Dr. Sean Baker, I am super thrilled that you said yes. You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into. I’m happy. I’m happy now. All right. All right. All right. We actually are very symbiotic in that I love elimination diets and I see the carnivore diet as the ultimate elimination diet and a great tool.

And where I would love to start And the question is, what it actually is, because I think there’s a lot of information floating about, and I’d like people to really know the ins and outs.

Yeah, you know, I, I think if we make the assumption that, uh, food impacts our health, which I think is a pretty reasonable assumption.

It’s reasonable, but yet unknown. Yeah, it’s surprisingly, it’s surprising that many physicians don’t, even, you know, gastroenterologists will say food has nothing to do with things like Crohn’s disease. I’m like, that seems very bizarre. But if we make the assumption that food is contributing to disease or how we feel, and we have a diet that consists of thousands of things, if you eliminate one or two of those, you still left, you know, another nine facored in there that you can’t fill, you can’t tell because sometimes multiple things cause problems.

So eliminating things down to the most, uh, simplest form as possible is something that is providing reasonable nourishment. Something like carnivore diet, this makes sense. And I, I kind of talk about it as a therapeutic tool, tool. I mean, it’s been very efficacious for things like autoimmune disease, cardiomyobolic disease, obesity, food addiction, those things that, uh, are increasingly more common.

Now you look at autoimmunity, it’s right now in the United States, it’s estimated between 22 and 50 million people suffer from that. We have 11 percent of the population suffering from diabetes. We Maybe a quarter of the population has some sort of mental health disorder. So it’s like, there’s a lot of people that can benefit from this sort of thing.

And so in essence, it’s basically kind of animal terms. I mean, for most people, um, they have some level of variety where they might include eggs and meat and cheese, you know, a little bit of dairy products. But for some people, it can be as simple as just steak and water, which is kind of crazy, it sounds like, but it’s, it’s literally, that is something you can sustain for a, a fairly long period of time.

I’ve done it for years at a time. I mean, Uh, with no, you know, no ill effects. Um, I think that a lot of, uh, things like autoimmune disease inflammatory process begin in the gut. And if our gut is inflamed, irritated, you think about, you think about what, how do we interact with the world? Most people think that our skin is our, our largest organ and has the most interaction with the external environment, but really our skin is designed to keep things out first of all, right?

So you’re not absorbing that much to your skin or you’re not supposed to. Whereas our gut, you know, people don’t understand this, but from our mouth through our stomach through all the way through our intestines is actually external to our body. 70 percent of our immune system presides in our gut. The surface area of our gut is estimated to be about the size of a tennis court, right?

So you have a tennis court sized surface area of something that’s designed to absorb things. So most of our interaction with the, with the world from a volume standpoint is going through our gut. And so what we put in our mouth has a huge impact on our body. So something like a carnivore diet or any other elimination diet has been tremendously efficacious.

And I think this is obviously said, this is the, like the, you know, it’s just like the, the, the ultimate elimination diet.

Yeah. That’s what I looked at it when I love elimination diets. I think that They are the ultimate, like the original biohacking when you really look at it. We’re connecting the

dots, right?

I mean, we’re sitting here at a biohacking conference, you know, I look at all these various inputs that you can provide which can have self efficacy But really if you don’t stop poisoning yourself, I don’t care what you do You can stand in front of red lights all day long. Don’t stop poisoning yourself.

Amen. Make a difference

Well, don’t you think that the fastest way that you can turn your health around is to change what’s at the end of your fourth eye? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. For sure. Now, I’m glad I asked that first question because I had thought and that the carnivore diet meant that you had to eat, what do they call it, from hoof to snout?

Oh, nose to tail. And

I’m like, oh no. Yeah. So you don’t. You could just say. No,

you do not have to sit there and eat raw testicles and raw liver like you see some people doing. That’s just kind of, I think that’s for entertainment purposes only. I mean, literally I’ve been tracking, you know, I, I, I took a survey of 12, 000 people on this site, Harvard university, one of the study, this of 2000 people.

I specifically asked, uh, David, dead Ludwig and Melinda Leonard’s in Harvard to ask this question. I said, the serve between people that consume already meets and those that don’t, and the outcomes were equivalent. There was no difference in, in, uh, resolution of disease, no, Increase or decrease incidence of deficiency symptoms.

So it’s unnecessary.

How quickly when you start this, do you start to see people shift and feel better?

So I think the metabolic transition takes between three and eight weeks for most people. There are people that’s symptomatic like gut issues. A lot of people have noticed that bloating goes away. Like there’s a lot of, you know, you see a lot with women there.

They’ve been brainwashed to this. Eat low fat, eat salads all the time, maybe have a tiny little piece of chicken on there. Right. And then they’re binging on ice cream at night because they’re starving, and they’re complaining that their guts are all swollen. And they say, oh, that’s normal. It’s not normal for your gut to hurt.

I don’t care. We wouldn’t accept that in any other organ system in our body. If we were walking around and we had chest pain, we would say, there’s a problem. If I walk around and my knee hurts, there’s a problem. But we accept, oh, bloating and discomfort as normal. It’s really not. It either means we’re eating the wrong food, which is most likely the case, or our gut is broken somehow.

So, When I see people dealing with diseases, by three months, most people see some sort of inflection point. So many people see it earlier, most people by three months. So I say if you’re going to do it, do it for three months, give it a fair shot, and you know, make a decision. It either works for you or not not At worst You ate a bunch of steaks or something like that, which is not that bad, it’s like.

Right, I say if I had to do one diet for the rest of my life, I could easily live on steak. Yeah. With some coffee. And you can, you can. That would be the reality. That would be my trifecta diet. Now, when you say carnivore, does that mean it is just meat?

Would it be a meat chicken fish, or is it really meat?

You can do it with variety for sure. Uh, most people for some, and I think there’s reasons why this occurs, but most people tend to gravitate towards ruminant meat, whether it be beef or lamb, particularly in this country. But I mean, you can do it with fish, chicken, pork, uh, seafood, some people eggs if they tolerate, some people dairy if they tolerate.

Dairy is one of those ones which is kind of gray area for many people. But yeah, I mean it can, it can be tremendously varied, however, funnily enough, the longer you do it, the more you just want a damn steak. It’s just like, just give me a steak. Yeah. And you just get drawn to that because it’s, it’s kind of primitively and viscerally satisfying a way that a lot, a lot of other foods are.

If you think about like our human, human evolutionary, uh, you know, time, well, for a long period of time, the only technology we had to hunt with was a spear up until about around 80, 000 years. And can you imagine how many birds you could get with a spear? It’s not very efficient. So we weren’t setting out the big, big megafauna animals, you know, kill a large animal you can eat for several weeks and you only got to hunt once.

If you’re chasing birds around with a spear, good luck with that.

Yeah, you probably expended more calories in that, in the hunt. So what about nutrient deficiencies? I’m sure you get asked this all the time. Yeah.

So one of the things people ask about particularly is what about phyto nutrients? These, these, these wonderful animals.

polyphenols and all those types of things. So it’s interesting, and most people don’t know that, but there’s a great, uh, bit of research that a guy named Stephan Van Vliet out of Duke University has done with another guy named Fred Provenza, and they’ve demonstrated that actually, believe it or not, beef has something like 70, 000 individual nutrients.

It’s not just protein, fat, a couple of items. It’s 70, 000 unique compounds to include. Many, many of the vital nutrients that the cow consumes. So the cow actually has a more diverse diet than you or I can have. We can’t, I can’t go out and eat grass and leaves, I’ll get sick. They can do that. They, they actually bio accumulate a lot of these vital nutrients.

Not only are they there, but they’re more bio available to us. You know, when you eat a big diet, kind of fibrous vegetables and fruits, the fiber actually, there’s a nice study from 1978 that showed that, By consuming a high fiber diet, you lose twice as much protein, twice as much fat, twice as much carbohydrate from the food.

So it’s inefficient. You think about, you know, food prices are going up. It doesn’t make sense to have half your nutrition end up in the toilet. So it’s very nutrient dense. The only thing people talk about is vitamin C. Are we going to get steroids from vitamin C? We’ve known for at least a hundred years or probably since, since the days of Arctic exploration back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, That actually, if you have access to fresh meat, it literally cures scurvy.

It prevents and cures scurvy, and the reason these sailors used to get scurvy back in the day, uh, was because they were eating dried, preserved meat as their, as their source of nutrition, and that doesn’t work. As long as it’s fresh, and I don’t mean you got to eat it, you know, from a warm animal. I mean, as long as it’s not been dried and canned and preserved, it provides enough to prevent things like scurvy, and I’ve yet to see it.

I’ve literally, as a physician, I’ve seen Thousands upon thousands of people on this diet. I’ve yet to see somebody with any sort of demonstrable nature deficiency, you know, it’s such it’s and we have with regard to vitamin C We have all these compensatory mechanisms like most people don’t know you can actually recycle vitamin C in the red cells Most people don’t know that the glucose molecule and the vitamin C molecule are very similar They’re almost identical except for one small difference.

They use the same, they use the same transporters And when there’s a high amounts of glucose around You Vitamin C transport is minimized. When glucose is lower, which happens on a lower carb diet, we get more vitamin C, uh, shut away.

So how important is it to get grass finished? Because I know that everything’s grass fed.

So is the grass finished? Right, right. So

it’s an interesting question. It’s a question I get all the time. Sure. The data that we have on humans, there’s not much. So there’s, there’s no real studies that show that. I mean, yes, there are nutritional differences. You can say, Grass finished beef, on average, has more conjugated linoleic acid, has more vitamin A, more vitamin E, you know, things like that.

The outcome studies in humans, there’s been really two studies that have been done. One, Texas A& M did it about 2014, comparing grass finned, which is grain finished, hamburger meat, and looking at like biomarkers like cholesterol and things like that. So really no significant difference. Another study was done in Australia looking at, uh, Uh, grass finished, uh, cattle and kangaroo meat.

No, grain finished cattle and kangaroo meat. So it wasn’t really, uh, an apples to apples comparison. They saw that the grain finished cattle had a higher rate of postprandial or aftermeal Uh, inflammation, which we’re not sure what that really means.

Wouldn’t it just be because there’s more arachidonic acid in that sat?

I mean, kangaroo meat would be really lean, wouldn’t it? Well, it is gonna be very

lean. Yeah, so it’s not a really accurate comparison. So the real answer is we don’t really have good evidence to show one is better than the other. Human health standpoint. Now, environmentally, there are some benefits, clearly.

I mean, you know, but just because it says grass finish on a label is very misleading because that just means the cow has access to grass if it wants. It may not eat it. It may just still be finished out on, uh, you know, hay or silage or something like that, or even grain. They can still call it grass finish.

Um, there is You know, in my experience, again, this is the same thing, the Harvard study, I’ve surveyed 12, 000 people asking about, does it make a difference? Again, for most people know, there are people that anecdotally will say, I feel better on grass finished beef, but there’s some people that say, I feel better on grain finished beef.

So it’s kind of interesting. So I can’t in good conscience tell you that you should only eat grass finished beef. Because some people find it, one, financially difficult for some reason. Some people don’t like it. You know, cause lean. It tastes different. It definitely tastes different. The other thing is grass finishing.

And I love regenerate branches. I support those guys all the time, but it’s a skill that is more difficult. Grain finishing is easy. It’s formulaic. They’re very consistent results. You know what it’s going to taste like. Some people prefer that with grass finishing. I’ve had some really wonderful grass finish meat, but, but likewise, I’ve had some stuff that’s like, I’m not a big fan.

So kind of like a car tire. So the, the, the real answer is at this point in 2024, eat what you enjoy.

Well, and what you have access to. What you have access to, what you enjoy. When you dine out, sometimes you’re like, yeah, what are you gonna do? I just recently was listening to a podcast and I heard this statistic and I went and you, you basically alluded to it where you were talking about what you would have to do to digest and how much you would lose and they were talking about the difference between eating a mixed meal because I’m all about How much protein you’re getting, because I work with women and they do eat enough protein.

That’s true. You know, but he was talking about when you eat a mixed meal that you’re absorbing less of those essential amino acids versus if you just ate straight wheat versus if you just took essential amino acids.

Can you unpack that one? Well, yeah. So it’s interesting. Like we hear about things like polyphenols are great, but actually polyphenols block the absorption of protein and fats.

So it’s like our, you know, what’s in that effect here? And there are. Numerous studies show that different nutritional mixtures, and you mentioned mixed meals, often things like phytic acid, which is high in things like grains and legumes and things like that, actually binds minerals, it interferes with the absorption, a whole host of things.

So it’s like you have to eat more of it, you know, and, and deal with the, maybe more calories to get the same amount of nutrition. In fact, like there’s a, we know that with the RDA right now for things like zinc, for instance. If you have, uh, 1, 000 milligrams of phytic acid in your diet, you have to double your zinc reform.

You have two, that’s one gram, two grams of, you know, phytic acid, which you get in grains and, and, uh, you have to triple your zinc intake just to make up for that.

And what would, what would that look like in terms of a serving?

Uh, so, you know, you might have like a cup, like a cup of cereal, you know, your, your standard cereal, which I don’t recommend anybody anyway, but, but that wouldn’t.

Literally double your zinc requirements for that meal. And so, you know, and then where are you going to get your zinc from? Well, obviously seafood, things like that. Meat, of course, good sources of that.

Yeah, I would wonder with carnivore diet, If it’s actually, people get to a point where it’s hard to keep their weight up.

Yes, that is, that is probably.

Which is a problem every woman wants to have, is how do I keep my weight down?

Yeah, but I can’t. Yeah, I mean, that is one thing and you know, it’s great if you want to lose weight and many people do lose weight on that. Not everybody, but most people. And it’s, you know, we have this crazy, uh, well, I’m sure you’re aware of the Olympic stuff, right?

Everybody’s on this magnetite, right? And it’s interesting, there are studies looking at beef isolate being incredibly potent at stimulating GLP 1. It’s like nature’s GLP 1. So like bone broth protein? Like the Yeah, it’s like, yeah, beef isolate, bone broth protein, but beef in general, it’s got wheat in there.

So that actually, and the way that system is supposed to work is we have something called the ileal brachycardia. That’s the system, if you look at the stomach, then you have the first part of the small intestine called the duodenum Then finally, the ileum. And in the ileum, there are cells that sense nutrients.

And there is the so called L cells, which is so secreted up one. So when nutrients wind their way through the digestive tract, and they stimulate those L cells, it says, hey, we got too much food coming in right now, slow things down, so we can digest and absorb it. So the drugs artificially manipulate that system, and it slows it down for days and weeks, where you get all backed up.

Whereas meat tells you to slow it down just for, you know, five minutes or so till you get, till you have a chance to digest and absorb that stuff. So, uh, meat is just an incredibly, I mean, it’s, it’s an efficient food. You think about if I were going to build a brick house, right? I’d like a lot of bricks.

You know, I don’t want straw and mud because it’s a lot more work. And that’s really the analogy between plant consumption and animal consumption. Every cell in my body is an animal cell and everything I need is contained in animal cells. I know it sounds simplistic, but you know, if you look at the history of every animal species on the planet, something like 85 percent of every animal has ever flown, swam, or walked on earth has been carnivorous because it’s easier.

It’s more efficient. To be herbivorous, You have to have all those extra, uh, anatomic digestive adaptations that occur. Like, you know, a hindgut femur, like a horse, or a foregut femur, like a cow, they have this specialized adaptation. So we don’t have very much of that as humans. We can, you know, if we compare ourselves to other primates, uh, a chimpanzee can get up to 40 to 50 percent of its calories from fiber.

Humans can get about 4 percent of our calories. So it’s kind of one of those things where it’s like, You get a little bit, but it’s not the main deal. The main deal that we’re designed for hardware wise is basically meat.

So you brought up fiber and that was definitely one of the questions. I’m sure you get asked a lot because gut microbiome is such the buzz now.

And fiber, you know, the general recommendation of 30 grams, how do you reconcile This diet and the fiber. Right. So

I will tell you with a hundred percent certainty fiber is not essential. If it was I’d be dead a long time ago. I basically consume essentially no fiber in eight years. I’m fine. I go to the bathroom normally every day.

Um, yeah, you think there’s a nice paper that a guy named Tommy Wood and Lucy Marien did in 2021. It talks about the metabolic flexibility of the gut. And the main benefit with regard to the microbiome and the gut with, with regard to fiber. is thought to be the creation of something called butyrate, a butyric acid, which sells these for energy, right?

But that pathway is not unique to fiber. There are many ways to get that. Actually, pro, uh, protein can actually be broken down into these short chain amino, iron fatty acids. If you are a low carbon and you’re starting to produce ketones, that beta iodoctybutyrate, which sounds very much like, uh, butyric acid, literally one hydroxyl molecule apart, is a very easily reversible, uh, uh, uh, reaction.

So you get plenty of gut, uh, energy for that. So it’s not really, it’s not really an issue. So fiber was conditionally beneficial. If you’re eating a western junk food diet, cookies and cakes and potato chips, yeah, eat some fruits and vegetables. It’s got to displace some of that. I think really, A high fiber diet, most of these studies are associational studies and they’re really a marker of diet quality.

If I eat a high fiber diet, I’ll probably eat Whole Foods Specials, Whole Grains, and so on and so forth. And I’m not eating as much of that pure junk. But when are you comparing it to? So yeah, anything’s really good compared to the standard junk food diet.

I think back, I did a reality show called Freaky Eaters.

And it was where people were basically, they got hooked on one thing and that’s all they would eat. So there were a lot of French fry people, um, but there were two guys. One would only eat raw meat. Right. And one would only eat meat. Right. And they wanted to show, we would do all of this to show how bad this was.

Cause the, The girlfriends and wives wanted them to be able to eat everything. Right, right. Except I went and did stool tests, lab tests, and I, and body comp, they go, they look perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I’m trying to find the thing. Maybe I could find some like parasites in the stool and try and find something.

But

yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve seen a number of people now that have actually, you know, got microbiome diversity checks and it’s actually gotten better by going carnivore. So they actually become more diverse. Wow. So it’s, it’s, It’s surprising. It’s surprising. You think and you know, you know, I’ve got a case series that we we’ve submitted written up on Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, biopsy, biopsy proven colonoscopy proven Crohn’s disease, an intervention, which was clearly documented carnivore diet for three to six months.

Repeat biopsy and colonoscopy, disease is gone. Wow. That is, that, that study is now sitting there at Harvard and also at Moderate Tech waiting on the IRB to approve it. Because the Institutional Review Board is saying, well, we don’t know if it’s ethical to publish this data, which I think is insane.

It’s so political.

It’s such an agenda. That’s so ridiculous. Such a propaganda. It’s not ethical. It’s, it’s, It’s not ethical not to talk about it, because double negatives are hard. Is, when someone does this, do they go straight into it or is there better off to do an adaptation transition period? What works best? I

think it depends on the person.

You know, um, there are people that are profoundly sick. They’re diabetic. Maybe they’re on a lot of diabetic meds. Maybe they have hypertension. Maybe they’re on, uh, mental health drugs. Probably in that situation, it makes sense to taper down, you know, taper down the fiber, taper down the carbohydrate. Don’t quit coffee right away because that’s, that’s a disaster.

Why would you ever quit coffee? Well, that’s true. What am I, what am I hearing? I thought we were friends. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I think for some people, if they’re, if they’re generally pretty healthy, maybe younger, maybe carb diet, then you can kind of transition right away. But I find a lot of people, because there are, there are concerns with transitioning right away.

Some people get Low on energy.

I was gonna say they’d be exhausted. They’re used to fueling glucose all the time.

Yeah. You, you do best with what you’re adapted to. And most people are adapted to, you know, on the risk diet, they’ve been eating it that way for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. You can’t expect within a few days or weeks to just totally, you know, be ready to, to transition over.

Now, what about types of meat? Like when someone’s doing this is, are they better off eating higher fat cuts? So they,

yeah, so if you are at a point where you’re not consuming carbohydrates, you got to get energy from somewhere, right? And, and proteins is not a, protein is wonderful as you and I both know.

But it’s not a great source of energy. I mean, we can, we can do it. And it’s, you know, the nice thing about it is it’s kind of inefficient. So you can actually eat protein. It’s really hard to gain weight eating protein. Yeah. You know, you look at guys like, uh, Jose Antonio’s work where they gave bodybuilders five grams per kilo and they couldn’t figure out where it went.

There was no fat gain. It was just like protein. And that disappeared to them. Um, I find, you know, women probably tend to do a little better with a little bit of higher fat because women, In general, sorry, I have a little more body fat than men.

Well, they do. Men have three to five percent essential fat.

Women

have ten to fifteen. Right. So women are probably going to do better with a little bit higher fat. Now, typically from a caloric standpoint, It looks like anywhere between 60 and 80 percent fat, which means 20 to 40 percent protein, which is clearly a high protein diet. I mean, the average American eats 15 percent protein, which is clearly too low.

Right. Um, so yeah, I mean the fat becomes important. And then how do you assess that? Really? It’s kind of like, how do I feel? How much energy do I have? I mean, there’s amounts that you’re going to need and you know, you got to figure out how to tolerate it. Cause some people, a lot of fat they don’t do well.

Maybe they need it. Yeah. So they’ve got to, They’ve got to maybe space it out. They’ve got to be careful with rendered fat. Rendered fat processes a little differently than whole fat. You know, you think about what our stomach does. If I eat a steak, like a prime, you know, beautiful, well marbled steak.

I’m so hungry right now as you’re talking

about this.

It’s

great. I had some rice up last night. Yeah, the others right across. Yeah, we had a tomahawk, you know, 48. Tom, well, not just me, that would be, there were three of us, that’s a one person. My husband and I will do that easily, but with

the fat digestion, if I eat a, if I eat like a big old rib eye steak, right, my stomach has to spend about three or four hours breaking it down into liquid and little by little it’ll go into the duodenum.

If I eat a big blob of rendered fat, a big blob of butter, grease, right, already liquid the stomach has nothing. It has literally nothing to do to it. So it just shoots it all into the small intestine and then it comes over well. And then you have bloating and diarrhea and things like that. So you just have to be careful with the VAT, the type and how much you eat at one sitting.

So some people might find that initially they just have to eat maybe three or four smaller meals until they get used to it. Cause there is a process where our body adapts and we have different differential expression of different gut cells. You know, cause the gut’s turning over every one or two days.

We have a new set of gut cells. So it takes a while for that to happen. Enzymes are being upregulated. So fat is absolutely important. Um, people would like central nervous system issues like things like multiple sclerosis, which I’ve seen, believe it or not, respond tremendously well, to include people MRIs where the plaques are going away.

There’s, they become asymptomatic. So, uh, mental health issues, you remember, our brain is largely, yeah, composed of fat. And if we’re not getting it, you know, I wonder everybody’s so stupid these days. And

do you think you can get enough omega threes from this? From the meat that you would need to supplement?

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. You don’t really need a lot of omega 3. The requirement is fairly small. Now, you can, like, again, grass I use it

for, I have a son with a traumatic brain injury and bipolar, so we’re always pushing

it out. I mean, it’s clearly beneficial, right? Um, and again, I think it has to do with great herbs, bioavailability, and absorption.

So grain finish has a little bit less than grass finish, but both of them are pretty good. And if you really, really wanted to push to omega 3s, just eat a piece of fish once a week. You know, throw a piece of salmon in there, some other fatty fish, and you’re going to eat, you’re going to have ample.

So I don’t know if you saw this paper recently and probably did, because it was such a buzz all over the internet about there, there’s no upper limit for protein.

Yeah, that was so outta Finland the hundred gram. What’s your comment

on that? Well, it’s interesting ’cause uh, I dunno if you know what Don Leman is. Yes. Yeah. Don, Don talked. Don was the guy who discovered the leucine trigger. Right? And I saw his criticism of study. One thing he was saying, well it was, it was used, it was a, uh, study.

He uses Cain, which is slower digestion study. Uh, so adjusting poach. This comparator groups were 20 grams versus a hundred and it said it could have been 20 grams with a 50 grams And you might have saw a difference, you know from 50 to 80, right? So it was it was kind of not the ideal study, although it was quadruply labeled and they had like four different isotopes they labeled Um, I believe you know because I asked on I’ve interviewed on I said Don, you know, most of the studies you’ve done on You know 30 gram, you know boluses, softened protein powder, it’s absorbed very differently If I sit there and eat a two pound steak What is happening with me?

And he says, you know, we really don’t have data on that. And what we do know is that when I eat a, like I said, this is old GLP one thing. When I eat a big old steak, it’s going to take 12, 16, 18 hours for me to absorb all those amino acids. So, so it’s almost like I’m eating multiple meals because it’s not being absorbed right away, as opposed to protein powder, which absorption characteristics are very rapid.

Especially whey, right? So I don’t think, I think you can eat certainly more than 30 grams of one meal and still produce muscle. I mean, I, I, you know, I, I’m, you know, I’m almost six years of age. I put on 10 pounds of muscle in the last eight years eating nothing but two, three pounds of meat in one, one, one setting.

So it’s, it’s definitely doable.

Yeah. I find the only thing that’s limiting me is like, I get full.

Yeah. And I go, yeah. Well, that’s, that’s the limiting factor. That’s the thing about carnival. A lot of women will say, and that is a lot of women have to, they have to break it down into smaller meals because it’s so easy to fall in this one.

It’s, it’s, I think it’s probably normal. Two meals a day type of pattern. You know, we’ve been trained to eat six or seven times a day. We’ve been trained to graze from 7 a. m. to 10 p. m. It’s like. Three meals and three snacks and maybe another extra meal on top of that.

The fourth meal. Don’t you remember when Taco Bell was marketing that fourth meal?

Oh my gosh, it’s like the hobbits where it’s got second breakfast, second breakfast, yeah. Well, it went, it was happening when the low fat thing happened and all of a sudden we’re like starving to death. We have to eat all the time and then we’re having snack wells which, right, well that really just sent us over.

It didn’t even taste good. No, but and no one ever ate just one. No. You kept eating them and eating them. Um, I just completely lost my train of thought, but what I would love to know is what your diet is like now. Like do you, is there a place for fruits and vegetables? You know, are there foods beyond all processed foods that you just think are problematic we shouldn’t avoid?

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because, you know, you think  this is an extreme diet. Why would anybody just only eat meat? Again, I think it is a therapeutic tool. I think if you want to fix a broken gut, this is a great way to do it. It might take three months, it might take six months, it might take a year, but you think about it.

Humans are omnivorous. We’ve eaten fruits and vegetables and other foods for as long as we’ve been humans, quite honestly. But I think the current diet is so God awful bad that it makes people unable to tolerate things that we probably could have tolerated in the past. You know, when you’re like, like you think about it, most of us, when we were kids.

We weren’t sick. We were running around with tummy aches and blood. You didn’t see the overweight kids, right? You didn’t see the overweight kids. And I think there’s something that changes over time and your capacity to handle these things is a problem. So I think I think an elimination diet like the carnivore diet is almost like a reset button in a way like Let me just hit the factory set at factory set settings And then I can slowly try to reintroduce those things.

I encourage people to do that. I say fix whatever issue is causing your problem And then see what you can tolerate. And some people have great success. I see people with Crohn’s disease that now are eating, I mean, mostly meat, but they’re still including a little bit of Maybe a sweet potato or some avocado or some, a little bit of fruit and things like that, and they’re doing just fine.

So I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, it’s personal preference. You know, some people, some people like the simplicity of like, sure, I’ll cook a steak and I’m done.

I would imagine a lot of people go on this and never go back thinking

it’s so much easier. A lot of people are so profoundly positively affected and are so kind of pissed off about how they felt they’ve been misled.

They’re like, how did that work? I’m done. It’s easier. It’s tough. I mean, honestly, it’s pretty enjoyable. I mean, I, I don’t like not look forward to eating a big old ribeye steak every day. I was like, I’m, I’m happy. I feel like I’m the luckiest guy on earth. You know, you think about it, this is how only royalty are going to be eaten.

So most of, you know, most of modern, modern humanity, you know, before, you know, if you were a peasant, you’re getting dirty grains, dirty vegetables, and maybe, maybe somebody throw you a piece of spleen once in a while and you get lucky. But, uh, this is, uh, You know, it’s, it’s, it’s quite enjoyable, surprisingly.

So are you sure carnivore or do you put some other things in here and there? So I Like what happens if you are, have your birth, like someone gave you a birthday cake? So interesting.

Yeah. So I am not religious, right? I’m like, if I’m at home, I’m cooking for myself, I’ll just get, I’ll just make myself a steak.

Um, I probably, without exaggeration, in the last eight years have eaten 10, 000 steaks. That’s. Legit. Um, I will include dairy products occasionally. Sometimes I’ll have some yogurts and cheese. Sometimes I’ll have eggs. Sometimes I’ll have fish. Every once in a while, I’ll have a little small piece of fruit.

And every really once in a while, I’ll have a piece of cake. You know, it’s just like, you know, but not, you know, it’s like once or twice a year, maybe at most. Like my kid will have a birthday and like, dad, have a piece of cake to celebrate my birthday. I’ll have a little small piece. And, uh, I don’t, you know, again, it’s, it’s what you do The vast majority of time it’s going to dictate what’s going on.

I mean, we all live in a world where there’s air pollution and sound pollution. You can’t hide from everything. So you gotta, you gotta, you gotta live in the world that you’re in. And sometimes I mean, the, the honest answer is I mostly don’t want that stuff, which is kind of cool. That’s really liberating because people say this is such a restrictive diet and I’m like, it’s actually pretty freeing because I don’t, I’m not addicted to this crap anymore.

I can take it or leave it. If I want it, I’ll have it, but I really want it.

Well, I mean, the biggest thing with protein is it’s so satisfying. It’s, it’s two things. It’s satiating. But more than that, it’s satisfying. Like you stop, I put people on just a seven day eat protein burst challenge. And the big things I see is they’re not hungry, but they don’t have cravings either because people will be not hungry and have cravings and eat.

So

you

got to have both those. Yeah. There’s that concept of satiety versus satiation. How do you feel right after you eat versus how long you’re not hungry for? And you get that, you know, we get people that like, like I said, they fall into this natural rhythm of two meals a day, typically for most. And that’s, you know, That’s, that’s probably beneficial.

Cause if you’re, you know, I, I remember when I was, uh, you know, when I was operating on a patient, I go by the doctor’s break room and there’d be a bunch of donuts in there and I’m like, I’m not going to eat that stuff. Walk in there three or four times. And it was like, I’ll just have one turns into five or six.

And yeah, I’m a big guy. I used to like to eat a lot. I, you know, I just, it’s just, it’s, it’s tough when she start. Eating that stuff that is, I mean, designed to be so, so. I mean, the processed foods are really, we should call it what they are as a recreational drugs. And if we treat them like a recreational drug, we realize I got to stay away from that.

And, and once you, once you sort of see it that way, it kind of changes your, your relationship with food. The biggest thing I see people is. Changing the relationship with food. I’m not eating because I’m bored, I’m stressed, the guy on the TV told me to, or it’s this time, or it’s social pressure. You know, you eat for nutrition and you can still enjoy it and still have fun.

I mean, I went to a nice party last night. We had a bunch of tomahawk rib eyes and it was a great social environment. It was so good for it. I wasn’t, I wasn’t poisoning myself to just to have fun.

Well, I, we also probably don’t hang out with people that do that anyway, so it makes it simple. Well, switching gears, because you just mentioned the, being an orthopedic surgeon.

So you were an orthopedic surgeon, started using this diet, started keeping people from having to go to the operating table, which I’m sure made your, your hospital was not happy.

I was with it. That was something that really. Opened my eyes to the reality of medicine. When I discovered that, hey, I was able to make people not need surgery anymore and brought it to the administration of the hospital and they weren’t happy about that.

That was something that I was really sort of, I became very jaded because of that. And, uh, you know, cause you’re talking about women, I think, and I like to talk about musculoskeletal health. I don’t, I’m known for nutrition, but I’m really an athlete and I, I’ve been talking about training, but one of the things that’s interesting, and I’m going to be talking about this later today.

Um, when we look at what distinguishes a young joint from an old joint, if you look in there with a camera, I usually like knee arthrosomies and shoulder arthrosomies. You go in there with a young person, perfectly white, it looked like freshly fallen snow. It was beautiful. You get there in a 50 year old and it looked like the inside of an ashtray, like somebody’s been smoking, chain smoking for years and it’s all yellow and crumbly.

And why is that? I was always wondering myself, why does it look different? Well, it turns out there’s something called An advanced glycation end product, or so called AGE, and that is a product of hyperglycemia, lipid peroxidation, something called the polyol pathway. Those things are all under the influence of diet.

So, it’s not that you can never have arthritis, but you can dramatically slow down, uh, the progression of that. Because even wild animals get arthritis, even on their natural diet. Like, lions will get arthritis in the wild, in their back and things like that. But you can dramatically alter that. And the other thing I’ve seen on Carver, and I believe it or not.

These people that have soreness, sore backs, arthritis, suddenly don’t have it anymore. And when you’re not hurting all the time, guess what? You can be more active. You can get out there and walk and jump and run and play and get stronger. And so I think that’s a huge, huge benefit. So she, you know, cause a lot of times you go to bed and you wake up the next morning, you’re like, Oh, my elbow hurts.

What did I do? Did I sleep on it wrong? Or maybe I was, I was, maybe that’s tennis from three days ago. Maybe it was a chocolate cake you ate last night. You know, you think when you start thinking about that, how it actually impacts inflammation and how we feel. So it’s kind of a, when you start realizing that, that, that, that does have an effect, I’ll see people will say, let me have a carbohydrate diet.

They’re like, Oh, I got off it and I, I had a bunch of cake and garbage. They wake up the next day and they feel like they’re hungover. And they’re like, their knee starts hurting. I’m like, that’s, that’s real. Yeah. It’s really happening.

You just connected the dots. Yeah. Yeah. So you saw that, you couldn’t unsee it.

Right. You had to shift. What are you up to now?

So I have been complaining about the healthcare system for a number of years. I’m frustrated with it. And you know, instead of just shaking my fist at the TV, like the old man, you know, so we, we started a company. My partner was out of Silicon Valley. Uh, I was a tech engineer, an AI engineer, I developed a company called Rivero, and basically what we do is we’ve got physicians in all 50 states, uh, that are aligned with this sort of philosophy that let’s get people off medications, let’s provide them the support they need.

And it’s not so easy as just telling people what to do because a lot of people need a whole support network. I’m crazy.

If it was as easy as telling people what to do, you could give them a buck and, you know, Well, what I tried to do was

orthopedic surgery. I was like, hey, read this book. Hey, go look at the video.

That’s not very efficient. You have to literally provide them, some people you got to hold their hand for months and years even. So we provide all that stuff. That’s the thing that you know, even doctors that are well meaning that want to do this, they don’t have the resources. To get this stuff. Right. So this is what we did.

So we, we, you know, we are a great team. We’ve got a great coaching team. We’ve got a whole bunch of great physicians, uh, uh, you know, an engineering team, a marketing team. So that’s, you know, that’s, uh, my hope to kind of change the paradigm of healthcare.

We are right there with you. I have another company called WineShare Collaborative, and that’s our big thing is taking on big food, big karma, big healthcare, big insurance.

And really elevating the doctors and healthcare practitioners that are working outside the system because the system doesn’t support health.

Well, I mean, if you look at where healthcare is going, the allopathic system increasingly corporatized, you know, these big companies, you know, Kaiser, Intermountain Health, they’re taking over every small practice.

So they’re essentialized. And when something is overly centralized, you have no choice in the matter. What you’re going to see, and you’re going to continue to see, is more and more farmer pressure. Like right now with like the ozempics, everyone is being inundated to get on these drugs, right? And some of the doctors, if they don’t prescribe it right away, they’ll go to somebody else.

Or they have all these little pop up clinics that are just like, they’re GLP 1 head dispensers, right? And so you’re going to have a period of time where you’re going to go into where AI will take over for a lot of it. You’ll go in, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll interact with some sort of computer interface, put your figure in there, I’ll sample some blood, they’ll run a lab like on the spot, and they’ll have an Amazon drone delivering your drugs to your house.

At the back end, I’ll have one physician signing 10, 000 of these a day. So they don’t have to spend money on marketing physicians, taking them out to eat, buying their, buying their staff, lunch, it’ll save them a lot of money. The patients will get the drugs right away. And everyone will be medicated and the farm will be happy.

The patients will be miserable, but they’ll have their drugs.

It’s absolutely frightening. That is. And you can totally see it. Yep. All right. Well, we support you. I’ll put this into the show notes. I’m going to put all the show notes at jjvirgin. com forward slash carnivore and I just love what you’re doing.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Good talking to you. Good talking to you too. Thank you.
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