We got some of this messaging backwards, where people say you've got to eat meat for protein and what are vegetables good for? Well, they have lots of nutrients in them. And it's true. They do have lots of nutrients in them, but that doesn't mean that the meat doesn't have nutrients in it. So there may be a lot of people who would benefit from extra vitamin C intake, just like pyromaniacs may benefit from more fire extinguishers in their homes than you and I would.

Right. Right. But that doesn't mean that a person who is healthy and eating a plant-free diet necessarily is going to be at detriment for having less vitamin C than that. The brain, if it's not getting enough ketones, then glucose really has to go up. And it never sat right with me the argument that people who are keto-adapted are showing lower ketone bodies because they are just using it more efficiently.

Tell me who you are and what you do. Well, that's always the question that is so difficult for me to answer because I like to do so many different things and I have a lot of different, um, interests that occupy my time. So, I spend a lot of time with my youngest who is still in high school, and I love to read and write. I especially like to read and write about metabolic topics and neuroscience topics and the connection between those and evolution. And I really like to synthesize different areas because I'm never quite satisfied with the answers that are just, uh, limited to one area of thinking. I also love tango dancing, although I haven't been out doing that as much as I like, just because I'm pretty busy. But that's that's a hobby for me, as well as playing bridge. And, um, I don't know, I have a pretty full life.

I already know you, so I know you skipped over a lot of things. Um, that's true. You, you're connected with a cryptocurrency. Is that right?

That's true. Yeah, I have a background in mathematics and computer science, and through that, I grew very interested in cryptography and met a lot of people who were in the early cipherpunk community. And the idea behind cipherpunks is that they really care about preserving people's freedom and privacy through technology, not just through law, although law can also be really important as a protection, but it's not a full protection. And so the idea was, let's use technology to to protect people and their rights. And out of that came, um, a lot of early attempts to make a digital cash, uh, that would preserve your ability to transact, um, even when cash systems might be at threat. But the problem that happened when Bitcoin came on the scene, Bitcoin was actually really exciting because it solved one problem that was very difficult, which is decentralization. So, how do you get it so that you can make all these transactions without going through, for example, a bank or a company that has some way to control all the flow of information, even if they, even if it's encrypted and they can't see it? But the problem with Bitcoin is that the solution that it, it uses to create decentralization, which is that many people across the world have their own nodes where they can verify that each transaction happened. The way that they verify that is by looking at it. And so right there, you've lost the whole privacy aspect. And if you don't have privacy, then you don't really have freedom because people can, you know, discriminate against you based on the things that you've decided to buy. And so, you know, a big problem with Bitcoin is if you have one Bitcoin address and you decide to let your employer pay you to that address, now your address is public and everything you do out of that is viewable by your employer. Not to mention that if you buy something from the same address that you got paid to, now the person who sold you that thing can see how much money you make. So, obviously, that's not going to work. And the cryptocurrency that I'm really excited about is Zcash, which is it was originally a fork of Bitcoin. So, it retains all of the good, the good, um, properties that Bitcoin has, but it has an encryption layer, a zero-knowledge proof encryption layer, which allows you to do the checking, sort of, it's kind of magic. It allows you to do the checking that all the transactions are correct without actually knowing what they are. So, I think that that's really important for the world. And so, I was involved with that for a while. I was on a, a grant committee, um, for a couple of years, helping to allocate funds for people to do projects related to it. And now I'm not, but I'm still highly interested in what goes on in that community.

Well, it's a really interesting time to be talking about not just, um, you know, cryptocurrencies, but in particular privacy, I mean, unlike any other time before now, because of the level of sophistication and capability to track. So, exactly what you said with Bitcoin. A lot of people don't realize this. It's an open ledger. So, yes, your address might be something that's unknown at first, but once I know what your address is, I can literally see all your activity, right, as far as going to other addresses.

Yeah. And that is a challenge because we're talking about money.

Right?

Yeah.

And so, I, I appreciate that. I like the, the concept of what you're describing with regard to Zcash and just a genuine interest in seeing if there can be more of a privacy-related, you know, like actual cash, like something where if you want to make a purchase and it's between you and the other party, that's your business between those two people, uh, or two entities, for that matter. So, um, let's round into one more thing before we get to the bigger thing. There's also a major connection with you and language. Tell us a little about that.

Well, I studied linguistics, um, just on my own a bit as a teen, and when I was deciding to go to school, I couldn't quite decide whether I wanted to study math or whether I wanted to study linguistics, actually, because they were both, they have a lot in common in a way, like the way that we analyze language can be very mathematical, and also I'm really interested in brains and cognition and the abstractions that underly how we think about math and how we think about language also have a lot in common and to me seem to be the really fundamental characteristics of human brains that make them different from other brains. Um, I ended up going to school for math and just taking linguistics on the side. But then when I went to grad school, I combined them for a while studying computational linguistics, which is really, um, it's a, a field of AI, and the kinds of models that I was looking at at the time are very similar to and underlying a lot of the modern AI technology, which I haven't, um, I haven't been in school since the newest models really took off, but they fundamentally work through computational linguistics ideas. Uh, I like studying languages just for fun. Um, I speak Russian and French fairly decently, although it gets rusty really fast. Um, yeah. Uh, language is very dear to my heart.

Well, it's, it's something that shows up a lot on social media because you care a lot about the precision of wording, which becomes very important, particularly when talking about philosophy and trying to get to some of these concepts in a meaningful and constructive way, right?

Yeah. It's easy to get into an argument that someone will say, "Oh, you're just arguing over semantics." But to me, I hear that as, "Oh, you're just arguing about what we mean." Well, yeah, of course it matters what we mean. Um, I think, you know, to be fair, if you say you're arguing over semantics, sometimes that means, well, your argument holds if we take the definition to mean one thing, and my argument holds if we take the definition to be another thing. So, we shouldn't let that get in the way of our mutual understanding. And I agree with that. But I do think that when people aren't precise, they can, um, just lose the thread of what they're really talking about because they'll start with one definition and drift into another without realizing how that impacts what they're talking about.

I think a great, certainly a huge pet peeve of mine is language that's suggestive of causality.

Oh, absolutely. So when I say, "Oh, well, you know, red meat is linked with cancer, right?" What I'm saying could, if you take as linked being associative, could be defensible from an epidemiological standpoint.

Yes.

But naturally, a lot of people who would argue as to whether or not it's causally connected to the, uh, you know, interventionally will, will, uh, create cancer, right? Or at least has a causal chain that starts with meat and ends with cancer. There's plenty of debate. But if I say linked, I say, "Ah, I mean, I basically, you know, I said the word that if you corner me down, I will concede was associational." Yeah. But it's okay. That's what everyone uses. Everyone says X is linked with Y. And so, you know, can I help it if you take that to mean causal? And yeah, this is where it becomes, I think, super incumbent for us to care about the use of language and how much it's suggestive, particularly when we're caring about getting to the truth.

One of the things that comes up a lot is, uh, when people are being circular and they don't realize it. For example, people will say, "Oh, the reason why you're gaining weight is because you overeat." But if you, if you peel that back, what they usually mean by overeat is that you ate and you gained weight. Like, basically, if I ate X amount and I didn't gain weight, then they'll say, "Oh, you didn't overeat."

Right.

So obviously all they mean by overeat is that you gained weight. And so if what it means to overeat is to gain weight, then you can't say that overeating causes gaining weight.

Right. Well, and this is where I like to immediately stop and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Your qualifier is at the beginning. You said over.

Yes.

You said overeat.

Yeah.

So, yeah. Wait, wait. Does eating cause me to gain weight? Right. If I eat today, will I gain weight? Well, gain weight. The over and gain are the two links.

Right.

How did I determine there was a gain of weight? Well, it was from the over.

Right. Right.

Okay. So, then the eat and the weight can be separated.

Right.

You didn't realize you created a linguistic slight of hand even as you said it by saying overeat.

Yeah. And it's because there's a hidden assumption in there.

Right. And this is, this is, and it's fascinating to me that there is such a massive debate, but we're still in the thick of it as to this kind of larger calories in, calories out component. And I do like that there's just a little bit more of an acknowledgement of, well, it's a description.

Yeah.

It's a description of thermodynamics.

Yeah. It doesn't break thermodynamics.

Yeah, doesn't break thermodynamics. Congratulations. Description met.

Right. It's bookkeeping. Calories in, calories out.

If you lost weight, um, and we're not talking about like losing a limb or something like this, then you did burn more calories than you consumed. But that doesn't mean that you, the reason that you lost weight was because you intentionally restricted your calories. Those are two completely different things.

Right. And even then, the term restricted becomes a meaningful qualifier.

Right.

Like, you don't think of something as restricted. If I could be like, "Oh, I eat as much as I want and I've lost weight." I didn't restrict, given the way I described this. Restrict suggests that I wanted to eat more than I ended up eating, but I imposed a restriction on myself. So, this is why I, I'm just been excited to have you on because this is the, the common traps that everyone gets caught into, which is really an important question that doesn't get as much attention as whether you eat less and move more, is why, why did you eat less and move more, or why did you eat more and move less? And that's where I think the smarter debate is.

Yeah. So, yeah. So this segues me perfectly up to the other major component that certainly I know you for, which is nutrition. So let's go back. What got you, what was the first point in which you started to say, I need to be more mindful of what I'm eating, and what revelation did that lead you to? Spoiler alert, I already know the story, so I just want everyone else to hear it.

So many stories. Uh, well, you know, a, a mentor from the past of mine named Charles Washington used to always say, "The lucky ones get fat." Which sounds counterintuitive at first. U, but what he meant by it was that fat, being fat is such a huge motivator in our society, not just because it's uncomfortable and, you know, can get in the way of being able to do activities that you like, but because it's such a shameful thing in our society. And so it's, it's a huge motivator, and and anyone who is overweight starts, uh, looking for solutions to that. And the reason he said the lucky ones is because, um, he believes, and I believe to some degree too, that if you are, if you don't take care of the inputs that you give to your body and you happen to not get fat from it, you're, you're one of these naturally thin people. There might still be problems that your body takes from those inputs that you give it that you might not be, uh, motivated to address if you don't have a vanity reason to.

And disease reasons.

Yeah. So the disease is more hidden.

Yes.

In other words, you may be developing severe insulin resistance, not realize it, and that manifests a bit later,

Right.

where it's further down the road of problems.

Right.

Would that be a fair way of stating it?

Yes. And, uh, you know, some people do end up with this different kind of phenotype where they might have diabetes even though they're not overweight, even though the typical stereotypical person has fat expansion that goes along with that. Not everyone does. And so you could, you know, have, uh, very poor health without it manifestation manifesting as overweight. And so, um, for me, I was overweight. And so that's what got me looking into nutrition in the first place. But I didn't, in my first iteration with that, I didn't stray very far from what I had been taught. Um, I grew up in a mostly vegetarian household for ethical reasons, um, not for nutritional reasons, but because I was familiar with that and sort of biased toward it as a good thing. When I first started looking into what I should do to lose weight, I thought that that was the obvious route that I should take. And everything around me, this was in the '90s, um, supported that idea. So it was very easy for me to find a lot of, you know, books and treatises that would tell me that that was the way to lose weight.

Fat is fattening.

Yes. Yeah.

So if you want to lose weight, you need to drop down the fat so that, you know, you can get less fat on you. Right. But even before I even went there, it was more about, oh, animal products are destroying your health. And so fat from plants, seed oils, for example, would be a more kind of benign, uh, effect on your body. And so I started by reducing meat as much as I could. And, um, I did eventually try veganism too for a little while. Uh, but none of those things worked to improve my health. Exercising more didn't work. In fact, I remember a really funny thing. I went to see my doctor one time and she had asked me about, um, what I was doing with exercise, and I said that I had started doing cardiovascular exercise three times a week, and she said, "Oh, that's maintenance level. If you want to lose weight, you have to do it more times a week." I don't remember exactly what she said, but I remember thinking, well, wait, I was, I was weight stable at a higher weight than I wanted to be while not exercising. So, how could three times a week be maintenance level? I don't know. Didn't make sense to me. But I did. So, I, I, you know, I went up on that. I, I tried various things from that class of thinking, and it wasn't really helping. Um, and the first thing that really got me to change my thinking about that was that I, I went on a trip to Russia in connection with studying language. Actually, I have a, I have a degree in Russian, and as part of that degree, I did a semester in St. Petersburg. And when I went there, it was in this vegan stage, and back then it was, I think 1996, and there just wasn't such a thing as vegan food there, at least that I could find. Um, so if I went to the store and I wanted to eat something that was going to satisfy my requirements, I could maybe get some plain macaroni or something. And after, you know, a week of this or something, I said, "Okay, screw this. I'm just going to eat whatever I want, um, while I'm here." And also, I was spending time with Russian people as hosts, and I didn't want to, you know, say, "Oh, your food's not good enough."

Yeah.

I just didn't want to do that. I thought, "It's okay. It's only four months. I'll, I'll go and take care of that aspect later when I get home and I'll just do be a good guest here." And I lost weight while I was there. And so I thought, okay, well, maybe it's, I didn't go to thinking like adding meat caused me to lose weight or something like that, but I just, I realized adding meat wasn't the, it wasn't the bottleneck because if I could still eat meat and I was still eating ad libitum as much as I wanted, uh, it couldn't have been the meat that was making me fat.

Right?

So, at that point, I was at a bit of a, uh, I was ripe for turning around my mind, but I didn't know what I was looking for yet. And it just happened to be that, um, Mike Eades and Mary Dan Eades had just published their book called Protein Power, which is a low-carb diet book. Um, it's a little focused on protein. Um, and definitely, uh, not against high-fat, but I think that fat in the '90s was still kind of demonized, and so they didn't want to put "Fat Power" on the on the book title. But anyway, I read that, and I was really struck because they had this extensive, um, citation system in the book and all these papers to prove their points about, or, you know, at least back up, support the things that they were saying. And so for the first time in my life, I thought, well, that that claim seems extraordinary to me. I'm going to go look and see what that paper actually said. And I was new to reading scientific papers, really, but I went, this is again back in the '90s. So I went to the library at the university and used the microfiche and looked up these papers and photocopied them and and took them home. And, uh, it, so it was then that I started this process of learning to read scientific papers from the medical literature and to really become familiar with the different styles of, um, argumentation in nutrition. And so there's argumentation like you were talking about from epidemiology, which has a lot of associations, but you never know when factors are conflated with each other or, um, when something's actually causal or not. And a lot of the papers that I was looking at had to do with real experiments and, and what happened. And so I found that all very compelling, and it really, it really set my life off in a different direction.

Um, I want to, I want to pause for one sec because I do think that while it's been covered on this podcast before, it's really worth emphasizing why there's a distinction like you were having and many other people are having. We're a wash in epidemiological data. And if you're not familiar with something called healthy user bias, you need to be, because what it is is if there's the medical advice of the day, the nutrition advice of the day, and you're somebody who cares about your health, you are more likely to follow those things. And therefore, you have a bunch of different things together, a bunch of different behaviors. If you're in the age of say, smoking, but you understand it's healthier to not smoke, and you're like, well, I care a lot about my health, so much so that I'm willing to be a social outcast even to not smoke, right? By the same token, if you're in the age of the low-fat diet, then that may also be combined with the not smoking, and also may be combined with, I hear jogging is good for you, and may also. So, what's the issue? Well, the issue is, is if you're observing people who have these healthy habits, and you're saying, "Oh, jogging associates with greater longevity." That may be empirically true if you got people who, that's the only thing that was different about them compared to other people for which the only thing that's different about them is that they're not jogging. But that's just not how the real world works. And so when you get into experiments like you're describing, where there's an actual randomization element and you're trying to make sure that you isolate the variable of interest by itself, that's where you get into some stronger science. It's no longer just populations or, you know, these like larger nations being compared. And I think a lot of us have that moment where we go, "Oh, wait a sec." Per what I was talking about earlier, it's not good enough to just say this is linked with that. We, we actually need to see, has there been actual experiments? Have there been actual, uh, interventions for which one thing has changed and how long was it followed for? And is it actually connected to the disease of interest, or is it connected to a surrogate that's associated with the disease of interest, which gets us to a whole another thing. But I had the same kind of awakening you did, and it took me kind of understanding that distinction and just how hard that is to accomplish. But then eventually, you do, you get into the papers, and now you actually can kind of see with more open eyes that a lot of things actually might even counter what the expectations are of the day. Would that be a fair way of putting it?

Yes. And this conflation of data is so ubiquitous, especially in nutrition, because everyone is basically on this baseline diet that is very uniform, and it's not low-carb, and it's certainly not carnivore, which we may get into at some point. But when you, when you look at that big bank of epidemiological data, um, it can look like, oh, you've got this huge spectrum. We'll break this particular, uh, key thing of interest into quartiles, for example. And there's some that people that are doing it really high, and some really low, and some in the middle. And we'll see if there's a difference among those quartiles or quintiles or whatever buckets we decide best fit our. No, never mind. Um, and the thing is that there, there are parts of the data set that don't appear in anyone, right? So if you're looking, you want to see like, what is it like for people who have high fiber versus low fiber, and you're looking at all the people who are on this grain-based diet. Well, what you don't get in any of that epidemiology is people who don't eat any fiber and don't eat any grains, right? You only get like, basically, are you eating white flour that's been separated from the hull or not? Are you eating the sugar that's been separated from your apple, or are you eating the whole apple? And that's a completely different, like, you can't get the information from that data set of what if you just didn't have the apple at all? It, it doesn't exist in the data. And so there are a whole bunch of things that your data can't do that people ask it to do. Like, what does it really mean to have a zero-fiber diet? You can't properly ask that question if you have the background assumption that everybody's eating a high, a high grain diet. That's very different from eating a low-fiber diet that doesn't have any grain at all, if you see what I mean.

Yeah. Well, there's, there's another factor, too. I mean, what fiber is a great example, which is why would you subtract the apple if, why would you subtract the fiber if we see that some people who have a lower amount of fiber, but at least some fiber, and we do some kind of an experiment, or never mind even an experiment, let's say that we're looking at epidemiological data and we find people who consume more fiber are doing better. Why would we even dare have an experiment where we have take away fiber? Like, we already know fiber is good for you, if we go by these assumptions I just laid out.

Right.

That more fiber is better. I mean, gosh, the only question is like, how much better could it be if you get more and more fiber? Maybe it has some dropping off point. But the, but what I'm trying to illustrate, a little bit tongue-in-cheek here, is a lot of times it's super counterintuitive to head in the other direction of what is thought to be a more harm. If going from here to here is better, why would we go from here to there?

Right.

Where we like flatten out and there's no fiber at all. That's, that seems that seems crazy.

That's right. And that's funny because sometimes, uh, people who understand that epidemiology can't really tell us about causes very well will still say, and I'll say that it can make for good hypotheses. But in the example that you just illustrated, it actually, um, would never lead you to a hypothesis that when you test it, a completely plant-free diet, for example, would never lead you to test that hypothesis because it looks like it's going in the opposite direction.

Exactly. And I mean, this is what's, this is what's fascinating to me. I say this all the time, epidemiology is actually very important for hypothesis generating. When you say hypothesis generating, a lot of people think that that's your way of dismissing it. Not at all.

Right.

We need observational data.

Yeah.

We don't have enough money and resources to do an RCT on literally every single thing there is in the world.

Right.

But what I do really like epidemiology for is that it's pretty good at knocking down assumptions. It's good at not, it's good at providing data against a hypothesis.

Right?

So if you, if you're absolutely confident that X causes Y, and then you get some scenario where you have a whole lot of X in isolation, and it's not associating with Y at all, you need to have some explanation outside of your hypothesis that can make that, can meet the understanding of why that's the case, particularly at a population level.

Right.

And, uh, something that a lot of people don't like when they hear me say it is that I, I think that the observational data that we have makes it very clear that carbohydrates don't cause diabetes, for example. And, you know, it's an easy, um, it's an easy inference to make if you have diabetes, you have a whole bunch of people who have diabetes, and you remove the carbohydrates from their diet, and all their symptoms go away. So, they're no longer manifesting any signs of this disease. It's a very easy leap to say, "Oh, well, the carbohydrates caused the diabetes. Take them away, and you don't have it anymore." Um, but you can't, you can't say that without ignoring huge swaths of populations in the recent past and probably even currently on people who eat carbohydrates and don't have diabetes. It's just, uh, you have, we have to look elsewhere unless we're going to ignore data.

Yeah. But that, but what, what you're saying right now, in the simplistic version, if you will, of "carbs are bad," would might sound anathema within a low-carb community, right? You're just, you're here on my podcast saying, "Hey, I don't feel like it's as clear-cut as carbs cause diabetes." Right? Now, I try to make this distinction as well. It does become relevant if you already have diabetes.

Yes.

In a distinctive way, which we'll get into, right? But I want to go back to the timeline again, real quick. Uh, your, the, it's really fascinating. I did not know about your St. Petersburg trip, and immediately my head goes, "Wow, I wonder about the timeline where, um, Amber never had gone." Like, would she still be trying to make a plant-based, plant-predominant diet work at this point? I mean,

Who knows?

Okay. So you come back now, you realize that eating meat is not necessarily what's causing you to gain weight. What happens next?

Right. So, I find that low-carb book and am completely fascinated by this whole new world of science that I wasn't aware of. Start to learn how to read papers and, um, and then more than that, I, I try the low-carb diet, and it completely works. I very quickly lose all the overweight that I was worried about, um, and feel great, look great, and, um, happily on this crazy niche low-carb diet and stay on it for for many years. Um, and this is, this was starting back in the '90s, so there had been a couple of waves of low-carb already in the past. I think, um, Atkins,

Was popular in the '70s.

And so, would it be fair to say that you were low-carb, but not at this point keto? You weren't that low-carb, or do you think you?

I was very low-carb, and I expect that I was in ketosis. In fact, I did buy those urine strips. I was in ketosis by those measurements, although I didn't, you know, I used those at first to try to make sure I was doing the right thing.

But then, you know, I had a book like a carb count book that I would look up all the things in making me look so old. Microfiche and carb counting books.

Yeah.

And, um, so I stopped, I stopped doing those measurements, um, after a while, and we didn't have access to blood ketone measurements for quite a while yet. Um,

And even then, they were crazy expensive.

Yeah. The, I didn't,

Keto Mojo for helping us out on that.

Back so in the early, like around 2010 or something, I feel like is when the first time that I got a, a strip that could measure blood ketones, and at that time, it was $5 a strip.

Right. That's what I remember.

So we're, so you, you basically became low-carb way before the current keto craze, so forth. We're talking late '90s.

Yeah.

And, and then I'm curious, did you start reading up on, I think at the time it was called zero-carb diet or something like that. There was a blog I remember running.

It was a while before we got to that. So.

Okay.

So let's see. It was the '90s that I first discovered it, and I, you know, I met here and there a few people who were low-carbers. There was a low-carb presence on the internet back in, um, the Usenet group days, before the worldwide web, even when, um, people would read basically like, like today's forums, except that, um, they're just directly on the internet. And, um, there, even before I went to Russia, I remember there, there was a diet alt. They were called alts.

Oh, yes.

And there was, uh, alt.support.diet.lowfat and alt.support.diet.lowcarb. And I remember I looked at that low-carb group and I thought that was the craziest, most stupidest idea I'd ever heard of. And I, like, I just immediately dismissed it and never looked back again. But well, for a while. So there were such people, and I did meet some of them along the way. Um, but basically, I just hummed along in my own quirky little low-carb universe, um, pretty successfully and happily until, um, I think I started gaining weight again, um, with pregnancies. And when I would get pregnant, and I would gain a lot of weight, and I would eat carbs because I would get a lot of, um, cravings for carbohydrates at that time. I wasn't really afraid of staying low-carb while pregnant, but I just, I just didn't want to white-knuckle through it. Um, and I think that there's a reason for that because in the first half of pregnancy, uh, women gain fat hormonally, they're driven to gain fat. And then in the second half of pregnancy, normally it reverses, and you, you lose fat to the, the fetus. U, the fetus needs to gain fat. The fetus comes out. We're the fattest earth animals that we know of. Like, even you think about a seal, it's not as fat as a human baby. Babies are born with about 15 or 16% fat, and in the first year, that goes up to 26. They're just a laying down fat machine from the end of, um, term, like the last part of when, when they're still in utero through the first year of life. And this is actually a really fascinating side topic for me also, because the reason for that is seems to be because brain growth is largely dependent on the fuel and the material that ketone bodies provide to the brain. Um, so humans are really unique in that our brain continues to grow, not just past weaning, which is already really unusual, but all the way up till we're adult, like two decades, your brain's still growing. You've got this period in early childhood where there's a major restructuring of your brain that is connected to, possibly connected to childhood amnesia, um, where most people can't remember stuff from before they're about four years old. And it's believed that, or at least some people believe that the reason for that might be a major restructuring that's happening, and you just stuff gets pruned and,

It's not needed.

Um, because you're building the new phase. And then, um, a similar thing happens starting around age 12. You don't lose memories for it, but you go through this huge pruning stage. You start needing a lot more sleep to take care of that. Anyway, your brain just keeps growing and keeps growing, which is not the case for almost any other animal. No other animal grows their brain, continues to need this myelination and all that stuff for 20 years, right? But we do. And I am of the opinion that the reason that we are so fat as a species. So we're fat as babies, like humongously fat as babies. But even when that baby fat goes away, humans are like three times as fat as our nearest great ape relatives. So if you looked, you know, what would you expect a human level of fit body fat to be? It, it's way, way the expectation would be way, way lower. And my belief is that we need to have that level of energy available to our, our brains, which are energy suckers.

Yes. And, um, we, it's really, um, it's really a positive adaptation for the neuroplasticity and ongoing restructuring of the brain that humans especially do throughout their lives.

Right? So this actually, when I was going to college, I was excited about this hypothesis that I had that I was like bouncing off my, um, I was, I was bouncing off everybody, basically, who, who he was interested in that. Effectively, I think the value of us taking as long as we did in order to have child rearing just to survival basis is that it necessitated the growth of the brain. So because a lot of the other animals in the animal kingdom are more hardwired and can move towards self-sufficiency at much faster rate. There's less need for that larger frontal lobe and less time. Exactly what you were describing. That's why it kind of reflects back for me as I was thinking about how, wow, there's really this just long structure cycle. The brain is massively complex.

Yeah.

So if you're trying to create this incubation period where you, you know, to, to use a statement the kids would make these days, "to let it cook."

Your brain is cooked.

Exactly. You're, you're trying to get it to a point where it's fully formed, adult, and healthy. You're talking a cycle that's longer than a lot of animals are alive.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah. It's crazy.

And so we're much more software-based than hardware-based. And I mean, as far as like, how much our behaviors are ingrained is much lower than a lot of other animals. They're, they're playing a game with each other that's spanned, you know, millions of years, but for which the degree with which they're doing that, you know, executive level function reasoning is much, much lower. And I believe that's absolutely how we won, right? The brain is ultimately the master trick, even though we're otherwise pretty soft and we take so long,

To raise to a point of functional value.

But it's also what necessitates the communal component. We're absolutely reliant on our parents much more so, and understandably a tribal component to that as well.

Yeah.

Now there's pluses and minuses to that, which I'm sure we may get into a bit more, particularly when it comes to things like, like how much we can interconnect with each other and who we find ourselves up against, right? But, um, yeah, going back to your timeline, I tend to find a lot of people have stories of getting into an alignment with diet and lifestyle, children, pregnancy, starting with pregnancy, massive disruption, and then you get tested for what your level of commitments are and what you think can work. A lot of, I mean, I, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people who are on a plant-predominant diet or who even were vegan. They said, "I have to take a break during pregnancy because I can't help it. I have these massive cravings." It's not everyone, but I have talked to a number of folks who say that's just the one time where I can't seem to get out of it. It's just something I have to work through.

Yeah. So, I did capitulate to eating higher carb, but the thing that was surprising is that I didn't re-lose the weight to the same degree after those pregnancies. And I don't know why for sure, but there were different, um, factors that could have been involved. And one of them was that I was on antidepressants. Um, I started, uh, antidepressants before I found low-carb, even when I was 20. Um, I was on Prozac for, I was on Prozac for about 15 years, um, maybe a little bit less, um, but a long time. And that could have been a factor in the inability to lose weight. Um, or it could have been something about my diet that was, um, a longer-term trajectory. It could have been something to do with aging. It could have been hormones. I really don't know for sure. But what I do know was that at some point when I was in my 30s, um, I was very frustrated because I had done all this studying about low-carb diets. Like, I wasn't just read the book and do the program. Like, I knew more about it than almost than anyone that I knew personally. And so I,

When it wasn't working for me, I, I just felt like I was at an impasse.

I don't, I don't mean to interject, but I, I feel like I see this very often across all walks of life for females who, again, I, there's something about the post-pregnancy for which there's, I think observably a physiological change

That is just a different context past that point.

Yeah. But I, but I feel like you're telling me now the same story that I've heard so many others where they're taking it on a bit more personally. Like, ladies, you literally manufactured a human, and I'm sure you're reading the same stuff I'm reading where just the sheer degree of remodeling, getting into more advanced things like apoptosis with tissue repair, that's all in play.

That's true.

Right? Like, there's, I don't know. I don't know how you guys can be so hard on yourselves for not being able to just snap back like an Instagram model. Like, "Oh, no problem. I just had a baby and, you know, all the baby weight is like just gone in 5 seconds flat." It's like, no, I, I'm not surprised that it's a change that your body had to work through with childbearing.

That's true. And, you know, that's something I haven't thought a lot about that connection between, um, tissue repair and that postpartum period because,

It's a pet topic of mine.

Yeah.

I mean, not, not just postpartum, but but just the, um, to get into the geek zone because we're going there anyway.

I believe that your immune response is rate-limited.

Absolutely. It needs energy.

Yep.

And it requires high insulin.

Yes.

Because that's building.

Right?

So, you can't lose fat if your insulin is high for immune system or building reasons.

An analogy is just like a city or even a country, let's say a country, you have services and you have a standing army, but it's expensive to have a standing army. You, you have to fund that army, right? You have to arm that army. And depending on how many, you know, how much it's in your country or around the world or whatever. The point is, it's resource taxing. You can expand the standing army. That's going to cost more resources, and your resources are rate-limited. You can't have your immune system up and on at all times, right? Or I should say, your immune response at maximum level at all times to handle all kinds of things. It takes time. Atherosclerosis is a fascinating topic to me because of the engineering complexity of trying to do this immune response in a very delicate area that cannot be shut down at all.

Right.

Yeah.

So you, you, there's, there's immune cells, there's macrophages are trying to do their thing there. And that's maybe the one area of tissue repair I'm of, you know, I have special interest in. But the other area that ultimately leads us around to is is our adipocytes, our fat cells. They're extremely relevant, extremely relevant toward the rate limitation of the immune response. And that's why one of the first light bulbs for me was how they found in, in folks who were very obese, and I think this goes back to what I'm not sure when they were first seeing this. They were finding the, the aizable mass of adipose tissue for people who were struggling with obesity was dead macrophages.

That's all part of this larger backlog of, we need to get to that. We need our immune, our immune response to deal with all things in the body that require repair. And the pro-inflammatory response is trying to get control, trying to get deal with the pathogens, etc. The anti-inflammatory response is the trying to then dismantle what we had to put up the structures and so forth, but also apoptosis and all of the stuff with regard to removing the debris takes time, takes, takes effort, and you don't get to feel it. That's a good thing because a lot of, a lot of how those immune cells are working and their process, oh my god, macrophages, I just can never, I'm such a fanboy for macrophages, all the stuff that they do, but they're, they have to be engaged in the remodeling effort. There's no getting around that part.

Yeah.

And there, there does seem to be a relevance towards how young you are when you're having your children versus when you're older, observationally. Right. But then there's a lot of science that that backs that up as far as what I, again, this isn't my wheelhouse, but, um, it's a topic that I think is of enormous interest.

So the immune connection, I think, is really interesting in terms of trying to understand what's so special about the carnivore diet. Um, people have different ideas, and nobody knows for sure because those ideas haven't really been tested. But the next thing that happened in this story, then, uh, getting back to that zero-carb thing, um, I found the zero-carb forums in 2008, and this was just people talking about what they were calling a zero-carb diet. I, I hated that terminology because, uh, what

They're really talking about is eating only animal source foods. And some animal source foods have some carbohydrate in them. And some plant foods, like oils for example, don't have any carbohydrate in them. But that's why the name's a terrible name.

Yeah. But it turns out that carnivore, which was what I was using to, um, try to solve that problem, also has its own problems, which we can get into later. But anyway, I found that group. And again, I reveal this embarrassing thing about myself. My biggest motivation was this vanity factor. Like, I didn't want to be fat. And I didn't understand why my low-carb diet, that had worked so well for me in the past, didn't seem to be working anymore. And it was also embarrassing from an intellectual point of view, because it's great to say, "Oh, I know what causes fat, and see, I'm thin because I figured out the problem." But then to have all this scientific information, but it's not working on you, it sort of takes away from your credibility, even if it's correct.

Um, so I've replayed this pattern a couple times in my life. But anyway, um, there were a lot of people on those forums who were like me, who had been on a low-carb diet and regained weight, or just couldn't get to the weight that they wanted to get to using a low-carb diet alone. But when they started doing this plant-free type of diet, uh, suddenly started getting, um, the weight loss that they wanted. And so I was actually really intimidated by this, because even though I ate meat at the time, I had a pretty vegetable-heavy diet. I still loved vegetables. I ate a lot of, um, what Mark Sisson later started calling big-ass salads. You know, that was a lot of my life was these salads or cruciferous vegetables. Um, I ate a very vegetable-heavy low-carb diet. And so I had to really work myself up to it psychologically. And I even put a limit on it. I was like, I'm just going to do this for three weeks and see what happens. And what happened was almost instantly, I was losing a pound every other day.

So you were saying, yes, be patient with yourself if the weight isn't coming off, but there was definitely something that I could do that really hastened that. And the connection to the immunity, I think, is really interesting, because the immune system requires a lot of energy, as we talked about. And if you have a lot of things going on that are damaging your body, that means you need a lot of immune system response everywhere, right? And that takes a lot of energy. And so the reason that I think, one reason that I think that the immune system might be involved with the carnivore diet is because there's a plausible story in which the anti-nutrients from plants, especially if you have, um, not so good intestinal barriers, might be causing damage throughout the body. That, if you take them away, frees up a whole lot of energy and resources to do all the repair that you want to do. The other reason that it's compelling to me is just because of the fantastic results that anecdotally people were getting and are still getting in terms of autoimmune type diseases.

So what we started noticing back then, and I have to say, I have to just remind you that back then, everyone who came there came there for weight. Like, nobody thought, "Oh, I'm going to eat no plants to cure my asthma," because that wasn't a thing, right?

Right. Um, but people would say, "You know what? I just realized I haven't used my inhaler for like a month," or "The joint pain in my fingers has gone away." And I decided to have some, like, Brussels sprouts on Thanksgiving, just 'cause it's a holiday. And suddenly I'm racked with all this pain that I forgot that I used to have. And so more and more people started sharing these stories of surprising benefits. There were autoimmune type benefits, mood disorder benefits, obviously digestive benefits.

Um, not so obviously.

Well, people, people who may not have ever heard of you or this diet, they'd go, "What are you talking about? You..."

Oh, that's right. Meat is hard to digest, right?

You need fiber for a proper digestive system. I, a lot of people definitely feel that way.

Right? So, I want to, I want to throw a couple of hypotheses at you that I realize we've never really unpacked before. Energy is one component, but I'll put two more on the table. One of them links back to a conference that you held, which we'll get to in time, but it was another light bulb moment for me when I had to prepare a talk for this conference. I got into why I had such a problem planning, as an experiment, a whole foods plant-based diet, which I was planning to do even after I'd gone keto, because I wanted to do it for an experiment and report on the experiment. And what it was was, I didn't, you know, I didn't have that much of a problem with the vitamins, and I knew people would be fine even on the plant-based side if I was supplementing, say, vitamin D, B12, etc. But the thing I was running into was, in order to do a whole foods plant-based diet in a way that I think would be satisfying to other people, that I did it right, is to not have something like a protein shake and to see if I could get the right amount of protein from plant-based sources. And you can, but there's this interesting challenge that makes sense once you understand the biochemistry between the, uh, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, which is, in the plant kingdom, they have different priorities. Their structure is different. Therefore, the proteins that they make have a different general composition of demands for the amino acids they use. In the animal kingdom, we have a different priority set of amino acids. So, a good example would be say, leucine, right? Higher up over here, there's a greater usage. And in this talk, what I, uh, likened it to was like color cartridges for a printer, right? Right. Imagine there's 23, uh, colors that are the 23 amino acids that, you know, we know of in the animal kingdom, but particularly for us humans, you know, I think nine of them are essential and another middle portion are conditionally essential, things along those lines. But if you were to think of them as colors and the uses for making these proteins, and you think of, you know, nucleated cells as basically protein factories, then it makes sense why you'd have to eat more plants. Not even getting into the bioavailability, which we'll get into, but you have to eat more plants to get the complement of all the amino acids your body needs to make use of, because some for which they're lower levels, you just have to find a way to get more. And that's why you'd need probably something like a protein shake, which is already, like, hopefully, you know, set up to have that complement for you, so that you have the higher amounts of amino acids you're going to get less of in a plant-based diet.

So, moving over to the animal side, if you're eating animals, you're like, "I figured this out when I was trying to set up this experiment." A steak, a nine-ounce steak, had them all at RDA levels.

Yeah.

Yeah. Nine ounces. That we're done here, right? That had the amino acids. Back to the immune response. It's not just the energy. The enzymatic activity is full of protein uses, right? So if I'm trying to support my immune response, if I'm approaching this problem like, "Oh, my body is in need of me supporting internally this environment that's conducive to its own immune response activation." How do I support my army, right? Well, it's more than just getting it the energy. I want two things in particular I think don't get enough attention. One of them is regulatory control of insulin. You'll probably know what I mean by how I'm saying that. If I'm low enough in insulin levels, that it's really more the capability of my immune response to have that delicate balance, that delta, then I'm going to feel a little more confident in that than if I'm consuming things from the outside that have insulin unique responses, especially if I'm doing it around the clock.

Right? Which I think is one of the worst things you can do for your immune response is eating, eating constantly around the clock, so that if your immune response is in need of activation, it's getting perturbed constantly by it.

Right? And then the other part is having the full complement of the amino acids necessary for those protein factories to keep supporting that immune response, because they're just like the other cells. They need the building blocks, and they probably care a lot more when the demand is much higher than the supply.

Right? And so if I were to guess, do I think that that's the whole story? Not at all. Do I think that might be a component of the story of why carnivore might be especially useful in a circumstance for which you have you're butting up against this theorized rate limitation I'm talking about? Yeah, I think so.

It's this whole concept of a balanced diet that really comes from eating plants, because like you said, um, plants, plants have different structures. And not only that, but different plants have different concentrations of different structures. And so if you're not eating animal source food or very little animal source food, you've got a balance problem all the time. You can't just go and eat only cauliflower or something like that. You have to get a wide variety of different foods. Just like they tell you to make a, a healthy diet, it has to have a wide variety of things. But that is really only a plant-based diet concern. If you're eating animal source foods, they already have the balance worked out for you, because because flesh from other animals is so much like our own flesh, that we don't have to be really careful about trying to, you know, this plant gives us so many of the amino acids. Now we have to balance it, do complementary proteins, that whole very complicated calculus that you have to do if you're eating a plant-based diet.

Um, I want to put, let's put a pin in it, because I do want to get back and I'll play devil's advocate on the,

Okay.

The missing things that I think somebody in the room who's pushing back on carnivore would say needs to be there, in order to be truly balanced, and that carnivore isn't truly balanced. But I'd like to still get through your timeline.

So, real quick.

Yeah.

Um, I'm just going to inject my part of the story, even though it's a little ahead of when you did this. But you were the first talk I ever saw on the carnivore diet. The first talk. And,

Which one was that?

I'm pretty confident it was on a low-carb cruise, and I'm pretty confident it was either 2017 or 2018.

2017. Yeah.

But the reason I wanted to jump ahead to give you my reaction is, I'll suspect my reaction was comparable to what you're now describing to us, which is, okay, look, I'm not afraid of meat. Okay. I'm comfortable with bringing down the carbs. Come on, totally plant-free? Now we're, now it just feels like it's falling off a cliff of logic. You have to have some nutrients. You have to have some nutrients from plants, right? I mean, really, really, we're going to just, we're only going to eat meat? Even if I have this motivation, not just a vanity one, but maybe, you know, I do have digestive issues with, I know this from other people I've talked to who themselves know that they have some digestive issues with some plant foods, and they're like, "But I still have to have a balanced diet."

So, is this what you were struggling with in 2010, 2011? When I had told myself it was going to be a short-term thing, I wasn't really that concerned with vitamin depletion because I just thought, it's not going to be that long. At that time, I was concerned about how am I going to, like, be satisfied with my meal? But that quickly turned out to be a non-issue. But then what happened was, it was so good for me, and not just from like losing a pound every other day, but I felt really good. And my, I mentioned that I'd been on antidepressants. I had actually, further down the line, been rediagnosed from having treatment-resistant major depressive disorder to having bipolar type two, which is, it's like the classic bipolar with mania and depression, except that you don't have psychotic episodes, which is what makes bipolar type one so dangerous.

Um, is that people kind of lose touch with reality in their enthusiasm. Um, I was classified as type two because I didn't have those. And it was basically depression still, with some short-lived occasional rises into what they call hypomania, where I'd get really excited and happy. And to me, it just felt like, "Oh my god, I'm not depressed anymore." Uh, but the pattern of it was something that was recognized. And so when that rediagnosis happened, I was alarmed. But at the same time, I thought, "Well, maybe this is why my antidepressants haven't worked. It's the wrong class of drugs." And I happily started trying all these, um, bipolar drugs, and they were horrible. Like, one of them, uh, made me unable to retrieve words. I felt like I could never, you know, it's normal to sometimes not be able to think of the word that you're trying to think of, right? But it just happened constantly, and I felt like I was losing my mind.

And another one was giving me something that's called brain zaps, which is like this feeling of a shock going up the back of your neck. Um, and I don't know if it's doing anything bad, but it was definitely disconcerting. Fortunately, neither of those helped with my depression, so I got to go off of those. I tried one which was an antipsychotic, and it just turned me into a zombie. I slept all the time and couldn't get out of bed. And then I tried another one which gave me severe anxiety to the point where I just, I knew that if my child went outside, he was going to have a fatal accident. If I got in the car and started driving, it's probably the last time that I would my family members would see me.

Wow.

It was just so intense. Um, so anyway, um, my mood was better, but I didn't immediately think, "Oh, I'm cured of bipolar," because bipolar is this long-term trajectory, and it's normal in a disease like bipolar, just like it is in a disease like arthritis, for example, to have remission and to have it come in waves, and that those may be very long-term things. So, just having a good mood, even though I felt better than I had in as long as I could remember, I didn't automatically think, "Oh, well, I no longer have bipolar." But because I felt so good, I ended up sticking with it for such a long time that I eventually had to realize, like, I haven't had a depressive episode for so long that it's not fair to characterize me as having any manifestation of that disease anymore.

Wow. That had to have been a huge deal.

Holy moly. I mean, I got my life back. It was so bad at that time that I would often have periods of suicidal depression where the only thing that was really keeping me alive was knowing that my children needed me. But I just, I felt like there was no, I was just in a constant state of despair and unable to get out of it.

You probably know about, I have a story, one of my experiments, it's like I experienced it for one day. It's a carb swap. A whole bunch of stuff was happening. It's on a Sunday. Um, I remember I was on a spreadsheet, and it just all of a sudden my mood dropped. I had this wave of exhaustion. It was just sort of like, I just, and weirdly, everything I was thinking had this dower, like pessimism applied to it, where just like, I just didn't feel anything was going to work out. And it was very acute. It like came on over maybe 60 seconds. And I started keeping, like, I recognized there's no catalyst. There's no thing that got me to start thinking this way. I don't know what's happening. And I started recording my mood in like a tin score. And I was like, "This is probably going to last, I don't know, 30 minutes or an hour." It didn't. It just kept going for hours. And I kept writing the score. And I kept thinking to myself, "Did I break my brain somehow or something?"

Yeah. And I have it in a, I have it in a blog at the time. And fortunately, in all the experiments I've done since then, I've never had anything quite like this. But I'm telling you, after that happened, I have an entirely different opinion on anybody who's ever struggled, ever struggled with this. And how much, if you could just change the brain chemistry, flip that switch, I just, all of a sudden I was like, "My god, we should just be like, devoting so much research, money, and resources to fixing everyone." And if there, and if this is like diet-related for anybody, they should all know. They should all know there's a possible dietary component to at least try it out, to try out if the diet component makes any kind of difference, because just dipping my toe in it for a moment. Again, I still don't know what happened on that day. And it wasn't at the beginning of the carb swap experiment. It was literally on the last day, right before I was gonna get the blood draw. But I also, this is a little embarrassing, but I also kind of had this like new respect for, um, the heterogeneity of women in their menstrual cycle. I was kind of like, you know, maybe it's really a bigger deal than male Dave was giving it credit for, um, before that point. But if you've only ever been on the other side of that, I also can understand why people are just kind of like, "Oh, why don't you just, you know, look at the brighter side of things?"

Yeah. Amber, why don't you just...

I did so much cognitive behavioral therapy.

Like, I could see all the flaws in my thinking. It didn't matter.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, um, so yes, now you're on the other side of this. This is what, 2010. Um, there was a, there's a kind of complication in the timeline because, uh, so I had planned to do the diet for three weeks. That was conveniently lined up with my birthday, because I was going to have some low-carb, maybe birthday cake, definitely not carnivore, on my birthday. But I never had that because I was feeling so good. I was like, "I'm not, nothing's getting in the way of this stride." And then a week later, I was pregnant. So I was like, "Oh, okay." I was still on that last drug that I was telling you that, um, gave me some anxiety. We had scaled it back to a very small amount. And I was on a small dose of thyroid medication because my thyroid was, my TSH was a little bit high, and I had been thinking that maybe that was behind my depression. So I had convinced a doctor to let me try thyroid. Um, when I realized I was pregnant, I stopped all my medication and I had some carbohydrate during that pregnancy, but I was so enamored with the experience that I'd had with carnivore that I was really eager to get back to it. And by the end of that pregnancy, I was having a lot of carnivore days. And as soon as I gave birth, I went back to carnivore within a few days. And because I had had to give up my antidepressants, like, I would never say to somebody, "Oh, you're feeling good, why don't you just stop your antidepressant?" Right? But I conveniently had stopped it, and I was nursing, and I just never went back on it because I never needed it again. Uh, I should mention, I've recorded with Matt Bizuki before, and he had a harrowing story of coming off a drug a little too quickly.

Um, so it is worth emphasizing, even if people are having good effects, please, you know, work with your doctor and so forth. Um, some people are far along to where it's difficult to get out of a particular drug. But that said, I have had a number of people. I had Robin Dobbins on not too long ago. In fact, her episode got released today. Bipolar and a very low, I think she's basically carnivore, and it's helped her treating bipolar to where, like, she has her whole life back. So, it's, it's real for many people. It's real.

Yeah. So, you get through the next pregnancy.

Yeah. The last one.

The last one. You're done.

Well, yeah. Unless there's some new medical way, I'm done. Yeah. So, then I, I was happily on a carnivore diet for, uh, for a really, really long time.

Were you, were you calling it carnivore yet? I started blogging in 2012, and that's when I, I think my first post that was on, I called it a carnivorous diet. And by, so, so that was after I'd given birth, 'cause like I said, it happened, the pregnancy happened almost immediately and not on purpose. I was trying not to get pregnant, which is a very common thing in the carnivore community. I think is increased, uh, fertility.

Yeah. To a point where people complain.

Yeah. Like, "Oh, I didn't think I was that fertile." It's like, well, you know, it's a commonality. There's, yeah.

There are now some folks. Um, I had Robert Kilts on.

And the name of the,

Um, the video, it's one of the more watched ones, is "Less Plants, More Babies."

Right. Right. So it happened to me.

Um.

So, I'm going to, I'm going to embarrass you a little bit for a sec.

Oh.

Would it be fair for me to characterize that while you're by no means the first person to think of, hey, being animal sourced, because like you just told us, you had come across this before. I do think of you as the person who originated this wealth of data and blogging and taking the step of not calling it zero carb, which you're right was not very descriptive, but was also a little bit self-conscious, right? I think the reason it was called zero carb, I think we can all say, is just that there's a bit of a stigma there was for not that's entirely gone, but with regard to having an animal-based diet.

Yeah.

Having an animal-based diet doesn't just sound dangerous. It sounds like it's, um, it sounds like it's so outlandishly extremist that it can be dismissed before it's investigated.

Mhm. And so you start just unabashedly writing about this diet, what its possibilities are, but at the same time, you aren't, you aren't overstepping and bumper-stickering it and making it sound like it's a catch-all perfect thing for everybody. You're, you're methodically investigating it through, I mean, as far as I know, you were the one blog.

Yeah.

That was accumulating years of this, right?

Yeah. So, I felt so self-conscious about it that at the time, it was after I went carnivore that I started blogging about ketogenic diets, because I had already accumulated a lot of knowledge just about ketogenic diets in general from reading all these papers. And I started blogging about ketogenic diets under one, um, domain name. And I, at the same time, really wanted to share this experience of what was happening to me with a carnivorous diet. But it sounded so crazy. I didn't want to be one of those people who posts their anecdote and, you know, is really unscientific, because I was making all this special effort to try to bring scientific credibility to a ketogenic diet. I didn't want to muddy that. So, I actually got a whole new domain, imperia.ca, to write about the carnivore diet. And I was calling it carnivorous, because we just spent so much time like trying to disabuse people of the notion of what we meant by zero carb. I was like, "I'm going to just cut that off at the pass and call it carnivorous or carnivore." Um, so I started doing that in 2012.

2012, right?

2012.

So, I mean, for anybody who's, for anybody who has no sense of the timing of all of this, keto is hardly a known thing at all. There are some, there are some papers that talk about the ketogenic diet.

Dave, my blog was the first hit on a Google search for ketogenic.

No kidding. Wow. Yeah. So, they, so to be sure, the keto diet itself technically goes all the way back a hundred years ago with regard to efficacy with epilepsy and then gets lost. That's a whole another topic of its own.

And I wasn't the inventor at all of the carnivore diet. There was a whole tradition. It was a really tiny subculture.

But it existed.

But it wasn't, but to your point, and this is the thing that I want people to really get. You're wanting to share this.

So life-changing.

So, yeah. But at the same time, you are so aware, and I would be too if I were in your shoes, that this is such a, it's so radical sounding.

It sounds crazy.

Exactly. And, and you know, it's not going to get widely accepted because you, when you were first coming across it in its former name, and here you are, you're starting to truck forward. They're saying, "I'm going to put this out." And this is pre-keto craze, post-Atkins. But Atkins is, I mean, there's no, nobody anywhere is making a proactive effort to more broadly reach people to say, "Hey, consider it truly no plants."

There are people working in the space, but the, it waxed and waned in popularity. I don't know if the '90s was one of those, like, where it started to get popular again when I found it. That's when Dr. Eades put out that book, and there was a new, uh, edition of the Atkins diet posthumously. Um, and Taubes' book came out maybe in 2003. So there were a few different waves, but it never really gained the momentum that it has gained in more recent times.

And you're talking keto in particular.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Just low-carb diets. But why I'm kind of drawing attention to carnivore, even when you had this adjacency with keto, is I remember after your talk, I like went to Google and I was just searching, and that was the thing. You were the one. There may have been forums, there may have been, but there wasn't like an authoritative, like, "This is the person who's making the case for animal-based only," and particularly with regard to possibly ailments that can help to be resolved by being in this diet. And I'm always, I'm always trying to do this on this podcast and always having the qualifier language, not one size fits all, not cure all, but are there people who might have back then, and certainly many today, who have found special efficacy with it? Again, not everybody, but have there been several who are struggling with the same things that you were dealing with? 100%. We have them in our movie.

We have people who had, who weren't, we don't have anyone in our movie who was actively trying to lose weight. A lot of people who ultimately took on this diet were for various reasons unrelated to weight loss. And that brings around the whole cholesterol topic and so forth. But really, at the end of the day, if you knew that this was an option, and it could be a healthy option, that'd be gigantic. But that was the other thing that I've got to think you were fighting, because it was my first initial prejudice. Here I am. I'm watching your talk in 2017 and I'm going, "Okay, this is, come on, there's going to be some..." So, so you know what? This actually seems like a good place to return back to the nutrients. Now that you are, now that you're a few years in, now that you're doing the research yourself, what would you say to somebody like me who might come around and be like, "Like, no vitamin C? I mean, you need to have enough vitamin C. There's got to be things that fruits and vegetables bring that eating just a carnivorous diet is not going to do the trick." Um, you're eventually, like, I could imagine somebody looking at you being like, "You're eventually going to deal with some pretty serious, uh, vitamin deficiencies." What would you say to that?

Yeah. So once I realized this wasn't just going to be a short-term experiment, that this was, that I felt better than I felt eating a low-carb, plant-garden variety, let's say diet. Um, then I had to, then I had to start taking these questions seriously, like, "Is this sustainable?" And at first, I thought, "Okay, well, somehow this is improving my health despite not eating vegetables." And then I had to consider, "Well, maybe it's actually because I'm not eating vegetables." Right? And one of the first people that helped me re-understand what might be going on was Georgia Ede. So, I came across a talk of hers from the Ancestral Health Symposium called "Little Shop of Horrors," and it was all about how plants don't have the ability to run away. And so, in order for them to survive over the ages without just having their bodies and reproductive systems just eaten into oblivion, they had to have a defense, right? So, some plants have a more physical type of defense, like thorns or something like that. But really, what developed over time was this arms race between plant-eaters and plants, where plants would have these defensive chemicals, especially originally, I think, against insects and smaller plant-eaters, where a lot of these chemicals that they had would be really disruptive to the ability of that animal to continue to live or reproduce, produce, if they ate too much of the plant. And usually, the plant's anti-nutrient chemicals are more concentrated in reproductive parts than in, say, leaves, for example, something that's a little bit more expendable. But everything's defended.

And a small modification, technically not everything's defended in that, you know, things like, um, uh, say the fruit that they're bearing.

Fruit is defended.

Oh, okay.

So, so one thing that's important for fruit, so it's true that some, um, plants have this strategy where they want seed dispersal. Right.

Right. That's where I was going.

Yeah. But it's really critical that the seed is mature before the, uh, seed gets eaten, right? Because if it's not mature, then it doesn't matter if it gets dispersed. So, first...

It won't successfully cycle the reproduction. And therefore, they want to defend before.

Right. Right. Okay.

So, you start with fruit that's not ripe, and the more unripe it is, the more bitter it is. Right. And the bitterness is a reflection of those toxins. The fruit starts out too toxic to eat, and over time, uh, the toxins recede and more sugar is developed as an attraction, as an attractant. But even at the point that you eat it, it still has some level of anti-nutrients in it. It's just whatever animal is going to eat it has to get to the point where the tradeoff of the ability to defend against those anti-nutrients and detoxify from them is worth the energetic cost that it's getting from the sugar, but it's never 100% free of those toxins.

So, it's, it's actually a pretty fascinating story, right? You've got, you got the plants saying, "Listen, we do, we do like you guys having something we give you when it's ready."

Yeah.

"When it's ready. And then you'll eat this, and somewhere else you'll pass the seed through you somewhere further away so that my DNA can continue to propagate, right, elsewhere."

Yeah. Yeah.

"And then, and then that helps to spread me out, and so I can keep trying to win the game of, you know, species."

Um, one little story I like, related to that, is about cedar waxwings. Um, there, there was discovered that there's a type of fruit. I don't remember exactly what they were. I can send you the paper later, but there is a type of fruit that would be part of their diets, but they wouldn't start eating it when it first becomes ripe. And scientists were trying to figure out why they wouldn't eat it. Eventually, they figured out that they don't eat it until another highly proteinaceous food becomes available, because they need that protein in order to detox even what's left in the ripe fruit, uh, from that other food that is a big part of their diet. And so it just illustrates that even something that an animal is built to be able to handle under the right conditions, they need to have the right, full, right conditions of their body being able to handle what toxins are still there to do it.

Yeah, that's, that brings around one of the more fascinating parts of the chemical defenses, which is protease inhibitors. Oh yeah.

That's a, it's a very clever tactic where, um, when you're consuming plants, again, getting back to the warfare, there's quite literally something that's part of what's getting consumed that inhibits the enzyme that can get you to the protein. So, if you're, so it already was a problem what we talked about earlier, where the complement of the amino acids are somewhat, um, uh, the proportionalities are really off. But then on top of that, you have capabilities by the plants to be like, "And also, you're going to be less able to absorb it in the first place."

Yeah.

"We're going to stop the enzyme that helps you to digest this."

Yeah. And then it becomes a bother.

Yeah. What little protein we have, you're going to, we're going to try to block that too. And it's like, ah, gosh. But that's, you know, that's the game, right? That's why if you're, if you're on a plant-based diet, and especially if you enjoy the activity of eating, I know many people are on a plant-based diet and they, they like that. It's, it's,

I mean, I enjoy the activity of eating, right? So, but it does typically require a greater bulk of food that you've got to consume overall. A larger topic that I think we would both agree is not as well understood is how we get to these particular states of disease where we have intolerances to particular foods or components of food. There's more debate there.

Yeah.

There seems to be less debate on when you take the steps to remove the problem foods, and whether that turns out to be beneficial to you.

Yeah. So, do we have enough data on hand that for a sizable fraction of the population, plants seem to be a problem, or at least certain types of plants? Would you say that's a fair statement?

I think a fair question, I guess. So, observations are observable, and mechanisms are, you have to design very specific experiments to test them. But there have been some, right? Or have there?

Well, so, for example, I think it's evident that a lot of people get improvements in their health by doing a plant elimination carnivore diet. And there hasn't been enough, maybe cataloging, or, you know, careful, um, full randomized type of experiments. Those are in the works. But I think that, like, for my purposes, I've interacted with enough people to know that there is something there. However, if you give any particular, like, guess as to why, that's something that you need to design a more careful experiment to verify. Like, you can verify, yes, it's true that, for example, kale has lots of oxalates, and oxalates have these poisons. It's a specific type of poison, and you can show that it will damage organs at a certain level of intake. But even that doesn't show that, for example, the mechanism of a carnivore diet working is the reduction of oxalates. Right? May be a contribution, it might not be an important contribution. It's a fact that happens at the same time. But we, without doing more careful experimentation, and also there may be multifactorial reasons why carnivore diets work, especially if we're talking about the diverse kinds of benefits that people are getting. So, someone who has Crohn's disease and is getting, um, relief in their digestion, is going to have a different mechanism of action than someone who has bipolar disorder, I think. Doesn't seem like it's the same reason why it's helping.

Yeah. I, I guess, um, probably a better way to reshape the, instead of a question, I'll sort of put it as my hypothesis.

Okay.

My hypothesis, given the anecdotal data that I've run into myself with friends, families, the communities, the conferences we go to, anecdotally, there does seem to be a number of people who benefit from subtracting plants. They're not, in my opinion, they're not the majority. Um, it's a, but it's a sizable enough fraction that it sticks out in my mind. And I don't actually know that it needs to be forever. It seems to be that there are some people, and there's some notable examples I want to jump into in a moment, um, for which there seems to be some recovery period.

Yep. They seem to then be able to reintroduce plants. Um, at the time that we're filming this, uh, some big news has jumped out with Michaela Peterson. She's actually been known for the lion diet, which is just, I think, salt and meat and, and I think it might even be muscle meat. I'm not actually sure.

Yep.

And, uh, I think it was broccoli. She's been able to reintroduce broccoli or something along those lines.

Definitely a green vegetable. I don't, it might have been.

Yeah, a green vegetable. But the, the more, the more the challenge is that, in the way that I phrased it just before this, I probably should, if I'm trying to hold myself to a tighter delta, it would be some threshold. Like, if I were, here's a better way of coming at it. If I were to design an RCT, what I would do is I would try to get a number of people who seem to have these digestive problems, as best we could identify that may be related to plants, and then randomize against those who subtract the plants entirely.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. Now, how much of that is oxalates? How much of it is the protease inhibitors, or any of the other possible things related to the chemical defense versus how much of it is the type of fiber and maybe the microbiome interaction? How much of it is gut permeability, and that perhaps that needs to heal, and it's just more distinct to the, you know, the composition of the plant? Who knows? Right.

Right. So you could imagine, like, a scenario where you've got intestinal permeability, and if you keep this onslaught of vegetable intake, it never has a chance to heal. But you could imagine a scenario where a couple years, um, of plant-free diets, so you don't have that stress on the system, gives it enough time to regenerate and heal. And now you can add back some plants. And because the intestinal barrier is complete again, it doesn't provide that same kind of challenge that it used to. Or you could imagine, um, people have, uh, subclinical hypervitaminosis A, for example. Um, your liver is stuffed to the gills. You can't get rid of it all. And all the plants that you're taking in are contributing to this, um, vitamin A overload. And you go on a carnivore diet, not the liver kind, just the muscle meat kind that we originally did. And over time, those stores finally have a chance to, uh, get released and detoxified and taken care of. And now if you eat, you know, some carrots now and then, it's no longer a problem. So there are many scenarios you could think of where a carnivore diet could just be a temporary, temporarily needed, and not something that somebody just inherently needs because they have some, there's something about them or genetics or something like that.

Yeah. The, well, and so let me bring it back to the nutrient deficiency question.

Yeah.

Because you brought this up.

Yeah.

Just now. Muscle meat. Why, why would somebody have organ meat? If you know, I like, I don't like liver. So can I just only have steaks?

Well, there already was starting to develop a couple camps coming into the later 2010s, right? That,

Later.

Fair enough. Much later. Were anyone bringing this up to you earlier though? So in the original forums, occasionally people would come around and say, "Oh, we've got to have organs because nose to tail, blah, blah, blah." But there were enough people who had been around for a long time who would say, "Look, I've been on this diet for years, I don't eat any liver, and I'm fine." But moreover, we had, uh, we had the example of the Bear Lee Stanley, who's extremely important for the carnivore diet, not because, not because any of the things he said were really scientifically important. Some of them were a little bit bizarre. Um, not because,

For people who don't know, the Bear is a musician in,

He was the soundman for the Grateful Dead, who invented the, the wall of sound stereo, um, speaker system that they used on tour. And he was also, uh, the other thing that he was really well known for was LSD manufacturing.

I think he was like the supply, the big supplier for a lot of those early days.

Um, so he was, he was already a big counterculture to begin with.

He, he, uh, studied ballet. He was a really interesting character, and I'm sorry that I didn't get to meet him. He died, uh, after I started low carb, but, and I think after I started carnivore, in a car accident. Um, but he, he did write about the carnivore diet, and he was a big inspiration, not just because of his writings, but because he was an exemplar. Like, he was a fairly long-lived person who had had a partying lifestyle. In fact, he had some kind of oral cancer at one point, which he, uh, which he was healed of. Um, and he was doing fine, and he didn't eat organs. He specifically said, "Don't eat liver." And his reason was, I think, to more to do with it's a source of carbohydrates. And this is not just about animal foods, but it's a low-carbohydrate style of diet. And so the,

And so, and so to, to emphasize, this had to have predated Atkins when he was adopting this, would that be fair? Or was he, when did he, when did he decide to eat only meat?

You know, I don't know the date on that.

But someone who did predate Atkins, that was also the second most important figure, or I didn't mean to rank them, but another,

Yeah.

Most important figure is Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

Yes. So, we have to go way back in time now.

Yeah. And he also, there's some controversy about exactly what he said about organs, because I know that he ate them sometimes, but organs is not the same as liver. Liver is a very, is one out of many organs. It happens to be like one of the only ones you can get here in North America, because we don't happen to eat brain and kidney and pancreas and those types of things.

Which are more commonly eaten overseas.

Yes. So when you say organ meat here, it almost just means liver.

Right. Um, so there's that distinction. But also, I know that he ate them sometimes, but he also was adamant that they were not, Stephenson was not, that they were not necessary. And he, we have him on camera saying, "This is a misunderstanding that you have to have organs in this diet." And in fact, uh, we would give organs to the dogs because they're just not that important. And all you need to have is high fat. If you have high fat, then you're good. You don't need organs.

Yeah. Just to speed run it for people not initiated, Stephenson, uh, was, I forgot what his job was, but he had been,

Canadian explorer.

Yeah. Canadian explorer. He's hanging out with the, it was the Eskimos, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. The, um, I'm not sure if at that time.

They were. I'm, I'm not always good about keeping up on the naming because I think the names have changed, but basically he's watching them just consuming most of the year. They're just consuming, um, seals, seal meat, right? And and just seemingly on a no-carb diet. He comes back and everyone's like, "No, they're just not believing him, right?"

Yeah. And so he was resistant at first. He ate his own like travel food, but then eventually he's just eating what they're eating. Eating what they're eating and started to like it and feel really good and, yeah, really changed his mind about it.

And so then he, because he's getting a lot of challenges, because he's like, you know what, whatever. I'll just turn this into a scientific. This is why we say he's the OG. He checked into a hospital and stayed in the hospital supervised for a year with a friend. Right. Is that?

So they only stayed for a couple months and then the rest they were outside and on the honor system. But okay, fair enough. Yeah. With Carsten Anderson, a fellow explorer. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

And they did a lot of tests on them and importantly, they didn't find any nutrient deficiencies there. They, the one thing that they found, which was a little bit, um, concerning, was that they were in negative calcium balance. Um, but everything else was perfectly fine.

Um, one other interesting aspect of that set of experiments was that uh, Karsten Anderson initially, they put him on a lean version of the diet and he got like really sick and and, um, then they gave him a lot more fat and it, uh, corrected itself. And there's a famous clip of Stephenson, um, talking about this exact thing. He's like, "Yeah, the lean doesn't work. You need."

Yeah. You need fatty meats and that the fat was super crucial. Yes.

And what, one of my earliest fond memories of being at the table with you and I think it was at that 2017 cruise is the way you ordered your steak. You would say, "Yeah, bring me the fattest steak you can find. The more fat the better." Like you would just lay. And every single time the waiter would just go, "Huh, that sure. Okay, oh, probably the one that uh, everybody else would have been fine to pass on."

Yeah. Back in those days, like I can remember saying to people like, "Don't, I don't, I only eat meat, so don't bring me anything else on the plate." And they would almost invariably like, they just couldn't leave it alone because it doesn't look pretty if you don't have something colorful on it. Um, but often when I would say that, they would say, "Oh, you don't eat meat?" Like they just couldn't even hear that.

Yeah. My go-to is just to say it's as boring as it sounds to the person who's taking the order. And for example, I did that yesterday when I was having lunch with my sister and I got like two burger patties with cheese on it and I said, "I just want two sides of a burger patty with shredded cheddar on it. That's it. It's as boring as it sounds. Two ingredients."

Right? And so when I say it like three different ways, then it like really locks it in. And then even so, even so, they brought it out and it was like under there, underneath it was like a leaf of lettuce.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, can't leave it alone. Yeah. Something's wrong. It's really hard on the chef because they're taught to make it pretty and all of that stuff.

But that's also, that's also what I like about the carnivore diet. Just to be rather blunt is I like that. So easy. Just throwing steaks on grills. Easy. That's great. Oh, I just have like.

Oh, the cooking time is just so abbreviated. Whenever I'm watching one of these, whenever I'm watching one of these channels where they're into the food, even if I'm searching for simple, they're like, "And it's so simple. You just do this and then you carve this and you put this over." And I'm, "No, you don't understand. I'm, I've never stopped being a bachelor inside my head when it comes to cooking. The shorter distance and time I can get from what I decide I want to eat to when it's actually being consumed, the better."

Yeah. And the less steps in the preparation and making it, the better. I don't love that about myself, but that's just I've never really been really into cook. The only time I'm into cooking is when I'm cooking for someone else. And then, you know, then that's the one time I'm gonna. But even then, um, I want to say it was for Valentine's Day. The misses, I cooked a steak. I hadn't cooked steaks for us in like a long time and that was nice. But I like that it was that simple.

Yeah. Steaks and cauliflower mash. That was it.

I want to come back to the high-fat thing a bit. Um, even though it's a bit of a pivot from the nutrition, the nutrient, um, aspect, which we should come back to, but I really want to talk about energy for a while. And I know that energy is an important topic for you. And I want to tie it in a little bit to some of your work too. So humans, I mentioned about how we're unique because of the brain development and I think that that's related to our extensive adipose tissue. But one thing that makes it, also ties back to the naming problem with carnivore because we're not really like any of the other carnivore species that we know because we've only been carnivorous really for a couple million years in the hominin lineage. Um, whereas if you look at say, a cat, uh, felines have been around for maybe 10, 20 times that long. And the, the way that that has really affected the way that we eat meat has to do with our protein tolerance. We really only have the ability to get maybe 30, maybe 40 on the outside percent of our calories to come from protein. Because if you try to keep metabolizing more protein as a human, we just don't have the ability to detox the byproducts of protein metabolism as well. And this is has a really important consequence for our ability to do carnivory because if you look at say, what a lion eats, a lion can eat like 70% of its calories from protein and only 30 from fat.

And that means that they're not on a ketogenic diet. They have a glucose-based metabolism. In fact, even herbivores have glucose-based metabolisms that are not in the way that you think or that someone might think where you're eating digestible carbohydrate. But almost every animal is highly, every mammal is highly dependent on gluconeogenesis to stay in a glucose-based metabolism. So the carnivorous animals do it by eating a lot of protein and converting all that into glucose and getting just some of their calories from fat.

This is definitely new information to me with regard to like the lions. So if you're talking 70% protein.

Yeah. And for the uninitiated, gluconeogenesis is the conversion of protein into carbohydrates.

Yeah. Into glucose. Into glucose, right? Yeah. Or sorry. Yes. Into glucose. But, but to that extent, you're saying there's a great, is it literally that there's a greater capacity by the lion for specifically gluconeogenesis and therefore that's why they can have a higher degree of protein?

Two, well, two, there's two things. One is that they do have increased capacity for gluconeogenesis, their liver just does it better. But also they have a better ability to deal with the byproducts of protein metabolism. Um, and then so, so herbivores on the other hand, they also don't get most of their calories from digestible carbohydrate. That, what they do is they ferment fiber in the gut into short-chain fatty acids, but they're not, uh, they're also not on a fat-based metabolism. They take those short-chain fatty acids and those are the substrates for gluconeogenesis. They're really specialized, um, for pro, uh, propionate, one of the main short-chain fatty acids to go into gluconeogenesis. So all these other animals are basically getting most of the glucose that they need by endogenous production. And humans used to, we believe, have a larger gut. And if you know about the work of Alistair Wheeler, they proposed, I think in, was it 1975? I might have the date wrong, but they proposed the expensive tissue hypothesis, which was that, um, they noticed that, um, the brain has expanded and the gut has receded. If you look at the difference between our closest great ape relatives and both of those tissues are really metabolically expensive. Like I think the brain uses energy, or, uh, spends energy, I should say, at about 20 times the rate of muscle, something like that. Uh, and the, uh, some of the gut tissue is also very expensive compared to muscle.

Actually, just to support what you're saying, one of the most fascinating areas of research is calorie expenditure by master chess players.

Oh, yeah. I've heard about that.

It's really fascinating because they, they, because they're on and absolutely are firing like crazy.

So. Yeah.

Anyway, it's pretty interesting. Um, so the question is like, how could we afford to expand our brains by so much, like three times, without, um, without, and how are we able to support that energetically? And so the expensive tissue hypothesis says that the reason that we were able to expand the brain was that we were able to shrink our guts. And what our guts were doing in the past was we had all this tissue dedicated to housing, uh, more microbes at in the hindgut fermenter pattern. So not like a ruminant where you have multiple so-called stomachs where you're fermenting, um, and then bringing it back up to break it up a little more for more fermentation. But this is after the stomach, you get to the large intestines. And we had, or other animals presumably, uh, a precursor to humans also had all this ability to digest, or not digest it, but take in fiber and have the microbes digest it, change that into short-chain fatty acids, and then that becomes the substrate for gluconeogenesis. Then we have glucose and we can feed everything we need to feed. If you give up all of that, um, intestinal capacity, so that now we can maybe deal with 100 grams of fiber or something like that, which is gives us, I don't know, 50 grams of, of, uh, equivalent, uh, energy. Um, now, how are you going to support that? If you want to make this energetic trade-off and give up the intestinal tissue, you're giving away the ability to use fiber for fuel. And so along with the expensive tissue hypothesis has to come, uh, in an, in exchange for less, a less fibrous diet and a more heavily animal source food diet. So that's pretty well accepted as, um, a way that humans have changed, um, the hominin lineage, changed, uh, to have more animal source foods in our diet to support this energetic demand from the brain. But what's not often talked about is that the animal source food can't be all protein. So we have this whole period of a couple million years where, uh, we're at the Homo erectus stage, where we were a hypercarnivorous species. We're eating at least 70% of our diet comes from animal source foods. Uh, where we eat so much meat that scientists are arguing like, how can we possibly have eaten that much meat? Um, and they talk about, um, the fact that probably we were eating, uh, some high meat, meaning like rotten, basically, uh, because that concentrates the signature of meat eating. But we had, we were eating meat as much as or more than typical hypercarnivorous animals, they imagine like hyenas or something like that for a long period. But all that time, we still had the constraints on the ability to transfer protein into energy. So, we have a low-carbohydrate diet because there, there isn't enough carbohydrate in the environment to support us year-round. Um, the fruits are too fibrous. The starches are also tied up with toxins and we don't have enough widespread use of fire for cooking yet. So, we can't get a big amount of, uh, our energy from carbohydrates. We're limited on how much we can get from protein. We gave up our ability to use fiber. There's really only one source that's possible left, and that's the fat that comes with the animal hunting that we're doing. Um, so the human pattern of carnivory necessarily has to be different from the kind of carnivory that we see in animals like, uh, canids and felids, who are able to just hum along on a glucose-based metabolism by getting it from protein. We weren't able to do that.

That's really fascinating. Do you watch the show Alone by any chance?

I have never watched it. No.

Okay. So, it's a, it's a bunch of survivalists of various types and they go to, it's, it's like a contest show kind of. It's a reality show, but all the contestants are required to spend this span of time alone, per the title, and film themselves doing all these survival tactics that they're doing to just try to survive and make it as long. It's a last longer. Whoever can last the longest gets the prize money, which is usually half a million or a million, something like that. But what's so fascinating about it is their strategies for food. They're all losing weight because they all cannot come up with enough food to sustain their weight. They.

Where are they? Like in a forest or something?

Oh, no. They're usually in, uh, I mean, it's, yeah, like forest, mountainous areas, but they're usually put somewhere like say, uh, in Alaska or Mongolia, somewhere and it's usually right at the fall, right before the winter's coming in.

Oh, no.

So it's brutal. It's a fascinating show. A lot of people check out within a matter of a few days, but some are actually lasting longer. And one notable thing that you can't help but notice, especially understanding a little bit more in the nutrition side, is how they can't get fat from like the land very easily.

Yeah.

Right. And this is a pretty serious issue because they can get small game, but then you're dealing with what you're describing, which is, um, a lot of protein, not a lot of fat.

Yeah. And occasionally they're trying to take the shot at getting, um, a big game animal.

Yeah. And spoiler alert, in a few seasons, there's those who accomplish that. But for example, one of them takes down a big animal that doesn't have a lot of fat on it and is saying to the camera is going, "I can't believe I'm just like starving."

Yeah. When I have so much meat.

Yeah. But it's just, I, I, it's all protein. Yeah.

And so you're seeing a real-world example of somebody who's in the wild who's filming themselves for a show who's dealing with the exact phenomenon you're describing where they just can't hardly stand it. And this gets back to, I think it's called rapid starvation.

Yeah. Right.

And, um, it's, it's something that's unintuitive if you don't understand this problem because if you think, oh, gluconeogenesis, no problem. I'll just make whatever energy I need to from whatever is left over on the protein side, but there does seem to be a lack of capacity of just converting it all.

Yeah. It's a special human problem. So, nutrient deficiencies, carnivore diet, I mean, it's missing vitamin C.

It's missing, um, what's, what's another? Is it, it's not vitamin A. What, what are the ones that are claimed that the carnivore diet is lacking that's ultimately going to be a huge nutrient deficiency problem for the community?

Vitamin C is the big one. Um, let's talk about that one a little bit because, you know, when I first came into this problem myself, I was like, well, how am I going to get all the nutrients that I need? I started looking into, what is the science behind the idea that you need vegetables to provide nutrients? And what I was really struck by was that what I finally decided about why we think that vegetables provide us nutrients and that we need vegetables for nutrients is that we got, we got some of this messaging backwards where people say, you've got to eat meat for protein, and what are vegetables good for? Well, they have lots of nutrients in them. And it's true, they do have lots of nutrients in them, but that doesn't mean that the meat doesn't have nutrients in it. And so I started looking for, uh, evidence that plants were sort of unique in being able to provide nutrients. And it turns out that that's not true. And we already talked about the experiment with Stephenson and Carson Anderson where they didn't develop any deficiencies. And vitamin C is one of those that really sticks out because there, there isn't a very strong, um, there, there isn't a cut of meat that is gives you a lot of vitamin C. It's actually pretty low. Actually, if you look at the, at a, like a USDA database, it'll just say, "Oh, it has zero."

Um, which threw me at first.

Because that's not actually true, right?

It's not actually true. If you look at, um, their data, you'll see that if it says zero next to that, there's a little footnote.

Always the footnote.

And the footnote says inferred, not measured, or something like that. And it really stands out because if you look at, like, other animals sometimes, like salmon, it'll, it'll show some small amount. It turns out that meat does have some vitamin C in it. It's not nothing, but it's pretty small. And so I was confused about this because there are observations in the community that I was in that people weren't getting scurvy. For example, there is the observation that Stephenson didn't get scurvy. And there were also observations, um, going back to exploration times in the 1800s, I think, before we knew about vitamin C, which is, uh, it's called ascorbic acid, which means anti-scurvy, basically, um, and it was known at that time that fresh meat would cure scurvy. But I think that that knowledge got lost because when we found out about vitamin C and meat doesn't really have vitamin C in it, it just became sort of unimportant. I don't know. Like just, oh well, it doesn't matter. We know what will cure scurvy and its vitamin C. Um, I don't know. It was somehow forgotten. So, I spent a lot of time thinking about how this was possible. One of the things that I realized when trying to get to the bottom of that is that the RDA for vitamin C goes way beyond what's needed to keep scurvy at bay, uh, which is on the order of six or 10 milligrams a day or something like that. The RDA is way, way higher. And the reasoning that they give the people who do all the study for setting these RDAs use a variety of different kinds of evidence. Um, in some cases, they will use experiments that determine how much of something is needed before a frank deficiency disease like scurvy develops. But they also have, um, sort of associative data where, um, vitamin C can help with metabolic syndrome type diseases. And so the RDA for vitamin C is actually based on these kinds of, um, try to prevent metabolic syndrome disease. So if you, if you, like me, believe that people on low-carb diets are at very, very low risk for developing metabolic syndrome, then you probably don't care about adding that extra buffer, right?

Yeah. This is, this gets back to a pet peeve of mine.

What's that?

Because this comes up with salt.

Oh, yeah.

Which, which we should tackle.

Oh, yeah.

Soon, because salt is fun. Salt sensitivity is often found with people with metabolic syndrome.

Oh, yeah.

So the, um, uh, the I have this analogy I like to come back to a lot, which is the pyromaniac's neighborhood and why you could come to the conclusion you need more fire stations in a given neighborhood because when you study the neighborhood that's a problem, the pyromaniac's neighborhood, they just, they keep burning down their houses. And therefore, we find that neighborhoods are better off having more fire stations, right?

How did you come to that conclusion? Well, we studied the place where fires are the worst, in the pyromaniac's neighborhood. Like, do you know that you can generalize that to all the other neighborhoods? I mean, why couldn't we? Of course.

So, by the same token, yes. I always feel frustrated when, especially reference ranges.

Yes. Ultimately, their root comes from studies on people with metabolic syndrome.

Yes. Because now you have to understandably ask the question, okay, so now we're talking about a context of insulin resistance syndrome.

Yeah. And what may be beneficial to them, truly may, may in fact be provably beneficial to them for their context. You're assuming must therefore apply to everyone else.

Right. Gets back to that original issue.

Right. Exactly. So, there may be a lot of people who would benefit from extra vitamin C intake, just like pyromaniacs may benefit from more fire extinguishers in their homes than you and I would.

Right. Right. But that doesn't mean that a person who is healthy and eating a plant-free diet necessarily is going to be at detriment for having less vitamin C than that.

Yes. But it's, it's possibly even worse. It could actually be that the opposite of metabolic syndrome, or to put it another way, if you're metabolically healthy, you may actually have needs associated with having less of a given thing that's assumed that you need to have more of, right? In the other context, but that's, that's usually never thought of.

Oh, yeah. It, it's always considered sort of risk-free and benefit unlimited, right? But you know, vitamin C, for example, you don't want to take a lot of vitamin C after weightlifting because the antioxidant activity can interfere with the necessary inflammation processes that build up your muscles in response to exercise, for example.

Which gets to another pet peeve of mine. You already know I'm a defender of inflammation, as crazy as that sounds.

Yeah. Anti-inflammation. Anti-inflammation. You. Anti-inflammation defamation league. Yes. Yes. Exactly. The why are you preventing inflammation for that which your body absolutely anticipates and has a playbook ready to go, such as working out, right? Why would you want to anti-inflame an, an induced inflamed process for muscle growth and repair?

Right? Don't you think there's a possibility of some downstream consequences if this isn't properly understood?

Right? Anyway, so. So, so with a vitamin C that can take us sort of at the borderline, six milligrams, 10 milligrams, if you're eating a carnivore diet, you're also eating so much meat that it even starts to add up the amount of, uh, vitamin C and meat that you could probably say, "Oh, that's, that's already enough to be antiscorbic." But it's kind of borderline, and I wasn't fully satisfied with it. And, um, I came up with another hypothesis. Um, it's still a hypothesis, but it has to do with carnitine. So vitamin C is the, the lack of vitamin C, it's well known that, uh, vitamin C is needed to, uh, build collagen. And so one of the things that happens in scurvy is that your wounds don't heal as well and you get sores and bleeding gums and stuff like that, right? But a lesser known thing that vitamin C is needed in the production of is carnitine. And carnitine is really important, uh, for various things, especially on a low-carb diet, because carnitine is used to shuttle fat into mitochondria for oxidation. And so you have to make sure you have enough carnitine on a low-carb diet. U, but even if you're not on a low-carb diet, you still need to burn fat all the time, right? Um, so when you don't have vitamin C, it also could compromise your, your carnitine levels. Um, and that will show up as the first signs of scurvy. Even long before you start getting mouth sores, you, you get tired. It's, it's the number one, the early symptoms of scurvy is, is bone fatigue. And, um, I was thinking about collagen and carnitine synthesis and whether or not the collagen and carnitine could be actually be getting it, you could be getting it from the diet on a, a fresh meat diet. And it turns out that collagen, you can't, because collagen gets broken up in such a way that to pass into your system, uh, it's no longer collagen and you need to reassemble it. And it's that reassembly process that requires the vitamin C. So it doesn't matter if you get collagen in your diet, you're still going to need the vitamin C to put it back together into your body. But the same is not true of carnitine. Carnitine passes through. And so the carnitine in a, a high meat diet, I believe is actually a really important sparing factor for vitamin C. So I think that the combination of, um, getting the small amounts of vitamin C that you're getting from meat along with all the sparing effects of carnitine could be the reason why we don't see scurvy happening in carnivores.

There's one more, um, a lot more edgy, uh, explanation that I'd like to mention anyway, just in case it becomes more interesting. And that's, um, some people, it's become very popular to talk about the hypervitaminosis A problem. And some people think that the reason that carnivore is so effective for all these various diseases, especially the autoimmune and skin disorder ones, is that a lot of people have subclinical hypervitaminosis A, especially because of all of the fortification that we're getting in so many of the products that we eat that come with, uh, retinol, retinol palmitate, or some form of vitamin A. And a muscle meat carnivore diet is a really effective vitamin A depletion diet. Um, and these, a lot of these same people, I will mention Grant Jenner, especially, who came up with, uh, the basis of the toxic, chronic hypervitaminosis A as a modern health problem that's become really trendy in a lot of places now.

Does liver have a lot of vitamin A?

Yes. Okay. And liver, eating liver on a carnivore diet is anti-correlated with success.

Um, in the late 2010s, um, several people came to the carnivore community who did not have the background, did not have either the set of anecdotes of people doing fine without it, and they didn't have the lessons from the bear or from Stephenson saying, you don't need to eat that or, or even avoid it. Um, and I think they just brought their own idea of, well, okay, this carnivore idea, this carnivore idea seems pretty good and it's giving some good results, but we don't want to like encourage people to not get their vitamins. So, let's just make sure that you're changing this diet in order to make it conform with our preconceived ideas of what's needed. And so liver is a really obvious way to do that because it contains a lot of nutrients, including, but not limited to, vitamin A, which has a pretty high RDA, which I think might be actually a little too high. So then, so to connect this timeline over to this point in time.

Yeah. You're, um, a lot happens between around 2014 and the 2017 point where we're, where you're doing the talk.

Right. But again, a lot of that is, um, I think even before you're doing the talk, there's enough traction with your blogs that there's interest. Even so, nothing remotely close to the degree of which carnivore is understood today. That's coming later.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go back to that timeline and then come back to the vitamin A and the liver thing.

Right. Um, in, in 2012, I start blogging about it, but I'm really tentative about it because I don't want to sound like a crazy person. And, but I continue to blog. And in around 2016, I start speaking more publicly about it. I'm on the Two Keto Dudes podcast talking about it and I give a talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium, not about carnivore per se. I'm talking about meat eating for, uh, weaning, weaning babies onto meat. Um, and in 2017, I'm hitting all the ketogenic conferences as a participant and, um, I'm noticing that, well, first of all, I'm coming to the mic and disagreeing with people about the necessity of vegetables. But I'm noticing that there, there is an interest in the community. Every conference that I go to, every talk that there's a Q&A period after somebody comes to the mic and says, "But what about carnivore?" And the speakers are all like, "What? Like, why would you do?" With the exception of Eric Westman, who says, "Oh, yeah, that'd be fine." But everybody else is like, "I don't know if that's a good idea." But I noticed that there's this huge uptick in excitement about it. I give three talks myself that summer. Once at the cruise, once at KetoFest, and once at KetoCon, all on the carnivore diet. And I decided that the time has come for there to be a conference where everybody knows about the carnivore diet. Instead of the speakers not knowing how to answer that question, the speakers are directly addressing that. And so that's when I decided to, uh, make a conference. Oh, I could, I guess. No, I've got my timing off a little bit. 2017 I give those talks.

Right. 2018.

Right. Is the year that everyone is asking about the carnivore diet. And so the fall of 2018, I said, "Okay, March of 2019, we're going to do a carnivore conference."

Right. And the way, the way that you, let's say, hedged your bets was that it was going to be an unusual conference in that it wasn't all on its own. It was going to piggyback on an existing popular conference, Low Carb Denver.

That's right. And it was the day before that one would start. And I'm sure you were doing what I probably would have done in your shoes, just like, I mean, maybe 30 people come, maybe 50 people come.

Exactly. I thought no one would come.

You know, it, at least makes it convenient that it's nearby because you were holding it in Boulder, whereas Low Carb Denver was over, I think at that time it was over at the the airport area or something like that for the 2019, or had they moved there yet?

Yeah, I think it was.

And, and so it was a low risk, right? If you piggybacked on it, if you kind of threw out some interest. Spoiler alert, not a low level of interest at all.

My first venue sold out. I had to move.

Sold out quickly.

Yeah. Good. Good problems to have. Yes. Obviously, the interest to me, that was one of those moments in time to me. Amber Heard's running this, um, or Hearn is running this, um, carnivory conference that's piggybacking. Oh, that's kind of cool. Finally, a conference that's going to be dedicated. And I'm wondering the same thing. Is it going to have a lot of people? Is it going to have a little bit of people? And it's blowing up like crazy. And that was, to me, that was the dotted line at that point. I was like, carnivory is, carnivore diet is real.

It's the real thing. It's, there's definitely an enormous interest and it's going to be big. So.

Half the people that I, that I interacted with and asked the question if they were going to Low Carb Denver said, "What's Low Carb Denver?"

Right. I was blown away.

I, I was honored to be a speaker there. Um, you know, we're kind of jumping ahead to 2019 itself. That's where I gave the pro, the protein talk. One of my own personal favorite talks of the ones that I've given because it was a lot of fun. It's one of the only ones I've done that's not on cholesterol. Was just on the amino acids and the ribosomes and it's just, um, but it had a bunch of existing prominent speakers on carnivore and you had arrived. Carnivore had arrived.

Yeah. And.

It was really exciting time. And boy, you couldn't wait until 2020 for that conference.

For the second one. Yeah. It never happened. Oh, so sad.

Yeah. The, um, it's, it's fascinating to me because I do, so if I can speak for you at this point, after that conference, everyone, it's not just you, everyone, they're like, "Next one, let's go. When's the next one happening?" No longer were you going to have a day. It was going to be multiple days and it was going to be its own conference. It was going to be separate from, uh, Low Carb Denver. You'd gotten into the planning stages. Um, later that year in 2019 is where I'm on the Houston stage. I'm announcing the study. I'm announcing the fundraising. So, I know I'm going to need to get on the circuit, but I start, uh, my travel planning then coming into 2020.

And everyone knows what happens next. January, February, Wuhan virus turns into Coronavirus 19 turns into Low Carb Denver cancels. And now you're one of the most anticipated conferences that's coming. And you were one of two people I was calling in March of 2020. You remember this, right?

Yeah. And I said, "Listen, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's, I, I really think this thing is going to keep going." I think. And all of us just didn't know.

Yeah. All of us thought, is this, is this a virus that's going to come and go? Is it?

Yeah. Nobody. And it, I, having now done three of my own conferences, or sorry, two. No one's coming, which is, you're, which you're going to be at.

Yeah. Very excited for that. Um, it's so hard to imagine having to cancel a conference months before it's about to start. You've put so much risk out there, money, organization, everything. Everything's on the line.

Yeah. But it was happening everywhere. And there was just this period of time, a lot of people don't realize this, there was just this period of time where it was uncertain whether places needed to. And if I'm not mistaken, you actually pushed it off first, right?

I first postponed it to August because surely it'll be all over by August, right?

Right. And then, you know, even then, it's funny, the carnivore community is so funny. Like there were a lot of people who were like, "This thing doesn't matter and we should all just go anyway." And, um, there are a lot of people who, um, felt that with a carnivore diet, we're talking about people who are really strong and and don't need to worry about these kinds of modern diseases. But the thing is that like half the people who are coming to the conference are people who are immune compromised in some way and they were like, "There's no way I'm coming to this thing."

Right. So you, I had to. And then, you know, soon it became obvious that the August wasn't going to fly either. And I put it off indefinitely.

Yeah. Although, um, you want to reconsider some point.

Yeah. It's, listen, it's, there were a few years where I was feeling really discouraged and, and I got really sick.

Yeah. And.

We should talk about that too.

Yeah. But before we do.

Yeah. Cuz we leapfrogged.

We need to roll it back.

To the liver. The liver thing to.

The split, right?

Yeah. So, by the way, I just, I want to say that I have these cards from the, the desk, the Own Your Labs desk, which are supposed to be questions. The whole gist of doing this is that, um, um, is that it's a way to do a mid-roll ad kind of, but it's more organic because I can like ask a question that's in it. But then I get into conversations like this where I'm like, I don't see any real good, like stopping point. This is so flowing. So, um, get your blood work at Own Your Labs. That's us. We're the sole sponsor of our, our thing. Okay, we're good. We're done. All right, back to the liver. I have a couple more things I want to make sure to get back to about energy.

Yes. But let's talk about. So, in 2017, I started giving these talks. That's the one that you saw. In 2018, I could see that the popularity was really exploding and decided to do my own conference for 2019. Around that time, a bunch of new people came into the scene and some of them were had their own ideas about modifying the carnivore diet to make it actually work in their, like opinion, because of what they had already studied. It's kind of like, oh, you could do a low-carbohydrate diet, but we know that fat's really bad for you, so it should be a low-fat diet, too. Like, is to me, it feels like when you're confronted with new observations that don't have any of the, um, assumptions. It's like the epidemiology we were talking about at the beginning, like you may have learned something from studies on people who all have this one assumption going through all of the data. If you take away that assumption, you have to kind of let the new observations stand and not necessarily impose what you think you already know on the new observations. But a lot of people, um, wanted, uh, to make it more nutritious, make it fit with the RDAs. And liver is a highly nutrient-dense organ. And people who added liver, all, all of the influencers I know of who insisted on adding liver intake regularly said that carnivore just really didn't work for them and they didn't feel good and they had to add back fruits and plants and honey and stuff like this. Um, so that's, that's one point of evidence. There's also like.

We'll appropriately qualify what we said earlier, which is it's correlative, not necessarily that we can count on it being positive.

Right. But to your point, we didn't have a lot of data on people who did approach that.

Right. And so at least to what degree there is anecdotal data, I have to say, I anecdotally, I think I've seen, I think I've observed the same thing of of folks. And this is where that term that you said earlier, it's an important one. Nose to tail. Nose to tail is this thought that, um, if you're going to be on an animal-based diet, you should be mindful to have everything between the nose and the tail, which is everything. And getting back to the organ meat, that's meaning, hey, don't just have muscle meat, have organ meat because it's nutrient-dense.

Right? And the nutrient-dense is something you quote unquote need.

But it, it is true that if you're, kind of the most prominent voice coming into that, that it'd be, it would have been interesting if there was just more conversations. I felt like the conversations weren't quite happening. There was sort of like this, there was kind of like this other version of carnivore that had the label of carnivore and then the debate was happening and you were going, "Oh, hey, hold it. Wait. Not trying to lay total claim on it, but we should have more of this conversation."

Yeah. Yeah. We should talk about this more, right?

Yeah. We've been doing this a long time and we know some things that maybe you should listen to.

Yeah. Yeah. Not in a, you know, just, just in a genuine, let's collaborate, let's discuss.

Yeah. But it is a fair point to bring up. I think it's a fair point you're bringing up where you're saying, of the broad push towards those people who have gone nose to tail, what has been the success spectrum associatively?

Right. To those who have also maintained carnivore otherwise.

Right. And what's the nature of what went wrong?

Yeah. Right. Um, I have some opinions on that myself, but anyway.

So that reminds me of the thing about the problem with the name carnivore. Um, a lot of people who are sort of newer to the scene and don't know the history of it, they see the name carnivore and they say, "Okay, we're talking about a diet that is only animal products." For example. So if you drink coffee, you're not on the carnivore diet. Um, and that may be true from the logic of what do we get from the definition of the word carnivore, but it's not true to the protocol of the thing that we decided to call carnivore. If you see the difference, like we started, you know, people on a couple different forums were talking about eating this particular way and this particular way might have allowed coffee. And then someone says, well, what's the best descriptor of this diet that we're doing? Let's call it carnivore because it's animal source foods. That's a, that's a very different thing from saying, let's do a diet that is only animal source foods and then see what happens. Right? It's, it's different. Another way that the name fails is that a lot of people come into it thinking, "Oh, a carnivore diet, that means you eat whatever wild carnivores eat." Well, that's wrong for a few reasons. One is again, that's just not what we're talking about. And sure, like retroactively you could say that's what we should have meant, but we were talking about something else already. Um, but the second thing is that, as, as I already talked about, other wild carnivores have this completely different provenance that allows them to eat a diet that's much richer in protein and lower in fat and succeed very well. We don't want to replicate that. That wouldn't work for a human. And that might include things like organ meats. If humans started their, and I didn't really talk about this, but there's evidence to the idea that humans started their meat eating through scavenging first. Um, coming into the kill site where a large carnivore had already taken what they were going to take, including the organs, including most of the meat. And it left mostly the bones that they couldn't get into, where humans would use like stone percussively to break open those bones and eat the marrow and the brain, which were very high in fat. And that may have been the way that we bootstrapped into a carnivorous diet in the first place. Um, so our, our pattern with respect to carnivory is different. Our physiological needs are different. And, um, also, you know, like my cat, when I used to have a cat, was a carnivorous creature by physiology. But if my cat devoured like kibble that has carbohydrate starches in it, or, uh, I had another cat when I was a child that would eat macaroni. Does that mean that now macaroni is on the carnivore diet because I've seen a carnivore eat it? Like that's, you, you got to be careful about your reasoning.

Yeah. I think I think the, there's just no getting around it. There was going to be a branding thing, no matter what.

Carnivore, when I hear, I think of carnivore and if I hear a carnivore diet, it is true. I just jump straight to like lions or cats or obligate carnivores.

Yeah. Where, actually, I'm not sure about lions. Are lions obligate? Okay. So.

In that, in that sense, that's what I have. That's in the center of my mind. But the, um, and I credit Michaela Peterson for not adopting carnivore diet, but literally coming up with their own term, Lion Diet.

Yeah. That was smart. Which also, by the way, if you wanted to argue, you could say, isn't truly lion because then it would have organ meat in it, right? Or something like that.

And would be lower in fat.

Yeah. Exactly. But the, the point of doing that was to just have a term that was close enough that you could get to.

Yeah. And now when someone says Lion Diet, they don't conflate it with any number of different ways that you could do carnivore, right? They have a very specific thing in mind. And that, that's good.

But this is sort of a distinction between your story and mine in that going back to lean mass hyperresponders.

Boy, if there, there are some moments I look back to and I, and I'm like, I could have done this better or I could have done that better or something like that. Easily one of the moments that I'm most proud and it was most, it wasn't fully carefully thought out, but it was designating this lean mass hyper responder and designating cut points.

Yep. And in doing that, it was a very unique name and has a very unique set of cut points and then it was a very solid definition. And the me of today is like, thank.

You past Dave for doing that because what happens is it's true. Um, you don't always know what thing you say or define takes off and becomes part of the zeitgeist.

Yeah. Yeah. In the case of carnivore, uh, it was actually a vegan that brought this up to me and says, "I don't know, hardly any carnivores who don't drink coffee."

And I was like, "That's a valid point, right? Coffee is derived from a plant, but do do existing carnivores in the carnivore community think of this as entirely plant-free or you can't call it carnivore?"

Right? And I don't know of any carnivores who do think of it that way. But if I'm like trapping them in a room and I'm be like, "Give me a definition." What is...

That's like saying like you chose the name lean mass hyperresponder and then you made those cut points on the definition of it.

Right? If someone like, I see this even in your group as recently as a couple weeks ago, like, "You can't be a lean mass hyperresponder. You're not lean."

Right. Right. Right. Or um, or you're not a lean mass hyper responder because your LDL wasn't 200, it's 190. So you don't, you don't quite qualify. And of course, I'm like, "Okay, it, it's, don't get me wrong, I appreciate that we have a definable level so that you could at least know to what proximal, you know, position you are to those cut points, but it's not a qualifier, per se, other than for us to get a sense of where the landing point is."

Right? And beyond that, and the name you chose is similar to when I chose to call it carnivore is because I thought, "This is a pretty good descriptor of what we're doing, right? It's not the defining thing."

Exactly. It's not perfect. Yeah. It's better than the previous one, right? And my and my lean mass was observational.

Yeah. So, do do I observe that people who have these cut points tend to be extremely lean? Yes. 100% of the time? No. Not 100% of the time.

Right. And so, this does get to where I kind of like that we start off with the linguistic part and the discussion of semantics and so forth. Is language is messy to an extent. We do, in the case of science, strive to find our way towards a greater accuracy, particularly when it comes to communication.

Yeah. The catch is that you do have this sort of issue, and I kind of want to bring it back to one of my other pet peeves, which I'm sure is one of yours, which is that almost as fast as a term gains popularity because of its association with something that can be positive, there's often the, uh, the commercializing of it. That's one problem.

Yeah, because that almost never goes somewhere positive. Sorry, I that's gonna sound cynical, but it's just I'm feeling this way about all things labeled keto. Now, um, but then there's also those who seek to diminish the thing that's positive by redefining it themselves. And frankly, I really, I really have to point the finger to research right now. Research are doing things like publishing papers for a "keto-like diet," which, if you look under the headline, cannot possibly be associated with an actual ketogenic diet as we would define it in a keto community.

Right. Right. And so by that token, that to me just doesn't feel as, you know, as good faith as I would like it to be for actually trying to advance the science. Now, to be fair, and I'm sure you'd probably agree with me, many of these, many of the folks who are saying, "Hey, carnivore should be X," even though it's been predominantly Y, right? Because this is what we think X should be, weren't trying to hijack the diet in a bad way. They actually genuinely were trying to advance what might be good about it just from what their perspective is.

Probably. But this is a challenge. The challenge is that, uh, but now there's differences in how people are thinking of what the word carnivore means.

Yeah. And what diet is the appropriate level of the carnivore diet.

And this is one catch without without there being some like, you know, set in stone version that was kind of laid out as to this is what it is in more material terms so that at least there's that proximity component.

Right. Yeah. Um, I, I want you to correct me if I'm wrong when I say this next thing, but when hearing about the coffee, I would regularly say, if it was an absence of you in the room or something, is I would regularly cite you, the first person who I'd ever heard of the term carnivore diet from, and I would say something to the effect of, "I think Amber would classify it as a diet that's 95 to 100% carnivore, accounting for things like coffee or spices."

No, I wouldn't say that.

Okay. Um, or sorry, I should have said animal-based. 95 to 100% animal-based, because that leaves room for, well, spices, which I think don't belong in a carnivore diet, and even more to the point, like garnishy type things, right? Um, the problem with spices is, and you could say that this would be a problem with coffee too. The thing, the thing with coffee is that observationally, people who were on these fora at the time, um, and didn't give up coffee, got all the same benefits that the people who gave up coffee got, and also, um, often, like I myself have gone periods without coffee without any real difference in in the effect.

Whereas spices seems to be something that is a concentrated, uh, form of things that actually seem to be having an effect on the benefits.

Um, so I gave a talk one time for, um, I guess, uh, low carb down under, called "Meat is Food, Plants are Medicine," and it's hosted on the keto mojo site. And that was, uh, uh, one of those little phrases that we used to say back in those days to distinguish, like, "Are you on a carnivore diet if you, if you, uh, take a take a drug?" Well, coffee is a drug, and it is derived from a plant. But it's the question is, is the embibing of that coffee giving you, uh, a problem because of the plant derivation that it's coming from or not?

Right? Um, the gist of that talk, "Meat is Food, Plants are Medicine," was I was making an immunological argument where, um, everything that we consume is either something that is familiar to our body because our body already makes it, or it's a vitamin, which is by definition something that that our body can't make and like an essential nutrient, something that our body can't make but that we need, or it's a foreign substance, a xenobiotic. And if it's a xenobiotic, then our body does everything it can to try to get rid of it. And drugs are of that class. So when you eat plants, you get some components that are things that are our bodies already make, like glucose, for example. Glucose isn't a, anything foreign, and it's not a vitamin. It's something that we make. And so if we get glucose from plants, our body sort of knows it knows what to do with it. It's familiar. Maybe you get more than you wanted, but it's a familiar substance. You also get some vitamins. So maybe you get some vitamin C. You can't make that yourself, but your body uses it in a positive way, but you also get these like just plain old toxins like anti-nutrients. And what your body first tries to do is not absorb it at all in the first place.

And that's where that... Yeah. And that's where the intestinal permeability can be a problem. And however much gets into your bloodstream, your liver, liver tries to break it down into metabolic, to metabolites that can then be excreted, right? And so I was arguing, I was trying to take that phrase that we used to say and give it some kind of a scientific understanding that when you're eating meat, everything that you're eating is something that your body knows about and is using. And when you're eating plants, you've got this really mixed bag of toxins and essential nutrients and normal endogenous products.

That's actually a very good point. I hadn't actually thought about it from, I was thinking about it from the protein direction from the discussion that we had from earlier. But again, you know, there are a lot of people who are a lot broader connected on the biochemistry than I am on this, but it's so incredibly fascinating the sheer volume of different enzymes that we have in the body that we make on a regular basis to to work with all of these various types of chemical reactions native to the body.

Yeah. And to to the extent to where we're consuming something that's truly foreign and ex, exactly what you're talking about, the xenobiotics, I, I my guess is, if I was trying to play devil's advocate, that there might be some things that are considered to be more benign.

Sure. And you can even say that some low level of certain types of toxins gives you this hormetic effect where your body's immune response, response to it, which is usually to upregulate antioxidant activity, like you make your own antioxidants. There's this misconception that a lot of these plants contain antioxidants. What they actually contain is toxins that cause your body to make antioxidants.

There's not. And that can be good.

Yeah. Technically, technically, it could be argued antioxidants are just another flavor of pro-oxidants, right? In a sense that it's far as it, if you're, if you're ultimately having the, um, unpairing of, if you're getting into the reactive oxygen species,

Yeah. Then you're getting into the component of how much that they can make each other non-reactive.

Right. Yeah. But it's, but usually the antioxidant is, is what comes back to the matter of control. Can you get control of the weapon that's getting used against the other reactive oxygen species that you don't have control over, and that is dangerous in that context.

Right. Right. Hopefully I articulated that well. But that's that's the irony is the pro-oxidant to antioxidant is almost like the matter versus antimatter.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But in reality, it's kind of they're, they're both potentially bad under the, under certain context, depending on the way that you're doing it.

So there's, um, I can't remember, um, having a hole in my memory here of the name of the component that comes from broccoli sprouts that has this hormetic effect. Um, it can, if you take broccoli sprouts or the, um, concentrated form of that in a pill, um, it's going to cause your body to have a reaction that creates a bunch of antioxidant activity. And if you're in generally good health, um, that extra bout of antioxidant activity may actually be beneficial. Or even if you're, you're just a little bit behind in keeping up that matter, antimatter like balance, then that extra like poke to cause you to give off more antioxidant activity than you were doing before that could clean things up a bit. Maybe there, there's a theory about that. Um, and people say that it, it's good for preventing cancer, for example. But if you have cancer, or you have a huge, uh, already you have a, a huge immune system load of things you're trying to deal with, and you add that extra, actually the outcomes are worse. It's procancer.

Right? And this is, this is this gets me back to just why rate limitation is a thing. Me as an engineer, keep thinking back to is how, how much...

Sulforaphane. Sorry, that's the, yeah.

So, let me, so I'd love to wrap this back to the practical application of the term in the context in the same way that we're just now talking about, let's say I adopt a carnivore diet and I like drinking coffee.

Sure. Right. And I say, "I'm on a carnivore diet."

Right. I'm drinking coffee and I tell my sister about it, who also likes to drink coffee, also adopts an identical diet to mine. And us, in this in this moment, I can know in advance that actually, no, it turns out it doesn't work for her exactly what I'm eating, even though I'm calling it carnivore, because it turns out that, no, she does need to give up coffee in addition to being in the diet.

Okay. But I'm calling it carnivore. So, I'm going to make a distinction. Um, carnivore generally includes a whole bunch of different foods, some of which might not work very well for you. For example, um, if you have a problem dealing with histamine detoxification, you're not going to do very well with a whole lot of fish in your diet or certain kinds of fermented meats, um, that I might have no problem with. And I think that's not because the carnivore diet doesn't work for you. It's because you have additional constraints on top of ones that the carnivore diet is typically addressing.

Right? But this is, this is where I think there's a, a key distinction. Like, let's say it is an allergy to shellfish.

Right? Or lactose intolerance, or...

Yeah. Still animal-sourced.

Yep. But if I, in my example, am the one touting the carnivore diet, and the carnivore diet can include coffee, right? And I'm just stating that plainly, and I'm saying, "I am on the carnivore diet. I got all these benefits after I adopted this diet. What about coffee?" "Oh, you can drink coffee. It's the one allowable non-animal-sourced right component."

Right. So, so tier one distinction would be like, it is animal-sourced, but for reason X, I, I need to actually eliminate that in addition to all the other things I'm eliminating.

Um, tier two, I don't know if tier is the right thing, but, um,

Scenario.

I, I'm on a carnivore diet, but I have discovered that I don't actually need to eliminate, um, dark chocolate from my diet. Makes no difference if I eat it or don't eat it, right?

But that's not clearly a carnivore food. Coffee, I think, is a different scenario because coffee was not something that was eliminated in the original carnivore diet, despite the name carnivore. And the way we were thinking of it back then was, "Coffee is a drug. Eat your diet and take your drugs. It's, or don't take them. Like, it's, it's not..."

Nobody's drinking coffee for nutrient value. No one's drinking coffee for energy.

Right? So that, so the argument would be, it would be no different than if, like, you were vaping or whatever. I mean, maybe that's not the best.

Right? But you, right. Where I'm where I'm going is it's, it's, uh, yeah, it's obviously a form of...

I'm not sure about this term, but like enjoyment, something to that effect, less relevant to diet specifically. My suspicion is that if somebody does better without coffee, um, and everything else is otherwise carnivore, that it has to do with the drug effects of it and not the fact that it has some plant components, like,

It's causing their cortisol to go up or something like that.

There's this just kind of... But maybe it's semantics.

Yeah, it may be semantics. This. So, this is the, this is a great way to kind of tie it together, I think, because this also brings it back to my research to some degree. Some people enjoyed going on keto, enjoyed going on carnivore just to try it out, and they're even having a good time with it. And then they get their lipid levels back and, "Whoa, whoa, my LDL is really high."

Right? And then they're going, "I'm, I'm kind of stressed about this. Like, I don't, I don't feel comfortable with my LDL being high." "Why'd you go on a ketogenic diet or, you know, a carnivore diet?" "I just, you know, I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy having high LDL." To me, this is like, "Well, if you're stressed about it, you could reintroduce some carbohydrates if you metabolize them well and there's no medical reason why you're doing it." "Does that mean you think I should be doing that, Dave?" "No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying if anybody's coming to me and saying they're stressed about something due to a change that they made for which, if they roll back the change somewhat, they'll be less stressed, and there seems to be no downside to rolling back the change somewhat."

Right? You don't even need to put this in the context of cholesterol and keto or anything else. I'd be like, "I, okay."

Right? If your identity is tied up in the the direction you're going, whether it's even one that I enjoy, um, but it's causing you struggle and you're worried about losing the identity.

You lost your car identity.

Right? Which is where I want to go next.

Right? So, getting back to the carnivore, I'm not sitting here judging everybody who's on a carnivore diet and drinking coffee.

Right? But I could get how these splits like what happened with the organ meat, right? Or what is true carnivore, right? Can come up. And the the pragmatic answer is, hey, this diet was great for a multiple removal diet, which many people have used it temporarily to help discover that aspect of it, right? It does seem to be a lot of people, certainly I know, I, I'm genuinely trying to like stretch to think of a prominent carnivore I know that doesn't drink coffee, but to be fair, I don't always eat with all of them, so I don't know for sure, but it does seem to be a commonality. Right? But in my mind, in me personally, I'm thinking of them as carnivore.

Right. Because that's just all they're consuming. I don't find myself going, "Plants, right?"

Yeah. Because the purpose of the adopting of the carnivore diet usually wasn't just because they thought it was a cool thing to do.

Right? It's usually because they were trying to deal with some kind of problem. The two biggest problems being ones like Michaela Peterson. Uh, the other kind of problem that I actually think the carnivore diet is pretty good at is for as restrictive as it sounds, its categoricalness makes it easier to follow.

Yeah. Keto is now harder to follow than ever, in my opinion. And I have family members who they're like, for example, I have a family member, they know who they are. Do they really love the keto bread that they buy from the store?

Yeah. And I tell them, "Look, your glucose numbers are higher because you're consuming the bread. You're consuming the keto. It says it's keto."

Right? "I know. I know. But they're coming to that conclusion on the label because they're going by net carbs. The resistance starch is through the roof. But I'm telling you, I've tested against those things. Me personally, they are not the, my rule for keto is it's truly keto if you can eat it all day long and the next morning you can test your glucose levels and it's nice and low."

Right? That's my rule.

Yeah. If you have to count something, then you get, you start playing these little games like, "I know I can have half a cup of peanuts. Why don't I have three-quarters of..."

Right. Right. And so the neat thing about carnivore is I can say to somebody, "Listen, boring as this might sound, if we're trying to at least gather information, this is where I love carnivore. So I'm saying, just do this experiment for me, 30 days. I try to talk to 30 days. I don't always succeed. Sometimes it's got to be two weeks. 30 days. 30 days. You can do anything for 30 days. We get your blood work in the beginning. Get your blood work at the end of the 30 days."

Right? Um, I try to, my opener is steak and eggs. "Have as much steak and eggs as you want. Go to town. Eat as much as you want. Get pounds of it." I secretly know that they're not going to overeat it. I've never yet met anyone who can overeat steak and eggs. They can have eggs. They can have steak. But only once you get into some refining of stuff does it become a thing. Maybe if they like get pads of butter on it or something, they can turn into a soup. That could go down quickly. But you cannot, okay, I cannot come anywhere close to overeating steak. Thousand calorie steak, 2,000 calorie steak. Are you kidding me? There's just no way. Thousand calorie or 2,000 calorie of heavy whipping cream. Easy.

Yeah. I could down that pretty quickly, right? So, when I'm saying this and I'm pitching it, it sounds attractive enough because steak and eggs are usually delicious, but yeah, they're going to miss their vegetables. They're going to miss their pies and a whole bunch of other stuff. But if I can get them to at least do it as an information gathering exercise,

Yeah. It's great. But what is interesting is the topic of beverages do come up. In which case I do bring up, "Hey, if you can't get off coffee, you know, do the coffee. But just so you know, there are some people who have problems with coffee, even on a carnivore diet."

Sure. Yeah. There are some. And the biggest issue that I find is coffee is unlike any freaking other thing. It's so addictive. The people that I know love their coffee. I can't, there's, there are, there are actually straight-up VIP keto people who've reached out to me, and I'm talking like big speakers, you know, who have asked me about getting their blood work properly and that kind of stuff as far as like lipids. And I'm like, "Yeah, just, but be fully fasted for the blood work in the morning."

"No coffee."

"No, I, I have to have coffee. That's just what's got to happen in the morning." "I'm just like, but just for the morning, just like until you get your blood work." "I'm like, 'You can't do it for just like one day just to get the blood work? Have your coffee right after the blood work. You can even bring the cup right.'" "No."

And I'm blown away by that, that it's that powerful to draw. Um, you already know this. There are some people on a ketogenic diet, and of course also carnivore diet, who have, um, a reaction where they have higher triglycerides.

Yep. We don't fully know what it is yet, but it does seem to be specific to coffee and not to caffeine. It's been assumed that it was caffeine. We think it might be caffeol, we're not, we're not sure. But even just in telling people the protocol of just go for a week without coffee and then test your blood. Anecdotally, Siobhan knows this all too well. Anecdotally, the people who are the most adverse to letting go of their coffee tend to be the ones who are more likely to have that triglyceride reaction.

Fascinating. Where if they have coffee, their triglycerides are 50, even 100% higher.

Wow. Than if they cut the coffee out. And there's a guest post on cholesterol.com where somebody went through seven different tests. Tried decaf coffee, tried, um, a caffeinated but low carb beverage, tried just, tried all the different combinations, and it just tracked with the coffee, whether it was caffeinated or decaffeinated.

That's fascinating. Yeah. Fully fasted, high triglycerides. So, I don't know. Anyway, so where we were going with all this was the definition of carnivore, things like having coffee in it, ultimately comes back to the practical. Your results may vary.

Yep. So, if you can go all the way to animal source products for what the practical reason is that you're doing it, but you're still keeping coffee, but you're still not getting the result that you were looking for, then it seems like a good place to go next is, "Okay, I'll see, see if you can take out the coffee, too."

Yep. There are different things you can do. You can look at your electrolytes if you're one of those people still adding salt, for example.

Oh, we got to get to that. Let's get to that. Let's get to salt. You, you came on the podcast with the salt, the salt guy.

Salt king.

Yes. So, um, I've shared it many times before on this podcast, uh, and online and Twitter and so forth that,

The lower carb I go, the more difficulty I have in seemingly retaining my electrolytes. And in particular, um, it seemed as if I was just losing all of them until I went with abandoned into salt. This is, uh, fall of 2018. Told the story many times over. I'm not going to tell it again here, but I am somewhat semi-famousamous now for supplementing anywhere from 3 to 4 grams per meal. Not consistently, but most of the time, such that I'm pretty confident my salt intake exceeds 10 grams a day.

Um, average, we'll say. And if I don't, and it's depends on how ketogenic I am. The lower carb I am, the more I find I have that need. And when I've done experiments where I cut out everything, I've tried to make it to the other end of the experiment, if I'm really, really keto for the, um, uh, for the hypocaloric phases where I'm not just keto, but I'm also eating half as much.

And invariably, I will get cramps very quickly. And at the, and in one of those experiments, it was the, it was 5 days at average levels, uh, weight maintenance levels.

Mhm. And then five days at hypo consumption where it was half of that. And not only did I get the cramps and needed to immediately, uh, bring in salt, but at the end of that fifth phase, I got blood work which included a CMP, which showed that both my sodium and my, um, uh, chloride levels were just below reference range.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Which was shocking to me because, as you know, the body's actually pretty good at keeping serum levels of electrolytes, even if you're really depleted.

Yep. Good at keeping them at within that delta. Um, but that was a big deal. Now, as I've said online many times before, in fact, I usually reference you. I say, "I seem to be part of a subset. It's not, I don't believe it's the majority that need to supplement anywhere close to what I'm doing, but that there are some folks who do better not having any salt." And that's the, we'll call it the Amber Hearn wing of the low carb world. So, give me your thoughts on this. How, how is it that,

Um, there could be this difference? People like me, but then also people like yourself, you don't, you still don't add any salt to your food. Is that right?

Almost never. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so there are a couple things that could be making a difference that don't have to don't have to do with like some kind of individual difference. And that is, if you're not on a carnivore diet, then you're eating a lot of plants, and the plants contain other minerals like potassium, for example. And if your potassium intake is a lot higher, um, then your salt intake may need to be higher to put that in balance. So, like, in the wild, it's herbivores that are going after the salt licks. Carnivores go to the salt licks to eat the herbivores, not to live, right? And I think that that's partly because of the the, um, components in the plants that are requiring more sodium to process. So that could be part of it. There's also the fluid intake. If you're on a low carb diet, that includes something that you drink more than you would if you were just drinking to thirst, which you would do if you had just plain water. So, if you're drinking something like, if you're drinking coffee, and you're drinking it because of that caffeine hit, you want, if you're drinking a sweetened, like maybe something made with a sweetener so that it, it is something you want for the taste of that, or if you just have some kind of habit or, um, belief that you should be drinking lots and lots of fluid, that can also increase your salt needs. And so I think that a lot of people who are doing strict carnivore diets who are drinking just to thirst and aren't getting that plant intake often find that, uh, if they stop salting their food, they suddenly don't need to address cramps and stuff with taking potassium and magnesium or whatever to try to get it all in balance, and they can just stop all of it.

Um, whereas, uh, carnivore dieters who are adding salt to their food are often having to balance it out with other electrolytes. So there's that. But all of that said, I do think that some people, for reasons that I don't really understand, need to add more salt to stay in balance somehow with with their, even on a carnivore diet. And I say like, if you,

Your results.

If you try it,

Yeah.

And you definitely do better with salt, then you should, then of course you should do that. But I do think that if you get rid of all those other factors, um, including plants and and drinking beverages outside of thirst, that that might change.

Um, so two things on that. One, actually, shout out to George Henderson. Uh, he connected me. I really need to find this paper, but there's this literally like five years ago, six years ago, something like that. And it was a paper that made the possible connection to, um, my fructose malabsorption might be relevant in mineral delivery because I guess they share some mechanisms in common. And so, in fact, it may be that my, um, absorption is just straight up lower. And it may be that other people who found that they need to do the same thing I'm doing and are happy that I've shared my story have something similar that they may, it's possible. I don't know. But there is one other component too, which is it's true, I do drink a lot more. When, um, I'm low carb versus when I'm not, like lower and lower carb, I tend to want to drink more. And I don't know exactly what the, you know, the relevant mechanisms are for that, or if it's just that there's more, um, interest in drinking artificially sweetened drinks or something along those lines a little more frequently to compensate or something. It's hard to, again, these are just the issues with trying to parse out data when several variables change at the same time.

Um, so yes, there's to kind of state the quiet part out loud and bringing it back to the carnivore diet in general is there's been a number of higher profile people who considered themselves carnivore who've since leaving carnivore, and there's a lot of folks who are not fans of the carnivore diet who draw attention to that. The interesting thing about this though is that for me, um, and I don't want to sound like I'm touting carnivore in particular, um, but there, there just, there does need to be a general acknowledgment that any kind of diet that is very different from what you were raised in your whole life, um, that you find you need to adhere to, is going to feel very restrictive. If indeed you're leaving out all of these things because you feel you need to.

Right? So those folks that I know who have been truly long-term on any given diet, truly usually had have some medical reason.

Yeah. They usually have something like epileptics, man. They're...

Severe consequences to breaking it.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's particularly if the, uh, temporal component, which is to say how quickly you feel the consequences.

Yeah. Ulcerative colitis, that's another one. You'll, if you, if you get it quickly, you will. Now, just to bring it back to, for some people, it's a bridge to recovery, and then they recover.

Yeah. Even with epilepsy.

Yeah. Even with epilepsy. Yeah. The original Charlie of the Charlie Foundation, um, literally who the foundation was built around him, uh, son of the famous producer for Airplane, um, eventually, I think it was at age 25 or something, found that he could now just eat anything. He had to be on a ketogenic diet for his epilepsy for a good, I don't know how long, but up to a certain point, he could recover. He could reintroduce foods. We do have a mutual friend who's online, who's on Twitter. She's known for her, um, her urban hiking.

Yeah. But if I'm not mistaken, she tried to reintroduce food. It didn't work out for her. Reintroduce non-low carb foods. I think it was very...

High protein? Maybe.

Might have been that. But, but...

Found that she need to head back.

Yep. Um, and we feature somebody in the documentary, Robin Dobbins, and she shared that story here also on the podcast. For for some, they can do it. For some, they can't. But why would they do it in the first place if it's working so great? Well, because we're, we're tribal people. We often are with other loved ones, or we have certain circumstances. You're traveling, or for whatever reason, you say, "You know what? I'm going to try breaching my diet a little bit just to see if this will work."

Yeah. Right. And usually it's a medical thing that would snap you back into, "Nope. I just, I don't have the kinds of choices other people do."

Yep. And for all those people that exist in the world, I think they're a tiny fraction of those people who don't realize they can be helped.

That's the part that breaks my heart.

Yes. That's the part we need to, we need to find a way for people to realize diet might be the answer.

Right? Whatever that diet is.

And that's ultimately why I started writing about it at all, even though I was so hesitant at the beginning, and why I started speaking about it is because I felt like, "Okay, maybe I am crazy, but this has got to help somebody else." And if it helps one other person get their life back the way it helped me, then it'll have been worth whatever people call me in the end.

Um, can we move to the part of the timeline where you got sick?

Yes. It's complicated because I don't really know exactly when what went wrong. Um, I know that I ended up getting a very bad salmonella infection. At this point in time, I think that, uh, subclinical hypervitaminosis A might have contributed to me getting sick.

Um, first of all, I did have a, a period of time where I started supplementing high doses of vitamin A because of a crazy idea I had. Basically, the the brief version is that I had taken, uh, blood work, got low vitamin D, as often happens with me, decided to start taking vitamin D in high levels. Quickly got the same response to that that I always get when I take high vitamin D, which is my rosacea started flaring. My face would get like my skin was ruddy, rough, and red. And I got the notion into my head that maybe, um, people who are saying that you have to balance vitamin A and vitamin D together had the right idea, and that I should try to commensurately add vitamin A to match these really high doses of vitamin D that I was taking. So for several weeks, I took really high doses of vitamin A. Maybe that was a problem. Maybe it wasn't a problem.

It's, it's worth noting, um, one important consideration is, uh, vitamin A and D are fat-soluble.

Yeah. And the reason that's relevant and why we want to be mindful of, um, fat-soluble vitamins is that they, they get stored, and not just in your, your fat, but in your liver, in particular, is where vitamin A gets sequestered, and it, it can cause damage and cause you to be unable to do all the things that the liver needs to do, which includes handling fat and ketogenesis. And I don't know for sure, and maybe I'll never know, if the, that vitamin A high exposure is what led to problems. But at that point, before I did that, I had been on a carnivore diet for eight years. I was in the best health of my life. I stopped getting sick very shortly after I went on the carnivore diet. I mean, this is another one of those things that you don't want to tell people because it just sounds nuts, but I didn't get a cold. I didn't get a flu. I had nothing.

I've talked about that on this podcast.

Just insane level of health that I was experiencing. And so, it was that winter I took that vitamin A. That spring I got sick for the first time. I got a sinus infection, really bad one. I took antibiotics for it. A couple months later, I got a campylobacter infection. Wouldn't go away. Sometimes it goes away on its own. Mine wouldn't go away. So, I took more antibiotics for that. And a couple months later, I was in the hospital with Salmonella so badly that I was, I was sick for a couple weeks, or maybe it was just a week. I, I was so ill that I had to take like opiates to deal with the pain. I was having hallucinative nightmares, and and then my gut never recovered.

I, I just, I went back to my carnivore diet, said to myself, you know, "Everything's going to be okay. This diet has worked so well for me. I'm just going to wait until the digestive issues pass because they will." And they didn't. And I just, I had fat malabsorption for months on end. And I didn't even really think about the possibility of it going on for so long and how that would affect me. But one thing that it did was cause me to have vitamin deficiencies because I wasn't absorbing my food.

Um, so I started gaining weight rapidly, and my vision started to get blurry, and that was really terrifying. I went to the doctor and he said, "Oh, you know, you're 40, whatever." And it's probably just aging. I was like, "No, no, no. You don't understand." Like I, you know, I'll look at a label and I can't see the words on it. Um, but I ended up taking some B vitamins and some glutathione, and it cleared up. I lost like 10 pounds in a week or something. I was like, "Oh, this is it. Everything's going to be okay." But it, then that that didn't really solve it. I continued to be sick for, for a really long time. I got chronic fatigue. It was just, I had all this momentum around the carnivore diet. I had been giving talks. I, I had that conference lined up that year. I gave, I think, 11 different talks within the span of 12 months. Every single one of them was a new original topic that no one had talked about before. I was on a roll, and I just, I just crashed out. And it's taken a really long time to get better. And I've, I've explored all kinds of different things, and I don't know which ones exactly to attribute to the recovery besides time and, um, various different things. But I, I do suspect that hypervitaminosis A at a subclinical level had some, um, responsibility for what happened to me. But I don't know.

It, it's, first of all, mad respect for the fact that you have been so transparent to not just us, your friends, but also just to the public. Your, your health journey is your anecdote. Sometimes you don't have the answer to what's happening.

Yeah. But, and it sucks because there are a lot of people who have been like agitating for my failure for a really long time. And so they're like, "Oh, of course the carnivore diet caused you to crash in this way." But it, I mean, and I want to be open to ideas that are contrary to my own. But if they had been there along the way, they would know that that's, it can't possibly be that the diet caused that because eight, you don't, you don't get stellar health for eight years and then suddenly crash if the diet is good for you. You get gradually, you, you get these problems that you say in retrospect, "Oh, actually, you know, I was, things were going wrong and I just wasn't admitting it." That is not how it was.

Yeah. No, it, it was, and again, this is what, that you establish the credibility of the fact that you'll not only talk about it, you blogged about it.

Yeah. You, you wrote about it. There's, there's, um, this is something I've been confronting a lot in my world, and there's more news that'll be coming out pretty soon that has to do with the study. But if there's one, if there's one observation that I've made about the environment that we're in, it's that there really is a spectrum, but broadly, there are some genuine truth seekers that to me are the real scientists. The people who don't quickly ascribe, I, you know, I pejoratively call this bumper sticker science. It's like, "This is pretty much all the way good. That over there is pretty much all the way bad." And we're in, we're in the rooting game. We're rooting for everybody who's on team A to do well, and everybody who's on team B to do terribly. And our job is to circulate everything that's good going on over here in team A, and definitely minimize everything that's going on that's bad. And then let's elevate everything that's bad that's going on in team B and try to minimize anything that's good and be dismissive of it.

Right? And so it just, it feels like a sport for a lot of people,

That are not, in my opinion, the best faith actors.

Yeah. But there are genuine truth seekers. They're out there. They're real. And a lot of how you can tell is by how open they are with their own journey and not shying away from sharing every aspect of it. And this is, this is why, like, I, I, uh, we were in some text exchanges, and it still moves me just thinking about it. But I know I've texted you multiple times that to me, you are a true scientist. You are the real deal. Because, of course, of course, you got a huge swath of people who are like, "Oh, the, the person who brought prominence to the carnivore diet, let's, let's hope that things go badly for her, right?" But all of the things that you want to predict that are bad about carnivore in particular, put them on a list, right? And the, the aspects of those things that we would expect to see in the list, I want to see in a prospective study like ours.

Yeah. The LMHR study, we have a bunch of people that have already outed themselves as participants who are on a carnivore diet. What detrimental effects have we seen now that we have a prospective study that's following them? Now, spoiler alert, a lot of them have already told me about their context, their situation, and so forth. And we're trying to re-recruit literally every single one of them we can for the five-year. And we're in discussions right now on not just the scans, the CT scans, which is the main genesis of it, but I want to collect all the data that we can that they will let us do, that the participants will let us do, and I think that they're very fired up to help provide that data. Prospective data is the most important because then you're not going by the anecdotes that can be cherry-picked by team A and team B.

Right? Because that's just going to go on indefinitely, right? Um, Nick Norwitz, myself, Adrien Sodto, we've had heart scans. If let's say they continue to look really good, would it be fair of us to be like, "And therefore, lean mass hyper responders are low risk because the three of us know?" Because you don't know how much of it is anecdotal.

Yeah. Right. And so I'm, I'm proud of the fact that you not only been able to share that, but that, of course, you could be aware, as I certainly am, that the antagonists out there just don't care.

Yeah. And you still have to put up with it in your pursuit of the truth.

Yep. So, I appreciate that that you would get a chance to share that with me here.

Thank you. And I think there's a pretty decent chance that you might be right on that one hypothesis. It could be the, the higher doses of vitamin A.

Yeah. Because there is, I mean, I'm, it's not even my wheelhouse, but I know that there's a lot of literature about that.

Yes. Yeah. So the problem is, is if you're right about that, it would also make sense as to why it's a long recovery.

Yeah. Even if it's not that, there could be other...

things like I could have gotten some other kind of uh exposure when I got those infections. There are multiple different things and I'm open to any particular hypothesis being wrong. um even a hypothesis that says that there's something missing about carnivore that's not supporting what you're doing. And I'm not one of those people who thinks like carbohydrates are evil. Um or plants even. Like yes, they do have anti-nutrients. Yes, I do think that the human body is specially adapted to a high meat diet and it should be good for people, but that's, you know, I want all of us as individuals to win, not, you know, the carnivore diet to win, >> right? So, let me be let me be a good devil's a good faith devil's advocate. Somebody might be here that'd say, "Look, I'm, you know, not casting shade on the whole carnivore diet, but maybe you individually, it's just turning out that it's not working for you. Why not go back to a more plant centric diet and try it out?"

Actually, I have over the past um what are we 26 now? to greater and lesser degrees since n since 19 since 2021 I have been um experimenting with different things. So in 21 I had some potato experiments which I've reported online. In a couple years ago I did some experiments around vitamin A elimination um and had some interesting results which I will um blog about sooner or later. Um I have tried going back to just low carb. I've tried um a more meat centric low carb diet um because >> low carb and not keto as in or is that what you mean by that? >> Um I don't spend a lot of time measuring ketones and I think that my ketogenic capacity went down a bit when I was sick which is why um I've had trouble fasting. I've done several dry fasting experiments which have been interesting and way better for me than fasting in particular. So I've done a lot of different things and I'm not married to the carnivore diet especially. I think it was important for me after like I understand why I held out for several years um just because of everything that I knew about it and everything that it had done for me and for the risk of like losing the benefits and all of that. Um, but there came a point where I think it wouldn't have made sense to keep doing something um when I wasn't getting better. Like it's a kind of definition of insanity kind of problem, right? Um, nonetheless, I think that um a carnivore diet or even just a much reduced plant meattheavy low carb diet is better for my mood than a low carb diet. And I still don't really understand why that is. >> Uh, but yeah, that's a work in progress. Well, guarantee there'll be people in the comments saying because garnner doesn't work. >> Yeah. Well, >> and again, >> different people, different times, different situations. >> Exactly. And that's and we literally just got done talking about how some people can do carnivore to meet a particular need and find efficacy and even possibly recovery. that's not well understood >> seemingly to the point where they can then reintroduce >> foods that they just wanted to reintroduce. Right. >> It's not surprising at all for me that anybody on being on any kind of diet could find that after a certain period of time it doesn't work for them. >> Sure. >> Right. But it's not at the same time we're not married to a particular diet being the oneizefits-all in the first place. And I think that you were in that position even before you'd gotten sick with regard to carnivore. I >> think you were very open about that from the get-go. >> Yep. >> So, as with before, as with what we were discussing before, like in the case of diabetes, I think that there may be a lot of debate as to how we get to the state of being in diabetes. Right. >> Right. Right. >> What to do about it? the list somewhat narrows. But even in that case, I've I myself, for example, um feel like I can tolerate carbohydrates better than I could at this at the beginning when I was pre-diabetic, >> right? >> But I'm pretty confident that I'm always going to be on a lower carb diet than I was from before. I bounce between keto and low carb, but I define low carb as being like under under 100 grams of carbs a day. >> Yeah. And that still gives plenty of room for like I may have buns on a burger now and then. Right. >> Right. >> But then again to you if you can I mean there's no there's no like gold star for being more restrictive than you have to be. >> No but that's but you know what I want to this is but this is a frustration with this space. I feel like nutrition has a greater h I know this is a very pjorative term. I'm just going to use a religiosity to it. >> Yeah. >> Where getting back to the team versus team thing. I've seen some of the most harsh statements made to people who are just struggling to get better. >> Yeah. >> And they find they find a diet's working for them. And and by the way, this is not I'm I'm not just saying uh low carbers are in the right. I've seen low carbers attack non-l low carbers y in very harsh ways that I don't love at all. Um I'm not how I am. I don't tend to call out people's behavior specifically, particularly publicly. I'll privately share sometimes that I don't love how they said one thing or another, but generally speaking, I try to stay out of it, but on a broader scale, just stating what I think is apparent gets pretty ugly out there sometimes. And I just I wish people would just remember at the top of the priority list is we should just be supporting each other's pursuit of our personal health. You know, if if you're if something is working for somebody's personal health and they are finding great strides in it, it you know, keep it in mind, please, >> before it comes back to diet tribalism. >> Anyway, I'm just >> That's another problem with the name carnivore, by the way. I think it's too sexy in like nobody wants like, "Yay, I'm a zero carbber." >> Right. >> Right. It's just not doesn't have the same punch. Carnivore sounds tough. It's like >> people want that name >> no matter what they're doing. >> That's why I like lean mass hypersponder. >> Yeah. >> It doesn't roll off the tongue too easily. Yeah. >> So, um you can't uh you can't just quickly assume uh people are wanting to call themselves that for the sizzle of it. Um >> can we talk about the energy model a little? >> Yeah. Um, so a few years ago I wrote a blog post about um ketones and glucose in the low carb context and how sometimes people have lower ketone body readings and that um lean mass hyperresponders sometimes fall in that category. And I was trying to make an argument that I think didn't really land. So, I want to try to approach it again. Um, the way I've been thinking about it lately is that we have two energy problems actually that are slightly they're connected but they're separable. There's the energy problem for the periphery and there's the energy problem for the brain. And the the periphery gets to use either fat or glucose. Basically those are the basic modes but the brain can't use fat uh doesn't cross the bloodb brain barrier very well and probably the reason for that has to do with the brain structure is being made out of polyunsaturated fatty acids which are really susceptible to lipid peroxidation and burning fat gives better ROSS better reactive oxygen species which is dangerous but whether or not that's the explanation the fact is that the brain is going to use either glucose or ketone bodies, which I like to think of as the transport form of fat. So, when you're on a low carb diet, the periphery can use fat and not glucose, but the brain, if it's not getting enough ketones, then glucose really has to go up. And it never sat right with me the argument that people who are keto adapted are showing lower ketone bodies because they are just using it more efficiently. Um for two reasons. One is it seems like an arbitrary u argument when the glucose argument gets the other treatment. Oh, it's up because we need a higher buffer. Why not say, "Oh, the ketones are up because they have need a higher buffer and the glucose goes down because >> because it's being used more efficiently." But the other reason is that there's um a concept of the metabolic clearance rate that happens in skeletal muscle. Basically, if ketone bodies get to a certain concentration, the muscles start rejecting them and letting them be spared for the brain. And below that threshold, the muscles will just use them up for energy. And the brain will take up ketone bodies only in con in like proportion to the concentration that they are in the blood. >> So if the muscles start using all the ketone bodies, that really means that the brain's not getting them. And that means that the brain has no other choice but to use glucose. If you're on a low carb diet, um, and you're not generating a lot of ketone bodies, then you have to ramp up glucose to to supply the brain because brain energy is like non negotiable. You have to be able to get it. So what I was thinking about recently was if the difference in what's happening with the lower ketone bodies and the higher glucose phenotype versus the higher ketone bodies and lower glucose phenotype is that in the liver if you've got a lot of fatty acids coming in from your lipolysis or from your diet the liver gets this choice point of either oxidizing them or resterifying them into triglycerides, >> right? if if they get stolen for triglycerides say um you don't get ketogenesis because ketogenesis requires that a whole so much beta oxidation is happening that acetal coa is there's more acetal coa than can go into the TCA cycle and so it by mass action falls into the ketogenesis pathway >> so if the liver is already taking a lot of them for resterification of triglycerides, you won't get ketogenesis, >> right? >> And so in this case, you could have a situation where uh the triglycerides get shipped out um for use by the skeletal muscle. And if that turnover is very rapid like it is in a low carb situation, you won't get a high triglyceride measurement, but you will get that um signature high LDL, >> right? Um, but it's going to be at the expense of ketosis generation because it's taking away from the fat oxidation, >> right? >> And so that's going to leave over the only possibility for glucose to get higher to make sure that the brain is provisioned for. Whereas if you're tipped in slightly, >> so let me pause you for one second. Yeah. >> What you just now described is, you know, is my hypothesis, >> right? is the partitioning you could say proportional hypothesis. So let me see if I'm understanding where I think you're what I think you explained before so that I know I'm in the same checkpoint. >> Yeah. >> If there's less heading toward the ketogenesis pathway such that there's less u BHB is it it's it's a combination of BHB and accetoacetate right that are leaving the liver or is it Yep. >> Yeah. So if there's less of those then coming back to the concentration gradient that you described that will necessitate a greater amount of glucose. >> Yes. >> Right. Coming into circulation. Is that right? Okay. So go ahead. >> To keep the brain going. On the other hand, if the liver decides to start partitioning a lot more toward beta oxidation, then you will start making a lot more ketones and your glucose level doesn't have to get as high. And at the same time, um, you'll have less triglycerides to go out to the muscles, but the muscles will be okay because in that situation, in order to get to that situation, you're taking in you're either taking in a lot of dietary fat or you're fatter and getting a lot more from your atapost tissue. Right. >> Right. Right. So you're you're higher in ketosis and you're asterifying less fat back into triglycerides for transport, but your muscles are okay because they can just take the free fatty acids also for energy, >> right? Um, so I'm thinking that the difference is that there's something that's tipping the balance of which way the liver is going, more toward fat oxidation or more toward fat resterification. Either way is fine on a low carb diet. It's just that in the LMHR pattern in which the LDL is going high and the ketones are going lower, um, it's just showing that you've tipped away from the ketogenesis. It's not that the ketones are getting used up more somewhere more efficiently. They're just not really being generated in the first place. And that's okay because the body can make enough glucose to cover that. And what I'm guessing is causing that tipping it to that direction is just the lower fat level and the higher protein ratio for people who are experiencing that. How does that land with you? Uh, it land well, first of all, I appreciate that you that you were able to recite exactly what I what you just talked about is kind of like a few levels up that I've had trouble getting a lot of people to gro, but I thought you did an excellent explanation for it. the piece that you added was the glucose levels compensatory being um so in other words if there's less ketogenesis production in lean mass hyperresponders you know somebody's got very high LDL they go and test their glucose level they go and test their BHB levels their BHB levels are really low and you now being in the the groups the lean mass hypersponder Facebook group it seems like almost every day there's some new there's two things that come up over and over people open a new thread where they say um hey my BHB levels are frustratingly low >> whereas my friend who sits around on the couch they've got a like a 1.5 and I'm like hovering at like you know point4 or something like that right >> the other one is is glucose levels and A1C which I'd like to also round back to because I'm curious if you have the same opinion I do but it's >> the way that I think of these substrates in circulation I realize is very different than how other people do in terms of circulatory dynamics. It doesn't take much is going to be my key phrase, right? So let's say ketogenesis and I'm just going to make up numbers here. Let's say it's a setting. Yeah, I'm fully fat adapted. I'm um BMI of 25. My uh LDL is 200 um and my you know BHB levels are let's say 0.5, right? And then I get leaner and therefore there's a a greater draw and I'm also getting more athletic. Uh, there's more demand that's below the neck. Now this is somewhat speculative of course but is there a lot of literature that below the neck there does seem to be a lot more interest by the body especially tissues in fatty acids particularly given the ATP yield relative to ke ketones I think there is I definitely think I can point to a lot with say cardomyioytes skeletal muscle and so forth in particular for triglycerides off of a lipoproteins but all that said, "Do I think non triglycerides, just free fatty acids, just those nephas are the predominant thing getting consumed in a fat adapted context?" Yes. Particularly below the neck. Below the neck, hey, don't have a choice. It's got to be ketone bodies, right? Right. It's got to be that. Therefore, in this new context in which I moved into, my BHB levels go even lower to like three. I'm super frustrated. Let's say the setting of ketogenesis in this new context has moved per my aams razor theory. It's moved down while my asterification of fatty acids the same fatty acids that would have gone towards that pathway are now going towards uh eststerification into triglycerides. >> Right? >> I went from 0.5 to.3. Do I think that there's been two-fifths of a drop in ketogenesis? Not at all. I think it could have been as little as a few percentages of a drop in the total ketogenesis pathway and a few percentages of an increase in the triglyceride sterification. We see this over and over again in high trafficking scenarios in the real world. Think of a freeway and think of one lane being blocked, right? That has seven lanes. It's impressive how much of a disruption that can be and particularly if you get into exits on-ramps and off-ramps, right? So, I'm saying the on-ramp for uh ketogenesis, there's there's a little less that's coming on. And that little less that's coming on, the offramps are still the same throughout the body and particularly the brain. And that tiny little bit of a delta difference can have a big change in what's presently detected in a snapshot in circulation more so I believe it's more so than what people think it is. I think people think these massive differences seemingly in circulating levels and and here's a way that I can inform this. Can I pump up my BHB levels say for a morning test tomorrow by having say a fat shake tonight? I bet I can. Do you want to know why I think that happened? Is because when I consumed the fat shake, I brought in a lot of exogenous fat, right? It had to get packaged into the kyomicrons and now I'm out competing receptivity of my adiposytes and my skeletal muscle to some degree and so forth. And just that little bit helped bunch up a little bit the offramps that would have otherwise been accepting the BHB levels. I think much of the BHB that I would detect in my keto mojo in the morning after isn't just now produced by the fat shake. It was existing BHB that I had made indogenously that now is not being taken up as quickly as it would have been had I not done it. I was going to disagree with you, but I think I agree with you for one reason, and that's because the metabolic clearance rate that I was talking about where muscles have this threshold where if ketone body concentration is pretty low for what I'm going to anthropomorphize the body a little bit. The body is saying we're we don't need ketones for the brain, so we're just going to use them. Once it gets to a certain point of uh ketone concentration, it like feeds back on itself and makes the ketone concentration even higher because the muscles stop using it as fuel. So you're you're going along the ketone concentration is little. It's a little it's a little. Once it hits this sweet spot, it then goes way up really really steeply. Not because you're generating that much more. the increment more that you generated is small, but because you've passed the threshold at which the muscles say, "Oh, okay, these are not for us." And so you that fits with your idea that it could just be a small small increase in ketogenesis and the serum levels all of a sudden skyrocket in response to that. But it's the reason I think that it that's true is because we have this data about that threshold where the muscles stop consuming it because now it's flipped over into this mode where we know that we have to have high ketone body concentration for the use by the brain. >> It's an interesting hypothesis. I feel like >> well the metabolic clearance rate isn't a hypothesis that we have that's what the graph looks like literally like that >> but do we but as far as the metabolic clearance rate so the the part that I'm having a little trouble with is how the curve works you're saying at certain concentration levels of ketone bodies only >> there's no other competing >> component relevant to this like if I did an infusion ion of ketone bodies into somebody who's not fat adapted based on the amount of concentration that I inject them with that I infuse them with. You know, I'm not a 100% sure where the curve goes depending on the rest of the state, but I know for sure in a low carb fat adapted state >> is this from like Bulock and Penny's work or >> um >> it's not Volic and Finny. Why it's hard for me to understand mechanistically is I don't know of anything that works in the way that you're describing where lower levels are preferentially taken up. >> Yeah. higher levels from the stimulus of the levels alone like what >> yeah this was noticed like 50 years ago but the that threshold the curve of that threshold has been more recently defined and the more um the more exercise adapted you are the higher that threshold is >> the higher the threshold of concentration of beta hydroxybutyrate Yes, >> in particular >> before it it hits that acceleration on the curve so that the serum levels go up. So if you're an athlete, you have to get to a higher concentration of generation before you will hit the high the high part. >> I have to see it. >> I'll show you it. >> Yes, I'll I'll see it. But here's here's my general take. My general take is this. And this actually will take take me back to glucose and the higher fasting glucose levels and the higher fasting A1C which I also talk about and I >> oh yeah that's an interesting topic too. >> It's controversial but this is my opinion and frankly it it tracks so far with my own data and everyone else. First of all anecdotally sorry this is a theory just my opinion. Here's my theory. >> It's really an old one. It's the AAMS razor adaptation of the Randall cycle. So, I believe if I go to somebody who's super ketogenic, let's say Nick Noritz, right? Um, actually Nick Noritz wouldn't be a good example because um, well, I'll set that aside for a second. In general, if you're somebody who is very fat adapted on net, you'll have less glute 4 expression, >> right? Because you've got more fatty acids in your cytool. Randall cycle in full effect. So, >> yeah. So it's not transported as much. >> We don't need to, right? We don't need to drink as much glucose from the bloodstream. >> Yeah. >> Because we've got more than enough fat. And they do have experimental models where they equate with human ones where they infuse fat and then sure enough you get this effect. What does that mean? Well, that means that if you are like very fat adapted, glucose resonance time, I think, is going to be longer >> because there's less offramps, right? Wrap that into the other thing I said. It doesn't take much. It doesn't take much. You don't It doesn't for as much lowering of glute for expression. It's not like it's eliminated, but does that result in longer resonance time for glucose for obvious reasons to me? Yes. It's it's really obvious. Does that also mean that you're probably going to have modestly higher A1C? Yes, you're going to have modestly higher A1C. The the lifespan of the red blood cells is an interesting topic, but I think there's just longer resonance time for glucose in the bloodstream for somebody's very fat adapted in this exact context. All else being equal, all else being there's a lot of variables that can mess with this number, right? >> It also depends on how much glucose is being produced. You can't you can't uh >> but that away, >> right? But now we're back to the on-ramps. So, how how what would bring me to believe in this hypothesis so much are two things. One, CGM. You put a CGM on somebody who has this higher fasting glucose levels. Weird. They're a straight line. Why? Because I think that the body's really good at maintaining homeostasis. Yeah. >> And acts on glucose more than it acts on fatty acids or triglycerides. It's that's the fuel substrate it cares a lot about keeping control of and it seems to me like homeostasis. Right. >> Definitely >> match that with the second thing. Low fasting insulin A. Yes. >> Right. Y >> it's so it seems to me to be effectively the near opposite of diabetic dysregulation of glucose which is what you normally are looking for fasting glucose and A1C for right because >> that is usually a fairly decent indicator >> but it's also moving right somebody who has diabetes and they have high fasting glucose >> have big excursions >> yeah they have big excursions they're going like this like crazy and typically Ally, it's progressively going higher and higher. Now, my A1C has bounced between 5.5 and 5.9 >> since, I don't know, six, seven years ago. Would you like to bet me as to whether or not my A1C is now something like 6.5 or seven or something like that? Would you like to bet me on that? >> I would say it was stable, >> progressively going higher and higher. No, it's been bouncing between that delta this whole time. And the more ketogenic I am, the more likely I will see a higher fasting glucose, but my CGM will be even flatter. >> That's where I'm going to push back because I think the more ketogenic you are, the more your ketosis level is high, the more your glucose is going to come down to to mirror it. If you're low carb and your ketone body level is on the low side, like around three or 0.5, maybe 7, if it's staying in there, yes, I think your glucose level is going to sit higher. But if you bring the the ketones higher and keep it higher, like at the 1.5 level, your glucose is going to drop and it's going to stay there. >> But but now I turn that back around to you. Why are your levels 1.5 in a snapshot in the blood at that time? Why would they why are they higher in circulation for one person versus another? Bringing it back to the other topic >> because of their protein to fat ratio. >> But set aside the protein to fat ratio in this >> but you can't set aside the causal factor. So what okay where I'm going with this is in the case of le mass hyperresponders if you were to biopsy their cells how much do they have a difference in glute for expression relative to a non-lean mass hypersponder also in a fat adapted context is it identical or is it different >> the glute for expression between the high the high ketosis versus the low ketosis No, no, no. Just between lean mass hyper responders and non-lean mass hyper responders both being fat adapted. In other words, is it possible that somebody is metabolically healthy, fat adapted, and is a lean mass hyperresponder, thus seemingly appearing as though they are being powered much more by fatty acids relative to ketone bodies, might have greater presence of those fatty acids in the cytools of their cells and a modestly different level of expression in glute 4. >> I agree with you that it's not going to take a huge level of difference in glute 4 between those two possibilities. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Then then we're on the same page. >> In order for us to better test that, in order for us to better understand whether or not the glucose levels being higher is due to production versus a higher standing amount, right? Like that's the key question. Is there more glucose actually being produced >> versus the glucose isn't leaving as quickly? It's the uptake delta. That difference is what's more important. Right? And it could be a combination of both. They're not mutually exclusive. >> Correct. But do I think that there's likely higher resonance time in lean mass hypers responders who observe the higher fasting glucose levels? I think that may be the case. But again, acknowledging acknowledging there's a lot of variables here, right? So existing exercise and disposal is relevant towards the glucose levels. Um resistance training, all the stuff you know that I care about that could also have these other effects on the standing levels. But the key question to me is how much their insulin levels are stable to match the stable levels of their glucose. >> Yeah. >> Particularly when they're so low that they're often we we have this come up a lot of times with owner limes is number of times people come back and it says that their their insulin levels are too low because it's more typical of somebody with type 1 diabet type 1 diabetes. Right. >> But super common with lean mass hyper responders. At first I thought you were saying too low to detect. You just mean like it's off the range. >> Oh yes. Sorry. I should have said off the range. >> Like under two or under one or something like that. >> I think it's like under three. They put it >> under uh because to be fair to be fair that is commonly somebody who's got type 1 diabetes if they're on a mixed diet. >> If you're on a mixed diet and your insulin's super low, that is a problem. >> Yeah. >> If you're on a mixed diet and your ketones are high, that's a problem. Everything's got to be >> contextualized. Yes. Um, so yeah, it's it's a really fascinating topic to me because standing fuel levels being affected quite dynamically is something I strongly believe in and I believe is not I don't think it's getting nearly enough attention. >> Yeah. Even if we have different hypotheses about why they are different, I think that we agree that it's something that needs more attention. >> Yes. Well, well, my my larger I think the reason I get a bit animated about this in particular with the fasting glucose and the A1C is that it's they're they're blunt instruments that we have better capability of getting stronger data for. I think a CGM is as good as you can get. Well, okay, I shouldn't say as good as you can get. It's one of the best tools that you can get to better understand the regulatory capacity of your body with regard to the glucose levels. What you might consider to be, you know, quote unquote high glucose levels, fasting glucose levels are based on those ranges that are outside of a fat adapted context. >> Yeah. >> Right. And again, I could be wrong. It could be dangerous to have what is a, you know, a flat level of glucose if you're throwing on a CGM and uh persistently um low enough insulin levels. The reason I draw attention to the low insulin levels is that's what to me leads me to believe it's a sparingbased concept as opposed to it being a you know production and insulinemmic pulsatile con constant. Right? If your fasting insulin levels are so low and your glucose seems to be so steady >> on a regular basis that to me suggests homeostasis. That's but again just my >> hypotheis homeostasis is independent of the throughput right because you could have very steady levels where the production and the uh use are both really high and it's just keeping these this steady level because they're in tune or the production level and the use level could be lower and still have that steady state with with just the measure even if it's steady which I agree shows like a really high level of homeostatic regulation, it still doesn't really tell you what the throughput is. And that that's I think a really interesting question, >> right? Which is why we'd have to just go get it. >> Yeah, >> we it's there's a one of the things we're trying to do is we're trying to get a um we're trying to get tracer studies going to test the energy model. >> Oh, fun. A they are crazy expensive. >> Yeah, >> they're so expensive. It's a lot easier to raise money for studies that check risk >> and you know people are much more excited about contributing to that. It's a bit harder to need 10 times that amount to check mechanism. >> But tracer studies don't need the high level of N either. No, but even for a lower level of n >> you to do it. The other issue is >> it's expensive. >> The B is even then there's unfortunately multicompartmental math. Still a lot of assumptions you have to make to some degree. >> Yeah. >> And um probably know this about me by now. I don't don't like a lot of things that rely on on assumptions. We can't we can't get around it. Our lives are built on assumptions. >> Sure. >> But I'm always trying to devise ways to make things more concrete in the data that we get back. That gets uh challenging sometimes. Okay. So, I got the cards way way belated. Um you've talked about thyroid markers like T3 behaving differently on carnivore. What's one common misconception people have about metabolism in ketosis versus glucosebased diets >> besides thyroid? >> Uh uh t Yeah. Oh yeah, actually no, just tell us about thyroid. >> Sure. So >> you you may already know this. We're actually published on T3 with regard to um the lip energy model. So >> Oh, I'm very interested in that. Yeah. >> So my prediction would be that the people who are LMHRs and have the higher LDL also will have higher TSH and T or sorry higher T3 than the people who are more uh who are more ketogenic and have the lower LDL higher circulating fat. Uh, no. I would say the average lower T3. Free T3 in particular tends to be lower. >> Lower on the on the higher LDL side. >> Yes. Hope I'm getting that correct. That's funny. I want to like pull it up. This is where I need like a Jamie like Joe Rogan has where I'm like, "Go and pull up my studies so I can be sure." the um but yeah, the T3, if I'm not mistaken, tracks with um tracks with insulin and tracks with >> Yes, it should track with insulin and with glucose use, >> right? >> Yeah. And so the so correct me if I'm wrong in all of this. The the key relevance that people might want to know about is um T4 gets cleaved and it can get cleaved into either T3 or reverse T3. um reverse T3 is kind of like the other pathway of where a T4 can go to from there, but it's very relevant with regard to especially access of fatty acids from the diposytes um which becomes relevant back to the lipid energy model, but I'll have to concede. I haven't I haven't connected with the papers in a little while and and the model itself and I'd want to get a refresher of my own model. But anyway, you're >> Yeah, same. >> You're suggesting um or I think your original version was Yeah, it behaves differently. T3 behaves differently on carnivore. >> Well, I I don't have a distinction between carnivore and low carb, per se. Got >> about T3, but the lower your glucose use is, uh T3 normally um would help to regulate your amount of glucose that you're using. And so what happens, one of the things that happens is if if you go on a low carb diet, your your T3 goes down. And if you try if you look at that and say, "Oh, this is lower and that's maybe a bad thing." Um, and that it should be the same as when you're on a high carb diet, and you replace the T3. What happens is it induces more catabolism of lean mass. And so what I think is going on there is that the T3 is supposed to be ensuring that you're getting enough glucose. >> And so if glucose is getting low and you don't want glucose to get low, uh then you need to start harvesting something to make more glucose. But if your glucose is going down low and your body's okay with that, you don't need more, then it's okay for the T3 to go down in tandem with it. And that that is just a normal response. That's at least how I'm viewing it. >> Another one. Uh, if you could give your pre209 self one piece of advice about diet and mental health, what would it be? before I found the carnivore diet. Well, obviously I would tell myself to get on that faster. Um, one piece of diet advice. Um, I feel pretty happy with how things went at 2009. So, um, there was a point in time before I found the carnivore diet where I was just at such a loss. Um, I I started becoming susceptible to all these like I guess I would say supplement-based ideas like, "Oh, you've got to start balancing your methionine with your glycine or you've got to take more creatine or you probably aren't methylating something properly." And >> how about that omega-3 with omega6, >> right? And I feel like um while there might be some people that stuff like that helps um it it was a red herring for me and I spent a lot of money and um didn't get anywhere. And you know I think that the body does a pretty good job of compensating for things that are added and taken away in um a lot of ways. So, I'm reminded of the chemical imbalance idea that people have for um depression, for example, where they say, "Oh, we're going to give you this uh serotonin reuptake inhibitor because your chemicals are out of balance." But actually, you know, your body just adapts to that. If if your body is um not producing a lot of serotonin or there isn't a lot of serotonin uh left, it's usually not because your receptors are long, >> right? >> It's because there's some kind of homeostasis that's trying to be achieved and if you muck with it, your body just compensates usually. I think that that's that's what's going on. Um, and so >> I discussed something like this with a recent podcast where the body has been so far undefeated in our attempts to come up with something that's outside of like species appropriate ancestral diet that was needed for the majority of the human species, right? So things we get ourselves into trouble for, you know, those those we might need say chemical compounds that we've come up with that's from modern medicine and so forth, but like a longevity drug that if 90% of the population takes it, they'll live longer. That again is outside of a a diet or an existing deficiency. >> Right. >> Right. I know of none. And maybe we will ultimately come up with it but as of as of now no. So knowing that every time we hear of the latest thing that ah this is this is what we needed or even this is what we need in this context I I start asking the same kinds of questions you're starting from which is the engineer in me is going I don't know this operating system's pretty awesome and we've got a long line of people who keep coming along and being like but it did this wrong so we need to bring it that you know again this is why you want to do experimentation You want to feel confident and even then when you do the experimentation to find an efficacy for a given context, you remember that it's in that context. You don't jump to conclusions. It can expand to everybody else regardless of their circumstances. So, okay, I got one more last one. You ready? >> Yep. >> Um, you've been vocal about engaging in good faith discussions on nutrition. What's the biggest barrier you've seen to productive conversations in the carnivore low carb space? >> You know, the biggest marker I find for bad faith discussion, which happens a lot on social media where people um tend to act in a very different way than they would if they were face to face with a person. is that instead of trying to understand what the person said and find something that might be on to something there, they just grasp on to some like the reason why it's wrong or stupid or um flip to um what really seems like a deliberate attempt to misconstrue what the person has said and maybe it's not deliberate but I think sometimes it is. Um so what what I really like when when I am engaging with somebody that I don't know very well and I'm not sure how it's going to go. What really makes me feel like they are doing their best effort to have a real grown-up discussion about something that's important to them. Is when they make some kind of attempt to show that they've understand they've understood what you said. >> And it's not like this. doesn't have to be this. I'm hearing that you say like that that whole like therapy thing, but um just really showing that you respect what the other person has to say even if you don't agree with it. Um trying to really steal man it. It sounds like a cliche but >> no but it's it's a it's a skill that is this is another cliche term but it's a it's a valid one active listening. >> Yeah. >> You are >> you are seeking to put yourself into the shoes of the other person and understand their thought process even if you disagree with it. And I know you said the therapy thing of like repeating back, but I do that all the time. I I'm also again it's a skill, but I've also done my best to not describe people's behavior in a negative way, to not name call, to I and I'm not perfect at it. There's times where I slip and I don't quite but generally speaking, I find that that's more conducive to having the conversation in the first place. But if I am having trouble with understanding what they're saying and I want to signal to them that I'm trying to be good faith about it, I will attempt to repeat back what it is that I think that they're saying. >> But one of my least favorite things is when it's the opposite. They're repeating back what I've told them and it's it's clearly a misrepresentation. And I and then at that point I start gauging. I'm like, "Wait a sec. Is this a genuine misrepresentation?" Like they're just not used to having these kinds of discussions and therefore they're oversimplifying what it is I'm saying. And there is some number of people out there that know that's a great time and energy waster. >> Yeah. >> For you, right? Is when they can when they can salaciously say something that they claim you said to them, >> right? Yeah. >> In a way that's going to activate you and get you upset. >> Yeah. I mean, I really hate being misunderstood. And I also like to talk about things where there's a sort of subtle difference. And so someone will say, "Well, I think that the problem is X." And I say, "Oh, yeah, that's a really common way to understand it, but if if you would notice this little distinction here, then it wouldn't be X, it would be Y." And so I really like to get into these conversations where I feel like there's some chance that the person's going to understand the distinction that I'm making. And they may or may not agree with it, but they'll understand the distinction and say, "Oh, well, if that were the case, then then you'd be right, but I still think you're wrong because of something else." That would make me really really happy, >> right? it. But mo much more often than not, they just sort of, you know, gloss over what I said and repeat what they said and then or, you know, change the the goalpost or something like that. But I always feel like there's this chance that they're going to understand me and that's where I get sucked in. Well, there's um I think that I think I'm a big fan of debate, period. And that to some degree, it just sort of depends on where I'm at in my stage in life as to how much I'll put up with the things I don't think are as productive and useful, such as the personal attacks. It used to be that I would put up with an unlimited amount of personal attacks if I thought there was something to be coming out of it. So long as if anything a lot of other people are watching online, they're getting information from it. >> That's just it. I often think, well, I can't persuade this person, but there's 10 other people listening that might get my point, >> right? And the and that is part of the value of having debates in general. Now, all of that said, I have come to understand the things that basically are worth just pulling out given I'm at a stage in my life where I just don't have the time. >> Yeah. >> Right. So for example, I call this a Bailey trap. So you've heard of the Mott and Bailey. >> Yeah. >> So a M for those who don't know Mott and Bailey is a form, it's called a fallacy, but it's really a form of argument substitution. >> Yeah. >> I say something that's very falsifiable. So in this example, I'm going to be the bad faith actor and you just put out a blog post that has 13 citations in the blog post. And I say, "Amber's such an idiot. She just wrote this entire article and she doesn't like rely on any scientific evidence at all." And then when I say this, you know how falsifiable it is. You may not have even intended to engage with me, but you're like, "Dave is absolutely wrong. I have 13 citations, 13 studies that I discuss in my article and that they're right there in the bibliography, right? And then without missing a beat, I go,

"Those 13 studies are meaningless. They have nothing to do with your article. This is why blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." And then I have like a lengthy like response. Well, what actually just now happened is without without acknowledging it openly, I changed my position.

"Yeah. I'm now technically acknowledging that there were citations, but my argument's changed from no, Amber did write something, but I believe that the articles that she referenced have nothing to do with what it is that she wrote about," right? "That's something different. It's a little more defensible, though."

"Yeah. And because it's a little more defensible, now I can make the claim. That's why I call it a Bailey trap. Is it attracted you to be interested enough to knock knock me down to claim that what I said was uh just a blatant misrep not just a misrepresentation, it was just false. You did have citations, but now now I got the conversation going and I've got way more time than you do. So I can commando keyboard this thing. Yeah. Like crazy. And then when you check out I'm like I challenged Amber and she she couldn't take it," right? "She like left."

"Yeah. And I I just Yeah. And then for the next I don't know 18 years of my life I can be like oh yeah I debated Amber and she couldn't handle it. I mean I I brought the facts point out her article was dead wrong. She couldn't because the nature of the internet today is nobody's going to actually go back to the beginning of the whole thread where what I said was demonstrabably false," right? "And be like, 'Oh, Amber actually correctly pointed out that Dave didn't misrepresented or at least just falsely claimed that she didn't have any citations.' No, instead I can just constantly insist that I had the right of of you in the uh the argument and you just couldn't take it."

"Couldn't handle it anymore. That's what I call the Bailey trap."

"Definitely. So ultimately, you just your better your your best option is just not bothered with people who are trying to clearly work their way up, particularly if they're a smaller account by flatly misrepresenting or just falsely making claims."

"Yeah. the the way I try to handle that particular kind of argument and I sometimes do better than other times, but I just doggedly stick to the very first thing that they said and say, 'Well, before we get into that, how does it relate to your initial criticism?' You know?"

"Yeah. Um, and just keep bringing it back and showing that like keep repeating the trace of the argument so that my response I try to make it so my response is never to move on until uh there's been some acknowledgment of the that we've moved. But, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't."

"Yeah, it's a I'm I this is why I like this. I want to have any any guest of, you know, of some degree of value that I can have for a good conversation I'd like to have here. And so far, I've had a few that are, let's just say, a little more than say the proddl lowering side or might have some critiquing. Uh that includes Chris McCascal, Alex Leaf. I had uh Greg Mushin on recently and that episode's been released. Um, but I also have a standing invitation to Simon Hill, uh, Gil of Nutrition Made Simple, uh, Lane Norton, all of them. I'd love to have them in this chair and just, you know, have a long form conversation. It's harder to have a lot of the these are usually the most productive discussions you can have, I find, when you're just in person sharing and discussing the ideas directly, and there's a lot of room for followup. and a lot of unpacking and you can have a we had like a little debate just a moment ago."

"Yeah, we did."

"Right. But it's it it's to me a lost something that's getting lost by social media. Social media definitely I mean it's engineered to we know this. We know this directly from the tech giants admitting it. It's engineered to help push the outrage component and how people can behave on the internet does kind of help facilitate a lot of less productive discussion."

"Yeah. Well, one thing that's different here is like I've made a commitment to come here and be next to you."

"We're standing in the same room, so I can't just run off when things start to get uncomfortable," right? "And um and yes, we've made a commitment to each other to have a real discussion. And that that in and of itself goes a long way, I think."

"I think so. All right. I think uh it's time for us to go get a steak. Unless you How Amber, how can people find you?"

"Well, you can start an argument with me on Twitter or X as I call it these days. uh keto carnivore. Uh that's where I am most publicly available."

"and then uh who knows maybe you'll run another conference at some point in the future."

"I think that's a really good idea."

"I I would love to come just uh get on the schedule. Outside of that they can see you in Cosai. Hopefully I'll get this aired before COSI happens. But if it's after COI then you can you can see the the video of the presentation you gave. Um, I'm so thankful you're able to come out here. So thank you for coming."

"Likewise. Thanks for inviting me."

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Amber O’Hearn on the Missing Piece in Diet Debates – TFP #029 | Amber O'Hearn

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