Why Carnivore is the Ultimate Elimination Diet | Health Theory

Hey guys, welcome to a special edition of Health Theory. When we started the show, we named it Health Theory because we wanted to explore every strategy that may improve your health. And if you've watched the show before, you know that to improve your mindset, you must first start with the body. Now, I've had the opportunity to sit across from some of the greatest minds in the health space, many of whom have talked at length about the carnivore diet. So, today I wanted to share with you everything you need to know about the carnivore diet. Enjoy. What is the carnivore diet? And this you you need to explain because you're the first person I've ever heard say because I'd never do into the carnivore diet before, but you're the first person I've ever heard say, "No, no, from an evolutionary standpoint, this is probably how we ate." And so I'd like to know sort of the the main things that that people throw out that our digestive tract is clearly set up to do both. That our teeth are the teeth of an omnivore. Like, right, how do you um show that that isn't true? There's a lot of nuance there. And I think the evolutionary discussions are always a little bit conjecture and the whole discussion here is premised on the fact that what we did in the past is what we should be doing now. And that is debatable as well. I mean some people in evolutionary biology would debate how quickly humans can adapt to things. What we do know is that humans have really only been doing agrarian that is farming type societies for about 10 to 12,000 years. This is called the Neolithic Revolution. But if we back up way further, we can go back 80,000 years and look at stable nitrogen isotope studies of collagen. So basically they look at different types of nitrogen in the bones of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. And what they see is so much nitrogen. So the ratio of the nitrogen gives us a sense of what these people were eating because we know that when we eat higher up the food chain, we accumulate more nitrogen. And what we see is that there is so much nitrogen in those bones that those people were essentially carnivores, meaning they were eating almost entirely animal-based diets. And then if you look back further 2 million years ago, again, we're getting into the realm of extreme paleo anthropology, but there's pretty good evidence if we look at the size of the cranial vault of a human, our brain size had this logarithmic uptick two million years ago. That was when we were homoctus, homohabilis. And we also see the uh the onset of stone tools and evidence for hunting then. So there's a really compelling story you can put together there that hunting animals, access to animal foods made us human. It made our brains go and we got from 700 cc's in the cranial vault to about 1500 cc's in the cranial vault in about a million years. the previous 30 million years of primate evolution, we'd stayed about level at about 300 to 400 cc's in terms of the size of our brain. There's pretty good evidence that the bigger your brain, the more developed the neoortex, you have more complex processing. So, I like the the I get it's a narrative, you're putting it together, maybe this, maybe that, and it comes together, and this is a nice uh narrative that has internal logic. Um but one thing that seems certainly plausible in that same internal logic is if we pass through a primate evolution and that we had you know um similar ancestry for a very long period of time and as far as I know most primates are designed to munch on a bunch of leaves and [ __ ] um and deal with that. If we started there, then why would we think that we swung all the way to entirely? And I think that this the interesting thing here is in that brain size that we had eaten vegetables and there actually are examples of primates eating other primates. The primates do eat animals, but we had had primarily a vegetable-based diet or a plant-based diet for 35 million years of primate evolution. And then something happened, right? And we became human. And I think that it was this sudden access to nutrient density and macronutrients that we hadn't seen before in higher quantities. So we had much higher quantity fats. So DHA, EPA, these omega-3 fats. There's lots of theories about what caused this expansion of the human brain. And I would argue much greater access to micronutrients in the animal foods because we were eating these much more bioavailable foods that it was the eating of the foods that made us human. And so then it became this risk benefit or just an like a an availability equation. If I can go hunt a woolly mammoth and I can get a million I mean how many calories in a woolly man? Like millions and millions of calories. It can feed the tribe for a week or I can go look for tubers. What am I going to do? Right? There's no question what you're going to do in terms of calories and fat. I think that the point you make is well taken and it gives us this really interesting survival advantage because we're not always going to be able to hunt perfectly. If you and I go out and hunt, I guess today is different in terms of the scarcity of animals, but say we're on the planes 30,000 years ago and we're hunting, if we don't come across a buffalo, we may not have any food today or tomorrow. And in that situation, I think the idea is that humans probably still ate some plants, but the plants were probably just the survival food. that when you really look at where humans get nutrients, and this is bioavailable micronutrients and where humans would have gotten calories from evolutionarily, animals dwarf plants in every way. There aren't many people today who are calorie deficient, but there are many humans that are micronutrient deficient. And so, if we're talking about micronutrient adequacy, micronutrient bioavailability, this to me is the great leveler. It's so interesting. Animal foods are far and away the winners. If you look at the bioavailability and the presence of vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, or the micronutrients, calcium, zinc, selenium, manganesees, or the DHA, and EPA, they're just animal foods are the richest source. They're the best multivitamin we've ever encountered. So, we're going to go hunt that. But evolutionarily, I think that if we couldn't get that, we would eat some plants and they're going to tide us over in terms of calories, and they're going to give us suboptimal micronutrients. We know that the micronutrients and plants are less bioavailable and so we can use them as survival food kind of hearkening back to our ancestry. But I think that what happened is we became people who realized that animals were the best source of nutrients and that is kind of the roots of the carnivore diet. 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 I you know I'm always researching I'm always looking and studying and I saw this excellent lecture by Dr. Michael Eids. He was talking about Neanderthalss and what they ate. And Neanderthalss 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 23 and meat data. And when he got it back, I had more Neanderthal DNA than 97% of the population. Oh. And so it it was just kind of fortuitous that both those things happened at the same time. And I was like, you know, I'm going to try it for a month. What what could it hurt? And so at the end of that month, I felt so much better. I'd lost another four pounds. 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 was about 80% better. But then when 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. Uh I I eat eggs, mostly the yolks. I'll eat butter or ghee. Uh 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. I I it just doesn't happen. No. For me, that sounds amazing, right? Um, so now let's get into the nitty-gritty of a carnivore diet. Nose to tail. What does that mean? How do I do it? Where do I get this stuff? So, how does one in today's world eat um a carnivore diet? Yeah. So, it's I think Tim Ferrris has this saying, it's not simple, but it's not complex, right? You imagine that you and I are out hunting and we kill an antelope or we kill a moose. A nose-to-tail approach to a carnivore diet thinks, I'm not just going to eat the tenderloin and throw the rest of the animal out. We're going to eat every piece of that animal because every piece of that animal has calories. And when you think about it, every piece of that animal has micronutrients that are unique. And so, so you're going to eat the cartilage. You are going to eat the cartilage. I do think that eating cartilage is a valuable thing, but in talking to my clients over the last year that I've been doing this, I've realized that there's like there's like junior varsity and varsity versions of carnival, right? when people come on the team, you got to put them on the JV team first, unless they're super gung-ho. So, I think that if people get intimidated by the ideal version of a carnivore diet, they can just think of like what is the doable version of a carnivore diet. But I want them to understand the basic paradigm because the most basic version of a carnivore diet often goes wrong because it's just too basic. And that is just eating that the muscle meat, which is what we see in the grocery store. So, if people want to try a carnivore diet for 30 days, you really could almost get away eating steak and eggs. I don't think that's ideal long term, nor do I think that's the best way for a human to do it in terms of micronutrients or macronutrients. But the simplest version is steak and eggs or steak. Is that better than hamburger and eggs? Probably. The thing I like about steak is that you can cook it medium rare, rare, and hamburger like cooked all the way through all the time. You don't want to cook out, you cook out nutrients, I'm assuming. [clears throat] You do cook out some of the nutrients. And so the nice thing about a steak is you can get a steak that's rare. People like that and the inside is better. I think it's better in terms of the nutrients in there. So, you're trying Interesting. Would you eat something if you didn't have to worry about microbial content? Would you eat raw? Absolutely. I've done I personally, and I don't recommend people do this, eat the majority of my diet raw right now. Get the [ __ ] out. No, you should have seen You eat raw eggs. I do eat raw eggs. That's scary. You're freaking me out. So, the here's the thing with eggs. What we worry about with eggs is contamination of campobacttor and salmonella on the shell of the egg. Correct. The inside of the egg is generally sterile. Uh-huh. It better be, right? When it have to be. It has to be. And if it's not sterile, you will know because you'll open it. It'll look like something died in there, which it did essent. So, when you eat the white of the yolk, the white of the egg, I don't want to eat raw because it has a common health called avidin, which binds biotin. Most of the avidin in the egg white is denatured when you cook it. But there's some evidence that not all of it is. And so, what I'm interested is the most amount of nutrients. And I really try to be a fat hunter in my carnivore diet. We can get into the nitty-gritty of fat to protein ratios, but I eat the yolk because the yolk is where most of the nutrients are. And I eat it raw because I'm lazy and I just want to eat it fast and it tastes good. Before we get to that, going back to your initial hypothesis, if you [ __ ] found an egg, you were not going to not eat the egg yolk or the egg white. You were going to eat that whole [ __ ] You know, I wonder what our ancestors would have done because you think they'd throw it out. I don't know if they they might not. You're right. They might. If I were in the wilderness and I came across an egg, I would probably cook it and eat the whole thing. Yes. But I don't need extra protein. And so I'm just going to discard the white, eat the yolk, and I eat it raw. I'll eat six to eight raw egg yolks a day. I'm not saying this is the way everybody should do it. Do you just chug them? Do you put them in a glass? I just put them in my hand and jam it down. God. So, how are you just letting the white s through your fingers? Just goes right through. And then you can eat the yolk raw. This is Don't have to eat the yolk. You don't have a lot of friends over when you're doing this, do [laughter] you? This is not table friendly. Dating is hard for me, man. It's interesting. Wow. Okay, so we're pounding six to eight egg yolks. Then we've got a steak chilling in the fridge that we're going to eat. The next thing I eat is liver. Culturally, as Westerners, we do not eat liver. I ate a little liver worse growing up. That probably saved me. When I first started eating liver, I would gag and I thought, "Oh, that's such a strong flavor. I'm not used to it." And then gradually, I got to the point where I was like, "Oh, now I'm adjusting to It's an acquired taste down for sure. I watched like a documentary or something about polar bears. Is it their liver that has too much vitamin A or something like that? This is an urban legend, urban myth. Yeah. So, there's never been a case report of vitamin A toxicity from eating food. There have been case reports of vitamin A toxicity, people taking vitamin A palmitate supplement, but you can eat a pretty decent amount of liver per day and not have vitamin A toxicity. So, I eat raw liver. People can eat it cooked. And I'll do three ounces or four ounces of raw liver per day. So I ate the egg yolks, then I ate raw liver. Again, this is the super varsity version. Yep. And I put a little sea salt on it. And you're gonna love this. I've I've gotten really interested in eating organs. And so now I'm eating I'll then eat kidney. Raw. Raw kidney. Yep. And then I'll eat raw brain. Whoa. What kind of brain? Cow. Lamb brain. Yeah. Why lamb just tastes better? uh cowbrain is impossible to get because of concerns about bovine sponge performance and philopathy super wild but you think about it evolutionarily this is all my experiment right I'm the end of one I want to know what this is like so I can share with people the brain and the bone marrow would have been I think things that we prize the most brain is a delicacy in many countries because it's rich in nutrients I mean think about where the DHA goes here and it's been interesting for me personally at this point in my carnivore journey to try and eat more of the animal and go past like that's gross Okay. And so at that point I will eat a steak, you know, and but a lot of times there's this anthropologic evidence and this interesting historical evidence of a lot of cultures eating the organs first and then saving the muscle meat for later or giving the muscle meat to the dogs or other animals. Wow. If people are primarily grossed out or probably grossed out about organs, there are ways to get organs that you don't have to eat them. There are these desiccated organ tablets which I think are a really interesting new sort of subset of a supplement industry where you can take brain, heart, liver, spleen, kidney, thymus, gallbladder of an animal, dehydrated at low temperature and then put it in a pill, right? Do you actually get the nutrients though? If you if you [ __ ] it up by cooking it, right? I've got to imagine by doing all that crazy processing that nothing goes. I want to study it and see how much is in there. But you know, desiccation is like low temperature dehydration. So they're like they're like freezing it and then pulling the water out that way. So if there's any way to do it, that would be the best way. But that's a very valid point. It can't be as good as raw liver, which is clearly the best thing ever. Yeah. Okay. So let's get to um well any I'm guessing that that's got to cover most of what you're eating. That covers most of what I eat. So give me tier one. So the basic carnivore diet is probably meat and eggs, right? You can do that all day long for 30 days. You'll be fine. Okay. Okay. What What am I missing? micronutrients. I I Here's what I don't want. I don't want [ __ ] where you have to supplement. Like if somebody's giving me a diet and they're like, "Wow, but make sure that you take the zinc, the magnesium." It's like I want something where what you're missing is liver. Liver because it has copper, [sighs] biotin, folate, riboplavin. Okay. So, it's got stuff I'm not going to find in the There's a little bit of ri There's a moderate amount of ribboflavin in egg yolk. There's a moderate amount of ribboflavin in muscle meat, but the majority of the ribboflavin is in the liver. If you wanted to make the simplest nut most nutrient- richch carnivore diet, it would be meat, eggs, and liver. Meat, eggs, and liver. Steak, egg, and liver would be just the most basic. 30 days. And then you could add things to that. You know, if people want to eat other things, you can eat seafood, right? You can eat chicken. You can eat pork. I can have chicken. Yeah. Yeah. Chicken breast. Sure. Or I have to have chicken liver. No, you can have chicken breast. The carnivore diet is kind of this the other another name for it, which I perhaps like a little more is a whole foods animal-based diet. whole foods animal-based diet. Yep. If it comes from an animal, you can eat it. You think carnivore has a PR problem? Well, I just want people to understand that our ancestors ate fish, our ancestors ate scallops, our shrimps, those are can all be on a carnivore type diet. In terms of the most doable, easy way, this is it. If you end up liking it or your wife ends up doing it long term, there are other manifestations I would make or other modifications I would make when you go when you go to varsity. So, I would include more organ meats, just different organs. Different organs. Kidney, heart. Kidney, heart. Yep. The brain sounds horrifying. It's actually not that bad. It looks nasty. It does, but isn't that kind of fun? No. Not. There are some things that I get down because it's like, "This is hard and I want to do it." Brain doesn't make the list. Is the carnivore diet safe? What blood markers are you watching? um sleep, sleep scores, heart rate variability, body temperature, blood glucose, and ketones. My my hemoglobin A1C increased by 510 of a point. So, it went from increased, which is surprising to me. Yeah. 4.8 to 5.3. But everything else, I mean, iron, ferotin increased, which I was probably expecting eating more red meat, things like that. I worry about cholesterol when triglycerides and glucose and liver enzymes are out of whack. So your liver tends to take the brunt of metabolic burden first. It's a key metabolic signaling hub. And so if your liver enzymes start to rise, your glucose is rising, your hemoglobin A1C is rising, then and your triglycerides are increased, then I'm I'm more concerned about what's going on with your LDL cholesterol, you know, and your low HDL. But without that context, I'm not totally worried about it. And the thing that people don't really realize is like your body can convert protein via gluconneogenesis to glucose. Um there's certain cells and tissues, red blood cells, the neuron, various central nervous system cells within our brain that need absolutely need glucose. They can't use fat store ketones. Protein can be back converted as can liberating stored body fat. The body fat is you know you have your triglycerides and on you know your triglyceride on top of that is glycerol and when you liberate that for free fatty acids to make ketones that glycerol gets converted to make glucose. So a lot of people think you need to have carbs to raise glucose for obligate glucose utilizing cells but that glycerol backbone gets shunted right into that cycle. So yeah it's it's interesting Tom I I don't know what the solution is for people. Should they go carnivore? Should they not? I think if you have digestive issues, it's worth a shot. And it sounds so polarizing, controversial, but you know, in functional medicine, we've been talking about this for a while. We, you know, people like Jeff Bland and Sid Baker, Mark Heyman, an elimination diet, which was essentially just basically plain old white rice and lamb. That was it. like that's almost carnivore in the sense obviously if you overdo the white rice you're going to negate some of that but it was really eliminating all the variables that could affect the immune system. 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 basement 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 three-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 in my own life, I went through a period that lasted probably for about two and a half years where I was essentially doing rabbit starvation, right? So I was eating basically chicken breast, broccoli, nothing on it, no oil, nothing. I felt amazing. I felt terrible. Exactly. absolutely horrifying, right? But damn, I was lean and it was amazing. Uh but yeah, I was I joint pain just was like in pure insanity. 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 raid 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 [clears throat] have to get you on Lipur." 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 gonna get shot with one of them. Which one do you pick? I take the BB gun if I do. That's it. And that's that makes good sense. And so my contention is is that an elevated A1C, an elevated ceptide, which tells me your blood sugar 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 Lipur. You need to find a new doctor because he 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. 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. Who would benefit from the carnivore diet? So, the carnivore diet is something that I'm super interested in. So, my wife has struggled very profoundly with microbiome issues and she has made tremendous progress. She's been dealing with it now for four years, but she's made tremendous progress. And she's gotten to the point where the things that she eat, she can maintain equilibrium, but she isn't like progressing as much as I would. She's sort of hit steady state, but she's not making progress in my estimation. Um, and so one thing that if the hypothesis about lectins is accurate and that you have plants that have these toxins in them, you eat the toxins, they break the epithelial lining of the gut and now you have um your autoimmune response. If that is accurate, then potentially for her, if she was a good carnivore and ate nose totail and, you know, got the whole mix of everything and isn't just eating hamburgers or steaks, um, I'd be very curious to see if that worked for her or not. Um, I'd be curious to get your take on the carnivore diet. Yeah. So, you would think as the author of Ketoarian, I wouldn't advocate for the carnivore diet. It's I do use a carnivore diet in my for my patients that need it. It's an an ultimate elimination approach. You're taking out a lot of variables and these people with really dysfunctional guts and gastrointestinal lining and microbiome and this inflammatory cascades going on. Sometimes you need that intervention to lower inflammation for a short period of time or for a period of time. It could be months. If you're going going to do the carnivore diet, you're going to want to make it make sure it's nutrientdense. You're going to want to make sure that you're going for more of the organ meats from a nutrient density standpoint like you pointed out. And I have people be fish ccentric as well. It's not just about the organ meat. So, I want people to getting making sure they're getting their healthy omegas from the fish. And grass-fed beef has omegas as well. But the the problem with this is that they it's not sustainable for most people long term. And we're going off of dairy, too. And many times we're going off of egg whites for a while, too, because the albumin can be a problem for some people with autoimmunity, the egg white. Some people have dairy sensitivities as well. So, it's pretty tight. That's why for most people, it's not going to be a long-term thing. So, we do it for a period of time. We do some broths and soups and stews and things like that. sort of a GAPS approach. I don't know if you're familiar with GAPS. It stands for gut and physiology syndrome or gut and psychology depending on what you're using it for, but it's the gut brain axis, the gut physiology axis. So, it's it the premise is lots of bone broth, soups and stews. So, we use that with sort of these nutrient-dense organ meats for a time and then we lean in. Why soups and stews? Bone broth I get. Yeah. I don't understand soups and stews. It's it's soft and cooked meat because even the meat can be hard to digest for these people. Many of them have hypocchlorria, decreased hydrochloric acid. They're not breaking down meats even. Wow. They have really messed up guts. So, we have to help with their digestion at the beginning really to even break down meats. But then you start with you lean into pureed vegetables after that and you know uh softcooked vegetables, low FODMAP vegetables which are the fermentable sugars that people with these dispioses can have a problem too. How the hell if I went carnivore for a year, how the hell would I still have bacteria like a SIBO problem? So for fermentation being the thing that I'm thinking of, would that bacteria not die off? Well, there are certain bacteria and yeast that feed on other things, too. They can feed on proteins. They can feed on ketones. So, then you're going to have to bring in some typically herbal antimicrobials to help with that. Oh, god. This stuff gets so complicated. It is complicated. My my whole day job is like looking at all the variables and trying to make this as digestible, no pun intended, but as practical as as possible. So, um what do you think about the carnivore diet? Is there any logic there? Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, you know, like Jordan Peterson's doing that and his daughter did it to cure autoimmune disease. And yes, if you are really sick, sometimes it can be profoundly helpful. I mean, if you have autoimmune disease, if you have um uh severe obesity, I mean, it there can be real benefits, but I again, you know, we used to eat 800 species of plants as hunter gatherers. We ate animal products when we could find them or hunt them and and it was a part of our diet. It wasn't a staple. Some cultures like the plains Indians like this Lakota they lived mostly on buffalo and they were the longest lived uh people in history they were had more centinarians per capita than any other population at the turn of the century. Yeah. So when you look at that is there you've talked about you know one thing that medicine really has got to start doing is looking at the laws of biology. So you know physicists are looking at the laws of the universe. What are the laws of biology? I'd love to hear what are some of the laws of biology. How does that play out in terms of um plants? Because I can walk you through it's admittedly like a lay person's understanding. But when I walk through the notion of the plant paradox and you start thinking of a plant as having a basically a chemical um evolutionary advantage or the way that they stop predators is by creating these chemicals that either upset their stomach or they're bad for them or they're bitter tasting or whatever. It's like, oh, that makes sense. When you have something, it has to have a mechanism against predation. Yeah. And [snorts] humans are one of the predators. And so, okay, it didn't develop claws or whatever. It developed like these chemical signals. You've talked about food being signals more than just calories. So, it's like, okay, well, there's actually some logic. Whether it's true or not is a totally different question, but there's a a followable chain of logic to why plants potentially have issues. And so, like, I'm one of these guys. I'm like always trying to hedge my bets like I have some vegetables just to make sure cuz I don't know which way to bounce. But at the same time I I keep telling my wife one experiment she hasn't run yet to just completely solve her problem is to completely eliminate vegetables cuz she has she's restricted them and that has helped tremendously. But it's like what are the odds that like when she eats animal products she's fine. like if she were to just eat chicken or just eat beef or pork or whatever, she does very well. There are some vegetables she can add in, she seems fine. And there are others that then become wildly problematic. Yeah. And so it's like, is there anything that they all share that for somebody with the sensitivity they're, you know, they're an issue or no? No, no. Like there's so many other nutrients in vegetables. If you're not eating them, you're kidding committing a cardinal sin of the laws of biology. Well, if you're eating nose totail, like you're eating the liver, which has more vitamin C, more vitamin A than any vegetable on the planet, right? Um, you know, you can get by, but you can get by or it's ideal. I don't think it's ideal. I mean, I think your gut microbiome feeds on carbohydrates, feeds on phyitochemicals. So, I have a little different view about vegetables. um and I call it symbiotic phyto adaptation which is a fascinating concept but essentially yes there are defense mechanisms in plants that help the plants but also can help us right so for example we don't make vitamin C we get it from plants we need things to help us detoxify so when you eat broccoli you upregulate the glutathione the pathways of detox in your liver through phytochemicals called glucosinylates Your microbiome loves the polyphenols in pomegranate and cranberry, right? So I think we have evolved co-evolved with plants. So we use these compounds, these phyitochemicals to regulate all sorts of biological functions from inflammation to our microbiome to detoxification to brain function, neurotransmitters and so so on. So I think we there are plants you would want to eat. You don't you don't want to eat poison mushrooms, right? You don't want to eat fox glove which kill you. you don't want any, you know, terrible these terrible poisonous plants, right? But there are a lot of plants that we've evolved with that we use in our bodies to regulate our biological functions, and I think they're really necessary. How does the carnivore diet affect gut health? But let's talk uh carnivore versus vegetables. So, I maybe I like vegetables a lot, but I tend to like the ones that are really um carby. Mhm. Sweet potatoes are so delicious. I would give up virtually everything to eat them all day. Um but I even though I like vegetables partly out of laziness because I don't want to cook them, I am almost not entirely because I'll throw in rice every now and then. Um, but I'm carnivore adjacent. I like that. What is it? What nutrients do you fear I will miss if I were to eat organ meat and all that but not have vegetables? I think if you are eating organ meat uh and doing it well with a variety of nutrient-dense meats, I don't think you'd be meeting missing many nutrients other than fiber, which is a major way that we help with gut diversity. A robust variety of plant foods is associated with a healthier microbiome longer term. And we have longer term studies with these. We don't have longer term studies with the carnivore diet. I would assume that if someone's doing it properly, they're they probably at a period of time would be would seem more good than bad because they're removing a lot of foods and then it's going to be a net positive for them if they're doing a properly formed carnivore diet, right? But is that going to be sustainable long term for them? Most people are are going to want more variety than that. Yeah. I mean, so the question is, you know, is are you gonna make your microbiome more resilient or not? People should try various diets and see what works for them. And I think a lot of people get stuck in this regimented thing where and it can backfire on them too. They're they're carnivore. So then when berries come in season, when people might watch this towards the end of summer, blueberries are going to be in full swing. Does that mean you totally avoid blueberries? Because there's I believe I'm not one of these people that think plants are bad. I think blueberries, the anthocyanidins and the various an you know antioxidants have a lot of benefit to your microbiome and to your body in general. But then when you start to identify that you're a carnivore or you're a keto or you're a vegan, you then you close yourself down a little bit. So I think in your case, you don't have any major health issues that I'm aware of, you know, that you've talked about. So I would just continue what you're doing. But maybe in the winter probably the best time to go carnivore. I'm going to say [ __ ] you. And here's I don't have I have one health issue and that is I'm dying. So the only real question I care about in every health theory episode I do is how do I live forever? Like if you're steering by how you feel, which is essentially what I do, I just don't know what its impact is on longevity. Um if a carnivore diet, like if somebody could tell me, no, no, no, a thousand% if you do a carnivore diet, you're gonna live to 150. I'd be all over the carnivore diet all day, every day. Wouldn't even think about it. I'd never touch another [ __ ] blueberry in my life. like I would just eat it. Um, but it's it's that big [ __ ] question mark about longevity that winds me up. Well, let me pose this question to you. How could a diet be negatively affecting your longevity if it makes you feel better? If it makes your sleep better, if it improves your heart rate variability, if it makes you stronger, if it makes you recover better, how could it slow down your longevity? I hope you guys enjoyed that episode and give the carnivore diet a shot if you think that it would work for you. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. [applause] 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 going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.