had contamination there. | ||
| So the quality, the way the milk is produced is important because any raw food has the potential to be contaminated. | ||
| Sushi, I mean if you look at the statistics... | ||
| Far more people get sick every year from eating raw plants than raw milk. | ||
| Many more people eat salad vegetables than raw milk, but people get sick from drinking raw milk when it's not from the right farm. | ||
| I don't think many people understand the history. | ||
| I think it was 1986, there was a huge outbreak of salmonella in pasteurized milk. | ||
| So pasteurized milk is not necessarily innocent either. | ||
| The food system at scale is just challenging for humans. | ||
| So what's interesting about raw milk is that it's different than pasteurized milk. | ||
| And we've seen this in multiple studies. | ||
| There are multiple longitudinal observational studies looking at kids who grew up on farms or off farms who drink raw milk and they have lower rates of asthma, eczema, and allergies. | ||
| So just the kind of stuff that I suffered with, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So drinking raw milk Probably is beneficial for kids programming their immune systems as a child. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| That says, this could be a uniquely beneficial food for humans. | ||
| We should be thinking about how to make this safely, but instead the FDA is just denigrating it. | ||
| It's absolutely insane. | ||
| I mean, the fact that to get it, you're going to stores where they're literally keeping it in the pet food section and it says not for human consumption. | ||
| And that's what we're now putting in our coffee over here. | ||
| Yes, and I mean, the folks at Rot Farm, they've literally had DEA agents, I think is the, I don't know which branch, show up with like long barrel submachine guns to their farm. | ||
| It's not a, this is not like the cartel, you know? | ||
| They're making milk, man, you know? | ||
| And the same farm, I've heard of the same thing happen at the farm here in Florida. | ||
| They literally, there's a guy on a cart behind an oxen, and guys go up to him with submachine guns. | ||
| Dump all of your milk out. | ||
| And look, okay, like you're worried about contamination, let's talk about it, but I don't understand what's going on now. | ||
| There seems to be, there's a real war on raw milk and the media is like really roasting me about this. | ||
| And I'll just mention this because there's a big thing about bird flu right now on raw milk. | ||
| And so what I understand here is that there was a herd in Texas that was not a raw milk herd. | ||
| It was a CAFO herd, so a Clustered Animal Feeding Operation, or a concentrate, basically factory farmed milk operation. | ||
| And the way they get grains to feed these cows is they have a big combine and they just roll through the field where there were some ducks. | ||
| And they pulled the ducks into the feed. | ||
| And the way that factory farming works is they just give it all to them. | ||
| So they fed cows a bunch of ground up ducks or waterfowl with the grains, | ||
| something a cow would never eat. | ||
| And that herd became positive for bird flu. | ||
| A few cows from that were sold across country. | ||
| And so now the United States government or the FDA is saying, don't drink raw milk, you could get bird flu. | ||
| When in fact, this is a factory farm operation for a non, it's a pasteurized dairy farm. | ||
| It's never been found in a raw milk. | ||
| And a cow would never come in contact with a bird. | ||
| A cow's not going to eat a duck. | ||
| Why would a cow get bird flu, right? | ||
| So to me, it seems like a little bit of scaremongering. | ||
| And look, I think we should protect the American people and make sure the food supply is safe. | ||
| But there are foods like raw milk, which can be produced at Marginally greater scale if you know the farmer and they're really uniquely healthy for humans. | ||
| The last thing I'll say about raw milk is a lot of people who are lactose intolerant can drink it because different bacterial cultures in the milk can change the gut. | ||
| I mean I can drink raw milk with no problem now. | ||
| I could never do that when I was a kid. | ||
| So milk is an interesting one. | ||
| Very nutritious food for humans. | ||
| Pasteurized milk, very tricky. | ||
| Raw milk Alright, so let's shift from milk for a second to the cow itself. | ||
| Can we talk a little bit about how cows are raised and the difference between say grass-fed and pasture-raised versus sort of factory-farmed animals? | ||
| And I used to drive, when I lived in Cali, we used to do that drive by Harris Ranch all the time, which they called Cowschwitz, because it was like, you know, it's the number, I think it's the number one meat producing lot in the States, and the stench for miles. | ||
| And I say, this is someone, I love beef, obviously, but that smell. | ||
| And then they changed the landscape around it also, because they didn't want people to see in there and the methane and all the stuff. | ||
| The same thing happens with pig operations, too. | ||
| People have flown drones over the pig farms. | ||
| So, you know, we have, what, 330 million Americans? | ||
| This is economies of scale, and it's driven by consumer behavior. | ||
| There are smaller farms now who will feed grass to cows from, you know, after they wean, after they're done feeding, getting milk, to when they die. | ||
| And that's grass feeding and grass finishing. | ||
| That's the way cows are supposed to be fed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Cows are ruminants, and ruminant means grass eaters. | ||
| You know, buffalo or bison, deer, elk, antelope, pronghorn. | ||
| There were millions, hundreds of millions of ruminants grazing in the western United States before we, you know, before the Louisiana Purchase and we moved west. | ||
| I mean, the United States, the western United States is a rich history of ruminants living on the land. | ||
| Not destroying the land, but living within a cycle of eating the grass, pooping and peeing on the grass, which actually fertilizes the soil, the grass grows back. | ||
| The reason the West is so fertile is because of hundreds of millions of ruminant animals that created that soil by being part of an ecosystem. | ||
| So, ruminants do not destroy the land In and of themselves. | ||
| When you put them all on a clustered farm and they trample the grass and you're just feeding them grains which can be contaminated with pesticides, with plastic. | ||
| The United States government allows all sorts of contaminants in the grain that these cows are fed. | ||
| You have a real problem because you concentrate the waste. | ||
| That's what you smell. | ||
| The cows are not as healthy. | ||
| And a lot of times this happens at the end of a cow's life. | ||
| Most cows in the United States still eat grass for 85% of their life, then they go to a feedlot to get fattened up. | ||
| This is profits, right? | ||
| Because the cows are fatter, the American consumer has developed a taste for that type of meat, and you know, granted, a grain-finished steak tastes good. | ||
| That's what's served in most steakhouses. | ||
| A grass-finished steak doesn't taste quite the same. | ||
| We're not used to it. | ||
| It's a gamier taste. | ||
| It's often more lean. | ||
| The fat on a grass-finished steak is often more orange because of the beta-carotene from the grass in it. | ||
| The milk from these cows is different depending on what they're eating. | ||
| So what we have is a problem where it's like, how do we feed everyone? | ||
| And I never want perfect to become the enemy of good for people. | ||
| I still think that grain-finished meat is a very healthy food. | ||
| A lot of people can't necessarily afford grass-finished, but I think it's very clear that grass-finishing, grass-feeding, that's the goal, right? | ||
| And so what can we do to make that more affordable? | ||
| When you say grass-finishing, though, grass-finishing is just that it was just grass all the way through. | ||
| Grass all the way through, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So nothing happened differently at the end when they say finishing. | ||
| It's just grass-fed, grass-finished. | ||
| the terminology gets confusing. | ||
| Yeah, but it should be 100% grass fed. | ||
| That's the goal, you know? | ||
| And people will say, that's not scalable. | ||
| It's very scalable because when you do that, you also improve the quality of the soil, | ||
| which means it can grow more grass. | ||
| And people will say, you couldn't do that with all the cows in the US. | ||
| You could definitely do that with all the cows in the US, but the consumer would have to see the meat prices go up. | ||
| The meat would become more nutritious and less full of pesticides and other problematic things. | ||
| The meat would become better quality, but would be more expensive. | ||
| We're kind of in this pickle, right? | ||
| And I think that the more that I. | ||
| I and you and all of us can help educate people and people can make the right decision and vote with their dollars, the more that these grass-fed operations can grow and it can become more available for people. | ||
| I don't think grain finishing will ever go away completely. | ||
| The other thing to understand is that the US government holds, I think it's hundreds of millions of acres in the United States, fallow in a program called the Conservation Reserve Program. | ||
| So when farmers are doing plant agriculture, that generally is a one-directional It takes nutrients from the soil, puts them in the plants, | ||
| the plants are harvested, they go to grocery stores. | ||
| Well, what's left is a soil with less nutrients. | ||
| And you do that for a number of cycles, suddenly the soil is not that nutrient rich, | ||
| which is why we had to develop fertilizers, the importance of animal manure on the soil | ||
| to put the nutrients back. | ||
| Is this also what regenerative farming is about, basically? | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| That's where the fertilizers came from in the 1960s and 70s, or even in World War II. | ||
| This idea that the soil is getting less and less nutrient-rich. | ||
| The problem is that if you just do plant agriculture, even if it's organic agriculture on a plot of land, eventually you're not going to be able to grow anything there. | ||
| And you have to let it stay fallow. | ||
| You have to leave it so that it can regenerate. | ||
| Well, if you put animals on that land, that's how the nutrients go back into the soil. | ||
| So all of these hundreds of millions of acres of conservation reserve program land in the United States | ||
| could be used for animal agriculture, and that would accelerate the process | ||
| of regenerating the soil. | ||
| I think that soil's not a sexy thing to talk about, and I didn't grow up on a farm. | ||
| RFK talks about it. | ||
| I know, he does, which is awesome. | ||
| So I didn't grow up on a farm. | ||
| It's not something I understand, but when you see the difference, | ||
| and you see fertile soil, maybe some of your audience is gardeners, which is great, | ||
| When you understand it, it's like, wow, that's really the crux of human life. | ||
| If we don't have healthy soil, how do we grow anything? | ||
| And if we can't grow plants, we can't grow grass to feed cows. | ||
| We can't grow plants to feed humans. | ||
| We have to have healthy soil. | ||
| So we need to think about the health of the soil, but it's so far removed from what we think about being in a city or somewhere else. | ||
| Did you happen to see my garden when you walked in? | ||
|
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No, I didn't. | |
| Yeah, show me. | ||
| I'm impressed with my soil quality. | ||
| I'm going to look at your soil, yeah. | ||
| So you will be very, very impressed with that. | ||
| Let's talk, we talked about donuts for a second, but I want to talk about sugar more broadly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think for the, whatever the good things that I've added to my diet are, um, I think it really was removing sugar more than anything else that helped with this. | ||
| Other, and just general, just feeling better and energy levels that were more stable and everything else. | ||
| Sugar is basically in everything. | ||
| Everyone put it in their coffee, they're putting it in their iced tea, they're putting it in. | ||
| Everywhere all the time and half of our sugar isn't even sugar. | ||
| It's high fructose corn syrup, which is just completely insane different. | ||
| Yeah Just talk a little bit about sugar and diabetes because it's also connected obviously to the obesity thing. | ||
| Yeah Yeah, so I think we mentioned seed oils and I think sugar and seed oils are the two boogeymen here if you eliminate processed sugar and seed oils, I I'm pretty sure your diabetes is gonna get better so The seed oils conversation gets complicated quickly. | ||
| We'll just leave it what we've already said. | ||
| Let's just eliminate them. | ||
| They're problematic. | ||
| Get rid of them and basically cook in butter. | ||
| Use olive oil on your salads. | ||
| But I want people to also understand that the seed oils, I think, are driving diabetes at a mitochondrial level. | ||
| At a cellular level, I think that the accumulation of certain fats in the seed oils are problematic. | ||
| Sugar is an interesting word because I think that this is a very specific discussion to have. | ||
| There's different types of sugar, right? | ||
| And what we see here is if I look at the medical literature, fruit looks pretty healthy for humans, but fruit contains sugar, right? | ||
| Honey, pretty healthy for humans, but it contains sugar. | ||
| Sugar becomes a problem when you strip it away from the food. | ||
| And that's intuitive. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| It's a processed food now. | ||
| Honey's not really a processed food. | ||
| There's over 300 compounds in honey that we don't even really know what they do. | ||
| Bees are complicated. | ||
| Fruit has hundreds of chemicals that we don't fully understand that probably give us information and affect the way we process these foods. | ||
| And it appears that when you eat fruit, or fruit juice, I made fresh-squeezed orange juice this morning. | ||
| I have this little $10 self-stainless steel juicer from Amazon. | ||
| When I drink orange juice, there's a lot of sugar in there. | ||
| But if you look at the literature, when you drink orange juice, the inside of your blood vessels actually becomes healthier. | ||
| It improves something called endothelial function. | ||
| But if I were to eat an equivalent amount of sugar as the orange juice without the orange juice, endothelial function is impaired, so what's going on here? | ||
| Well, there's information in food, and if you strip the information away | ||
| and you have this isolated ingredient, your body doesn't really know what to do with it. | ||
| So sugar for humans, probably not great, but when you're consuming it in fruit or honey, | ||
| the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives, and they don't really seem to be any negatives. | ||
| Obviously, consume fruit or honey in the context of your health | ||
| and in the context of your activity, but even things like watermelon juice | ||
| given to someone during a glucose tolerance test improve glucose handling. | ||
| So you can give someone fruit juice while they're drinking pure glucose and it improves the handling of the glucose. | ||
| So I just want people to understand that I don't see any evidence. | ||
| There's a lot of discussion about this now and I think that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| I don't see any evidence that fruit, fruit juice or honey are harmful for humans. | ||
| They didn't cause diabetes. | ||
| They're problematic for diabetics because they don't handle the sugar well, but I don't think fruit, fruit juice, and honey cause diabetes. | ||
| Would you always tell people, though, it would be better to eat the fruit rather than just drink the juice? | ||
| I don't have a problem. | ||
| Because of the fiber and everything else. | ||
| I don't have a problem with fruit juice, yeah. | ||
| I think it depends on your physiology, right? | ||
| So, earlier we talked about, okay, people who are super healthy or just want to lose weight, don't have an autoimmune condition can do this. | ||
| If you're diabetic, right, your body doesn't handle carbohydrates well. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Whether they're carbohydrates from pasta, whether they're carbohydrates from a white potato, white rice, brown rice, or from fruit. | ||
| You don't handle the carbohydrates well. | ||
| But understand that as a diabetic, those foods generally didn't cause the diabetes. | ||
| It's more of a symptom than the cause. | ||
| So I think that if you're diabetic, you can still have some fruit and you're not going to handle it as well. | ||
| So maybe fruit is better than fruit juice for a diabetic because you don't spike the sugar too high. | ||
| But if we're talking like healthy humans, like I drink a lot of fruit juice, I eat fruit, I live in Costa Rica, I'm very active, I don't have diabetes, you know, I'm very insulin sensitive. | ||
| So interpret it all in the context of where you are with your health. | ||
| I do think that even a diabetic could eat strawberries or blueberries or some fruit or even a little bit of orange juice throughout the day. | ||
| Obviously, it depends how brittle your diabetes is, like how quickly you respond to the sugars. | ||
| Maybe that's not the main food you eat, but they don't have to fear that completely, right? | ||
| This is important to understand that those things didn't cause your issue. | ||
| I'll just say this for diabetics so I round out the conversation. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| That if you have diabetes, if you're not handling carbohydrates well, I do think there's a place for lower or moderate carbohydrate diets in that setting, but I do not think diabetes will get fixed unless you remove the seed oils and other problematic foods. | ||
| So we see this a lot of times as people will, you know, remove just the carbohydrates and they kind of end up with diabetes their whole life or they stay on meds and unless we remove the things that are probably causing it at a cellular level, the diabetes won't resolve. | ||
| So that is a two-pronged equation in diabetes. | ||
| Maybe limit them somewhat, but I think for healthy individuals, you or I, I wouldn't fear fruit juice at all. | ||
| And as it pertains to sugar specifically, like when people are thinking about a spoonful of sugar, like there's just no purpose. | ||
| What's the point? | ||
| Yeah, ultra-processed, ultra-processed. | ||
| But even with honey, I mean I'll just say this, there's a study where they gave honey to diabetics over eight weeks, and at the end of the eight weeks they were giving them I think 120 grams of honey a day if I'm not mistaken, and that actually improved fasting blood glucose. | ||
| So honey is not necessarily the devil when it comes to diabetes. | ||
| Obviously, don't go crazy with it. | ||
| Scale it, you know? | ||
| And I'm not saying honey is medicine for diabetics. | ||
| It's just like, it doesn't cause diabetes. | ||
| It's not gonna cause you to have diabetes if you put honey in your coffee. | ||
| Let's talk about exercise a little bit beyond just the food portion. | ||
| I have a very similar policy on exercise that I do with food, which is I've just sort of figured out something that roughly works for me. | ||
| I do cardio every day, which I know they tell you you probably don't have to do cardio every day, but I do about 40 minutes of cardio every day. | ||
| I lift probably four or five times a week. | ||
| It's not very regimented. | ||
| I just kind of, I'm kind of like feeling like what feels right in my body, what should I do? | ||
| It's kind of working for me. | ||
| What do you think like generally people should be doing as it, you know, if you're just, if you're just someone watching this that does not work out at all, that's just like so intimidated by even just like stepping foot into the gym or starting. | ||
| Yeah, this is an important point. | ||
| So, not that this is even a debate. | ||
| I think changing the quality of your food and exercise are both important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not that you asked me this, but I'll answer this question anyway. | ||
| I think start with food. | ||
| Because I think once you improve the quality of food, you will want to move. | ||
| And I think that if you start with exercise rather than the food, or you believe you can out-exercise a bad diet, you've put the cart before the horse. | ||
| You basically just can't. | ||
| So I would say to people, when you want exercise, go exercise, but start with the quality of your food. | ||
| And so I don't like this idea of having to really self-flagellate, you know, with, I have to go work out today. | ||
| Okay, yes, you need some discipline, but Most of the people I've ever seen or worked with, | ||
| like once you improve food quality, even my 65 year old father, he just says, | ||
| man, I feel lighter, I just wanna move around. | ||
| Great, then you're walking around the block. | ||
| You just walked a block today, that's fantastic. | ||
| You wanna walk two tomorrow, great. | ||
| So you don't have to run a marathon or a half marathon or a 5K, just get up and walk, just move. | ||
| But know that improving food quality, again, back to unprocessed meat, fish, chicken, eggs, vegetables, fruit, do those things, you will want to move. | ||
| And as you get healthier, you will want to move more. | ||
| Okay, so someone watching this, they're going, alright, I've cleaned up a little bit of the diet stuff, I'm starting to feel a little bit better, maybe I'm looking a little bit better. | ||
| But I haven't hit the gym in a long time. | ||
| Just go for a walk. | ||
| I don't even know what to do. | ||
| Just start with a walk. | ||
| Start with a walk. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the walk. | ||
| Even outside of my cardio, we do usually about a 40-minute walk. | ||
| Because being outside is amazing, right? | ||
| You're getting sunlight in your eyes. | ||
| You're seeing nature. | ||
| Hopefully, even if you're in a city or at least outside, it's stimulating for your brain. | ||
| It's good to be outside. | ||
| It's good to breathe the air outside. | ||
| We know that being in natural landscapes affects our nervous system and calms our stress nervous system, our sympathetic nervous system. | ||
| So just start there. | ||
| Just start with a walk. | ||
| You know, what's amazing is that I see more and more of these outdoor workout spaces now. | ||
| And I definitely hear around Miami or other places, like, maybe you'll walk by a pull-up bar or you just do a couple push-ups. | ||
| And even if you have to do push-ups on your knees, you know, it doesn't take much just walking. | ||
| And in terms of movement, I mean, I think learning how to do a pull-up, you know, that's a great exercise. | ||
| And then body weight air squats. | ||
| You know, you don't need much more than that at a basic level. | ||
| Like just, and that body weight air squats affect, you know, you have to think about ankle mobility for people, | ||
| but you can do so much without a gym. | ||
| Just getting up and down out of a chair is using your quadriceps and so much of your lower body | ||
| and this posterior chain. | ||
| And so just starting with those things. | ||
| And then once you are brave enough, or once you're ready to go into a gym, | ||
| there's all sorts of resources in terms of what to do. | ||
| It doesn't have to be overly complicated. | ||
| Again, I like your strategy. | ||
| What do you want to work on? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know that it's like, maybe there's ways I could be optimizing more. | ||
| And I think about that sometimes, but I'm just like, it basically working. | ||
| Like I see my body changing right now. | ||
| So I'm like, let me just keep going with that. | ||
| And then I guess if it plateaus. | ||
| If I lose or something, then I'll shift a little bit. | ||
| Try to make it fun. | ||
| If it's basketball, if it's kicking a soccer ball with your kids, if it's throwing a baseball with your son or daughter, try to make it fun. | ||
| It doesn't have to be complicated with the exercise. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of complex protocols now. | ||
| Zone 2 this, just go move. | ||
| Just go move. | ||
| Just go move. | ||
| And when you fix your food, you will want to move. | ||
| And then there's a world open to you and you can do all sorts of great things. | ||
| Go swimming in the ocean. | ||
|
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Go swimming in a pool or take up a new sport or whatever. | |
| Are you big on any of, you know, like the cold plunge, light therapy, like all of this sort of newer, I don't know if it's cutting edge exactly. | ||
| Cold plunge certainly has existed for a long time. | ||
| But how do you feel about some of those type of things? | ||
| I think they're great. | ||
| I don't think they're imperative, you know. | ||
| Again, they're complicated for people or expensive or you have to have access to them. | ||
| Most of them you can do in nature. | ||
| I think the word biohacking is this new interesting word, but most of that's available in nature. | ||
| Most biohacking is mimicking what happens when you go outside. | ||
| You can join the polar bear club when you jump into the ocean. | ||
| Yeah, I mean it's June now, so there's not as much cold water, but cold shower, It's Miami, right here, or it's getting warm. | ||
| Gosh, if you go for a walk around the block, you just got hot, you already sweat. | ||
| You generated some heat within your body and you moved fluids out of your pores. | ||
| You detox a little bit through your pores. | ||
| Sunlight, a lot of red light therapy is mimicking wavelengths that are available to you outside that are free all day, most of the day. | ||
| Obviously, there's concerns about UV, depending on your baseline skin tone, but morning and evening sun is either Free from UVA and UVB or very low in UVA and UVB and it's full of red light. | ||
| So they're great. | ||
| Is that another one that just seems crazy that everyone became so afraid of the sun? | ||
| Not to say that skin cancer doesn't exist and my dad had melanoma and I try to be aware of that but that people really sort of became we're putting all of this stuff on our skin all the time but now we're finding out that all kinds of bad stuff in it. | ||
| Potentially massive effects. | ||
| You know, melanoma is an interesting one. | ||
| The data that melanoma is exclusively related to the sun is very weak. | ||
| Melanoma is not the strongest sun-related cancer. | ||
| There are two, squamous and basal, that are more related to the sun. | ||
| Melanoma often occurs at the bottom of our feet, you know, in a bathing suit area, things that don't see the sun a lot. | ||
| So, melanoma is an interesting one. | ||
| And in fact, there is some evidence that people who get low-level chronic exposure outdoor workers have lower rates of melanoma. | ||
| So, melanoma is a confusing skin cancer and we don't have to go too into that. | ||
| But I think that melanoma is a scary one because it really is the most aggressive cancer. | ||
| But to say that melanoma is directly related to the sun or exclusively related to the sun, that's a hard argument to make. | ||
| Now, could some people potentially worsen melanoma risk with multiple burns? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, I'll just say this about sun exposure and sunscreens. | ||
| I think we need more research here. | ||
| This community has pushed back on some of the things I've said in the past also. | ||
| If you look at animal models, right, we don't have this research in humans because who would pay for it, but if you look at animal models, when you feed animals more of these seed oils and the fats than seed oils, they get more aggressive skin cancers. | ||
| So I think it's very possible, again, that seed oils are contributing to this incidence of skin cancers in the United States, and yet no one's thinking about that. | ||
| You know, like, what if my skin is All of the cells in my skin, the dermis and the epidermis, have lipid membranes. | ||
| And those lipids, those are fats. | ||
| And those fats are affected by the fats that I put in my mouth. | ||
| So when you're eating seed oils, more of the components of those seed oils end up in your skin. | ||
| And is it possible that that makes the skin cell membranes more damageable, more fragile, that the damage in the membrane is then, you know, affects the nucleus and the DNA of the skin cells or leads to either easier burning propensity or skin cancers? | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| So let's do one other thing in our remaining time and then I hope we can do this maybe every couple of months where this was like our 101 session and dive into some things more specifically next time. | ||
| Let's talk about brain health a little bit, which actually is probably the most political thing we can talk about because everybody seems to have a theory or two on Joe Biden at the moment. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| But we have a lot of, there's clearly an epidemic either of dementia or ultimately Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. | ||
| There's a series of these diseases now that are kind of loosely connected. | ||
| I suspect you think that's largely because of our diet. | ||
| I think it's Mostly because of our diet. | ||
| And I think that dementia is scary. | ||
| You know, I had a grandmother who died with Alzheimer's. | ||
| I had another grandmother, so my paternal grandmother died with Alzheimer's. | ||
| My maternal grandmother had Parkinson's later in life. | ||
| I think that the neurodegenerative diseases are very scary. | ||
| Again, I think that just like heart attacks, that's visceral. | ||
| You know, I don't want a heart attack. | ||
| You see this image of somebody, oh my heart really hurts. | ||
| But it's also poignant to see someone that we love, elderly or middle-aged, if it's early onset, lose orientation with what's around them. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a very sad thing. | |
| And I think that there's a lot of evidence that this is related to the quality of our lifestyle and diet, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Certainly exercise is powerful for this. | |
| And I think that the quality of the foods we eat determine this long term. | ||
| And again, I haven't heard enough discussion about this in the literature, in the popular press, about the quality of the foods we eat. | ||
| I mean, coming from a history of formal training in psychiatry, we see these things all the time. | ||
| And I'll tell you that neuroinflammation, which is inflammation in the brain, is affected by inflammation in the body. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| And how do we get inflammation in the body? | ||
| Well, it starts in the gut. | ||
| And it starts with the foods that we eat. | ||
| And we know that there are components of these ultra-processed, low-quality foods that affect our guts. | ||
| So if you were concerned about something going on up here, you're gonna take care of the gut, | ||
| but are there specific things you should be eating that are, I assume, avocado and some of that kind of stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I would say there are certain things you should be eating and a lot of things | ||
| you should not be eating. | ||
| In fact, I was just talking to a friend on this trip to Miami and she said, | ||
| I have some of my family who has Alzheimer's, what should they eat? | ||
| And again, this is just what I told her, I'm not making medical recommendations on a podcast. | ||
| And I said, you know, think about the quality of their diet. | ||
| This was her grandmother that she was talking about. | ||
| And her grandmother is from India and so they don't eat much meat or any meat. | ||
| And I thought, well, there's a lot of nutrients in meat that support the brain. | ||
| Creatine is the first one. | ||
| So creatine is the bodybuilder thing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But the benefits of creatine, which is uniquely found in meat, the body makes a small amount of creatine, but it's uniquely found in meat, especially red meat, dark meats. | ||
| The benefits of creatine in the brain are difficult to overstate. | ||
| Like, it is an incredibly powerful food. | ||
| So her grandmother should probably be supplementing with creatine Again, something, or, you know, I think traditionally, because of their religious background, they've never eaten red meat, but like, you know, again, we're back to something that I think really is at the center of what I do, which is red meat is healthy. | ||
| You know, we've been told for so long that it's not healthy, but that's a health food. | ||
| Whether it's the certain fats in red meat, like stearic acid, nutrients in red meat, like creatine, taurine is another compound that's been studied for longevity, potentially for brain health. | ||
| Again, only found in meat. | ||
| So in this case though, because there's a religious or cultural issue, you would say that taking a supplement of creatine would be okay? | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| But it kind of speaks to the broader issue, which is quality of the foods, including animal foods in the diet, is essential for these things. | ||
| And yet we're told to get rid of these things, right? | ||
| But so many nutrients in meat, especially red meat, vital for brain health. | ||
| Getting rid of the seed oils, and these fats that we were told are bad for us. | ||
| Butter, tallow, ghee. | ||
| They contain so many of these nutrients that are essential for brain health that are hard to find. | ||
| Vitamin K2 found in animal foods, found in egg yolks, you know, associated with decreased rates of cardiovascular disease in the Rotterdam study. | ||
| And yet we're told butter and some of the richest sources of vitamin K2 are harmful for us. | ||
| Vitamin K2 for the brain, vitamin D for the brain, either getting out in the sun or doing supplementation, like simple, simple things, but just quality of diet and lifestyle. | ||
| I think this is definitely what's going on. | ||
| And it kind of, you know, look, We commit, I think rightly so, tens of millions of dollars to research these things. | ||
| But no one is really talking about the elephant in the room. | ||
| I believe we should be doing very granular bench research into the roots of cancer, the roots of Alzheimer's, dementia, the roots of Parkinson's. | ||
| But can we fund a study to look at food quality in these people? | ||
| I mean, there's something going on here. | ||
| and at least anecdotally, again, just my personal experience, | ||
| I've had many people come up to me, places I've been, and they say, hey, I changed my father's diet | ||
| and his dementia got better. | ||
| It's just an anecdote, it's not a randomized controlled trial | ||
| but that's enough to make me think something going on here we need to think about. | ||
| That actually sparks one last thing, I promise. | ||
| And then I want to do a tour of the garden. | ||
| Maybe we will get him into my pantry over there and we'll see what needs to go. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'll do it. | |
| I think we're doing alright. | ||
| But what about the social component to this? | ||
| Because I said to you that these guys are huge fans of yours and we've all then, because they start talking about things, we've all started eating better and playing basketball and working out and blah blah blah. | ||
| And that portion of it versus, you know, just kind of being your own island, I think has become very important, at least in terms of what we do here. | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| Behavioral change is difficult outside of a community. | ||
| Some of the most effective behavioral interventions have happened within religious communities that I've heard of. | ||
| I think it was called the David Project. | ||
| A doctor went to one of these large churches, I forget where it was, and just went to the pastor and said, hey, let's just get your Little small groups talking about eating healthfully, and people lost so much weight within that community. | ||
| So either within a church setting or other communities, if your community is changing, you will follow suit as a human. | ||
| You are tribal. | ||
| And the flip side is also true. | ||
| If you are in a community of people who are celebrating junk food, good luck changing your diet. | ||
| Because every time you do anything, You show up to a barbecue, oh, come on, how come you're not eating the brownies with the gravy and, you know, have this Coca-Cola? | ||
| And like, that's very difficult. | ||
| So choosing who you hang around with is super important. | ||
| And we know beyond that, that like actual community, real human interaction, critical for our brains, without a doubt. | ||
| Let's hit the garden. |
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