What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Keto | Ken Berry on Health Theory

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Health Theory, sponsored by our friends at Athletic Greens. We've got an awesome offer for you guys in the description below, so be sure to check that out. In today's episode with Dr. Ken Berry, we discuss why your doctor is lying to you, the importance of eating ancestrally, why the US nutrition guidelines are absolute garbage, and the efficacy of the carnivore diet. Everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dr. Ken Berry. He's a board-certified family physician who has treated over 25,000 unique patients from newborns to centenarians and everything in between. He's also the author of the controversial book Lies My Doctor Told Me, a book he became obsessed with writing after realizing that much of what he'd been taught in medical school about nutrition was just flat-out wrong. After years of research and getting his own health in order through a bespoke ketogenic approach, he began challenging the medical establishment and trying to separate fact from fiction and help his patients achieve optimal health. But what I want to talk about is how this all started for you being a doctor that himself was overweight. Like, what did that trigger in you, and how did that start this whole ball rolling? So, I was raised in a a very poor family, but a very proud family. And uh the parable that I grew up hearing was the parable of the preacher who was caught in the bar. And when the congregation said, "What are you doing, dude?" And he said, "You do as I say, not as I do." And that was the defining parable of my childhood. Don't ever be that guy. And so, I kind of grew up with that philosophy. You you you you lead by doing. You lead by example, and you lead the way. And so, when I a few years into my practice, I became very I was almost 300 lb. Woah. I was pre-diabetic, all my inflammatory markers were getting crazy. And one day I remember I bent over to tie my shoe and got short of breath. And I was already starting to see the looks in in patient rooms, you know, when I'd be counseling a patient who was overweight and I'd be telling them, you know, the American Diabetes Association diet or let's join Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig and I kept noticing the glance down at my dunlap. I don't know if you know what that is or not, but in the south a dunlap is when your belly done lapped over your belt, right? And so I'm like, yeah, I can't be that guy. I can't I can't go in there and tell you, Tom, you got to lose weight, man, when it looks like my water's about to break. So then what was that first step? And so I I climbed up in the attic, got down all my nutrition notes from from medical school and you might envision this these, you know, me coming down with this precarious tomes and stacks and it was actually about this much. It was a small paperback book and a half semester worth of notes. And so I went through all that and I'm like, maybe I forgot something, right? And and to sum up what I was taught in med school, it was eat lots of whole grain, avoid saturated fat and jog. And so I'm like, okay. So I started doing that and I did it faithfully for a month, month and a half and gained another 5 or 10 lbs. And so at that point doctors have this thing, they always think their patients are secretly non-compliant. Like I tell you join the gym, stop eating Cheetos, but secretly I know you're you're in the bedroom eating the honey bun and you're not getting on the treadmill, right? And so but the problem was I knew I'd been doing it. I I wasn't fooling anybody. I was with me. I knew that I was jogging a mile a day and I knew I was eating zero saturated fat and eating multiple servings of whole grains and eating lots of fresh fruit and I was gaining weight and my numbers were getting worse and I said, okay, so obviously I don't know a damn thing about human nutrition. And so I went back to the drawing board and and kind of stepped outside of my box and started reading uh books that we weren't given in medical school. And that that was kind of the beginning of it all. That's really interesting to me that you were able to look at that and say, "Well, I guess I don't know or understand this." So, how do you stay so open-minded? And how do you stay open-minded now, or do you, I guess? Like you obviously have a pretty hardcore vision of what's working now, things that work for you, things that are working for your patients. How do you stay open-minded now as you learn more and more? Well, I'm constantly reading and researching and looking. And I'm I'm weird in the way that I'm happy to be proven wrong. I don't have a problem with that at all. I've already been proven wrong on my initial, you know, what I thought was right. And so, if someone comes along with something better, then I'm happy to listen because my progress kind of followed a circuitous path. And so, it was kind of a natural progression from paleo, ancestral, to primal, to low-carb, high-healthy-fat, and then ultimately to keto. And then for the last 8 months, I've been almost exclusively carnivore. And that that's actually been for me the penultimate step of of my health. I've never felt this good and had numbers this good. Hm. All right, well, we're going to get to that. But first, I've heard you talk about how we've ended up here. Um and that's something that I find utterly fascinating. So, how did the medical establishment end up preaching with a straight face whole grains and all of that stuff? Well, it there's several things that kind of came together all at the same time. We had the the the misleading research by Ancel Keys. And then we had uh all of the big food corporations. And we had all this wheat, and we had all this corn. And so, they had to sell that. And so, it's almost like we created the perfect storm of big medicine, big pharma, and big food all coming together, all three making billions in profit, but everybody getting sicker because of it. But not sicker quickly enough for it to throw up a red flag. Because if I put strychnine in your water, obviously that was immediately bad, right? But if I just slowly poison you, and it takes 20 years, nobody's the wiser. And so that's kind of how the chronic inflammation of the the stupid American diet has come to a head, and now we have this other great thing called the the internet, right? And so anybody can virtually look up any research study. And so when a doctor says, "Oh, all the research shows that that, you know, saturated fat leads directly to heart disease." Now there are people they can print out every single study that has those keywords in it, and look at it, and go, "Where? I don't see it anywhere. Where is it at? I see hints of it, and I see, you know, tiny relative risk values in observational research, but where's the definitive study that says, 'In this control study, we show without doubt that that A leads to B.'" You eat a lot of saturated fat, you get heart disease, the end. And that study doesn't exist. And so now the cat's kind of out of the bag, because anybody can look this stuff up, and you don't have to Google many words until you understand exactly what that study's saying. Talk to me about questioning things. So how do people, and obviously you encourage people heavily in your book to begin to question things and understand things and be their own advocate? What does that process look like? So the one thing that even I struggle with when I'm beginning a new topic is I don't know who the hell to listen to, and you're going to get a lot of conflicting voices. And the good and the bad of the internet is you can find anything, but anyone can also post anything. And so you get, you know, a lot of conflicting information. Do you have a way that you walk your patients through how to begin to discern fact from fiction? Most of the time they've already done the trial and error research before they get to me just because I I tend to attract that kind of patient. Uh people who are proactive, who who have a plan, who want to get better. And then uh it also comes down to the n = 1 of try it on yourself. And you know, anybody who says, "Oh, you shouldn't eat an all meat diet for a month. That's That's going to hurt you." Obviously, human beings we've been doing that for millennia. That's not going to hurt you to try that for a month. If it doesn't work, move on to something else. Try vegan for a month, see what that does. There's enough people who've done that enough times that's not a dangerous proposition. And so if you were going to if if somebody wanted to do an n of 1 protocol, which I am so into and that's really become my obsession with dealing with Lisa's illness and realizing that all the literature in the world, like it'll take you down a path that maybe works for some distribution of the bell curve, but when you get down to that one individual person, different things react differently. But doing an n of 1 well is actually pretty difficult. So what do you suggest? Do you strip people down to say all the way down to a carnivore diet and then you build back in or do you taper them down slowly to pull them off of sugar? Like what what is your n of 1 protocol look like? Yeah, most people start out with just eliminating the obvious culprits. And so we'll we'll get rid of all sugars, even organic locally sourced honey and agave nectar that's organic. We'll get you know, and and people think, "Well, that's got to be good, right?" No, that's pure sugar. And so we get rid of all sugars, that's step one. And then we get rid of all grains, that's step two. And then step three is to get rid of all vegetable oils. And so for most people Even olive oil? Well, not olive oil's good. It's naturally oily, right? You don't have to chemically express the oil, but more like seed oils like canola, like soybean, uh the the the oils that have to go to the chemical factory to become oil. And so usually almost always those three steps are going to make people feel better. They're going to feel better and that feeling better than you felt in years, that's motivation to go, "Okay, now I'm I really I'm feeling great. I want to feel even better. What's the next step?" And then that would vary for different people depending on what conditions they had and where they're from in the in the world, where their ancestors have lived for the last 100,000 years, uh how much they're willing to give up versus what kind of compromises they want to make. So many variables come into play and that's why they call it practice. It's nice. I like that. Um even if something is completely natural like a local organic naturally sourced honey right from the comb, you're biting into it yourself. Like why do you have them strip out that? I think a lot of people believe in natural. Uh and I believe in natural, but what we have to do is we have to make our diet as ancestrally appropriate as we possibly can because human beings have been on this planet as Homo sapiens sapiens for about 200,000 250,000 years. And in that time, we ate lots of certain foods and you can go back and you can look at the the nitrogen and carbon dating and you can pretty much figure out what different peoples ate in different parts of the world. And so we know that at no time in history did people live on 300 g of carbs a day or 350 g or even more a day like we do in modern society. That never happened. The vast majority of humans on the planet ate lots of fatty meat. They would eat some veg either on purpose or if they couldn't get fatty meat. And then once a year, they would eat some berries and maybe some fruit depending on what latitude of the world you lived in, right? And if you live far enough north or far enough south, you didn't even eat you didn't even eat that in the summer. Just didn't grow. And then maybe once a year if you lived in the right part of the world, you'd find a honey tree. And oh yeah, the the entire tribe would wear that tree out, right? And they would lay around in a sugar coma for 3 days. But that happened once every year or two. That wasn't an everyday thing. But now we're trying to tell people, you know, the the powers that be, the actual nutrition authorities are trying to tell people, yeah, you need to eat 50 g of carbohydrates per meal three times a day and then three snacks in between with 10 to 20 g of carbohydrates in each snack. And so I think that's ancestrally very inappropriate and that's what's going to lead to the to the inflammation, to the the chronically elevated blood glucose, the chronically elevated insulin levels, the inflammation and the disease. So I think a way into that to get people to understand um how it can cause such a metabolic disconnect is what you say about milk. And I've never heard anybody talk as directly about milk as you do. So walk us through how much milk should people be eating, why or why not? And so you have to understand my my context. I grew up being a milk baby. When I was playing three sports in high school, I would drink a gallon of milk a day. Oh. Okay, because I I was taught that that'll make you strong. That'll make you a better an athlete, right? And of course it was 2% milk cuz I didn't need too much saturated fat. That's all my my grandmother would buy for me. And so this comes from a guy that used to live on milk. That I still love milk, but I have immediate symptoms now. Being as uninflamed as I am now, if I had a glass of milk, immediately I'd start to have the throat clearing and the heartburn after several days, the dandruff and the and the acne, everything would start to come back. And I've I've actually experimented with that and it's like, yeah, definitely I don't need to drink milk. And so there are three macronutrients in milk. There's the saturated fat. There are there's the proteins and then there's the sugar, right? The lactose. And so milk, its primary purpose is to take a newborn helpless mammal and help it gain weight and grow as quickly as possible. That's the purpose of milk. It's not to help you lose weight as we've been told. It's not to help you make muscles. It's It is to help you gain weight as quickly as possible for that particular species. Right? And so the proteins for many many people are are inflammatory even either a little bit or substantial amounts. And so you get this inflammation because you're drinking a protein that's not really the protein that that's made for human beings. And then you have the saturated fat which we've all been taught to fear but which in the end which is going to turn out to be the thing you need to worry about the least. That's actually the good part of milk. And so I still use dairy in my diet but I only use full fat cheese, butter, ghee, maybe a little heavy cream. And the my my logic for that is is that all of the lactose has been removed from a full fat cheese because the microbe that turned it from milk to cheese ate up all the sugar. That's what it was after. And so it but then in the process it also denatures the protein. So it changes the physical shape of the the protein and making it much less inflammatory. And then of course it's full fat so I've got all that good saturated fat which is which is good for me. And so that's why I think full fat dairy, nothing less fatty than heavy cream, is probably not that bad for most people but you mentioned the bell curve earlier and there is a distribution out on the table who can't even drink heavy cream. There's still too much inflammatory protein even in heavy cream for them. Yeah, the the inflammation, uh that's really interesting to me and it seems like a preponderance of the stuff that you talk about is really designed to lower inflammation. One, I'd like to know why so much of the standard American diet causes inflammation. Like at a at a cellular level, what's going on? Um and then two, what are some like quick biomarkers that people should be working with their doctor to track to see if they're trending in the right direction? So, anytime you feed an animal something that's not a part of its natural diet, it's going to get sick. It's going to get inflammation. It's It's going to It's going to not feel good. It's not a not going to perform as well. And that That's true for dogs. That's true for horses. That's true for humans. And so, uh veterinary science is is much advanced over medical science. If you have a sick dog and you go to the vet, one of the very first things he's going to ask you is what have you been feeding this dog? Mhm. Right? Because that matters. That's a big deal. And so, if you've been feeding this dog a vegan diet, that's what's wrong with the dog. Stop feeding him something that he's not supposed to eat. And the same holds true for humans. Only for the last few hundred years have we been eating grains in the quantity that we eat now. And you know, we've been cultivating grains for 10 or 12,000 years. But just because we were cultivating grains 10,000 years ago doesn't mean we were having 11 servings a day of grain back then. Like we're supposed to have now, right? According to the official guidelines. And then also some experts would argue that the grain we have today is not the same grain of a thousand years ago or 5,000 years ago. That it's it's not necessary even if it hasn't been genetically modified, it's been crossbred enough times that it's essentially a different species of grain. And so, we just haven't had enough evolutionary time to adapt to it and to get used to it. put a Let's dig deeper on that. So, what would we be crossbreeding for? Obviously, palatability would be one, but so is it increasingly high in gluten? Like what is it that we're putting into it that makes it hyper palatable that becomes this increasing problem? I think there's there's a much higher percentage of gluten. And I think there are there several other inflammatory proteins that are in much higher concentrations now than they were hundreds of years ago. And then back you know, a thousand years ago you ground your wheat between two big rocks and so it was it was barely processed and now we grind it up into the finest powder imaginable which makes it hyper palatable, makes it easy to eat a lot of it and you don't have to really do any work to eat it. And then if it is inflammatory for your system which I think it is for most humans the surface area contacted by the tiny particles of wheat is much much greater than the surface area that would be contacted internally with the more coarse ground wheat of the past. That's interesting. And are you talking about that from a permeability standpoint or Yeah, absolutely. And so much of grain is is insoluble fiber, right? You can't digest it at all. Your bacteria might might use some of it in the in the large bowel but as far as you digesting a lot of it you can't, right? And so but when you grind it up into the finest powder imaginable then your body's more able to assimilate even more of it and you wind up with more of an inflammatory shock because you're able to absorb more of it. It's really interesting. I want to go back to what you said about veterinarian medicine being ahead of human medicine and that they lead with what you're eating. Why do you think that's the case? That's actually really interesting to me. Because it makes good sense. But why aren't human doctors usually he's a stand alone guy. He doesn't have a bevy of special specialists you know, at the hospital at the vet hospital and so he has to kind of think holistically about the animal and globally about the animal. He can't ignore their diet because you know, most farmers are not going to tolerate putting their their dog or their horse no matter what a thoroughbred they are on five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 24 prescription medications. And so a vet's job is to fix the animal not medicate the animal. And so I think that they just they come at it from a different perspective and therefore they get a different result. I think a conspiracy theorist-y, which is not my normal bent, but how much of this the problem in the standard American diet is a problem of systems? That's maybe a weird word, but I mean in that you've got you said their job is to fix the animal, not medicate the animal. How much in what's happening in humans is that we are on a intentional or otherwise a system of medicating people. And then one thing you said about Ansel Keys that I found really really interesting was that he was a bully. And that he would actually if people challenged him, he would shut them down and so people stopped challenging him because it would end up damaging their career and sort of accidentally created this massive knock-on effect of nobody challenging the thinking. Yeah. So how much of what we're dealing with now is related to a bunch of weird sort of systematic things? Well, it really is kind of the perfect storm of Ansel Keys' research. And you know, he wasn't an MD. He was He was No, he was not a a medical doctor at all. But he did this huge research study in which he took he collected data from 22 countries as you probably know, but he only published the data from seven countries and that's why it's called the seven countries study. But he just cherry-picked the data because he he believed in a in a vegetable heavy diet. He believed that eating animal products was inherently either bad or unhealthy. And so since his research was not really peer-reviewed in any meaningful way, since it wasn't double-blinded, since it it wasn't randomized, his bias slipped right into the research. And that's one of the system things that is is our our current nutritional research is terrible because of those very things. Most of the studies are observational in nature. Most of them use a food frequency questionnaire. And they'll ask you questions like how many cups of ribs have you eaten in the last 3 months? Or how many pounds of broccoli have you eaten in the last 3 months? Who could possibly answer that in any meaningful way? And so you And so if the researcher has a bias, it's it's human nature. It's not a conspiracy. It's just human nature. If you believe something and there's nobody looking over your shoulder, your belief is going to seep into your work. But the problem is is that a lot of the the schools of nutrition and a lot of the medical schools still cite that research routinely as gospel. And so until enough people know better than that and stop doing that, that research with his inherent bias is going to keep slipping into the medical recommendations. And that's just one of the many systems that that I think you're are broken that have to be fixed before we can be a healthy people again. And what does fixed look like? So what did you do to yourself? What do you teach your patients? So you got to get rid of all the sugars. You got to get rid of all the grains. You got to get rid of all the vegetable oils or the seed oils. And then for some people, that's it. That's all they need. At that point, their body the inflammation gets better, their markers what markers are you tracking? you there's a there's a bevy of them and different experts kind of have their own favorites. But you could look at uh erythrocyte sedimentation rate. You could look at a CRP, which you can have a high sensitivity or cardiac or just a regular CRP, which is a C-reactive protein. You can look at homocysteine levels. You can look at ferritin levels. You can look at all of these different markers. And and the problem is is we haven't done this enough for long enough to really know which ones are the very best, right? Some people look at fibrinogen. There are all these other markers that we're still kind of experimenting with because everybody's been so busy prescribing pills, they haven't been looking at, "Hey, what's the best marker for inflammation so I can know I'm having a meaningful effect on this human. But most people, when they do step one, two, and three, and then start playing around with some of the other steps they can do, they feel so much better that they don't care what the labs say. They're like, "No, dude, I haven't felt this great in 10 years." And that's not to say you never can have sugar or grains or or, you know, any kind of oil again, but that needs to be a rare treat, just like it was 50,000 years ago. But if you do that every single day with snacks in between, you're going to suffer. Mhm. What do you think about constant glucose monitoring? I think it's I think it I think that's going to turn the tide on a lot of the recommendations that endocrinologists give their patients. It's going to turn the tide on the the the recommendations and advice that registered dietitians give their patients, because currently patients will check their blood sugar once or twice a day. And so, I was pre-diabetic. My A1C was six. I was moving that way, right? But if you checked a fasting blood sugar on me back then, it would have been normal. And so, unless you check Interesting. Why would your fasting be normal? eaten overnight, and so my blood sugar would come back down. So, you're saying you didn't have a physiological metabolic problem, you had a purely diet-based problem. Almost all of mine was was just diet and self-inflicted dietary damage, right? And so, there are millions of pre-diabetics uh living their life in in the United States today who have no idea, because once a year their doctor checked the only check the only marker of glucose and insulin metabolism that he'll check is a fasting blood sugar. And if if that's all you check, you're blind. And so, when you check a fasting blood sugar and it's 90, all you know is that that moment in time this person's blood sugar's normal. That's literally all that tells you. It doesn't tell you anything about the past, it doesn't tell you about their average. But when you check an A1C and it's 7.4, oh my god, you're a diabetic. And if I hadn't checked that A1C, I would have no damn idea and I would have said, "Oh, everything looks great, uh Mr. Bell. You all see you next year." Right. And that happens every single day in doctors' offices across the country, across the world. We check a fasting blood sugar, it's normal or it's maybe a little bit high, right? A few points high, not a big deal. We'll watch it, we'll check it again next year. And then you get to enjoy another year of damage being done to every tissue, organ, and cell of your body because anytime your blood sugar's high, you're doing permanent damage that cannot be taken back. Explain that to me. So, here's why I think that people gravitate towards cholesterol. They have this picture of there are pipes in my body and those pipes get clogged, they get clogged with cholesterol, don't eat cholesterol, right? And that's like the visual representation is so easy. Yeah. So, why is elevated blood sugar problem? What damage is it doing to the tissues? So, your body's made to run on a blood sugar from 60 to 99. And if you eat a a veritable feast, it might get up to 110, 115, maybe 120, but that's about as high as a normal person with normal glucose metabolism uh back when I was 20. I could have eaten a dozen donuts and drank half a gallon of milk, which I did on several occasions. And my blood sugar an hour later would have been 110 Wow. because back then I was so young and metabolically healthy, my body could take it. Meaning you can grab that glucose out of the bloodstream, put it into the cells. and so I had I had some muscle and so my my insulin level would spike and it would put all the glucose out of the bloodstream very quickly. Now, that's not to say that was healthy. It just I was so young and metabolically resilient. That's really interesting. Why isn't Why would you say that's not healthy then? What is the Is it an insulin problem? The harder your pancreas has to work, the higher your insulin level is. And so, we know for without doubt that chronically high glucose levels in the blood damage every tissue, every organ in your body. But it looks like that chronically high insulin level also does damage. And there were damage look like? Like I don't So, I've heard the analogy that having too high blood glucose, you're literally burning the tissues. But it's one of those like if I were on national TV, I don't I wouldn't want to repeat that cuz I don't really know what they mean by that. actually much more complicated than that, but that's a pretty good analogy. But what happens is all every tissue in your body is fed by tiny blood vessels, right? Called arterioles and then down into the capillary level. And when the blood sugar gets high, it causes inflammation. And then the chronically high insulin as well is going to inflame those, it's going to damage those, and they'll start to close off. And so if you close off one little tiny capillary in your retina, you won't be able to tell that at all. But if you close off one a day, within 20 years, you're going to be going to the doc saying, "Doc, I can't I don't know. Something's wrong with my eyes. I can't see good." By and so you've got 20 years of damage. It's too late at that point. But the tiny blood vessels, that's what's being damaged. And so when you're when your retina or when your brain part of your brain or when your penis loses its good blood supply, it stops working. And that's a problem. And so for years we were taught that uh you know, if you're type 2 diabetic, you're just not making enough insulin. Turns out that's complete rubbish because we can check a a lab called a C-peptide which tells me exactly how much insulin your pancreas is producing. When your pancreas when the beta cells in your pancreas make insulin, they make a pre proinsulin, which is two insulins and a C-peptide stuck together. And then when you excrete that, the C-peptide breaks off and and we currently say it doesn't do anything, but think about that. That's ridiculous. It absolutely does things. What we should be saying is we don't know what that does yet. But it does something. But insulin is constantly fluctuating in your system. And so you can't check just a spot insulin because if you've just eaten, if you haven't eaten, all those things that if you're under stress, if you're sick, that all those things affect your insulin levels. And so checking just a spot insulin doesn't really give you much information. But I can your C-peptide levels stay pretty constant your blood around the clock. And so when I check a spot C-peptide and it's elevated, that tells me without doubt your pancreas is having to work too hard to make insulin to put the blood sugar out of the bloodstream, right? And so where does it put it? It pushes it out of the serum, out of the bloodstream, into the cells. And so what we used to say is oh the the lock and key mechanism of the insulin somehow is gummed up. Your insulin can't let the blood sugar into the cell. But Jason Fung, uh a nephrologist, said this very elegantly. Basically, the cells are already full of sugar because of of the orange juice and pancakes and bowl of fruit you had for breakfast, right? And so then when you come along and you have lunch, you know, two two sandwiches, the four slices of whole wheat bread, now you've got all this more glucose. Your insulin level spikes even more trying to push it into the cells. The cells don't have any room. They're full of glucose. And so your blood sugar starts to stay high and that's the beginning of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. That's really interesting. Is it true that cells will actually reduce the number of um insulin receptors that they have to begin basically saying hey, I'm full? And eventually they will kind of become insulin resistant. But that doesn't start out that way. And so like when I was 20, I could eat that dozen donuts and I eat that it would just push it all into the cells. Even though that wasn't good for the cells, it still kept my blood sugar down. It's really interesting and I am I literally have no idea the answer this question, but it's putting the glucose into the cells because the cell is simply storing it or because the cell can actually use it as fuel Both. That's interesting, which is why I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, that exercising can actually wildly impact your your likelihood of becoming diabetic or having diabetic symptoms. So you're using the glucose. And then actually actually doing some exercise before you eat can open the muscles and they can accept much more of the glucose out of your bloodstream. And so a lot of people use that as a hack if they know they're going to grandmother's house or going to the buffet, they'll work out right before they go or they'll do something that Tim Ferriss talks about in his book The 4-Hour Body, they'll go to the bathroom and they'll do 20 50 100 bathroom stall squats and that opens up all your muscles and then you can pretty much eat whatever you want to. I'm not recommending that by the way, but that is that is a useful hack for some people if you know that you're going to be in a social situation where you're going to have to eat or you're going to hurt granny's feelings or you know, you're going to look weird if you're just standing there drinking water where everybody else has a buffet plate, you can sneak off to the bathroom and do your your stall squats and then you you're not going to spike your blood sugar and therefore you're not going to spike your insulin because the muscles are ready for that glucose. That's really really interesting. What are some of the biggest myths that are still being perpetuated today that really piss you off? Well, there's a list of them. So where do you want to start? What subject? Let's start with vitamin D and the sun exposure specifically. Right. And so the there's the vitamin D issue with with breastfeeding moms that and that's one of the very first lies. And so let's talk about okay, I'm a I'm a intern. I've just graduated med school. I'm an intern. I'm on my obstetrics rotation. And so the the chief resident who's in his third year of residency would say, "Okay, don't forget to write the vitamin D drops for the breastfeeding babies." And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" He's like, "Well, humans don't make vitamin D in their breast milk." And so immediately that struck me. I'm like, "Okay, so for for the last 200,000 years we've not became extinct because of rickets because human mothers don't produce vitamin D in their breast milk. What? That was immediate a huge red flag flag for me, but I didn't have time to research it at the time. So, I filed that away somewhere. And then later after I just started my practice, I researched that and I looked into it. And they found that if you give a breastfeeding mother 6,000 6,400 international units of vitamin D a day, guess what she does? She makes all the vitamin D in her breast milk that a baby needs. And so, if if the mother's deficient in vitamin D, then she doesn't produce vitamin D in her breast milk. But if you if she's getting the vitamin D that she would have gotten 100,000 years ago from being out in out outside all day and from eating all kinds of grass-fed fats, you know, fatty meat, the yolks from eggs, any fat that she could get her hands on, brains, then she would be getting all this vitamin D and she would produce more than enough vitamin D for a baby. And so, absolutely women can make vitamin D in their breast milk if they are not deficient in vitamin D themselves, which women are capable of doing if you'll feed them the ancestrally appropriate human diet and let them go play in the sun. Yeah, let's talk about the sun. So, um people obviously believe that the sun causes skin cancer. There's a lot of interesting research coming out now talking about how if you double apply sunscreen, you're more likely to get skin cancer than if you only apply it once. What what's your thinking around sunscreen and skin cancer? Yeah, the research about that that that proves that sun exposure increases your risk of of skin cancer is just atrocious. And then when you think about this, some of the research is done on donated foreskins. So, when we circumcise a baby, that they would collect the foreskins and then they would do in vitro research on the foreskin skin with ultraviolet light and then they would make they would make recommendations for you as an adult human, cuz you know, foreskin doesn't get a lot of sun anyway. And then you're making global recommendations based on that kind of research. That's the kind of research that we get this from. But then when you think about this topic common sense-wise and ancestrally, we would be extinct as a species if sun exposure caused skin cancer and melanoma at at rates that we're currently having. Your skin is built of something. It's built of what you've eaten over the last 9 to 12 months. That's what your skin is made of right now is what you ate over the last year. And so if if you've eaten crap for the last year, you want to bet me that you're at increased risk of skin cancer? Sure you are. Then there's also this thing called diagnosis drift that I talk about in the book as well. It when you take off a non-cancerous skin lesion, you get paid about the equivalent as you get paid for an office visit. But if it's pre-cancerous, you get paid about three times that much. If it's cancerous, you get paid anywhere from 10 to 100 times as much to remove that. Guess who diagnoses it? The doctor that's removing it. Now we've got human nature at play again, right? And so and so it's called diagnosis drift. If you get paid more for it to be a more dangerous lesion, then it's human nature. Guess what? It's going to be a more dangerous lesion more often. And so a lot of the increased cancer rate is diagnosis drift. A lot of it is from our terrible diet that we're we're trying to build skin out of. That's really interesting. So what do you think is happening at the cellular level based on what I'm eating that would cause that particular cell to become cancerous? Like is it damaged fats? Like what? So every cell membrane in your body has to have cholesterol to function properly. And so when we tell everybody, you got to eat less cholesterol, and I'm going to put you on this pill to lower your cholesterol even lower, and I want you to eat lots of whole grains, and I want you to use canola oil because if you use bacon grease, that's going to give you a heart attack, right? And so, when you're using basically what amounts to artificial fat instead of real fat, you're building inferior cell membranes. And so, every cell in your body is at increased risk of something bad. And in the skin, that could wind up being eczema, it could wind up being psoriasis, it could wind up being one of the skin cancers. Oh, that uh yeah, that is crazy. You are what you eat is such a powerful sentence. like a truism, but it is it's absolutely a fact. Let's talk about a true carnivore diet. First of all, what made you want to go that far? And then what does a carnivore diet look like? Is it just I eat beef, or is it organ meats and all that stuff like So, I had I had kind of come from standard American diet to primal uh paleo to low-carb high-healthy fat to keto. And on keto, I was eating a ton of fatty meat and a little bit of vegetables. And and I I enjoy green vegetables. But then I kept uh you know, I'm always researching, I'm always looking and studying. And I saw this excellent lecture by Dr. Michael Eades. He was talking about Neanderthals and what they ate. And Neanderthals were were exclusively carnivore unless they couldn't get meat. And then they would eat whatever, of course. But if they could get fatty meat, that's all they ate. They didn't eat anything else. And about that same time, Nisha and I, my wife, we checked our 23andMe data. And when we got it back, I had more Neanderthal DNA than 97% of the population. Oh. And so, it came it was just kind of fortuitous that it both those things happened at the same time. And I was like, you know, I'm going to try it for a month. I felt so much better. I'd lost another 4 lbs. People were saying, "What do you you look better. You've lost weight." Like they could see the the even even from keto to carnivore, my inflammation was even better. I felt better. I used to have terrible heartburn every day. Every day, even with paleo primal. When I went keto it was about 80% better. But then when it in the carnivore, I have zero heartburn ever. Break down carnivore for me. Are you eating chicken? I don't eat much chicken. My carnivore is lots of fatty red meat, mostly beef. I I eat eggs, mostly the yolks. I'll eat butter or ghee, some full-fat cheese, salt, pepper, and some spices. That's that's the the entirety of my diet. And that may sound boring, but I have yet to sit down and go, "Damn it, another ribeye?" It just doesn't happen. No, for me that sounds amazing. Right. Um you're going to die of heart attack, right? Right. Right. And so, my cholesterol currently is 350. My LDL cholesterol is 250. And I'm not worried about those at all because more and more the research that's been shelved and put in the basements and put in the attics about lipid and you know, cholesterol and LDL, now that all the research is becoming available and people are doing review articles and looking at all the data, it actually looks like the higher your total cholesterol is the longer you live. And so, the entire model has been upside down this entire time. So, I'm not worried about my total cholesterol or my LDL at all because my HDL is very high, which is my good protective cholesterol. My triglycerides are very low. My hemoglobin A1C or my 3-month blood sugar average is the lowest it's it's been since I've been checking it. All my inflammatory markers are back to normal. I feel great. So, tell me, where's the risk in that? Okay, that's super interesting. Um walk me through what parts of the um the cholesterol numbers people should be caring about, not caring about um because so in my own life I went through a period that lasted probably for about 2 and 1/2 years where I was essentially doing rabbit starvation. Right. So, I was eating basically chicken breast, broccoli, nothing on it, no oil, nothing. I avoided You felt amazing. I felt terrible. Exactly. Absolutely horrifying. Right. But damn I was lean. Yep. And it was amazing. Uh but yeah, I was I had joint pain just was like in pure insanity. Yeah. And then I because I heard that ketogenics possibly had some cancer prevention stuff, I tried it. And it was like it was like taking a drug. It was so anti-inflammatory on my joints that I was like, well, I'm never going back to rabbit starvation. That was crazy. Um but my cholesterol levels were so low when I was doing the rabbit starvation and I thought that was a good thing that I was super amped. I felt bulletproof, thought I was going to live forever. Then when I started doing ketogenics, my numbers went significantly up and my doctor was like, we have to get you on Lipitor and I was like, you must be joking. I've got two guns, Tom. I've got a a 12-gauge shotgun and I've got a BB gun. You're going to get shot with one of them. Which one do you pick? the BB gun and find out. That's it. And that's that makes good sense. And so my contention is is that a an elevated A1C, an elevated C-peptide, which tells me your blood sugar and and and serum insulin levels are always high. A very low HDL and a very high triglyceride level, those four tests those that's the shotgun. If your LDL is is 250, 300, that might might be a BB gun. But the the even the research on levels that high is completely inconclusive. If your doctor says, "Oh, you have a high total cholesterol, you need to be on Lipitor, you need to find a new doctor because he's at least 10 years behind in his reading, okay?" Now, if he talks about LDL, then he's at least current. But still, when you look at the research in its totality, it's not a risk factor. It might be a BB gun, but it's not the shotgun that that high blood sugar, high insulin, low HDL, and high triglycerides are. That's the shotgun that's going to kill you. Mhm. It's really interesting. So, talk about salt, blood pressure. Seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around salt. Yeah. And so, human beings, and all mammals, really, love salt and crave salt. But in human beings, we consider this a character flaw. If you if you like salt and actually eat it, something wrong with you. You're not You're not a very bright, or you just don't care about your health. But what about the deer in the wild that will walk for miles to lick a certain mud or a certain rock that has a high salt content. Are they Are they gluttons as well? Or they just don't care about their health? I doubt that's true. I think they're doing that for their health. The blood of mammals is very salty. Mhm. Okay? If you If you If I check a basic metabolic panel on you, your sodium level is going to be 1 135. Your chloride level is going to be 110, right? Your magnesium, which we all want to talk about, is going to be 2.5. And your potassium that we all want to talk about is going to be three. You see the difference in those levels? Your blood is meant to be very, very salty. If you have normal kidney function, then you effectively can't overdose on salt. Your kidneys can excrete so much sodium and chloride that it it's ridiculous, okay? Your kidneys are not going to let you keep too much salt in your body. Even the research in people with with late end-stage heart failure, they do worse on a salt-restricted diet. And you think that's the very people you they should really be restricting their salt, and doctors tell them to do that every day. But when you actually look at the research, they do worse on a low salt salt diet than a normal salt diet. If you start to mess with the salt and try to lower that, immediately your cell membranes stop functioning properly because the sodium and the chloride are supremely important for proper cell function. If you are limiting your salt, you're limiting your performance. And there are actually athletes who, instead of carb loading, they'll salt load before they work out. But and it increases their their endurance and their strength by 10 15%. I've never heard that before. That's really interesting. I've I'm a long-time salt junkie. Um I used to eat rock salt. If you've ever had that, I'm guessing where you grew up you have. Used to eat rock salt till I got nosebleeds. There's just something about salt. One more thing, what do you think the carnivore diet is doing to your microbiome? Like are there Is there anything to think through there in terms of the microbiota that are feeding off of greens and I think that's a huge hugely important question. I think the the gut microbiome is a completely unknown entity. But what I do know is that the multiple carnivores that I correspond with have no problem in the bathroom. There's no problem with constipation, with diarrhea. Everything works like a charm. There's no problem with that. And so, all their markers are good. And so, we go back to that again. They feel great, and they look great in the lab. So, where's the problem? Right? Now, I'm not at all discounting the gut microbiota. I think it's a huge deal. And so, I think that probably in starvation situations when we're having to live on you know, grass and and and grains and stuff. I think that we can use the gut microbiome to help make fatty acids and to help make other nutrients. But when you're feeding the body what it needs, which is mostly fatty meat and maybe a little bit of veg, you don't even really need the gut bacteria to do that work for you because you got it. Very very interesting. Before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online. So I do most of my work on YouTube. I have a few YouTube videos you can check out if you just search Dr. Ken Berry, you'll find me. And then I do a lot of work on Facebook and Instagram, the same search ought to turn me up. Love it. All right, my last question. What's the one thing that people can do that will have the biggest impact on their health? The one thing you can do is to realize that you are literally made of what you eat. And then to go back in time mentally and think, what did we eat 10,000 years ago? What did we eat 100,000 years ago? Because your DNA has not changed at all since then. You are the same creature that used to roam the savanna 100,000 years ago. You are the same genetic animal. You have to eat the food that they ate or you will suffer. And when you start eating processed grains and processed sugars and processed vegetable oils at the amounts that we currently eat, that's going to lead to nothing but chronic disease. Amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show. That was incredible. All right. All right, guys. The most fascinating thing about this man is he is blunt as all hell. When you dive in his world, you're going to realize very quickly that he's not pulling punches. He wants people to question everything. He wants you being your own advocate for your health, diving and he talks a lot about building a bottom-up approaches, looking at what's going on in the world, seeing how people are reacting, seeing what people are talking about. In the age of the internet, do not wait for the medical establishment to hand you something down. Chances are that it's outdated or it was influenced by something else. So, really being a part of figuring things out on your own and researching and learning that stuff is the way to go. And what I love about him, and it's why it's one of the very first things that we talked about, is never afraid to admit if he realizes he was wrong about something, to say he's he said many times, "Oh, I used to, you know, tell people to do this and and I was wrong about that and I'm really sorry and now this is my current thinking." And anybody that's willing to evolve their thinking like that and change the way that they approach something, that's somebody that I feel that I can trust because they're not hemmed in by their own dogma, by the things that they've said, which I think is a major trap. So, he is a very fresh voice in the space. I encourage you guys to go, hear what he has to say, check it out, and like he would do with anybody else, by all means question what he's saying. I think he's questioning what he's saying so that he can really build a robust model that actually works in the real world, and that's why I'm so intrigued. All right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you, sir. Amazing. Hey, Impactivist. I hope you loved that episode. And now I want to take a moment to introduce you to our awesome friends at Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is one of the best all-in-one whole food supplements out there. And as I hope you guys know from watching the show, you need to fuel yourself with the right nutrition if you want to be at your best every day. And I'm talking cognitively, psychologically, physically, all of it requires absolutely top-notch nutrition. And as you guys know, to me the gold standard is without question eating a whole food diet whenever humanly possible. 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