Is a Carnivore Type Diet the Real Paleo Diet? With Loren Cordain, PhD

studying one of the last remaining indigenous hunter-gatherer societies in the world and he's looking at their diet and in that interview saw where he completely agrees with us he says they actually avoid most vegetables particularly stems and leaves because of the anti nutrient content they won't eat those things unless they have to even though they're in the jungle those things are readily available what he found was this hunter-gatherer society made a lot of fruit ate a lot of meat welcome to the fundamental health podcast I'm your host dr. Paul Saladino this podcast is the result of my relentless search to understand and correct the roots of chronic disease and illness in this podcast I will share with you everything I have learned about how to live the most healthy and radical life possible thanks for joining me on this journey what is up you guys thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the fundamental health podcast we are now one week closer to the release of the second edition of the carnivore code you can go to the carnivore code book calm to pre-order your ebook print or audio book now super exciting things are happening in the space thank you so much for all your support we are so excited that this book is going to reach lots and lots more people and affect lives positively this episode of the podcast is with Loren Cordain and his graduate students really the guys who originated the Paleo diet a huge fan of his MI and it was one of the first books that I read that actually got me thinking about Paleolithic diets and all of these themes so we get into a lot of interesting things in this discussion one of the more challenging things for me as a content producer as a writer as a doctor in the space is that my ideas are constantly changing because I pride myself on not being dogmatic this episode was recorded in February of 2020 shortly before the book was published and you the second edition is coming out in August of 2020 so now six months after the release of the first edition and even in those first six months I have been continuing to learn and adjust and modify my ideas about some of the concepts I think there probably will be a third edition of the carnivore code and maybe even a fourth edition but this is one of the challenges for me as a writer is the way that ideas are changing so one of the ideas that we talked about in this podcast with Loren Cordain is salt I have not changed my perspective on salt in the show notes for this episode you will find no less than 15 references shared with me in collaboration with my friend James Dean Athena : Tonio showing that salt restriction leads to insulin resistance and worsening of outcomes worsening of erectile dysfunction Orson enough ortho stasis or orthostatic hypotension low blood pressure when you stand up or change positions from seated to standing quickly so I have really no clinical scientific personal doubt that adequate sodium intake is crucial for humans and is something our ancestors would have done repeatedly and sought out with significant intention I will respectfully disagree with the Cordain group on this sense in this regard and as you will hear in this podcast we we get into a little bit of a debate about this at the end one of the more challenging issues that I've been wrestling with over the last few months is fructose and as you'll hear in this podcast we all kind of toss it around and say is a problem is it not I am planning to do a couple at least one or two podcasts in the near future dedicated exclusively to fructose if you are following my stuff you'll know that in the first tier of a carnivore diet as I talked about in the carnivore code you can go to the carnivore code book calm to get a pre-order copy I think fruit is one of the least toxic foods for humans from plants as one of the most interesting parts of this interview from these guys in the Paleo diet group was a discussion of this group of indigenous hunter-gatherers in South America and the research of a gentleman called I believe Douglas London which we talk about in detail and he looked at basically these hunter-gatherers and what they were eating these are the Cayenne o people spelled K a W Y M and O we talked about it in detail in this podcast I will try and publish an actual interview that this group did with the with Douglas London but basically as you'll hear us talk about they eat over 70 varieties of fruit and they generally avoid vegetables this is really the next incarnation of quote a paleo diet which is looking a whole lot like a carnivore ish type diet to me and when I hear this I think that makes a lot of sense this came up in the podcast that I did with Bill von Hippel as well and I've been wrestling with this idea and what I have recently learned is that a lot of the research put forth by Robert Lustig and those who vilified sugar or specifically fructose is done in animal studies in which the rates of DeNoble lipogenesis happen much more quickly with fructose than they do in humans furthermore the amounts of fructose that are used in these studies to suggest these high rates of dnl that i talked about in this podcast are with massive amounts of fructose really amounts of that that you could not achieve very easily at all in any normal human diet so I think that my ideas about this continue to evolve and an explorer and I continue to explore these ideas and I think that is what we all want to do is to continue to learn explore so please listen to the podcast with that stuff in mind it was recorded six months ago then coronavirus happened and none of this is terribly relevant during coronavirus but I still think this is a great conversation that I should release and it's a very cool conversation especially about this inclusion of fruit and many hunter-gatherer diets and I think it corroborates a lot of the things I was talking about in the book with Tier one carnivore diet so with that in mind I hope you will enjoy this podcast with these guys and I hope that you will check out the first edition of the carnivore code please go to amazon.com leave me a review if you've read the first edition it helps us reach more people if you like this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes thank you so much thank you to my sponsors blue blocks BL u BL o X blue blocks comm you can use the code carnivore MD for 15 percent off your order they are making what I believe to be the best blue block glasses out there I've got the clear ones which are the 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that whole continuous glucose monitor podcast episode with me that you should definitely check out detailing my CGM results interestingly I've done a CGM in which I had a good amount of honey in a day and it did not make me insulin resistant and I didn't have evidence for a major de novo lipogenesis with changes in body composition so I'm still learning as well and I think we all should be and it should not be anathema to suggest that ideas can change and evolve so check out nutria scents that I oh I really think that including a CGM in your life will give you a very clear i
ndication of your glucose sensitivity I'm super stoked for my dad to do this in the near future I will share his results and you can let him know I sent you your sense that I Oh check out that podcast you will learn a ton these are going to revolutionize the world because I think it is so powerful the how humans will change their behavior when they are met with real-time feedback my friends in white oak pastures are always great sponsors of this podcast white oak pastures calm you can use the code carnivore MD for 10% off your first order they simply put our making some of the best meat on the planet they have grass-fed grass-finished beef lamb pork chicken which they are working on getting to be low PUFA now which is super exciting for me and you can get amazing eggs all kinds of good stuff there they have suet and organ meats they are sixth generation farm that is now regenerative for the last 20 years you can see in the book and many other places that the amount of carbon in the soil there is increasing significantly and that I believe is the main metric that will determine the persistence of human life on this planet so big deal super super important please support them and blue box a nutri cents and give my book a review on Amazon if you have read it appreciate that stay tuned for super exciting projects coming from me in the next few weeks on how to get more nose-to-tail nutrition if you do not subscribe to my newsletter what are you doing go to carnivore MD com get subscribed as a fundamental health insider I will send you a newsletter every week with happenings pre-release good stuff and all kinds of information about podcasts interesting articles I've been reading it is the spot to get information from me you guys so one last thing if you want to be entered into a drawing for a sign edition of the carnivore code pre released before you even get it on August the 4th see the posts I've been doing on Instagram about this comment tag a friend needs to read this book and I will enter you in the sweepstakes and a couple of lucky winners will get signed copies of the carnivore code into your carnivore omnivore meat eating meat appreciating hands before the book is even out August the 4th and the new edition looks amazing like I said there will be a third and fourth edition probably because we will continue to learn but that's what we want no one should stay stuck in their Dogma anyone who is not updating their ideas is a dinosaur in my opinion so this is a challenge of writing a book and I appreciate all of your support as we continue to learn and grow together and move toward what I believe is some pretty damn radical health so listen after this podcast what is going on with me alright we're live thanks to you guys for coming on we've got dr. Loren Cordain Trevor Connor Mark Smith this is like the Paleo crew so thank you all for being here well thank you for having us we really appreciate this yeah and I loved it III definitely want to start out by saying that I'm a fan of dr. cranes work I read the Paleo diet a long long time ago when it first came out it was really groundbreaking at the time and has pushed a lot of things in the right direction I think that time everybody's been trying to understand you know what the Paleo diet is and like you guys have talked about in your work people define at different ways and I think that's kind of what we're all talking about today I think that we all certainly agree that looking at anthropology and looking at where humans have come from can give us great insights into how to create health in our current diets so I really appreciate all the work you guys are doing for sure I think that uh with that I think a good starting point is I use an analogy with Trevor early today I mean I've been involved with this since the late eighties early nineties I was dr. cordain's first graduate student involved with palace nutrition and to me it was kind of like this makes sense it was based on what foods were naturally available to us and as you say from an anthropological perspective what could have influenced our genetics I'm like here we go just QED and I just went with it and for a long time just work clinically with people and saw great results so obviously that influences you a lot but I I said a trapper really and truly if we buy into which obviously you do that we're talking about foods that are naturally available people that feel that way we're kind of all on the same team so really what we're then discussing is we're trying to pick the best team and which players are we trying to put on the team and and that's where we might have some disagreements go wait a minute my right wing is better than your right wing or we think but let's hear your argument let's hear our argument so I think if we come at it from that perspective I'm always out of people is like I'm I wouldn't have adopted the Paleolithic diet if I was closed-minded so I've always been open-minded and I think we all three of us are and we just want the science to kind of lead that we're probably going to discuss that open ladder that was out there and I love their the way that they wrote it in terms of respectful and saying hey we want to be proven wrong and we're kind of the same way so I think if we come at it from that perspective we're just gonna have an enjoyable discussion that our goal is always to find the best diet for humans that's that's what we're trying to do I love it dr.

Saladin I'll say man I was listening to your podcast and the drive up to dr. cordain's house this morning and I can't remember the exact wording but your opening was something on the lines of saying you were seeking a natural diet to improve people's health and I just heard that and went ok I like this guy I like what you're about this is this is what we're trying to do here yeah you know we try try really hard not to be dogmatic obviously I'm super excited and interested in the carnivore diet and we'll probably get your your opinions from from from this group of researchers about it but but I try not to be dogmatic and I think that ultimately what I hope to offer my listeners and everyone the community is ideas around which foods can create health and and reverse disease in humans and that's the conversation we're all trying to have and I've openly said that if somebody is if somebody's thriving on any diet Who am I to tell them to change it I would never tell them to change it but I think that a lot of people are not driving I think that the majority of people who listen to this podcast even you know all of us can probably have improvements whether it's in energy or mental clarity or libido or body composition everybody still wants to get better and I think that a lot of people have been told that they the diet has no influence on their health the Diana diet has no influence on autoimmune illness or inflammatory illness and that is a huge disservice to humans and then furthermore you know people there is this trend now which is from the team that's sort of separate from ours the plant-based team not the animal-based team I hear more and more that people are going to physicians with illnesses whether it's rheumatoid arthritis or autoimmune illness or whatever and they're being told to do plant-based diets and I think ok if that helps great but if that makes you worse I want people to know that there are other options out there and that there's a large group of researchers there's a large group of people who believe that animal foods are very beneficial for humans that have been a central part of human diets forever they are not hurting us and that to remove all animal foods is likely going to hurt people now one step beyond that is kind of where I go with the carnivore diet how we would and I think actually the similarities between our ways of thinking are very very strong and that we are constructing hierarchies of plant toxicity I think we all agree that
well raised animal foods grass-fed grass-finished animal food primarily from ruminant animals that are fed a species-appropriate diet is a central part of the human diet and then we are all just drawing a plant toxicity spectrum a little differently so and even in my book which is out by the time this podcast comes out my book will be out you guys I have a plan toxicity spectrum and I talk about a carnivore ish diet and that's just sort of my you know reprisal of a plant toxicity spectrum so we'll dig into all that today but what I worry about is that there is a movement now there is a zeitgeist toward plant-based diets and I think these are hurting us our children our families and they're bad for the environment because they destroy the proper eco systems and they foster mono crop agriculture so I couldn't agree with you all more yeah I think that going back to when I first met dr. Cordain and we started doing this we actually started using the diet to help with autoimmune patients so the first thing we did like this this in theory sounds good essentially back down it was called an elimination diet so that's removing grains removing dairy removing legumes so removing things that you humans can't eat without some processing and I first thought was what let's do a diet analysis and we're going to miss anything in the first thing we realized was that we actually improve the nutrient content of the food so that's exactly what we were doing and certainly you know the anti nutrients that are in the plants obviously is what you're referring to and we would agree yeah yeah before we get started I'd like to just do a few introductions because as I mentioned I've kind of handed over my website and my business and everything to the two best graduate students I had over a 32 year career and Mark Smith he's a PhD in physiology dr. Smith was my first graduate student that was when I first got interested in this whole concept back in Oh late 80s early 90s I was teaching a graduate level course in this and Mark and another PhD student of mine came over to my office every Tuesday and we worked on a paper that we eventually published in the British Journal of nutrition on rheumatoid arthritis and diet and so that paper was very revolutionary because we were the first people before Fasano group came out with the notion that autoimmunity begins in the gut and so we published that paper and then a decade later or maybe even longer than that my last graduate student Trevor Connor MS degree and he should have gotten his ph.d / story behind that so anyway so anyway Trevor was my last student and he also worked on an autoimmune project a really revolutionary project and he can talk to you a little bit about that so that's kind of the connecting thing theme amongst all of us and they all took my courses I taught research design and statistics and this evolutionary medicine class that I was able to teach my ID design on diet and nutrition so that's what I have to say to start off - thank you for that I wish I'll just say dr. Cordain that I wish I could have been one of your students I wish I have been able to take those classes because I was reading the Paleo diet you know people who listen to my podcast may know this you know I was a raw vegan for a while for seven months and had all sorts of problems like extreme gas and bloating and I was no fun to be around in a small enclosed space like an office and I lost 25 pounds of muscle mass and I was like this is not a human species appropriate diet and I think it was sometime around then that I found your work and I oh this would be so cool so that's I mean it's been you know you've you've been on my on my brain for many many years and this is such a neat thing to actually get to talk to you now look at where we've all ended up but well thank you for having me on your show yeah and so I love this concept and I think that we're all in agreement here that that foods perhaps primarily plant foods can trigger inflammation in the gut and that may lead to autoimmunity that's a concept that I think Western medicine will probably wake up to and about maybe 20 years from now you know but I think like you said I think your group was the first you know group of people kind of saying this and we will get into the plant toxicity spectrum and how we might all draw it differently but this notion that that the food we eat is clearly damaging the gut whether directly or indirectly or we can talk about the mechanisms and as you suggest dr.

Cordain you know Alessio Fasano if people are not familiar with him he's a I believe a pediatric gastroenterologist at Harvard who's done a lot of research with gluten and the gluten molecule and the way that gluten molecules and specific fragments of gluten gliadin can trigger the release of a compound called zon Yulin which is almost our guts intrinsic signal to open the floodgates to open those tight junctions to open the the occlude and channels to open the tight junctions between the cells that make up our gastro intestinal epithelium open the floodgates allow water and allow immune cells from the immune system layer the lamina propria which is just on the human side of our gut lining into the gut to combat some perceived invader or an implement inflammatory insult so this is a fascinating thing and I think that as you suggest I really believe that so much autoimmune inflammatory illness begins in the gut so it's all about the food we eat right that's huge we're speaking the same language because those terms that you use I don't know if your listeners understand all that stuff but these are concepts that Mark and Trevor and I talked about regularly and we trade scientific papers so I respect you that you've done your homework and you understand these fundamental concepts and you know for the average person you talk about these concepts and you say leaky gut and that's enough you don't have to go into that kind of detail right we do it all so it's quick identity what dr. Cordain was saying before is I was his last graduate student he had a couple years with me and just went on to retire [Laughter] but my thesis paper was entirely about the effects of wheat on autoimmune disease looking at how it can spark an immune response that eventually leads to various autoimmune condition so what I was really looking at is it creates this imbalance between and I don't know how deep down these rabbit holes you want us to go but it's go deep man unless you love it this is a geeky podcast man I love it so yeah I talk all the time about the th17 versus T regulatory cells th17 is a type of immune cell that was designed to really most of the time be very down regulated because it's a very damaging type of cell but it was designed to handle any sort of bacterial infection it up regulates it goes and kills the bacteria but boy it does a lot of damage to your body as well then a down regulates and then the dominant T cells the T regulatory cells your immune system down regulate so my old thesis was looking at the variety oh it's not just clean but you're looking at WGA you're looking at amylase trypsin inhibitors wheat has this remarkable mechanism for getting past the gut barrier as you're pointing out the the elevation of Sanyal in to open up tight junctions get into circulation emulate LPS and cause this this imbalance between th17 and tra and keep that up regulated and you read any study on any autoimmune disease and they all say this condition is preceded by elavator th17 I love it and so I'll just clarify some of those terms for listeners T helper 17 is one of the subtypes of a t-cell so in the immune system we have T cells and B cells which are part of the adaptive immune system and then we have an innate immune system which is made of dendritic cells and macrophages but what trevor is referring to is T helper 17 which are balanced by T regulatory and there are other types of T cells immunology is just a flurry of alphabet soup but an
d then a couple other acronyms that Trevor used I want to point out we're talking about gluten which has a fragment called gliadin and then there is also wheat germ a gluten 'm WGA and talk about WGA in my book which is a lectin it is a carbohydrate binding protein and then you also about talk about amylase and trypsin inhibitors these are intrinsic to many grains so one of the things I talk about in the book is that plant babies plant seeds especially do not want to get eaten and they have all sorts of these amylase and trypsin inhibitors we see this kind of across the the various plant species with some variation but and plant seeds broadly is seeds grains and nuts and legumes and we can talk about this nuts and seeds versus the grains and legumes which we made different opinion on but what we're talking about here is that plant babies I think most of us would agree go on the far end of the spectrum of plant toxicity these are pretty toxic things plants don't want these to get eaten and they put all sorts of things in them to kind of really mess with our guts would you guys agree with all that yeah sorry it was long done no go ahead mark I was going to jump in with one a case study story that is kind of a fascinating thing that we did as I said when we first started doing this we were doing it for autoimmune patients so there's a couple of things I think that you can look at clinically some people are going to have issues with a leaky gut and so that plays into it you've also got the epidermal growth factor thing there as well where you may have an intact gut but basically some of these lectins these dietary you know I will say to my my clients and patients kind of nutrition 101 or proteins you get digested in the stomach these leggings are resistant to the proteolytic enzymes in the gut and if it's a leaky gut or if in fact you combined that receptor and get it into your systemic system you've got something that shouldn't be there in its intact state and that's where all sorts of problems could arise so and obviously the dairy equation comes into it you know it points out you've got something like a 5,000 fold increase in epidermal growth factor which we have in our saliva to help repair the gut we're in small quantities but then someone consumes milk and it's meant for not for a human and you have a 5,000 fold increase it up regulates that receptor and all of a sudden you've got a lot more of these elections getting into the systemic system so I think we're gonna have a huge spectrum of genetics there of some people getting affected more than others but I wanted to just and I think this is important perhaps for your listeners when you talk about autoimmunity about the need to be strict for certainly a while to determine what foods might be a problem we had a as I said we were working with autoimmune patients and I was sort of going off doing lectures almost on dr. cordain's behalf I did want to remember to some hunters who were loving with the message that we were sending out I was featured in both hunter magazine was went to one of the churches that was interesting they were a modern church that believes the earth was I think four thousand years old so had kind of change how I approached selling the concept but anyway the point was we were getting information back from people requests as sort of they wanted to try this and there was one particularly interesting case study a lady with multiple sclerosis so we said okay well we know we're not hurting you we've done a data analysis we feel we've got a good diet we think it might help so she goes on the diet and immediately starts to see improvements in another meeting with another friend that had fibromyalgia wanted to do it in that discussion she mentioned she liked green beans and I mistakenly said that's more alkaline I think you can probably consume those was a bad recommendation but she went home she loved them ate them for a couple of days got on the phone with me and said I clearly can't do green beans I got on the phone with dr. Cordain yeah saying Jesus you know we shouldn't be doing that whoops sorry mistake learn throw them down the road looking at some of the research with multiple sclerosis we were trying to get the DHA levels elevated which had been shown to help in certain circumstances Jocasta hexanoic acid so one of the omega-3 fatty acids so fish oil DHA and EPA this is the DHA component found a lot in brain tissue actually so anyway I you know back then didn't work with good quality stuff was just sent her to the local health food store and said see if you can get some DHA we think that might help she goes home takes two I think two capsules of DHA calls me up as well clearly I can't do this DHA I had a terrible reaction to it and I'm like that just seems strange don't go down and I were talking we're trying to figure it out and get you know what maybe there's something else in that that pill I said get the bottle read out what's on the on the built on the bottle for me and she said okay it says that the gelatin capsule is darkened with a herbal extract Karen that's not a herbal extract carob is a bean extract we'd already established that legumes and beans are not good for so I don't know how much was in that but it's kind of like a kid with a peanut allergy I don't think you need a lot to trigger that a whole immune system so when you are trying to deal with an autoimmune case you do have to be straight for quite some time to try and clean the system out and then you can reintroduce things to see if they're offending but you have to do it one at a time to I don't obviously you can do lab tests and stuff like that but but I was that's always a story of a case study that we found rather remarkable mark I'd I think this is a good point to bring up wheat germ agglutinin WGA and the doctoral student that I had before Trevor her master's thesis was to feed people we Tru so we fed him a hundred grams of wheat germ and which was pretty nasty things to do yeah I think they downed it with some orange juice and then we kept him in the lab for the first 6 hours and drew blood at one hour three six and then we had him come back the next day and drew blood at 24 hours and so what we were interested in was our high a working hypothesis was that when you ingest wheat germ or WGA it ultimately gets into your system so we thought it would be pretty obvious where we're going to find it so what we did is we drew whole blood and we spun down the plasma and we threw out the erythrocytes and the other formed elements and so when we and then I worked with a guy from Austria and his group who developed an assay to measure WGA in human plasma and so we spiked the plasma the WGA to make sure the damn thing worked and lo and behold we came up with absolutely nothing there was no WGA in plasma so we went back and we looked at plasma proteins there's about 60 of them and there's only one plasma protein it's a very minor one that binds Doug BGA so what we suspect is happened in that experiment is we threw out the baby with the bathwater is that the WGA was bound to erythrocyte proteins and also leukocyte proteins so we did this whole experiment we got everybody involved we had to go across countries we had to go you know from Europe to United States with human tissue and and so forth and the whole thing was big bust and so I just was kicking myself well why the hell did we throw out those red blood cells now that component and that's interesting so what we're talking about here are lectins and I talked about this in my book these are carbohydrate binding proteins this is one thing that I agree with dr. Stephen Gundry about it's probably the only thing I agree with dr.

Stephen country about right but there's a whole chapter in my book about this and we're talking about wheat germ agglutinin there are other lectins gluten this kind of can be considered a lectin there are electives and kidney beans
we're talking about lectins and grains and beans and if I understand you properly dr. Cordain what you're saying is that the lectins were binding to cells of the human body they were actually binding to white cells bindings for bread blood cells and they were having potentially some biological activity so they were in a different fraction of the blood than you expected and that was why you didn't see them but it certainly it suggests that they are binding to ourselves and potentially exerting negative physiological effects am i understanding that properly that's exactly right and we believe that lectin that's found in kidney beans and all the other Phase II olace beings is PHA fighting agglutinin and in in rat models we definitely know that finite hemagglutinin gets through into the system and the same thing with WGA so what our study was unusual is that we were attempting to do the first human study to show that lectins got into the system and you know I took a little bit of money and funding to get that whole thing going and some time and an interested graduate student but had I done it over again I would have kept the erythrocytes measuring WGA and erythrocytes is a more complex situation and in plasma and I can't remember who the author is but there's an absolutely fascinating study on WGA the addresses so as you know some of the people who counter this say this isn't a factor when you cook weed you cook out all the WGA you cook out all the like tons this happens and it's just not an issue but this paper demonstrated that very very small quantities of WGA can get past the epithelial cells and then what they actually do is they bind to the basa lateral side of the epithelial cells of the gut and then they get those cells to amount an immune response so this paper show that takes very very little WGA to really cause a fairly significant response you want to add a gram levels you know yeah if you look at the research on that that it is correct that cooking will destroy you know maybe 75% but it's kind of us so what when you like how much arsenic do you know if it's all toxic if it's all yeah that's been the response so you know I'm an on the doctors TV show recently and they were just up in arms they couldn't believe what I was suggesting with a carnivore diet and they were saying you know we've talked about lectins in the past they're not a bad thing for humans and people will say they get disorder they get to nature when we cook them and it's like oh really to the one percent of lectins get to natured and and there are many foods we eat and this may be something that we have slightly different views on there are many foods foods we eat that can have lectins that are not cooked I mean nuts and seeds and I mean there are there are many foods we eat that have lectins that are not cooked and not denatured at all so the fact that there is yeah why don't we amount my little anecdotal story of the lady with MS is an example of how little you need small small amount it's the same you know if we appreciate the children can have an anaphylactic shock if they have a peanut allergy surely it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to realize that a low level inflammation or something like an autoimmune response could be as a result of slightly high levels or even the same amount of levels if it can create such a shock to a child and I think that another part of the discussion if we're talking about autoimmunity and the lectins you know that we've talked a lot in our world about molecular mimicry and I think it's important for perhaps the ordinance to appreciate you know why is it problematic in one person and not in another you've got your health so sometimes different with the growth factor receptor that could be different quantities some people might have leaky gut some people might not but beyond that there is this molecular mimicry concept based on the haplotype your immune system we all have different immune systems and how it presents that molecule to the immune system so a lectin comes in the immune system effectively binds it and shows it to the immune system and so depending on where it grabs it that molecule may or may not look like the self and so that there's huge complexity within this whole parameter parameter where yes some people not gonna have a problem other people will so that for probably for a lot of people might confuse things is that it must be brothers just didn't didn't happen missed us and just that must have been but that's absolutely the case and either different HLA human leukocyte antigens or different HLA haplotypes that present the proteins differently because they bind different areas of the binding groove so that's fairly well known to immunologist yeah and I talk about this in my book as well and this is I think this is why creating a spectrum of plant toxicity is is a little bit challenging on an individual basis I think we can draw broad strokes these are the foods that are most likely to be triggering for for many people but as you're suggesting mark and dr. Cordain that that there there are gonna be individual variations and just because one person can tolerate it doesn't mean it's gonna be good for somebody else and certain people are gonna react to different different foods in them in the book I talked about Plinko which is that game on The Price is Right that has all these pins that stick up and you drop a disc and it goes down these pins and ends up in a dollar amount we all kind of have this individual genetic board Plinko board with different pins we all have different genetic susceptibilities I think to plant toxins and that's maybe you know a foreshadowing of why I might draw a plant toxicities picture spectrum a little more broadly than you guys would but I think we all have an Armour we all have an ability to sort of detoxify some plant toxins but not others and and we all have chinks in our armor and those are different places for different people and the immunologic variability are sort of individual genetic immunological prints based on these HLA and MHC multiple have has to be so compatibility complex haplotypes is is what determines what it looks like and this is what's so interesting for me when when Mark eats lectins it might cause eczema when somebody else eats another plant toxin it might cause autoimmune thyroid disease we all have this sort of individual genetic response for ultimately it's it's probably the same trigger it's some sort of immunological in the gut for many people it just looks differently for different people and that's why we see a spectrum of seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand other immune diseases which are probably all very similar in their route what you guys are doing what are the amazing things I found with wheat is the number of mechanisms it has to just dis regulate our immune system and like you said in each individual it's going to express differently and some people gluten is going to bind to a particular HLA and you're gonna end up with celiac but that's not the same for for other people the when you you mentioned before that some people go well it's not an issue because you cook it all out I actually say that the cooking is in some ways the worst things we can do because if you walk out into a wheat field and just take some raw wheat and you eat it you're gonna have a very unpleasant couple days and you will never do that again because you are gonna be very violently ill the issue that we have is but I mean raw bean if any of yes don't do this at home you got raw beans will kill you Klink yes but if but if you try and eat a raw bean if you ever see a bean on a vine that will you will be vomiting and diarrhea within the hours so the issue is we cook it and you yes it does get rid of a lot of electives but it's not making it harmless what it's doing is cooking out enough that you don't have that violent reaction and what you end up having is this dysregulated immune res
ponse that builds over time and leads to these diseases unfortunately we're very immediate people you eat something you throw up you go I'm not going to eat that again you eat something and you get heart disease ten years later you're not going to make the association or eczema two weeks later right that's what Sprott that's the problem I love that you said this mark that in order to really understand which foods are triggering us we have to go through extended periods 30 60 90 days of specific intentional eating in which were completely eliminating those foods in the book I call this a clean carnivore reset it's been called elimination diets in the past but we have to have periods we can't have a small amount of gluten you know because that's enough to trigger we can't have a small amount of beans it doesn't work like other things it's this is not a macronutrient based weight gain body composition equation where it's like I can have one chocolate chip it's like no your immune system is exquisitely sensitive you can't have one chocolate chip you know and that's not specifically the example I mean to use there but you can't have one you know being you know that's it that could be enough to trigger your immune system and that would confound the whole experiment people know what's going on I want to just jump in there a little bit what was interesting clinically I did find with some people they did sometimes appear to be a dose relationship like the lady with a mast she he's saying I could go to the movie theaters and my kids and I could have three pieces of popcorn but if I had five I was done so I I mean I would probably advise not to do any of it because it could could trigger but I have seen some cases where it does seem dose-related which might be counterintuitive yeah interesting so I think that we all are on the same page with the grains and the legumes and the dairy I've talked about dairy in the past I'm not a fan of dairy for a variety of reasons casein and whey are very triggering for a lot of people and I do think that this epidermal growth factor stuff is quite interesting I've seen some research that the dairy actually can contain igf-1 I think evolutionarily just doesn't make a whole lot of sense for most people to drink dairy and then the question becomes why are we doing that what nutrients are getting there it's it's kind of effectively flash up the picture that I use in the lecture and it has a someone sucking the teat of a cow yeah it's just yeah it's strange and of course there are there are pastoral cultures that use dairy but I think the vast majority people that I work with do much better without it so grains like weed and legumes and dairy we all agree on let's just move a little further on and we'll kind of inch toward carnivore and we can kind of talk about some of the concerns you guys might have here I'm I I kind of lump together all the seeds so I'm not convinced that nuts and seeds are much different than grains and legumes I think that nuts and seeds are are also likely to have lectins and are also likely to have digestive enzyme inhibitors certainly almonds and seeds like this are derived from ancestral fruits that have a lot of cyanogenic glycosides like apricot and stone fruits but I'm curious what you guys have you guys still think that seeds and nuts are okay or if any of that is evolved or I see them very similarly sort of from a phylogenetic perspective you know if you want I look at it from a perspective of the spectrum I mean obviously if someone's got an autoimmune disease we usually take out what would ordinarily be considered in the modern Paleo diet paleo food so Peppers could be Tomatoes sorry Tomatoes you know foods that you're okay with most people but typically with autoimmune patients you go hey nightshade you sort of want to take those out so obviously there are lectins in paleo foods it's whether they become problematic so I think the genetics complained to that I think it's a sliding scale to a certain extent and and I recently just did an article for the Paleo diet calm where I was kind of trying to make the case for being paleo and I said at the end of the day it does three things very well one it was very good from a control of insulin sensitivity to it provides lots of nutrients and three it doesn't provide a lot of anti nutrients so I think we're all sort of that that's the premise of what a good diet is and then I think that's where we then arguing the team who's playing on which positions so I think most of the when you talk about the seeds and the nuts I don't see them as problematic as say the wheat or the grains but yes I think for some individuals they could be problematic and then that scale would shift even more as we move to sort of vegetables and fruits and and so it becomes then a balance of getting the nutrients that the body needs versus eliminating the anti nutrients and the ability to tolerate anti nutrients and the ability frankly to tolerate not getting nutrients like how well can you do without then in the nutrients you need but ultimately those are the three things I look at insulin sensitivity getting good nutrients and not getting anti on you chips that can be problematic scale that's now arguing okay yeah it's funny because that's exactly the same equation that I use to think about a carnivore diet I just solve it a little differently you know it's like you're in calculus and you're like oh and I do this integral I get this we're doing the same equation it's just what I see on the other side of the equals sign is a little differently because I think a carnivore diet and we can talk about this I want to make sure we cover this is exactly that it's all the nutrients that humans need with essentially zero anti-nutrients and then there's room for adjustment in there and I think people we can talk about some point and counterpoint where you guys might have some issues there but let's let's move a little further down we talked about so now we've talked about nuts seeds grains and legumes you mentioned in the movie further done I actually want to throw a question at you because I say to that interview I did with dr. Douglas London yes your your listeners know this is a fantastic researcher is down in Ecuador right now studying one of the last remaining indigenous hunter-gatherer societies in the world and he's looking at their diet and in that interview saw where he completely agrees with us he says they actually avoid most vegetables particularly stems and leaves because of the anti nutrient content they won't eat those things unless they have to even though they're in the jungle those things are readily available what he found was this hunter-gatherer society made a lot of fruit ate a lot of meat and I was wondering what your response was to that no I thought it was so fascinating and that's that's essentially if we skip ahead that's essentially how I would draw the plant toxicity spectrum with an asterisk around fructose fructose and how we feel about about higher levels of fructose and so we can get into that but I definitely think that if we are looking at plants the least toxic part of plants at least from an anti nutrient perspective rather than a sugar molecule we don't if we just put fructose you know put fructose for glucose aside from an anti nutrient perspective the fruit of plants I think is is much less likely to have anti nutrients in fact usually has very few there are some fruits that are poisonous but very rarely and in the plant toxicity spectrum that I draw in the book which is called the carnivore code I'll have to get you guys a copy I I think of the non sweet fruits things like squash avocado olives and berries as the least toxic the least toxic plant foods and slightly you know moving a little bit further toward the toxicity sites the more sweet kind of hybridized sugary fruits are less desirable
but I would think of the non sweet fruits as as the least toxic plant foods based on individual sensitivities one one interesting anecdote I'll share quickly and then I'll throw it back to you guys is that that I did a couple of carbohydrate reintroduction experiments so I've been eating as strictly No - Te'o carnivore diet for the last year and a half plus and you know I was kind of I want to I always wanna be an experimenter and so I thought well let me introduce just one thing I'm introduced egg corn squash because I was curious you know as my gym performance gonna change am I gonna feel differently as my body confidence she's gonna change what's gonna happen and my eczema which was pretty severe prior to going carnivore came back within five days and I thought wow that's crazy like and of course there's just n of 1 and but it's me thinking acorn squash triggered eczema for me that was the reason that I went carnivore in the first place was that even on a pretty strict organic autoimmune Paleo diet my eczema persisted and so removing all plant foods was quite helpful for me in many ways that I've talked about a previous podcast but reintroducing squash triggered me a little bit so that's strange I cut it out the XML went back away so I think of those non sweet fruits and we don't traditionally think of avocado is a fruit but it is you know and squash is a fruit those non sweet fruits I would think of you know my hypothesis those are probably less toxic to humans so I think this is quite fascinating that this tribe there was the Huaorani and there was another tribe you sent me in that and those are the particular so the Huaorani and I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation here is kind of the broader tribe in particular I don't know sect or what I don't know how you would describe it a group he was working with was the cow amino and do you know what kind of fruit I would I love the details like I wonder what the fruit in the Amazon looks like you know it's it's equatorial so maybe it is a pretty juicy luscious type of fruit but one thing's he brought up is they eat a huge variety of fruit and he compared it to the Western diet where he said you you go to the supermarket and buy the fruit you have about 10 things to select from you said they had over 70 different fruits that they ate is that get out the year or at any one tab that's that's what's fascinating you said this is this is the rainforest these fruits are available all year round you can eat them at any time yeah but they would only eat particular fruits at particular times the year what also Trevor based on the he says they can literally sense the fight on nutrient records and they literally reject foods that they know yeah I have over 30 different words to describe the phytochemical taste of foods I was fascinating did you did he say anything about the macronutrient ratios like because it's if they're eating meat and fruit how much of their diet is from fruit do you have any sense of that you know I don't have it in front of me and I should have pulled it up before we came here I looked at the interview I didn't see it specifically yeah I mean he did say the by calorie the meat is the highest percentage but I think it was something along the lines of like by calorie or by energy meat was around 55% we actually have estimated that in hunter-gatherers you know 2,000 right here American Journal of Clinical Nutrition paper and it was broken it down I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head but 3 tends to be an item that hunter-gatherers like a lot and at least the contemporary studies of hunter-gatherers by ethnographers until you there's one South American fruit that most Americans eat daily and they don't know that they're eating it it's called cacao Theobroma right well the seed they don't right so what they do is that the fruit itself is allowed to rot and basically ferment and then what are left or that what are called the nibs and so we grind the nibs up and the nibs become cocoa powder which red chocolate from and that's an interesting story that I'm not going to go much further information will come in the future I do have your paper pulled up here and just to your points you brought up nuts and seeds dr. Cordain did an analysis of there's 229 hunter-gatherer societies and Liz all the plat for the it's an N of 768 they have 317 different types of fruits that were identified which accounts for 41.3% of the total plant food the hunter-gatherer societies eat nuts is 9.6% and seeds is 7.2 and leaves 3.6 percent so small really small yeah yeah so this is quite interesting and I've had this commerce conversation with a number of people recently that that leaves and stems are not really eaten by hunter-gatherer tribes and and that they are probably going to favor things like fruit and then the question we can talk about fructose and what we think about the physiology associated with that what's interesting about the 2000 paper and this is just a counterpoint that I'll offer is that I wonder how the the animal to plant ratios of hunter-gatherers may have changed with marginalization one of the things we know about current hunter-gatherer tribes is that they are shorter than their previous generations and that there are political norms now that prevent them from hunting big animals and so certainly in Africa we know that the the elephants are no longer hunted and now long now the elephants are destroying the BOA bob forest they'll go over and they'll just just destroy a boa Bob tree and so there's different changing landscapes because the indigenous people are not allowed to hunt giraffes and elephants megafauna so I wonder when I see these plant animal subsistence ratios of hunter-gatherers if we can really infer much of our history based on what we might have done I think it probably my suspicion is that it was different based on latitude and that equatorially we probably ate a lot of animals and fruit and then as we move northern climes we probably ate more animals but the ratios I think may be skewed or there's a potential the ratios could be skewed by current changes socio-political changes you know the hodza the akong these people they can't hunt the way they used to they can't be nomadic or they used to they're kind of coy stirred it's a different if it's different different way of living for them now and the megafauna have gone stinked you know in the last sixty thousand years we don't have a big woolly mammoth to go hunt so what I'm completely agree with you and I yeah just what I kind of throw in a little bit more detail about that study so we did regression analysis on the plant animal subsistence ratio and exactly as you predicted as you move in latitude what happened is plant food is replaced by more fish food animals food stays about the same but the problem with ethnic so actually a terrine here okay so um the problem with ethnographic studies is they're all subjective so somebody has got to go into the field right and make some sort of non objective impression of what they see so we were lucky enough after we did this paper we did another paper and I think we published it in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition where we rounded up the 13 objective studies of hunter-gatherer diets where they actually measured the content so sometimes what they would do is they'd make two portions of the meal and the scientists would get the other portion and then do the analysis so there's about 13 studies that have done that and we put them all together in this paper and they tend to agree with you know even though the sample size is fairly small they tended to degree agree with the larger ethnographic study which had 229 societies in it that the average hunter-gatherer diet contained more animal food than plant food and the ethnographic data if you use means it depends on the statistics that you use but came out to me about 55% animal 45% plant but
then you have to look at it those are estimates based on weight so you got to go back and do the caloric estimates so it's it's still kind of a tricky wicket I mean it's an imprecise way of doing things and there are very few people that now have access to these groups Doug London good Trevor mentioned is one of them and I've known Doug for a decade or so and he's one of the guys that has the knowledge to be able to look at what these people are eating and to be able to tell us what is it is not different and this is where I have to give a little plug for dr.

London because he's trying to get back down there to do more research and one of the things he wants to do is the analysis of this this diet and what's really important about the hunter-gatherer society he's studying us as you point out there's still a lots of hunter-gatherer societies out there but most of them are not eating and living the way they lived in a thousand years ago this is one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer society that still living words lived for millennia and is still eating the way it used to eat and that's why it's so important for him to get down there and do this research because there's a opportunity to study this is is disappearing it's fascinating and as you mentioned in that interview with him a highlight that he mentions that they they are pretty much free from chronic disease which is probably the most important part of this whole equation that that they that they're living in the Amazon they're uncontacted how cool is that and they don't have diabetes or high rates of cancer or other chronic diseases common in Western civilization I'll also mention I think it was maybe in the interview that you had or somewhere else I was reading they have like 90% of the population has been bitten by a poisonous snake yes it was like oh no wonder they don't have a life expectancy of 85 years old but so anytime somebody says those hunter-gatherers died when they're 35 it's like okay look like these are very complex these are confounded things they die of different things if they live to old age as I have talked about in multiple previous podcast generally speaking hunter-gatherer populations have what is called squaring of the morbidity curve where they do not suffer chronic illness which is why all four of us are even having this conversation because these are sort of the people we are trying to emulate in their escape from disease but they suffer different things they get bitten by pit vipers you guys like well I can I can tell you that as the damn well truth because my colleague Kim Hill he's a PhD anthropologist he was at Arizona State in his wife Magdalena Hurtado spent every summer for the last 25 years 30 years studying groups in South American jungle and he is a meticulous scientist and so he recorded the mortality rates from various causes and you're absolutely right in this one hunter-gatherer tribe the number one cause of death was snakebite and that that that is going to confound estimates of life expectancy all right so I wrote a so build I the science guy did that whole video talking about how horribly how horrible was for Paleolithic ancestors that they lived short lives on healthy lives and all this sort of stuff so I went and went through some of the anthropological research and actually one things I found was very fascinating is most what really brought down the the average age of death was childhood mortality yeah they showed that if you live past the age of 14 your life expectancy was basically the same as it is now exactly without chronic disease with squaring of the mortality curve exactly and the other thing I'll just mention about the hunter-gatherer plant-animal ratios is that it's so fascinating and I think I think Weston Price and a number of others have observed this that the amount of animals in the diet was really dependent on how much they could get it's like they ate as much as they could get if they could get if they could get more they ate more and it probably changed and I talked about this in the debate I had with Chris Master John that that I that there are there are instances recorded and again as you point out dr. Cordain the ethnography is so challenging if a tribe in Africa takes down a large animal like when they can get a buffalo or a water buffalo or whatever they're hunting you know if an elephant they will eat that exclusively for a week you know and it's in that case like if they have the meat available they may have periods where they are exclusively carnivorous and who knows so it's interesting for me that but the more meat they could get the more meat they ate and Weston Price also contrasts a couple of tribes the Mallory in the Kikuyu in Africa and notes that the Mallory were much more robust and ate many more animal foods than the Kikuyu and these are they're pretty much neighbors in in Africa and the Kikuyu were much more agrarian and we're not as robust and so I think we all agree that the more animal foods that hunter-gatherers can get the more they will eat and the generally the more in their diet the better they do now the the extreme end of that is this carnivore diet and I want to get into that but I just want to highlight a few things about fructose before we do that so I I hear this and I hear these hunter-gatherers eating all this fruit and then I see all this research and I think it's hard for me to make sense of all of it and I'll just highlight a couple of things here for people and I'll get your thoughts and then I want to make sure we have time to actually actually talk about some of this other stuff so I don't know if you guys have seen this paper I'll do a screen share here this one is interesting fructose you're a case and the back to Africa hypothesis if you guys are listening on iTunes or anywhere you can find this on YouTube basically what this paper is suggesting is that there was a mutation that occurred in our yura case gene which increased our serum levels of uric acid uric acid is very complex conversation but that that fructose in combination with uric acid acid may potentiate the storage of fat so uric acid has been found to potentiate the effect of fructose to increase fat stores suggesting that the mutation provided a survival advantage what's so interesting that they're suggesting here is that by getting this year a case mutation we may have been able to become fatter by eating fruit and that may have allowed us to survive harsh winters so the question for me then becomes if we are not calorie deficient does fruit serve a role in our diet does just do high fructose diets benefit humans the other paper I'll point out why did I do that let me try again here it's not to share and then I'll do one more see if we get this to work um this one works so this other paper is fascinating this is Robert Lustig who is no fan of fructose October the title yeah fructose it's alcohol without the buzz this is actually a great paper I'll just highlight a few things the hepatic glucose metabolism is pretty different than hepatic ethanol metabolism ethanol is alcohol essentially and that's also very different than hepatic fructose metabolism without getting too deep in the weeds here I'll just point out to the listener that there's a glute 5 transporter in the liver which essentially extracts all of the fructose from the circulation fructose is phosphorylated independently of insulin to fructose 1 phosphate by the enzyme fructose kinase and this is where the concerns I have arise biochemically and I guess we're still learning here and I'm not convinced that I have this figured out but the concern is that with fructose biochemistry different things happen ultimately leading to the act to de novo lipogenesis right so you get xylose 5 phosphate potent simulator of protein phosphorylation protein simulant stimulator of protein phosphatase 2a activates carbohydrate responsive element binding protein which
is CREB stimulating the activity of DeNoble i but genesis fructose also stimulates people are alpha cofactor 1 beta etc etc and then this is what's confusing to me that human studies demonstrate a rate of fractional de novo lipogenesis of 2 percent with glucose yet up to 10 percent after 6 days of high fructose feeding and it goes on to say I'm a recent human study demonstrated that fructose feeding increased fractional turnover lipogenesis to 17 percent so my point here is really just to I guess to share that there's I'm not I don't I think there's questions that remain for me about fructose over feeding and for the listener de novo lipogenesis is basically when we take carbohydrate and make it into fat and yes it can happen that this is sugar into fat it generally doesn't happen in extreme amounts but it appears to happen more avidly with fructose so I worry about these high diets because of eSATA thing when you talk about a Western diet yes that's what demonstrating even kids did you get any fatty liver disease because the other important thing to remember about fructose is it enters glycolysis right below phosphofructokinase which is the rate-limiting enzyme in that whole process so when you take in fructose your processes no matter what your your liver ends up with all this lactate or pyruvate depending on which theory you believe that's got to do something with and that's why it ramps up dnl because it's got to do something with all this end product of glycolysis and certainly on a Western diet where you're eating a lot of high fructose corn syrup that's a major issue and sorry Marc I interrupted you basically I sometimes smile of this because it's like most of the studies that I've seen they're using the amount of fructose that you can certainly get in a Western diet that you'd require to eat 16 apples to get the fructose Lavery's you studies show the negative effect like who can eat 16 apples that's the whole point in nature it's it's you know mostly fiber so if you yeah if you drink fruit juice yeah I would agree that can be problematic but if you eat an apple and drink a glass of water or even iron so clinically and as well as obviously you're going to look at the activity profile I'm a high intensity interval training guy even more so sprint interval training so all of my clients 12 to 16 20 minutes a week they're doing all-out 60-second Sprint's that changes insulin sensitivity does a lot of different things to the body and they're going on a paleo diet and but I've never limited fruit I've never limited any quantity of what I call animal you know free-range naturally fed animals fruits vegetables nuts and seeds have been my sort of template and I've never really limited and I the success rate is really really high particularly when we compare it to a Western diet obviously if we can improve I'm all open for it but I think the fruit thing I've just never seen an issue if they're eating fruit that's natural so even with the high glycemic things like you know the you know things like watermelon I mean it's got the same glycemic index is white bread but you think the watermelon is gonna be problematic I done ghost its yeah I think we need to know it's it's that's the question you know it's watermelon bad that's what everybody wants to know you know it's watermelon I paddled Harvick mark brought up something really important I think the glycemic index is a very valuable tool but it does have one flaw to it the way they determine the glycemic index of each food is to make you eat enough of that food depending on who's doing the measure to consume either 50 grams or a hundred grams of carbohydrates from that to here even skittles that's easy that's bag and you can test the glycemic index for a watermelon to consume 100 grams of carbohydrates pretty much after you know entire watermelon which nobody's going to do so one thing thought to Cordain actually taught me one the first classes I took with them is the concept of glycemic load sure which is looking at the impact of an actual serving size of the food and so when you look at the guys seem ik index of fruit as Mark said it's really high watermelons up there with white bread when you look at the glycemic load you see an entirely different story and fruits tend to be very long ago he seemed aglow that was why I asked about the the people in in you know in the Amazon how much fruit because my sense is that with fruit week still could get fat and if we ovary fruit we still could overwhelm the livers ability to practice process the fructose I think I think that the fiber in the fruit could affect satiety slightly but I think fructose is fructose and if we ingest you know upwards of thirty to forty grams of fructose a day I would be very concerned that that's going to have negative effects on the liver or the hepatic you know de novo lipogenesis etc I mean a dozen monkeys we see this in animals right and again humans are not bears humans are not monkeys but in primates they they will fatten themselves by just gorging themselves on fruit is it a dose-dependent effect and should we be making fruit a part of our diet does it have other things that really make it valuable or not yeah it is a dose-dependent effect and so I think the argument that Trevor addmarker making is that it's very difficult to get dosages that are physiologically meaningful so I I've spoken at conferences with Lustig and those folks and Jenny brand Miller who is Miss glycemic index she's a colleague so my feeling is that you know fruit for the most part unless you're you know completely blasting on high sugar fruit like Greeks or something is not problematic yeah yeah and the only other thing I'll say about fruit and the sugars is the dental stuff which always worries me when I was a raw vegan I got seven cavities within a few months that may have been some combination of soluble fat soluble nutrient deficiency as well but whenever whenever I eat fruit I can like feel it in my mouth and I have really healthy teeth now that I've been doing carnivore but when I eat fruit like I I would not eat a date right now because it would my teeth would hurt I would feel like something in my teeth ah that's completely subjective but you guys I just worry about the dental effects of all that sugar and I have a number of clients and colleagues who are dentists and we've talked a lot about the changing pH in the mouth and the acidification that happens in the mouth when we eat a lot of sugars specifically the simple sugars can change the acidity in the mouth and lead to tooth decay and I see tooth decay I mean this is Weston Price reincarnated you know Weston Price is smiling somewhere right now but you know one thing we'd have to you know concede to is the fruit that we eat today is probably quite different from crabapple versus a nice juicy apple where they have today so I think that probably where it's not difficult on a clinical level to look at someone and know how things aren't going in the direction we want it to we need a modifier for you a little bit so just like the genetic component who responds to let ins I think the same is going to be true of insulin sensitivity what kind of active they doing is the genetics in the history of the family history with what kind of exercise component is in there so I think that certainly is plausible that it could be problematic for certain people and not for others and I think as a clinician you just kind of go let's let's modify let's modify as needed yeah all right I want to make sure we cover this let's just jump into it what do you guys think of a carnivore diet and I don't know if you know how I do a carnivore diet its nose to tail I wrote a book about this you know I'm eating the whole animal it's like we're all in a tribe we're gonna take down an Impala or water buffalo respectfully and we're gonna eat this whole thi
ng nose to tail we're gonna get fat we're gonna get bones we're gonna get bone marrow we're gonna make some stock out of the bones we're gonna eat some of the small bones get calcium we're gonna get the liver and the organs for folate and all this stuff like what do you guys think about nose to tail carnivore maybe we can offer some point counterpoint here yeah I can go ahead and take that there's a phenomenon that my anthropology colleagues talk about and that concept is called rabbit starvation and it's a well-defined concepts that's been recorded time and again in the historic literature and so you know the guys Lewis and Clark and and many of these famous frontier men encountered it and so what how it works is that if you only have small animals to eat like rabbits or squirrels you die you can't you can't survive on that but that's just the fad right if we're if what if we're eating the fat from the animal we shouldn't get rabbit starvation I'm right but the point is is that fat if you measure it in terms of mass on an animal which is done constantly so you can measure fat mass on any animals you can do it chemically you can do it by electrically impede yuria dilution you can do in all kinds of ways and what we see is that fat scales linearly with body weight okay so the larger the animal the greater the fat percentage is so let's talk about that a little bit but so squirrels have about four percent body fat by weight and the balance is protein because mammals generally don't store carbohydrate sure the carbohydrate that is found in muscle deteriorate sure is metabolized through rigor mortis after the animal is killed so all any available carbohydrate and muscle is gone the liver contains about three to four percent glycogen by way and it does remain after the animal dies but three to four percent of you know if you have a 200-pound deer doesn't amount to very many grams of carbohydrate at all it's practically none right so basically the equation that you're looking at now is fat to protein ratio and in our 2002 paper we developed those cubic relationships and so what I did to develop those cubic relationships we took fat percent by weight and we plotted it against fat percent by energy and so I guess probably you could call that up and you can see it's an amazing powerful relationship we had to curve fit the relationship and it's a it's a cubic relationship and it has an R of 0.9 and r-squared of point nine nine and we use hundreds of samples so those are that's that's that's a powerful relationship that we see with nature yeah okay so it's and these are home carcass analysis so what we saw with at least white-tailed deer we had a range of whitetail deer I think this is the one you want me to share my screen here sure if you can let me see if I can figure out how to do this where's the button to share my screen oh there we are sheriff yes okay so sorry we're gonna you're going to see you open the the left here and on the right can you can you see this now yeah so there's the the three graphs of dr. Cordain talking about and there's actually one on the next page where we used all fish so this is just a sample of gear but we also have a sample of meat as well so these are you know unchangeable relationships this is a biological reality so if you look at the body fat percent by weight and then you plot it against protein by percent of energy that's this declining in the lower left hand corner that's this decline in cubic relationship and so you can see that at very low body fat percentages the protein content is extremely high sure as as body fat percentage gets greater and greater then the protein percent decreases now let's go over here to 15 let's go towards the end of the graph 15 percent maybe 17 percent you'll notice where that intersects the y-axis it intersects it at about 35 percent of energy sugar and so 35 percent of energy represents the the average maximal pearl protein ceiling that humans can ingest and so whether your readers know it or not is nitrogen is toxic and so we have to get rid of nitrogen by the liver synthesizing urea and the rate-limiting enzyme for the synthesis of urea is a compound called our jin.o succinate synthetase and that's why so with humans when we go down to low protein diets that enzyme is down regulated when we go to high protein diets that enzyme is up regulated and so we upregulation stops at about 35 maybe 40 percent max of calories and so when an animal has 15% body fat that is that is the size of an animal that you can eat the entire carcass on but okay so how do cats get around this cats are obligate carnivores and so they can eat all that meat that they want they can get around it because our general succinate synthase in cats is not up regulated it's constantly turned on so if they eat a ton of meat then they can metabolize it over the course of a 24 48 hour period whereas we can't and so what does that allow us that allows us we haven't worried about so if you look at this graph you can see then that 35% of protein energy and if you're only eating an animal diet then what what's left you have to eat that yes and so if you have to eat fat if you flip over to my ketogenic diet criticism ketogenic diet and you look at all sources of animal fat they're devoid of potassium magnesium folate and vitamin C yeah okay yeah sleek entailment yeah so that that's the point is that over the long haul and also calcium so it over the long haul this is not an ideal human diet I would not be the first to agree with you that it can be consumed seasonally but over the long haul it people don't do well on it and the best example we have is the Inuit and so my deceased colleague Stephane Lindenberg whose tremendous scientist actually analyzed the bones of virtually all studies that have been done with Inuit and by the time they're in their 50s they're all osteoporotic now they looked at four reasons and I looked at some of those studies I'd like to talk about the - yeah I had questions about those yet um well I set these to Trevor and March defines analysis so maybe it would be better if you read those first before I look at them I looked at them oh you saw Stefan's yeah yeah okay oh it probably at this point it you know the audience I think it it comes down to let's let's agree that obviously there would being periods of time where people hunter-gatherers would be an unaccountable diet we all agree with that so I think our position is and then so your counterpoint would come back and go okay you can do this long term because you get all the nutrients you need and we're going we think you're gonna be nutrient deficient at a certain point in time you know I've certainly seen some research with ketogenesis or going on a keto diet that you know obviously tremendous benefits with anti cancer epilepsy things like that but a long-term again could be nutrient deficiencies I've seen some hyperthyroidism criticism and things like that yeah I'm happy to answer all those I'm prepared to answer on this criticise yeah that's where the discussion yeah we're we're sort of diverging a little bit with we think that you would be nutrient deficient hmm not a problem so the nutrients which nutrients because I can I want to answer dr. cordain's criticism here Trevor do you mind pulling off the screen share yeah I just wanted to show this because I think this is the other side of it all this analysis of the 229 hunter-gatherer societies you didn't find one that was entirely dependent on animal food you also didn't find one that was entirely dependent on platitude there was a broad range but it was always a combination sure sure that's were shown as well and I was on the screen and like like we talked about it with latitude that may change as well that the that there are populations of people at higher latitudes who have higher amounts of animal foods in their diet so I
appreciate the concerns about nutrients but so the nutrients I heard dr. Cordain talk about were potassium calcium magnesium folate and vitamin C that are not found in animal fat I want to I want to talk about those specifically so calcium is quite easily obtained from animals that's in the bones I mean we can just you know if anyone's ever eaten like a wing or a small bone you can eat the calcium if everyone anyone's ever made bone broth with trabecular bone you can crunch on that so I don't see calcium deficiency as a problem on that I have to be able to start a fire to make bone broth and fire use in hunter-gatherers is maybe 70 thousand years at the max now that's fire production there that will okay so if you want to start a fire at will there's a specific way of doing it if you want a control fire you can get a lightning strike so that's traditionally how it was done but there is evidence from the and earth also showing that they lived in coal caves in the dead of winter because there weren't any fires to use to start the fire and the way hunter-gatherers make fire is with a tool called a hand drill and it's a very difficult process you and I or anybody here we couldn't do it the first time we tried it takes a little bit of skill so my point is is that fire hasn't always been with us and so you know what I mean you got a factor that him to be equation yeah yeah and I think that you know when we're eating bone marrow we're getting calcium as well you know there's always I think we can pretty clearly say that hunter-gatherers have been eating bone marrow for a long time and breaking bones and there's fragments of bones and bone marrow so let's let's go into that we can look at the nutrient content of bone marrow and you can look at the nutrient content of blood as well so yeah so if I don't know what nutritional software you use but you can use a nutritionist pro and nutritionist Pro contains about every database that is possibly imaginable and you know I'm not saying that in in that data now every time I've seen bone marrow talked about there's calcium and bone marrow and every time I've eaten bone marrow I'm eating little flecks of bone in the bone marrow so I think that humans getting getting how about something called how about if I call up because they I think and nutritionists brothers maybe six or eight different types of marrow and they're not showing high levels of calcium yeah I just know that on all the all the bone marrow supplements that I've ever taken they always list calcium and whenever I eat bones I'm getting bone meal with the bone you know and so that's where I think you know and and today I mean we can talk about what Neanderthals were doing but on a carnivore diet as I can constructed today I can get calcium quite easily magnesium is quite interesting I think that the main source that humans would have had from magnesium was water I don't think there's any adequate source of magnesium in in the plant kingdom especially not bioavailable magnesium at all so if we look at the oxalate and the phytic acid in plants I don't think any of the magnesium is very bioavailable in plant foods there's about a hundred grams of magnesium that's probably much more bioavailable per pound of meat I appreciate what you're saying about the fats protein ratios and I agree with you there that the human ceiling for protein intake is probably about 35% of our calories from me but 35% of our calories from meat can be a lot of meat for a human it can be you know one and a half two pounds of meat a day is easily within our bodies our livers ability to do urea synthesis and you know two pounds of meat a day is going to have 200 milligrams of magnesium that's that's exactly my point that's incredible entirely my point is if you are limited to 65% or more of your calories from fat then the muscle tissue has to make up the balance muscle tissue and organs and I think that's what's been forgotten is that liver is very high in folate as our egg yolks I mean kidney is very high in folate vitamin k2 I think when we if we only look at the muscle meat there are nutrient deficiencies like I'm talking about a contemporary diet composed of carnivorous foods and hunter-gatherers for you know the last two and a half million years eggs were a seasonal food so that's kind of yeah that's kind of out sure but they didn't need organs of animals of course they didn't know of course they right so I mean so like what folate deficiency isn't an issue if you're eating the organs of an animal nor is vitamin k2 or riboflavin or any you know no I'm saying that full weight is problematic if all you're eating is protein so if you yeah well not exclusively I think if you eat liver in even in the proportions that it's found in animals you'll you'll get you'll get a decent amount of folate especially if you eat it with things like kidney or heart or other organs which have different compositions of folate and muscle meat if you're only thinking about muscle meat yeah but and the same is true with vitamin C that that the liver of the heart the brain the spleen the thymus the pancreas these are all much more rich sources of vitamin C than the muscle meat and so I imagine I'm pretty sure ancestors would have eaten all of these contemporary hunter-gatherer is eat all of these and so many of the nutrient deficiencies I think go away quickly when we're thinking about eating nose-to-tail was interesting let's see you were actually just talking about this on the episode I was listening to on the way here this morning and you did bring also the fact that you have to be careful about how much liver you eat because there's a ton of toxicity factor well I think people wonder about vitamin A I think it's questionable but even I mean 2 ounces a day of liver is pretty safe and that's that's gonna have a robust amount of folate in it you know that's not a and then there's kidney mushy organs question I want to ask you about because this I found interesting you send this in the email yeah and this is an important one to us is the the sodium to potassium ratio sure yeah yeah so I think that um so what I would offer on this I'll offer a couple of studies on this one real quickly which will hopefully be interesting so there are a number of sort of nuances with the sodium potassium ratio the first one I'll just offer is this so this one is why is it bringing it to the front let's see if I can get it to go so the concerns I have about limiting sodium so on on the Paleo website I saw something that suggested that hunter-gatherer diets had an average of 700 milligrams of sodium per day which I thought that's that's pretty low and I suspect this is somewhere we will we will all disagree a little bit but let me see if I can get this one okay so low salt diet and insulin resistance this is a review paper from 2016 and it looks at multiple papers looking at various amounts of sodium now what we're talking about here is sodium intake rather than sodium chloride intake so this is a summary of 1 2 3 maybe 15 randomized control trials across over in parallel designs looking at various methods of insulin resistance usually it's you glycemic hyperinsulinemia clam or an insulin suppression test but or an OG TT and they're looking at various intakes of sodium and various durations 5 to 16 days and they're looking at insulin resistance and what you'll see here is that there's a pretty clear pattern that sodium intakes in in the realm of 700 milligrams a day are pretty clearly inducing high insulin resistance even rolled out these are norms X page next page chart down there so if you you dig don't you've just went past it so take a look at this chart what if you dig into this particular review but they point out is there's methodological issues with most of these studies over on the right that a they are a one-we
ek study giving very very low levels of sodium which is a shock to the system you look on the left here when you have a long-term study so more than four weeks you can actually see a low sodium diet improves insulin resistance likewise controlling the restriction so these over on the left or either sticking within the the what the recommendations for sodium so at the low end but not with going below that one gram per day mm-hmm and also long term all the ones on the right which show increases in insulin resistance for one week studies all those are shorter days they were shorter these ones on the left and in particular is ministry of food and drug safety which is the only controlled long-term study looking at both high salt and low salt consumption and that study showed pretty conclusively that low salt improved insulin resistance high salt increased insulin resistance so don't agree with you on that I do agree that if you suddenly dramatically reduce your sodium consumption you're gonna have an impact and it might be a short-term insulin resistance it also has a catabolic effect on the body but that's completely reversed after a couple weeks so actually if you read the conclusions of this review and they say the exact opposite of what you were just trying to show there's only it is that long-term low sodium consumption improves insulin resistance point out to you guys that the largest study ever done in hunter-gatherers was done it was published in 1975 by JD Neil and William Oliver and they went down into the Brazilian jungle and they looked at a group of people that they were and also and no salt culture they had absolutely zero assault and if you look at the aldosterone concentrations and sodium concentrations as well you can see that this these people reading virtually no salt and the estimated salt content and maybe you could send him that paper because I sent it to you guys yeah so if you look at that study they they examine five hundred and six people and the entire so virtually the entire tribe everybody was examined for blood pressure and if you look at it across actually blood pressure stays low throughout life it doesn't rise systolic blood pressure remains about 100 diastolic about 60 and it doesn't change over the course of life so what do we know about insulin resistance in blood pressure what happens to blood pressure with insulin resistance insulin resistance is highly associated with hypertension bingo so here you have a population over a course of the lifetime 6070 years they don't get any salt in their diet blood pressure remains low and then seven years later Neal and Oliver went back and they monitored insulin resistance in glucose levels and I'll let you read those papers and decide for yourself so have Trevor and any of those if you don't mind I'm going to quickly share my screens I do want to show you two other studies they're actually relevant to a lot of what we've been talking about these are those studies from for 2018 so this first one degree right in the title high salt intake causes leptin resistance and obesity and mice by stimulating and dodging this fructose production so you're saying you have concerns about fructose here's a study that actually shows that high-salt diet promotes fructose and I love this paragraph here cuz that goes back to those short the concern of those short-term studies this has in contrast to short-term studies long-term and this has been the purple here long-term intake of high-salt diet associated with increased frequencies of obesity insulin resistance non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome another study how high is the soap that's a sorry it's down to methods you can see I'd write all over this and I guess so they did they did multiple studies but it was a 1% hypertonic salt solution for you can see it over here on the left for 30 weeks and the mice 30 months that's a very long worsen hypertonic I'd have to I mean but they were seeing effects you can see over here on the right by week 13 what they actually initially saw was in the short run you saw a catabolic effect in the mice that they would get lighter then after three weeks you would see a reverse and the mice taking the salt solution would start getting shown showing signs of obesity that you wouldn't see in the other mice and then it would get quite dramatic by the 30 weeks it's fascinating study I recommend it's very a lot of details and I'd recommend reading the house I guess what I'm just wondering about here is is this is this even a reasonable amount of salt and take what was mice nicely they said it's not that extreme and I was one of the important things here another study is very interesting here again this one gets complicated what do they mean not that extreme I mean what is extremely convenient in what we would consider physiological levels before a human but what is a mouse is species-appropriate consumption of sodium but as we know yeah I mean that's I mean that you can't you can't compare apples to oranges there I mean do my seek out sodium in the wilderness you mice have the same sort of physiologic there's always actually human that's looking at nlrp3 which is elevated by Ross production so reactive oxygen species and it shows that but this dog does its mechanism or NLP 3 elevates il 1b which can lead to insulin resistance and what they looked at is combination of a high-salt diet in humans and then trying to counter that with potassium if you scroll down and you look in the affects results here potassium supplementation ameliorated salt loading and do Stockton's in distress and subjects you kind of see in their titles yes exactly is the active effects of salt loading an nlrp3 and thumbs up again fascinating study quite complex but I love right at the end their conclusion is potassium which is K is abundant in fresh fruits and vegetables there for a greater fresh fruit and vegetable consumption a reasonable salt restriction but again could protect against the occurrence of insulin resistance and CBD but potassium is also found in similar amounts gram per gram and animal meat animal medium animal meat has as much potassium gram for gram as fruits and vegetables that's that's that's a nutritional fact that you know you'll get 14 don't absolutely G we have a spreadsheet listing about a thousand naturally-occurring food and so Trevor maybe you can send him that spreadsheet this came out okay yeah so that that came from nutritionist Pro and seven or eight different day vases so you might want to take a look at that okay look at the what is the what is the content of sodium per 100 grams of mussel meat well scroll down we've got it right here so isn't that to be up there yeah um yeah does it go above that you're you're you're doing it for a hundred a hundred tab for a thousand calories they don't have a thousand calories right we could do it anyway but some what you can see is that the sodium or potassium to sodium ratio is what averages 5.3 yeah so so my I guess our point is is where does the salt come from what where does the sales come from where does the sodium come from if you eat real food it comes from you mean where does the sodium come from if you're eating real food as opposed to supplementing with like a sea salt or something like that well you to supplement with a sea salt you have to have technology well see this is interesting I've talked to other people about this that that there's pretty good evidence that animals move to mineral deposits that animals seek out salt but the animals consistently go to salt licks and the humans could have easily followed animal trails to salt licks and mineral licks when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail the animals were rabid for the salt from our sweat we would pee on the ground and there would be deer that would come straight out of the woods to lick the pee off the ground because they were so eager they were so in need of the sodium I mean I think that I don't
think any other say I think we're on the same page here we have five basic flavors or that we perceive salty sweet sour bitter umami okay and so all of those have survival values or they're built into our nervous system through evolution is a predilection for these foods or avoidance of these foods so the bitter foods we avoid the sweet and salty foods we seek out as we do the you mommy flavored foods so there's no doubt salt is very rare in a terrestrial environment tell me where you're gonna find salt in a terrestrial environment it just doesn't exist and that's why the potassium sodium ratio in thousand foods here is is you always get more potassium than you do sodium welcome here you go to your question about craving I think this is something that's misinterpreted remember we evolved in a in scarcity so will we crave something we don't crave it because it's in abundance and we eat it every day we crave it because it's actually quite rare and we evolved to if we encounter it to make sure we eat it because we might not encounter again and they've shown that our desire for salt is one of our strongest desires which is an indicator that it's actually rarer to find it I don't know that I'd agree with that I would say that's probably an indication that it's a critical nutrient in human physical nutrient so you have a craving for we're talking about human physiology you're familiar with the sodium potassium ATPase pump right sure so there's four there's four major or six major ions that we as all vertebrates have to deal with calcium and magnesium sodium and potassium and hydrogen ions either acid or base so those are the main the six major ions that our body has to regulate and so those ion ions have been regulated from the very beginnings of life on Earth 2.6 2.7 billion years ago those cellular mechanisms in the membrane were already in place so I guess the question comes up is if you look at those mechanisms why does the sodium potassium ATPase pump blow out sodium and take in potassium similarly if you look at the calcium to magnesium ratio it takes in magnesium and blows out calcium so the typical cell whether it's a human a reptile a fish or whatever contains very tightly regulated amounts these six ions and so when you look at the hydrogen ion concentration acid based it tends to have more base than acid and when those ions get out of whack as they do in cancer and heart disease then we have a lot of problems and one of the ways in which they get out of whack is by a high-salt diet what would be considered a moderate salt diet in a typical Western diet and what that does is sodium impairs that sodium potassium ATPase pump and over the course of decades in a lifetime it allows more sodium intracellularly and less potassium so this information is just relatively recently known because of the way in which you have to measure intracellular so do you have to develop specific NMR probes to do it without going in and screwing up what those ratios are and this is tits Easwar TI t ze and it's just it's fascinating and we'll send you some paper to look yeah i'm not sure i i'm not sure i agree with how that so in those papers that you were showing trevor you were talking about the potassium and I think that there's this I'm not aware I think that there i've never seen any good evidence that there's an absolute requirement for a certain sodium potassium ratio i think that there's probably a need for potassium in the human diet i think most would agree there's a need for potassium in human diet but i don't think that the ratio I think the ratio has been widely misinterpreted by many people and as you point out in those papers I think that a lot of what gets skewed in these people is that when they are doing lower salt diets they are probably potassium deficiency in that study that I showed looking at the many low salt verses higher salt diet studies what we don't know unfortunately without looking at individual studies is any individual subjects insulin resistance how much of that sodium they're holding on to and what their baseline potassium level is my premise is actually ever here you showed us point out the exactly that fact that there is an issue of all those studies that they looking at salt sensitivity and individuals they weren't looking at whether they were already they had high blood pressure whether they were insulin resistant already and they said actually it was very good control and all these stuffs it's challenging but III think that I am not convinced that in the in the setting of adequate potassium which I think a meat-based diet would provide because meat is so rich in potassium but higher amounts of salt or in any way shape or form detrimental to the human body I mean we can manage it we can exclude it I would love to see some of this research suggesting that higher sodium breaks the sodium potassium ATPase I've never seen that I think it's pretty clear that if we go too low on sodium we are going to develop insulin resistance now where we draw that line is questionable I've seen it I've not seen the I've send you a lot of studies showing that I salt diets are associated with insulin resistance the only studies that I have found as ones you just pointed out sure sodium you said those are all weak those are all one weak studies you said did you send me epidemiology studies that no I say the ones that the ones I just showed you those are in my rice those are in mice no one was human how about the human studies how do you explain that the yanomamö people 500 people were studying for blood pressure over the course of a lifetime cross-sectionally and blood pressure doesn't rise so how do they how many become insulin resistance if low salt on a no salt culture causes low blood pressure over the course of the lifetime in five hundred people how many how much salt were they getting per day um I think it was around less than a hundred grams 100 milligrams right yeah our milligrams yeah that's that to me is I'd have to see the study that to me it's gonna pull it off and depends it to them no it's not far-fetched a hundred milligrams of sodium is essentially that's that's an I don't have that one available I'm looking right at that you want a human study it says right on the last page this Korean study is one the only long-term properly controlled studies with a hundred and twenty subjects and it shows that low sodium diet improves in swimmers who are potassium deficient people who are in people who are insulin resistant baseline I sent you that one on the email this morning the sodium weeds were in the sodium weeds were about sodium have to do is get to the point of us we've kind of reached that point of disagreement we need to sort of summarize a disagreement and come back with maybe some written blog together yeah you know mark do you have blood work do you know your fasting insulin level this one right there I haven't done it in a while to Rome would you so culture was that yeah that's the one yeah maybe hear us okay so here's the paper you want me to share this sure getting good at zoom here this is my first apologize about the video that was a last minute thing but yeah here's the here's the paper okay 1010 milli equivalents of sodium tell me that's not low what is that that's in their diet yes I'd have to do the comp I'd have to do the equation what is ten milli equivalents of sodium how many milligrams a day is that basically place for brief periods on ten milli equivalents of sodium diets brief be read the paper okay okay well well how about if we go down to the tables that show it shows aldosterone it shows okay there's the blood pressure yeah and there's a blood pressure this is 506 people right okay I guess we're okay so they were sewing over there did they measure a fasting insulin um yes but in another paper what was their fasting insulin on I don't have that on th
e top of my head but we'll send you the second paper okay well said they say look I I think mark at the good point you know we we have so far you know first 70 minutes here we're all on the same page here and I think the other thing around the page is watching the ridiculous movie like game-changers know they take somebody who's on a nothing but fast-food diet have need something crazy and then show them this blood is hazy and say look how bad a meat-based diet is for you I think you know we do have to step back here and go you know we're getting into the weeds here but there's a whole lot of places that learn agreement here yeah I've asked you about this a little bit before the podcast Trevor do you have a fasting insulin I know Mark said he doesn't have a fasting insulin level from his blood work you know I have had mine a while ago to remember I'm a competitive cyclist I still race with the the pros and again this is an N of one but I can tell you my my insulin sensitivity is quite good do you know it how do you measure that I mean I don't I tried looking forward I don't really keep that stuff because I get frustrated with my doctors when they try to tell me about my diet but you know the last time I had a measured it was quite good and just again the end of one this is never something I would try to publish I can tell you if I grabbed a bag of Skittles and eat it I feel like I was having a heart attack I show all the signs that you would expect to see if somebody is who's highly incident insulin sensitive right right I guess it's just yeah whenever I ask people about their fasting insulin they may say oh it's really good and what's the number cuz here's my concern that that you know I think that a lot of the problem with insulin resistance is hyperinsulinemia I don't think it's glucose refusal at the level of the muscle that happens physiologically with low carbohydrate diets I don't know I think that it's hyperinsulinemia that is driving a lot of the problems with insulin resistance then potentially causing you know smooth muscle hyperplasia and the artery walls and etcetera etc we I think that we we know that postprandial glucose spikes can affect like the calyx at the level of the blood vessels and I wonder if that has to do with postprandial insulin spikes as well and so I'm getting more and more interested in insulin levels and so I see that as a pretty cut-and-dry arbiter and I would love to see those numbers on someone with such low salt intake you know most of the time on on carnivore diets we see fasting insulin levels of two or three and I personally would consider something about four or five to be abnormal and so you know if I don't know this to be the case but I would be curious you know if if you're eating a diet with 500 milligrams of sodium per day and your fasting insulin is eight or nine I would say hmm we can make an argument I don't know that's what your number is because we don't have the numbers but that's my concern is that fasting insulin is going to have to work very hard to conserve all of that sodium and and that could have problematic consequences down the line I don't think we want fasting insulin to be eight or nine on a low salt diet and if we increase your salt and your fasting insulin went down we can make an argument that your body is saying ah thank you for a little bit of sodium I think that a lot of the research that looks at higher sodium diets and insulin resistance is is epidemiology it's not interventional I've never seen an interventional trial that shows that in a population that is potassium that is getting adequate amounts of potassium I think that there so I just showed you the one I'll dig up some others and send them to you again going back to your nf1 I'll give you a completely another way of kind of beating around the bush here but the one thing I have been doing with a lab saw my other horn is the sports world I do a podcast on endurance sports science and I've worked with a lab called Cu sports and we've been analyzing my my muscle glycogen and I just I get them to shake their heads because mine is just always replete their weekly we even did a fasting when out did a couple hour ride came back and you barely seen any drop in my my muscle glycogen and so certainly if I was I would assume I was extremely influenced that's not what you would see you why would I guess I I'm not sure that's a great surrogate marker for that I guess like I said I don't have the blood test my insulin right five six hours I guess what I'm suggesting is is they're subclinical hyperendemic here that the body is kind of just holding on to sodium like crazy and other things that's my concern with these low sodium diets I think that they're probably probably what would you consider a low sodium diet um I would probably say anything below 2,000 to 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day paper the Tony Sebastian and I rode in 2017 so we'll send that paper to you as well Tony Sebastian is a nephrologist he spent his entire career looking at the sodium-potassium blood pressure blah blah blah blah he's got a colleague you've probably heard of her Linda for said oh Linda first eddo has done some of the few randomized controlled trials of contemporary hunter-gatherer diets and so mark has a list of all 50 studies that have been published and he told me that there's not a single study on carnivore diets in the medical literature but we have now 40 or 50 studies of paleo diets there's definitely two studies of a carnivore diet in the medical literature there was one done at Harvard looking at the gut microbiome and there was one done at Bellevue Hospital a number of years ago looking at film or Steffensen who lived with the Eskimo in the Inuit and I'd love to see those if you can tell them it was a quick just say literary review I just want to PubMed just out of interest just to see what was published and I didn't see any can come out but my you know I didn't exactly I wouldn't want to lay my my research capabilities on just that little brief appearance yeah and there are numerous published case reports as well and yeah things like this so yeah we want to try to do here like I've always said many times the the discussions get confusing for the listener right you move on to another area without the disagreement of hand being solved so I think we you know we had this agreement sort of conversation them if I were to summarize I think from the audience we go where we disagree where are we starting to argue and and that's where we then I think need to focus and come back maybe another time and rather than just throw at it with you haven't had a chance to read yet and and we you might have us we go okay what are the things that we're really challenging ourselves here and it sounds to me that you're going you don't think the ratio of sodium potassium is as important that we perhaps do so that might be point one that we don't go back to our camps and go okay but let's bring some ammunition back to the argument later with that I think perhaps I don't know whether well you certainly stated what you consider low sodium would probably be where we would be if you ever said you know much much lower than perhaps we would do I think we've done with the analysis of what unless you go to the Salt Lick our data shows that you can't get to the levels that perhaps you're suggesting so that's another area we could go back and bring that that those ammunition back to the discussion sure what else did we well I don't know what you guys I was trying to make some points about the the nutrients and then we kind of got off track on the sodium my feeling is that a carnivore diet is not nutrient deficient in any nutrients I think we were specifically focused on sodium we weren't saying a carnivore diet was deficient in sodium but we got off on the sodium rabbit-hole but yeah this is actually more of
a question for you because as you were still talking about if you eat nose-to-tail and you're eating the brain you're eating everything else and in fact you know when you look at hunter-gatherers when they would kill an animal the the brain and the heart you know these organs that obviously would have seen these nutrients were kind of sacred and the person that did the kill will often get given that so how much is available I've perhaps you've got the research on that when you talk about the nutrients in the uncertainty there's no question I think we would agree certain times of the year you're going to be a carnivore right we all agree on that so your argument is you can do it long-term we're saying hey we don't think we do it long-term to the point of the the organs and the brain being available with nutrients have you done a data analysis a whole tribe is there enough to go around there's plenty of meat and fat but is there enough of those organs and that would be an interesting area to look at because then I guess if there was plenty to go around you might win the argument if if there isn't enough to go around we might go hey you need a supplement with fruits and vegetables to get it right I think it depends on the size of the animal that you're hunting and that goes back to the points about contemporary hunter-gatherers being limited by marginalization and political socio-political norms and you know mass animal extinction I think if you're hunting woolly mammoths there's enough to go around you know if you're hunting Buffalo there's enough to go around I mean a liver and a buffalo is 12 pounds you know you know liver and a spleen and a heart I mean you've got 40 50 pounds of organ meat in a buffalo look at it as a percentage you know I mean I'm good yeah just just just to give a finite view you know it's 12 pounds but how many how many people are in the tribe but who knows how many are in the truck how many Buffalo are there there were 100 Millions you know and then the questions get to become you know what is doable today you know can i construct the carnivore diet today from white oak pastures about campo and not get nutrient efficient and can I create a diet today that that allows me to have the maximum amount of nutrients without any plant toxins because we didn't we didn't also get into a lot of the plant toxins that might be included on a traditional Paleolithic diet like oxalates you know I mean there are a lot of high oxalate foods that people might eat that so again and then you know I have some pretty distinct views on on many polyphenols like resveratrol and curcumin and I don't think that they're necessary for humans I think they're actually probably pretty damaging so if you guys are familiar with my work you know you can read about that but you know I think that there's you know a carnivore diet eliminates all plant foods there's there's no need to get any of these plain iodine nutrients at all if I can construct it in a way that has all the nutrients I need or be very discerning about the parents that I do eat from a different perspective so okay so once again you know I always like to let the data speak for itself and try to you know downplay charismatic individual scientists what-have-you but I think that if you were to take the diet that you recommend on a daily basis and just lay it out for us tell us how much of this meat how much of that which organ here we're talking that and then once let's run it through nutritionists Pro that's what I did with the ketogenic so it's it's pretty much being done no I mean can you send that to him yeah I mean I can pull it up for you right now there was a guy I think of his name he on he has a whole nutritional analysis and he did a nutritional analysis of my diet and it was like there's you can get everything you need on inositol card no wait a minute if some guy did it for you I'm talking about you doing it yourself it was it was a well-respected guy in the community I'm thinking I blanking on his name but he has a program that he uses he coaches people with this and he ran it through the whole thing I mean we can do it you know yeah well so so we did two and I published this paper at research gate dotnet okay it's not a you know it's not a juried website yeah it's right so we did this analysis of the typical ketogenic diet in which limits carbohydrate right right but I have my thing else let me just pause you there because I don't eat a typical ketogenic diet let me screen share I'll screen share this if you do so this is Marty Kendall right so he has this optimizing nutrition and he did a whole post on this and you know you can see it here and I don't need exactly what was on here I changed some things and some of the things he estimated were incorrect but you know you can look at the chronometer nutrient profile of what I was getting in a day and you can see here all the B vitamins you know vitamin C okay there's only four nutrients five that you have to worry about potassium magnesium there we have the potassium which is potassium fantastic waitwait percent of the RDA but there's no RDA for potassium there's never been an RDA for potassium so you know we believe there the ratio is very important we can we definitely love to have that conversation whether the ratio right now and that is why we so we would look at this and say that's a three to one sodium definitely they're actually contending values for as in and we reported those who Jared paper Sebastian yeah so I mean obviously this k2 is wrong look this is look at look at magnesium where's that magnesium is 101 percent so 422 milligrams of magnesium a day manganese is low because I software what softer was this misuse he uses I think he uses I mean you can look at this post its Martin I can you have to I don't care about that's anecdotal what soft word was he using I think he used chronometer I don't know what chronometer is right so if you have the actual the the what the the meal was what the menu was yeah yeah go through me and Rosie have you sent that to us we put in a nutritionist Pro answer yeah okay I'm very interested to do yeah so that's all here there's like a good point to focus on is are we even arguing about the same thing like so you know and then we might be coming back to should people not be using this software I don't know well I think that the main thing that we disagree on is the sodium potassium ratio because I think it's pretty easy to demonstrate that you can get plenty of magnesium on a carnivore diet I think most of the magnesium is from spring water anyway you can get plenty of folate you can get plenty of riboflavin you get plenty of B vitamins you can get these things you can get potassium we disagree about the sodium to potassium ratio yes that's probably the biggest nuance that we're gonna disagree on I don't I don't I don't think discussions regarding ketogenic diets are relevant because everyone is going to construct them differently and a lot of medical kyojin ik diets are very high in fat with a four to one ratio and if you're eating an adequate amount of protein and organ meats you can get many of these nutrients we can go down the vitamin c rabbit hole if you want but i've done that many times before and I think the interventional studies are pretty weak and showing that any you know that large amounts of vitamin C are beneficial for humans that humans need large amounts of vitamin C the question I have for you then obviously let's I'm a big fan of as much as looking at the literature there is you know yeah down on the where the rubber meets the road you're in there in the trenches I've done it with the Paleo diet for 30 years and had great results you're obviously arguing you're getting great results and you're doing the blood work and you're happy with the blood work that's coming out what's the time
length that you've you've had people do your diet well I mean there's people in the community that have been doing it for 20 years you know and then how much how much of that is pure accountable versus frying in some fruit I think there are people in the community of been doing it for 20 years pure carnivore how about a contemporary study a randomized controlled trial crossover with an adequate sample size let's say 30 to 60 people and doing the blood work up doing the nutritional analysis and then publishing it so so you know I challenge I challenge people I challenge people in the late eighties to do a Paleo diet and now we have about 50 studies I don't know if they're all randomized controlled crossovers but a few of them are and these diets you know are very therapeutic yeah and we're planning to do studies it's just you know they take time they take time and money so we one thing we have in common is we we've been where you are right now right I think they take time and money to do and you know first of all we're trying to tell you well this isn't absurd you know that that people were hunter-gatherers and so I think when we think about this and then I'll wrap it up I want to respect your time and I appreciate you guys being so generous with your time you know one thing that we agreed upon was that people were carnivore for some amount of time and the question becomes are they slowly developing nutrient deficiencies are they slowly getting ill or are they doing just fine and then not being able to hunt the animals as much is it sustainable to eat and entirely or virtually entirely in oil based diet and these are the sort of interesting conversations I mean there's there's now thousands of anecdotes of people who in resolving autoimmune disease and I think that the key here the only reason we're asking these questions is that a lot of people like myself don't resolve eczema we don't resolve autoimmunity on Paleolithic diets that still include some plant foods and so we say well can a human survive on only animal foods and there's some pretty compelling suggestion and literature to suggest that it's possible and doable and can lead to quite good health I mean if you look at people in the community they're doing really well and the blood work that I've done is extensive and looks fine you know yeah I don't remember this on my head it's not I I have measured it yeah well there's a bunch of susceptibility haplotypes for autoimmunity and they fit into about twelve categories that prayer I can't remember yeah so that would be interesting if you're bringing up anecdotal end of one's and be interesting to see what your HLA haplotype yeah if some people that's into in the into one of those known susceptibility haplotypes yeah I think it's possible yeah and sometimes more sensitive than others dr.

Sal Davis is ever getting close to the end of our time here I just what I was getting out when I brought the game-changers before is if we were debating with them and they brought that that silly blood study to we wouldn't have gotten into a passionate conversation at all Minnesota says there's nothing scientific about that I know we got a little passionate here but I just want to say that's because this is really interesting and you clearly are very well-read and would love to continue having some of these conversations they're learning because they're just they're really interesting conversations they're super interesting conversations and I think the sodium stuff is at the center of it because we're all trying to figure it out I do think that and maybe we can do a part two at some point in the future I'd love to get into more of the the ketogenic stuff because and I'll just tease this for the audience and we can table this for next time but I suspect that the majority of the time free-living humans would have been in ketosis and so I wasn't sure whether you guys had problems with ketogenic diets as they were constructed or ketosis as human physiology because ketogenic human physiology as far as I can tell is probably the norm for humans rather than a carbohydrate based metabolism but we may have to table that for another day yeah do you promise and we do this again I will figure out this camera thing I bought this camera on the way here and I just notice I think my face is entirely black it sorry I can't see my face about that we did we do what we could and I appreciate you guys coming on so where can people find more of the work from from you guys well so we do have a website it's the Paleo diet comm and that's in the middle we are tossing out what we have right now and in April we're launching a brand new website it's got most the dr. cordain's writings from the last ten years so the one you wrote about the keto diet salt that all of that is up there dr. Cordain is on ResearchGate so anybody has access to that he's been putting a lot up there that's all those are the whole of my publications are available you should be there's over a hundred do we lose you know I'm here okay sorry that where is that where we can find you guys okay awesome and then the last question I always ask my guests is what is the most radical what is the most radical thing that you have done recently oh boy I'm not sure you want my answer to that of course I want your answer to that well do you mark do you want to go first dr. Cordain or do you want me to tell mine so as I said I still race in the pro peloton from time to time so I was in a race down in Trinidad and Tobago and it's a fun race but it's a really dangerous race and I was trying to catch back up to the lead riders so there's a group of cars behind the peloton that I was weaving through so I had to go into the other lane of traffic and the road was supposed to be closed coming downhill in the rain and a car came the other way I tried to swerve crashed hit the ground fracture my hip I was sliding headfirst towards this car got up on my elbows and basically slammed my back into the car then some of the cars from the race stopped they picked me up they put me inside a car and then one of the guys went to check out my bike and started fixing it and all that went through my head was boys fixing my bikes good I guess I need to keep racing so I got out of the car when they broken hill got back on the bike and raced another two and a half hours that's that's intense that's pretty radical we know the worst part of it is 10 kilometers from the finish I got a flat tire no vehicles had any spare wheels left so after doing that I still had to abandon the race oh that's brutal oh my goodness well I should let you go first because I don't want to say sure you wanted me to go first well I mean the problem I have is I was a competitive rugby player but I that was in my past so I I think the most radical thing I've probably done recently is a eat a pizza or something like that wheat pizza why would you do that dr. Cordain anything radical from you I'll be 70 in October that retirement community have been retiring since 2013 and the most radical thing I've done in the last two-and-a-half months and Trevor can attest to this is we moved into our retirement home as the beautiful home where is it where do you live now I live in Fort Collins we just moved from one side of town to the other we lived in a great big house we'll raised all those few things and now move into a much smaller house but it's right on the edge of town and we've got wildlife we have mountain lions bobcats fox deer everything in a battle yard I love it that sounds amazing yeah that's that's pretty radical all right well thank you so much for coming on guys I appreciate you all and I look forward to our next conversation I hope so I got to say I think I'm speaking for all of us I think this is one of the more engaging conversations we've had in a while so thank you yeah thank you a
ll right you guys thanks for listening I hope you enjoyed that one like I said lots of stuff in that one from a few months ago still learning changing my ideas not on salt listen to the show notes look at the show notes if you want tons of data about salt and how important it is for insulin sensitivity and good blood pressure and all that stuff but if you have questions about fructose stay tuned I'm going to be posting a lot about that in the near future and I will do a whole podcasts on that hopefully in the next week or so so that is super exciting sign up for my newsletter at carnivore and decom you can go to the carnivore code book com to pre-order my book thank you for the support ebook print and audio are available I recorded it in my voice and believe me for the audio book I recorded it a little more slowly I tend to talk real fast cuz I get excited but the audio book is really high production totally professional production and it's in yours truly of this voice that you all know and love maybe I hope thank you anyway I'm loved in Austin meeting some awesome people here checking out an environmental hormesis cold plunge in saunas swimming in lakes and rivers getting sunlight exercise and this is what it's about we don't need plant or medics we got an environment or me sis you guys so check out the ocean lab if you are in Austin I so hope that Kido Kahn next year will be here or that I will meet you all give you high-fives and hugs and carnivore fist bumps and elbow bumps or leg bumps or whatever we're going to do in person because I miss my people I miss my tribe if you want to be a part of my tribe go to carnivore nd sign up for that newsletter I promise it will bring a value to your life I will do my best to fulfill that promise anyway thanks for your support guys please leave this podcast a review on iTunes it is now over 800 reviews with a five-star average we are crushing it thanks for leaving a review for my book on Amazon if you've read it over 520 reviews 5 star average I'm just so honored that I get to do this work and you guys find value in it so thank you so much and stay radical and I cannot wait to talk to you next week you .

Video Description:

The second edition of The Carnivore Code (new cover and index!) is available for pre-order now! www.Thecarnivorecodebook.com release date is August 4th, 2020 in ebook, print, and audiobook formats.
Dr. Cordain is a Professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. His research emphasis over the past 15 years has focused upon the evolutionary and anthropological basis for diet, health, and well being in modern humans. Currently, Dr. Cordain's research team is exploring the connection between dietary elements that increase intestinal permeability (primarily saponins and lectins) and autoimmune disease, particularly multiple sclerosis. He has lectured extensively on the "Paleolithic Nutrition" concept worldwide and has written three popular books (The Paleo Diet, John Wiley & Sons; The Paleo Diet for Athletes, Rodale Press; The Dietary Cure for Acne) summarizing his research findings.
Time Stamps:
10:48 Start of the podcast.
19:18 Paul’s nutrition journey
19:58 Do plant foods trigger inflammation?
24:48 Plants don't want to be eaten.
30:23 WGA
32:39 Lectins.
36:28 Lectins and autoimmunity
37:58 Genetic susceptibility to plant toxins.
43:33 Nuts and Seeds.
46:38 Diet of hunter gatherers.
1:00:48 Did our Paleolithic ancestors live short lives?
1:02:54 Fructose consumption.
1:13:38 Thoughts on a carnivore diet.
1:23:48 Is there risk of nutrient deficiencies on a Carnivore Diet?
1:30:18 Sodium to Potassium ratio.
1:40:48 Do animals seek out salt?
1:51:38 Trevor’s fasting insulin levels.
1:56:48 Are there carnivore diet studies in the medical literature?
1:58:58 Are there nutrient deficiencies on a carnivore diet? (continued)
2:01:38 Other plant toxins.
2:03:52 Optimizing a carnivore diet.
2:11:48 Where to find Dr.Cordain, Mark, and Trevor’s work online.
2:12:38 The most radical thing they have done recently.
References:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.20266
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23493539/#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20the%20only%20distinction%20is,%22alcohol%20without%20the%20buzz.%22
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4731857/#:~:text=For%20instance%2C%20the%20studies%20which,increase%20insulin%20resistance%20%5B2%5D.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29507217/#:~:text=Here%20we%20show%20that%20high,insulin%20resistance%2C%20and%20fatty%20liver.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29359681/#:~:text=%3A%2010.1017%2FS0007114517002926.-,Involvement%20of%20NLRP3%20inflammasome%20in%20the%20impacts%20of%20sodium%20and,insulin%20resistance%20in%20normotensive%20Asians.&text=Salt%2C%20promoting%20oxidative%20stress%2C%20contributes,oxidative%20stress%2C%20improves%20insulin%20sensitivity.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1132118/
https://optimisingnutrition.com/optimising-paul-saladino-mds-nose-to-tail-carnivore-diet/
Low Salt Intake and Insulin Sensitivity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10371376
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10371376 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=iwaoka+glucose+salt https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7997846
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3050268
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8487006
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21036373
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7826551
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1676891
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1921252
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25185125
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1921253
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9752889
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12691602
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17425514
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17425514
Nutrisense (Continuous Glucose Monitor- CGM): www.Nutrisense.io, use the code CarnivoreMD for 20$ off.
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November 16, 2020 Tags : iMovie , Paleo Diet , Video

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