The Evolutionary Logic Behind the Carnivore Diet | Shawn Baker on Health Theory

if you're eating the wrong diet things probably occur that shouldn't occur and I think most disease that we see today you know has at least in some part a dietary component everyone welcome to hell theory today's guest is dr. Shawn Baker he's an orthopedic surgeon record-setting power lifter one-time semi-professional rugby player all-american track and field masters athlete former nuclear weapons launch officer and most recently the guy known for popularizing the carnivore diet and Shawn that's where I want to start so the carnivore diet obviously has gotten a little bit controversial people are kind of weird about it I would do I'll say I do what I'll call a lazy man's carnivore diet so I eat probably 90% of my calories come from meats primarily red meat some pork what is it that makes a carnivore diet so controversial and why do you still think it's worth trying well I mean first of all Town thanks for having me on I mean the carnivore diet yes certainly is controversial because it goes against what we've been told from a nutrition science standpoint for the last you know hundred years or so you know if we tell people that you know meat is really bad for us which we've heard particularly red meat we've heard that for decades now we've got people that are really only eating red meat and what's what would you expect to happen to their health would be they would get very sick acutely or even over a period of time but in fact what we're seeing is quite the opposite and I think that is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way because they have a lot of personal investment in a different narrative and I think that is why it's partially controversial I think there's a sort of a comfort in saying that you know everything in moderation in balance even though we can't really accurately define even to find what those mean quite honestly but that's just sort of a platitude people put out well I believe in a balanced diet when I ask people what does that mean to you and what does it mean to somebody from another culture you know they have very different definitions and so we have to look at I think the full spectrum of human existence to say what is perhaps the ideal diet and as humans were very lucky that we have a diverse capacity to eat a lot of different things doesn't mean you know I would say that if you were to take people from a hundred thousand years ago and offer them to eat Doritos and Twinkies they would definitely eat them does not mean we're designed for that that's really interesting to me are there things cues that we can look at a human to see if we're a true omnivore and what that means and yeah so I mean no doubt humans are omnivorous I mean we clearly are I mean we can look at every human it's been on the planet we could say that they've been eating a little bit of everything the question is how much of what is represented and so I think when we look at how to determine what what's something suited for really as a human being what is the overall impact to your health to your performance to how you actually you know feel you know subjectively and objectively you feed somebody a certain night and see what happens to them and you know I would say that if you're eating the wrong diet things probably occur that shouldn't occur and I think most disease that we see today you know has at least in some part a dietary component you know if we sit there and eat you know this modern industrial diet of you know novel foods that really aren't designed for us we see what happens we see depression we see autoimmune disease we see gust or intestinal problems we see chronic obesity we see all these things a lot of these things we tribute to aging which probably aren't really aging it's just disease and I mean I like to use so the world record for 50 for a hundred meters sprint at 85 is about 15 seconds at 85 years 85 years old which is pretty decent time and okay so I like to say if you could run 100 meters in 15 seconds you're probably on the right side of being dead you know I mean this is just a simple heuristic but it makes sense you know you think about a wild animal the weak the slow get eaten right same thing happens to humans as we break down as we deteriorate we don't get eaten by lions we get eaten by disease and so if you can maintain you know whatever you were at say 25 whenever you're at your physical peak you know and you can stay as close to that as possible for as long as possible you've not only in my view prolong well prolongs your life but most importantly prolong the quality of your life you know prolonged your function and there's clear evidence that you know athletic ability lean muscle mass it protects you from disease it protects you from you know dying it allows you to function better so I think it can be as simple as that how old are you 50 3 okay so talking about holding peak performance as you age I know last year you set the rowing record and you're going back to defend that again so that's certainly very impressive how do you maintain that peak level of performance well I mean I mean just just to be accurate so I want a world championships last year I set three World Records when I turn 50 when I when I was at the World Championship in my and I was in the 50 plus classes in my age house but you know I mean you know I've been training my whole life and my cell like I one day I woke up and said ha I'm gonna be a good athlete I mean I've been consistently doing the basics for 40-plus years and you know it's something that you know it's important to me I'm a competitive guy it drives me it's part of my identity it's kind of it's kind of built in at this point but I mean I eat what I think is a very good diet you know and I'm not promoting that everybody needs to a carnivorous diet I think there's you back off that because there's so much backlash around or do you back off of that because truly truly it won't work for some people no I back off because I think most people don't need to do it I mean there's people that are doing you know you know largely well above average and very good from a health perspective and if they're doing great I don't see what you need at you is the metric they use cuz I know at least in the interviews that I heard with you in particular you don't worry about your blood levels so is it that you just go hey how do you feel how do you perform and that's the metric you should care about so let me clarify so I it's not that I don't agree with blood tests or or that I haven't checked them because I've done that around a blood test because people were asking me you know I hope countless - it's no big deal but I think you have to be very careful in your interpretation of blood tests because you have to put it in clinical context you know as a physician I viewed you know thousands upon thousands blood tests and very often you'll get one that's not quite perfectly within a standard reference range and you'll say is that rule is that relevant to what's going on with that particular patient so we have a lot of people are kind of armchair quarterbacks trying to do medicine with lab work and they just look at these labs and say AHA that one's out of range you must be sick and that's not necessarily true I mean we have to understand that many of these labs have incredible variability you know cholesterol is one of these things a guy named David Feldman is showing they you can change his LDL cholesterol hundred points in three or four days and so we're sitting there you know you go on once a year for your annual test and your cholesterol is borderline high and your doctor says hey we're going to put you on this drug for the rest of your life when you could have come in three days later and it would have been normal your blood level of vitamin D can change 30% in a day you know within a single with and within the course of a day so depending what time of day you get it drawn you know things like you know cholesterol all these other ones they change so much and so you really want to know is what is going on chronically and so I like things like coronary artery calcium skin that's it's a cardiac test you can take them looking at the calcium in your heart it gives you an idea you can run that test so it's a CT scan so and I had that done about two years out of the diet and coronary calcium perfect zero no calcification very good metric for assessing disease and other people say well it might miss saw plaques and so on and so forth but still the people that have no calcium have the least likelihood of having plaque or anything from cardiovascular disease an easy method is this waist to height measurement you know we know that if your belly is too big you know relative to your height you're at risk for metabolic you basically have metabolic disease and so these things that are more probably chronic representation because there's a lot of people out there walking around that have really nice lab bags but they're not healthy so the problem is when we chase lab values rather than health we get a very different different set of goals so when you have somebody with somebody could have a perfectly stable glucose for ten years and they have hyperinsulinemia so in the background they have disease they have the pathophysiology going on but we just haven't detected it yet so I think that's a bit of a travesty quite honestly so breaking out of that though what should people be paying attention to so things I've heard you say before so okay we've got weight to waist to height ratio you've got if you're a guy are you waking up with erections you've got the calcification of the heart like what are other things that we should really I think I think insulin sensitivity is prob a useful metric I mean if you look at the the relationship of pretty much every chronic disease and hyperinsulinemia we see a you know we see a pretty consistent relationship now again I sort of rally against associations because there's some problems with that but in general you know I think those things are important like I said you know you mentioned sexual [ __ ] that's very important I mean it's some people laugh about it but it's a very important why health why is it important I've heard it said that basically a rectal dysfunction is a precursor to heart disease it's like if you're having vascular problems there chances are that you have a bigger problem going on at the level of the heart yeah absolutely some people call it canary in the coalmine and you know it you know obviously our male member is a blood dependent that and so when you do have when you do have impeded blood flow you know in in any part of your body it's probably help occurring systemically unless there's some trauma or something like that so we see that so it is it is a concern for cardiovascular disease so the fact that at 53 years of age I wake up every day without a own erection you know indicates which you know indicates what's going on my heart because you know as I you know I said I had a coronary calcium skiing zero you know what I'm doing athletics are you asked your function I don't know if you've ever met on one of these if you've added CrossFit or something like that with the concept to that they're they're very challenging from a cardiovascular standpoint so that's interesting so talk to me about exercise heart health obviously you're very known for talking about diet but also I mean just standing next to you you are a wall of muscle so you clearly take care of yourself physically you push yourself one I think people like you said that people look at aging is sort of this inevitable thing but in reality you've retained a lot of muscle mass so one can we add muscle as we age to why does that matter and then three how do we do it yes so you know as far as can you gain muscle yes you can definitely gain muscle pretty much in any way there studies in people in the 80 in their 80s shown they can put on muscle mass now you know this the formula for that is pretty simple I mean it's adequate protein adequate leucine resistance training you know either either heavy weight or light weight depending on you've got to stimulate the muscles maximally and then for many people for most people it's at some sort of caloric surplus and you can get that through carbohydrates you can get that through fat but beyond that you know what do you have to do I mean at this point at 53 I like to make sure that you know I've spent some time dedicated to actually getting stronger and it's basic compound movements some time spent you know trying to build muscle to maintain that it's not that you have to have huge giant bodybuilder muscles but having lean muscle mass being in the top you know there's a nice study at the Honolulu longevity study looked at strength in in mid midlife people that were in the highest quartile for strength had a 250% chance increase of making it 200 so it's so important to do that it's almost as important as genetics what is it muscle mass muscle density the ability to contract the muscle because I've heard you say there's not necessarily size its strength is it that they didn't in the study they didn't make a differentiation between strength and size because if I really think at a just a biological level what's going on it would seem like if you get really sick that there are amino acids and things you're gonna go down and strip from your own muscle to recover from that and if you have no muscle to strip then you're just done but that would lead me to believe that size would be pretty important yes so there's a there's a clear correlation between cross-sectional muscle area and strength oh that's being challenged we're seeing some some research showing that you can be very strong with with relatively smaller muscles so I think ultimately when we look at the longevity it's really strengths and really strength to size ratio that's important so you want to be lean and strong and I think what strength comes function so function for one is important you know when we lose when we lose some of our independents for walking again again when we get to the end of life you know we see people that lose some independence with walking and strength says plays a big role in that there is you know it's not that you can you there's no there's not there there's no relationship between strength and size so there is some but the research has shown that strength and I think quite honestly because most of us looked at older people older people are typically not bodybuilders and so we're not looking at mr. Olympia versus the the puny guy we're looking at kind of normal people a normal distribution we can say these kind of you know normal people the ones that are on the stronger end of the spectrum do better than the people that aren't and so when we see you don't have much physiologic reserve particularly muscle mass when we do get struck with disease cancer you know infectious disease something like that not having that that sort of buffer that the muscle provides tends to produce a work at worse outcome yeah that's super interesting I want to go back and walk through the lineage of how humans end up here so the evolution question so one day I was thinking about okay where do we fall in the spectrum of what we should be eating and all of that and I was like alright if we share a common ancestor with monkeys and chimpanzees gorillas whatever obviously gorillas chew a ton like they're all about leaves I know that chimpanzees actually get some percentage of their calories from killing other animals not the least of which being other chimpanzees so how much do you think is is there truth to we came down out of the trees as food became more scarce as we started turning into hunters we find cooking all of that stuff that allows us to grow the bigger brain like what what was that sort of rough step-by-step process that you think led us to being the omnivores that we are yeah so if we go back even further you know there's research now that shows that the very first animals the very first multicellular animals started out as carnivorous animals and you think about it when you're trying to build structure it's very easy to take like and build like and so when we go to a different sort of building materials it becomes less efficient you have to have specialized adaptations and some averts going back about 800 million years the very first animals appear to be carnivore and most of the animals have ever been on the planet have been carnivorous so an herbivore is a really specialized adaptation grasslands evolved about a million about a hundred million years ago so we started seeing the first larger herbivores come in then but if we go back to primate evolution about 25 million you know we've had you know monkeys and eventually you know the ones that are still remaining the bonobos and chimpanzees you know the gorillas they've had 25 million years of evolution to try and develop increased brain size and they've been doing on our fruit based diet it has not worked it is not you know we've got 25 million years to try and end doesn't work and so something had to change to allow the differentiation into what we are now and so if we look back in the global climate record starting between five and three million years ago we saw a dramatic shift in what happened with global temperatures and so we went from a lush tropical environment to a very much a colder savanna you know type of type situation grasslands and so if we look at you know what people humans and pre humans were experiencing it was more kind of Canada and not Costa Rica so we've got this situation where the food supply is very different and some some of the early you know hominids tried to make it on a vegetarian diet there are things like Australopithecus robustus and Boise I and they would they just went extinct and so because they didn't they couldn't survive in the environment so we've had you know in human evolution all kinds of humans it evolved and what occurred was you know as we grew this bigger brain it requires a more and more efficient effective caloric dense fuel source and that was an effete and we know that going back to Homo erectus just with simple spear technology they had no trouble killing elephants you know that and that's what they usually use was a you know their their food of choice and even think about if you and I were to be magically transported back 50,000 years and our technology with Spears and we could say well you can gather you know plants for three days to get to get thousand 2,000 calories or you can go out and kill one of these big slow things it doesn't run away that just looks at it because you know remember these animals sort of evolved with really no predators I mean they look at me Lions might eat the small elephants but beyond that once they're full size like you know what are you going to do to me being human so we see that when humans in Africa they kind of co-evolved and so they had this abundance of food abundance of fuel helped them to grow that bigger brain I think that's what occurs in if we you know with comparative anatomy if you look at another primate and we look at their digestive tract you know humans have on an anatomic basis you know looking at at you know what what the hardware is not the software but the hardware seventeen percent of our digestive tract is able to ferment and we compare that to a chimp or an ape or urilla they've got something like fifty to sixty percent of our gut confirm it so we lost much of that fermentated of capacity which means we cannot get a lot of nutrition from fiber or you know these are followed bores it eat leaves we can't get much nutrition from that it's one of the reasons why a plant-based diet helps people lose weight because they're just not absorbing much nutrition so they lose weight maybe they're maybe it's not the best way to lose weight so that's that's we just don't have that capacity anymore it's really interesting now given that we have the 17% ability to ferments when you hear the standard advice about all things in moderation like there's I don't know something intuitive about that that feels right I've never lived my life like that but when people say it I'm always like oh God like there is something haunting about that and if we know that we are omnivores why is it advantageous to go so full on into carnivore is there something that's missed is it a complete diet could you literally live on red meat forever or are there times where you feel that it's important to dip in and have some vegetables because there are micronutrients or whatever missing yes so you know if you were to ask me what is probably a realistic you know ancient diet for humans it's probably a whole bunch of meat and probably a few plants here and there probably fruit being most most common you know if you think about what's available to you know fruit is generally well tolerated nuts and seeds you know without processing can be very tight you know a handful of cashews raw can kill you five kidney beans can kill you if you eat them unprocessed so you know that was probably the basic diet now we have so many people today whether digestive decision probably destroyed by you know I think seed oils and some of these other products that we were exposed to I think that compromises people so they don't you know tolerate étoile is the big problem well so there is some researchers a group out of Hungary called the Paleo Medicine you've seen a group and they've looked at gut permeability and there's there's something there's gossip called leaky gut so normally our digestive tract you know we eat the food we take we absorb things we want to take in and we don't allow anything else extra come in there there's some degree of permeability that's normal but we get this exaggerated permeability that occurs when we're exposed to certain foods seed oils this flag is one of them based on their research when they look at they say that some every time someone eats seed oils gut permeability increases significantly and that allows you know bacterial endotoxins LPT lipopolysaccharides other things to be absorbed through them through the you know the gut barrier and in a sense to cause problems in the body whether it's autoimmune disease or many other problems and so when we go back to the the baseline you know and I think all humans have the capacity at least a healthy human now there's people were as they age we lose some of our digestive capacity one of the common things we see with people as they get older their gastric pH you know goes up they don't have the capacity to produce a really acidic stomach environment humans have the among the most acidic stomach environments on the planet compared almost any other animal we are on par with things like hyenas and vultures which were scavenger animals and the thought is the reason we developed that is because initially when we were an australopithecine or something like that we scavenged meat and that meat was probably sitting out for a while it was probably heavily contaminated so the animals that had a more robust ph that could kill that you know live doubt this is in the natural selection sort of theory on that but as far as why somebody would do that is it is it something you can do for a long time I mean I've done it for three years I mean I basically had essentially only red meat with the exception of some fish here and there's some eggs here and there some spices in case I got to eat in a restaurant and you know three years in I'm wearing winning World Championship so I mean if there's an if there's an efficiency maybe it's a ten-year deficiency I'm kind of skeptical about that you know there's people they've been doing this stuff for 10 years 20 years that are still thriving and it's kind of interesting to see and it just makes sense from an evolutionary pause ability standpoint you know what food if there was some essential plant nutrients some essential plant food that you had to have to survive how would you get from Africa to Europe to Asia across the Bering Strait into Alaska down down to North America what plant would be there that you had to have so I cannot think of if you can tell me a blueberry is essential for human nutrition I'm gonna say where'd you get blueberries in the Bering Strait 50 thousand years ago when it's frozen so I mean it's like you can always get meat though yeah yeah that's it look man so one I love what you're doing with the end of one stuff and just I feel like there's a whole movement happening right now where people are going I get it like there's no I don't have proof but I'm telling you I'm living it and it's kind of RAD so I I partly because of tape well actually let me back up so it used to be 60 pounds heavier but not in a good way all just fat a little bit more muscle in fairness but mostly I had in putting on muscle I was on a seafood diet so if I saw food I ate it I've been on that one yeah and it was actually I was eating so much I hated eating it was just oh but I didn't want to miss a second to put on muscle so I ended up putting on a lot of fat and I decide okay I'm gonna get lean and I did I got very [ __ ] lean and I did it by basically rabbit starvation so I was eating very high protein probably eighty eighty-five percent of my calories came from protein I tried to keep my carbohydrates to zero and I tried to keep my fat to zero so the 15 percent was like [ __ ] sneaking in just because I couldn't like not yeah yeah you can't just eat the chicken breast but I got as close as I could and I did that for two years it got shredded would be an exaggeration but I got very lean six-pack abs the whole nine and it was miserable I hated my life I was hungry up around the clock and my wife and business partners pulled me aside and said you no longer have a personality and I was like wow I really need to like take this seriously and the big thing was and I had struggled with this my whole life so I didn't I didn't make the connection unfortunately my wrists hurt so badly that even in my 20s I was icing them every night and I iced them every night for about 15 years I assume so much that I had what looked like burn marks on the back of my wrist and that was misery and then I met Peter Atia and Dom D'Agostino and they said man this whole Kido thing you need to be eating fat and I just could not wrap my head around that I was like it's called fat it's gonna make me fat like I'm not gonna eat the stuff they're like don't be a dumbass eat it and so I went I went fair up utak ketosis so I was doing a four to one ratio it was misery it was gross I'd the keto flu the whole nine but within three days my wrist stopped hurting and I was like whoa it is the closest food-related thing to having a drug like effect I've ever experienced in my life and so I went off keto for a year because I had had such a bad experience with it but I kept my fat high and my wrists have never hurt since that was insanely transformative and then through that just because I'm super lazy I didn't want to have to try to do it through vegetables which is a lot more just takes a lot more concentration and I found myself I was probably taken in I don't know 85 like I said 85 90 percent of my calories now come from red meat and like a nice fatty pork rib and it's been awesome but I've kind of and tell people started talking about the carnivore diet I was kind of holding my breath like am i [ __ ] up my microbiome am i moving myself backwards in some way that I you know can't see it and so at one point I pushed hard and I went heavily vegetable because for ethical reasons I would love to never need to eat meat and I started to feel like [ __ ] now it's entirely possible I just didn't do it well willing to accept that but sliding backwards into the most ignorant way of getting in red meat and I feel [ __ ] awesome yeah I mean there's a lot of stuff in there and so I would say you know for one if we look at biochemically what to humans need what are our essential requirements there are only essential amino acids essential fats vitamins and minerals that's it there's no fiber there's no final neutral acquirements those are conditionally may be beneficial but they're not required so we look at absolute requirements so if you're you know rabid starvation too much protein and I would say that if we look at evolutionary I think probably most you as we're getting about 30 to 40% ocassion protein the rest majority the rest would be from fat and then maybe a few you know plant foods here and there so I think you know when you go too much on the protein for too long that's that's that's a problem and we see that with people and I did something similar when I when I went from 300 pounds to 230 pounds and of course of three months I did the same thing I you know I exercise three times a day I cut my caloric intake in half you know just plowed through it like a you know competitor I'm just going to do it and and I was at working at a hospital a nurse that says hey we like that doctor Baker because you're not so pissed off and grumpy all the time and it's the same thing you can't sustain it you're miserable you're hungry this is a thing for a diet to succeed you have to well the two things that make diets not succeed are one you're hungry all the time because you can't maintain that and two the food sucks right so if you go like I like eating Oreos and ice cream and Twinkies and cake and cookies that's good now you're gonna say I can't eat that but what am I going to replace it with well you're gonna replace it with quinoa and kale and that kind of sucks but you can say hey maybe if you replace it with steak and eggs which are for most people guys particularly has pretty good stuff I can do that it says it's satiety producing and it's also very nutritious and again I don't necessarily think everybody needs be a hundred percent but when you get your nutritional needs met through you know meat whether it's in you might add eggs you might add organ meat some people are proponents for that some fish or something louder a little bit of dairy you are much more likely to be satisfied you're much more likely to be able to eat and frequently you know what when the food is right I think the the atop of G intermittent fasting happens naturally and that's what happened like when I eat twice a day and that's pretty much my routine some days this once occasion it's three times but it's just because I eat enough I'm satisfied to eat to my satiety and you think about what other animal needs a nap to eat a micronutrient able to eat you know a dietician behind them telling them how to eat I mean they just eat and they don't have chronic disease and they stay healthy so there should be a food for humans where you can just eat to satiety eat when you're hungry and maintain a healthy level of body weight and avoid disease and I think a meat-based that seems when I say seems to because I'm on a very biased you know I'm biased I see the results I see the positive results I get every day people sending me the results I'm very much well this seems to be pretty cool I'm excited to announce that Harvard David Ludwig is going to be doing a carnivore study you know this will be this episode will come out after it's been announced so so we're gonna be starting to do that get more actual you know real modern data on this stuff you know what the study is gonna be are like the thing I'm really curious about is will it include organ Demeter we're just talking like some burgers well it'll include whatever people are eating so we're gonna we're gonna try to get as many people as possible there's a visit of people already doing this is people have already been doing it for six months we're gonna it's going to be a survey it's gonna be looking at their blood work it's going to be assessing their health you know you know obviously they're there's a lot of you know potential confounders and subjective bias and something like that but it's getting that in the literature and then going from there and say look we have a population of three or four thousand people that have submitted to us to a study and they are either maybe they're all sick and dying or maybe they're really healthy which i think the latter is can be a case but so we did when we get that into literature now we have power to say okay now let's do some intervention trials let's see what it does for psoriasis let's see what it does for rheumatoid arthritis let's see what it does for depression because what I'm seeing anecdotally yeah anecdotally I'm just saying every day I get people hey I had PTSD it's gone or it's gotten it's significantly better no seriously I had suicidal depression I don't think about suicide anymore do you think this is inflammation I think the thing I think it's a combination of things and so if we look at from a mental health standpoint we know that creatine carnosine carnitine taurine all things are found almost exclusively in meat now granted your body can make some of that but when it's in lower levels and we know that people on plant-based diets have lower levels there's a nice study in 2018 looking at carnitine levels in people with major depressive disorder their carnitine levels are low when you supplement carnitine again carnitine is a meat based product their depression gets better so we see that so it's probably one maybe reduction brain inflammation but to also supplying these nutrients that have sort of positive you know brain cam three of X and so the thought that nutrition has no role in mental health disease is mind-boggling to me that people think it does it I mean I'm how could it not I mean your brain is just an organ like any other organ in your body like your liver is it subjected to the same environmental you know goodness and badness that everything else is and so why nutrition wouldn't have an impact on brain health also there's a connection to the gut right though in terms of controlling neuro chemistry huge influence serotonin almost exclusively stored in the gut release from there that one's crazy and then the whole notion of leaky brain syndrome right leaky gut and leaky brain my parallel if you have a leaky gut you probably have a leaky blood brain barrier yeah that does seem very striking that people would push back on that one thing I want to know so like I said I do sort of a lazy man's carnivore diet you're the first person I've heard talk where it's like hey it actually you're not pushing organ meat really hard you're even saying like maybe grass-fed is a bit better but like grain feds a lot better than going out and eating a Twinkie so do I need the organ meats I really don't want to yeah so it's kind of interesting so I know there's people that disagree with me and like I said I my whole sort of sort of belief system is let me see what the results people are actually having the way they feel or blood levels well everyone all of us all of it you know because you know the results are you know generally are you reversing disease are you improving body composition are you you know can you subjectively and objectively say you're healthier but what if you're already healthy like I'm a healthy dude I'm living a healthy lifestyle since my mid-20s so I'm not gonna be the guy where you see some massive sweet I will say from my rabbit starvation my doctor loved it because my cholesterol was in the [ __ ] sure sure but I felt like death right cuz that was nothing yeah that's a great example of great labs but feel like alright so that's what I'm trying to figure out like so a guy like me what should I be paying attention to because like you've I've heard you say many times we're never gonna know if this is gonna make you live longer right that that is an experiment that takes an entire lifetime right so I don't [ __ ] know but I want like the best guess so actually while its I guess it makes people like sort of giggle under their breath but okay erection like am i wind up with an irregular or not I love symmetric yeah how do I feel psychologically a metric waist to height ratio metric like I want to know like what are the things that as doctors get educated what should they be looking forward to know whether to assign somebody a carnivore diet and then what should they be looking forward to know if the carnivore diet has worked right so I think you know we have such a sick society there's a study came out that 88 percent of us are metabolically unhealthy 88 percent there's only 12 percent of Americans that fit a criteria of normal metabolic health parameters so we've got such a this is why it's just so important we have such a disaster and it's only going to get worse and the problem is with this you know obesity diabetic diabesity epidemic that will turn into a dementia epidemic and that's impossible to take care of but so when we look at you know you the healthy guys so I would say now you're at performance you know it's like how fast can I run them on how fast getting around 100 meters right how much can i lift what's my comp is money comes is like am i waking up with a boner every morning you know am i you know what where am i where am i doing what do my joints hurt is my back hurt you know those are the things that really matter to you you could care less what your LDL cholesterol is if it's if it's 75 and you feel like garbage it's like I don't really care about that I want it I want to feel and perform and do well you know subject ly so that's part of my life experience right you know the the thought of you know what do we need to eat on a carnivorous diet you know this is the thing what I and I've done service I'd I do to serve a couple months so I got 11,000 responses in 24 hours and we asked them 25 questions what are you eating you know the interesting things to me were how many you were taking prescription medications and how many of you came off your prescription medications and you know we didn't stratify about my period of time it could have been three months or less 70% of those people drop their meds you know and so it's like that significant health improvement then you say how many of you guys are eating organ meats on a regular basis 15 percent so 85 percent of the people are eating them either not at all or very rarely to eat or I I don't generally I mean IV you know what it's offered to me if someone has it I'll heat it I generally don't like it are you eating it because you just like hedging your bets no no I eat it because I don't know offend the person that cooked it for me I'm not eating it because I'm worried about some deficiency right I mean again if you look at the people that have been doing this diet the longest you know that the pioneers the guys gonna do it the 2021 years they just eat steaks and ground beef and they're fine alright here's a random question for you so watching a documentary on wolves the Alpha always gets eat the liver I think it is why would that matter if it doesn't have some extra move so this is I think one of the things with you know when we look at animals okay usually a predator animal is hunting a prey and what's relatively lean protein is not a concern on on a meat-based dot you're gonna get plenty of protein what you're not going to get is fat where is fat located on a lean animal it's located in the viscera so they go after the perinephric fat the pericardial fat the omentum this is where the concentrated fat is and this is why we see that you know we hear historical accounts of you know like the polar societies where they'll throw a the lean meat to the dogs because I got plenty of protein what I don't have is fat remember fat is and that's why I remember you with your sore wrists yeah all eaten protein I'm like there's only so much I can eat of that and then I need some fat and so I think really it's fat seeking here that's why we're cracking bones to get the marrow that's why we're eating brains because brains are high in fat it's not necessarily that there's some magical nutrient in them and yes liver has more vitamin E yes the liver has some vitamin C but I don't think I mean again I don't have scurvy I mean you know I mean it's I haven't had vitamin C in any significant quantity outside of what I get in steaks in three years scurvy is a water-soluble vitamin I would just get symptom within a few months and then I would get sick and so we're not seeing that now some people again some people feel better on that and I think some people that are particularly vitamin depleted that's probably a good strategy you know I think some people I don't think you just have to experiment like if you if you sit there and choke down a liver because you don't like it so I just come just doing out of my duty and you say I noticed no improvement or maybe there's some placebo effect where you notice something for a little bit if you don't notice it consistently maybe you don't need it yeah agreed I can't let you go without talking to you a little bit about the military your experience is all over the [ __ ] map it's so fascinating like looking at you I'm expecting a meathead but you're not a meathead you're a surgeon you've served in the military nuclear launch office yeah yeah you see I used to be in charge of hundreds of icy odd nuclear warheads you know back in the Air Force I used to be the guy that you guys saw the movie war games back in the day I was one of the guys who's down you want to be that guy uh you know it was kind of funny so I was in medical I went to college university Texas what the medical school got roped into playing rugby you know this guy is getting a Paul McCartney who was not the Beatles but he had a gym so he said you know you need to play rugby and so I started playing rugby and then I liked wrong and I end up being pretty good I got selected on the western US team and the all Texas team then I got recruited to play in New Zealand so I was like I'm in medical school and I was like [ __ ] I'm gonna play so I dropped out of medical school much to the chagrin of my medical school professors I liked you you know you're a good guy why you doing I was like man I wanna play rugby so I went there and then I went into the military as a nuclear weapons often when I can't because I so I could continue to play rugby for the military so I played up until I was thirty and during that time my day job was nuclear weapons guy so this was just simply something to do while I played rugby right and then I then I got tired of I remember I was playing this team from Russia I was laying on the bottom of a pile this guy's kicking me in the head I'm blood coming out of my ears I'm white I'm 30 I'm done I want to go back so I went back to medical school the military paid for that and so when I got out they immediately you know I needle II had to repay my time to them as a surgeon so they immediately sent me to Afghanistan and this is like you know crazy crazy time every reason look this is 2007 2007 old Afghan war and it was just all day long every day trauma constant trauma people being blown up the worst injuries you could possibly see little kids you know we took care of Taliban we took care of you know the good guys the bad guys the civilians it was it's nonstop it was every single day how do you deal with that like how do you mentalize the trauma like even just hearing someone scream I've got to imagine like being back and hearing some someone screen would bring that back how do you like frame that how do you get that yeah I mean it's it was such a unique situation I mean combat trauma is it's just not a normal I mean the closest thing I ever saw as a physician was a refinery explosion where we got you know people getting blown up or a train accident but but I mean generally it's it's so out of the normal realm of my existence I don't associate anything normal day-to-day with that sort of stuff I mean and when we were there it was like you know all you did was you know sleep wake up eat operate till until you got tired you know try to get some sleep sometimes operate in the middle of the night and occasionally exercise and that was it for constantly every day and you're just exposed to that and after a while you kind of become a little bit of me into because it's like you know it's like oh another guy's legs blown off you know we're used to that I remember when I first got there it was kind of it was kind of sad because I flew in through Kurdistan we unload our stuff we're sleeping to this giant hall like 300 guys on cots we go in we hook up with the army who is we were a lead we're the Air Force we were leaving the army guys and the first night at Aulis we got to go work and we get in there and the first thing I see was this poor I'm he's like a 23 year old Canadian kid both legs blown off above the knee you know a special ops guy and full beard cuz they were both full beard and special ops new second holy [ __ ] welcome to welcome to the war you know this is in real life and it just never stopped from day one it was just constant constant constant drama and you know I don't regret going because I learned a lot and I was there helping people and I was privileged to be able to help people but it's it's not a good place it's not it's not that you know no one no one should ever look forward to war yeah what did you learn said you learned a lot well I mean I learned how to improvise you know to think fast on my feet because when you're you know as an orthopedic surgeon in the US you're like I need this and you get all the equipment you need but there you're like I need a screw that's 44 millimeters long like we got a 65 and a 21 21 so I mean you know you don't you don't have the right equipment the right materials you're just trying to figure out how to do the best you can with what you have and so it's you know and it's unpredictability you know there's a lot of you know when I when I was operating as a u.s. guy was like my goal was to make surgery as boring as possible it's like routine everything the same way over and over again that's what you want over there it was like you don't know what you're gonna get you don't know if you have you could we ran out of saline we were in where there's no water we're like we're doing it's urgent we don't any have saline to rinse wounds or wash our hands I mean what are we gonna do and you you just don't have a choice so sometimes you learn that you can do a lot more than you think you can and that's really just incredible like I can't imagine how that begins to shape the way that you think did it change it all the way that you think about people about humanity about your job I think it made me not fear things you know cuz I was like anything that someone throws at me I've seen much worse particularly from a medical standpoint you know it's it's kind of like I've seen the worst of the worst that you can possibly imagine and you know like I said as I do what I'm doing now I get a lot of negativity thrown my way and I'm like that's like you know what what am I worried about you know and so I just kind of laugh at that stuff so it made me a harder person a tougher pronoun not a mean person you know I still care very much about people but at the same time I'm kind of you know imbued with this resilience to you know keep forging ahead despite what seems to be a lot of opposition because I think what I'm doing obviously is controversial you know with guarded diet it's there's a lot of pushback there's a lot of status quo that does not want to be disrupted you know there are a lot of people that are happy to provide you with pills for your various ailments and illnesses and and manage your disease and that's a billion trillion dollar industry and you know we're all thankful that there's medications that may help us in a certain situation but we would much rather not have them in the first place yes very much so which leads me to my last question but before I ask that where can people find you online so I am active on social media Instagram it's Sean sha WN Baker bak ER 1 9 6 7 which is my birth year I'm on Twitter at s Baker MD a YouTube channel DeSean Baker and so it's important we're starting a company it'll be out by the time this comes out called meet our XCOM it's going to be a it's going to be a giant resource for people that are interested in learning more about that all the scientific references that support this we're gonna have some coaching component for people that want to have some support as they do this and so that'll be something I'm pretty excited about it then of course books coming out it'll be out by the time this is episodes that carnivore diet by Shaun Baker and you know knock on something that it does well nice man that's exciting so to the end that we would much rather just not get sick then have something to treat it what is one change that people could make that would have the biggest impact on their health yeah I think I think ownership taking ownership of your own health is probably the biggest thing people do because too many people outsource their health to other people and I mean you know I'll speak it as a perspective as a physician yeah I want to do it I want to help you but I don't have as much invested in your health as you do so you have to take ownership of your own health and you have to be willing to see what actually works for you and so I think we have to step outside the box and say what is actually helping me be objective about it you know you know measure what's important to you not what's important to somebody else measure what's important to you because ultimately you've got to live in that space you've got to live in that body and if you know if your labs look great but you feel like garbage there's something still wrong so you have to be willing to be your own you know guide for some of this stuff all of that all right guys I couldn't agree with that advice more so take things into your own hands you should be doing an experiment on yourself you should be figuring out what works for you it's always interesting when people are so even keel to have clearly a strong belief about how things should be but can also say that hey at the end of the day it's gonna be up to you try it see if it works for you if it does great if it doesn't move on and try something else and speaking of trying something else if you haven't already be sure to subscribe until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential