Bioavailability of Food; You Are NOT Getting the Protein You Think You Are From Plants!

hello and welcome to the how to carnivore podcast i'm your host simon lewis and you're tuning in to the plant-free md series with dr anthony chafee dr chafee is a surgeon nutritional researcher and former pro-rugby player he's been strict carnivore for three years and an on and off carnival for more than 20. dr chafee looks and feels like a real life superhero if losing fat building muscle finding focus and getting the most out of life is important to you you're going to love the plant free md series hey everyone simon lewis here with the how to carnivore podcast youtube series and we're back with anthony chafee md and today's topic is bioavailability of nutrients so uh you've probably seen on instagram and other platforms where people have compared say spinach with a steak and they've listed how many nutrients are actually in each and it's really eye-opening to see how much easier it is to get key nutrients from animal products versus plant and vegetable products we're going to dive into that a little deeper today but first of all welcome anthony yeah thank you very much good to see you yeah good to see you too matt so uh i'm guessing you're not tucking into any p protein no no yeah well i mean that was the that was a whole agenda of things like uh game changers you know they tried to make this scientifically looking uh you know presentation uh that they tried to pass off as a documentary uh basically talking about how how great plant nutrition was how toxic meat was but of course you still need still need protein right and so what are you going to do well we have this very conveniently we have this pea protein supplement right here who's the main producer uh you know james cameron just happens to own 140 million dollars worth what a coincidence yeah it's it's so nice that you just had it right there for you just don't you don't have to go anywhere it's just it's all set up yeah that's that's the thing you know um you know think about this this way we we put these these plants and and plant materials through so much rigorous uh you know extraction and processes it's like a chemistry experiment or industrial uh sort of a process to just to extract these nutrients out of them if we were designed to do that if that was so good for us our body would be able to do that just naturally you know a cow can do that with grass we can't you know we can't do that with peas we can't do that with soy we can't do that with grass so we can't do that with any of these sorts of things because we're not set up to do that we don't we don't have the biochemical and physiological processes that are required to do that so we just we know flat out that's not actually how we evolve that's not actually what we're supposed to be doing so it doesn't matter how many arguments they make it doesn't matter how many studies that they put for it all which were garbage by the way um very painful uh film to watch very very painful i've never tried what the health i mean i was furious within two minutes of watching that maybe i was just making just angry notes on my phone about about you know sourcing things and putting links and everything like that because i had a friend of mine oh you should really watch this you should really watch this it'll change how you think i'm like probably not but as soon as i got in it i was just like i was furious and i was just making that copious nose and extended my like you forced me to watch this nonsense now you have to read you know the the rebuttal on it and uh if i can find that i will make maybe make an episode of just going through yeah that would be hilarious so annoying and so that's the thing we you know it doesn't matter what their arguments are we can't actually extract this stuff naturally so it's not natural it's just as simple as that and so it doesn't matter what they say after that because you can make a convincing argument you know with a bunch of you know crap you know it's just a sales pitch but that doesn't make any sense so just to sort of um i don't know get get my bearings uh sort of like i mentioned before it's like if you compare a plant with animal and you're looking at say like the nutrient quality yeah generally you're gonna need so much spinach to get anywhere near as much say like iron or protein as you could from just any bit of steak but even if you do get that those nutrients from the plants um are they equal to the equivalent amount of nutrients from meat no not at all no they're different they're completely different chemical compounds some of those compounds are bioavailable and some aren't you know bioavailable meaning that we can we can digest and extract and utilize these things to the same degree you know it's it's very very different even like different ions you know uh you know of of iron will be more or less uh available to us and these things are trapped in in in greater molecules as well you know they just measure the the gross amount of say iron more protein and so forth they'll just measure the gross amount of these sorts of things and just okay that that's how much you have and they'll just put that on the label but that's not how much you'll actually be able to absorb very very simple way of demonstrating this you know most chemistry classes will do this in high school and certainly in college in their lab classes they take like some special k or corn flakes or some sort of cereal oh you know cheerios and you crush it up dissolve it in water and then put a you know spinning magnet in there stir it all up take it out the magnet is covered in iron filings because that's the iron that's in cereal and a lot of processed food is actual iron filings so that is not bioavailable like the metal the metal the actual metal right so that when you look in there it's like oh special k has you know 100 of your daily requirement for iron it's like yeah not as bar iron like that's not really useful to us so you swallow an ingot of iron well that's all the iron i need for the month uh yeah it's not going to do anything for you i mean you'll you'll you'll be able to get a bit off of that yeah because your your stomach acid will sort of break it down a bit you know some people will take this stuff with vitamin c and that will help you know it's more acidic and and that's not the guys things really you know taking stuff but it's yeah but it's this like it's not a natural process yeah and so you have you're having to do something extra which is is not what nature does nature just happens nature is natural you know koalas aren't making chemistry experiments to try to try to extract nutrients that we know that we know of that's true it could be some sort of secret cabal of of uh k of koalas and so forth um so yeah these are completely different bioavailability and and you know we know in plants that these things are much less bioavailable than they would be in meat you know heme iron is much more bioavailable and they they you know people say oh it causes these sorts of problems blah blah blah there isn't a single piece of high level evidence to suggest that to even suggest that these things cause a problem you have these epidemiological studies that are nonsense there's nothing showing causation between ingestion of heme iron and any sort of problem animals around the world including humans eat and drink blood all the time you know genghis khan and the and the the mongol horde they were drinking horse blood the messiah in africa are drinking blood okay animals throughout any animal that eats another animal they're ingesting a lot of weight so are you saying that some people think drinking blood is bad for you is that kind of some of the vague way i'm sure i'm sure there are quite a lot of people that are appalled by the idea but you know the the people saying that that heme iron is somehow bad for you is completely missing uh what's in front of you um but there's a lot of other things too um the the way they measure protein for instance is very different so when you're measuring protein in in these you're generally pretty accurate you know if you're saying there's 30 grams of protein in in the steak that's probably 30 grams of protein because the way they do this is they actually measure there's a difference between crude protein and an actual protein crude protein is just measuring the amount of nitrogen that it exists in a compound so they'll grind up a bunch of wheat and they'll measure the amount of nitrogen that's in that and you know per year why would you use nitrogen as an indicator i'm not sure how this works so protein protein amino amino acids and this has an amino group it has a nitrogen group in there as part of that and that's what that's that's a requisite part of being a protein is this nitrogen group in there and so what what people do because it's just you know how do you how do you separate out just normal nitrogen with actual protein amino acid nitrogen you know it might be a bit difficult maybe they just don't care to do it maybe it's more expensive but what they do is they just measure the total nitrogen and they just assume that this is all from protein which it is not it's relevant assumptions yeah well that's it it's an assumption but they know it's an inaccurate assumption but people conflate this by saying that no no this is definitely look at all protein that's in there but everybody everybody in the industry knows that that's that's actually crude protein they're not talking about real protein and when you do this with with animal uh meat and so forth it's it's actually actually it's actually much more accurate and much much more of the nitrogen is in the form of the amino amino acid so you're getting much less actual aminos uh and protein in this you know whatever soy drink than you actually think you are right okay so if it says 15 grams in the label you're not actually your body can't absorb 15 grams and we're not sure if it's actually 15 grams of real protein am i right it was definitely not 15 grams of real protein and then definitely can't absorb all 15 because yeah well let's say let's say there's there's no way of telling how much of that is real protein yeah how much of that is just nitrogen um but you know let's whatever amount is actual real protein that's not going to necessarily be bioavailable protein let's take wheat for example yep 80 of the protein in wheat is gluten gluten is not able to be used by your body at all you cannot break you do not break this down you do not break this into amino acids you do not take this in as a as this composite amino acids and then use it as protein it is not available at all eighty percent of the protein in wheat just off the top is not usually not available and the uh and the other twenty 20 you know is going to be of varying degrees of usable but 80 just not so let's say you know you got 15 grams of crude protein 10 of that is actual amino acids you know two of those are somewhat bioavailable so you you've gone you know quite you know quite far down very quickly can you get enough protein yeah sure you know but you're you have to eat a lot more than you think you do and again you know the theme of you know my entire life here is that there are other things in plants that you don't want in your body and so you're getting all of those things along with it some of those things would be you know we touched on it before we're done and the plants are trying to kill you episode you know they have protease inhibitors a lot of these plants have protease inhibitors so they actually actually stuff up your digestion it's not just like when you get this nutrients in then that's it no plant does not want you to eat it it if you eat it it dies okay there's very very strong survival uh you know mechanisms in in nature protease inhibitors they stop the breakdown of protein in your gut so even even the the minimal protein yeah the small amount that's bioavailable now your body can't even actually access much of that either so you get a diminishing returns very very very quickly and and there's other things as well there's other things that screw up with your digestion and slow down the you know the degradation and uh absorption of nutrients protease inhibitors are just one of them and i think the thing that's sort of popping into my head just as we're talking about this is is uh plants and you know wheat soy blubber as this real kind of emergency food of you know if there was absolutely nothing else available you might be able to consume these plants and get enough nutrition to sort of just survive and just get by uh and then you put that into the context of people living today where we do have the means to get any food that we want why why people would choose to eat these foods that have you know have so little bio-available nutrients so that your body has to work so hard just just to get by you know what i mean yeah yeah and that and that's certainly the case look we're a robust species we have the ability to survive on different different sources we have you know we have an herbivorous past we have some holdover protections from that but they're not they're not great and you know most plants on earth are inedible and will cause extreme illness and even death but some of these things we can eat and certainly that would have conferred a survival mechanism to you know people throughout history not even that you know ancient but you know people caught in a siege and you just have a bunch of grain you can survive on this for a time but you're going to get sick you're going to get malnourished and and different sorts of vitamin deficiencies but we can survive anyway until we get to our preferred proper and optimal food source which is which is meat which people have known from time immemorial this was this was very very important and you know there's different sort of historical records of people basically you know restricting meat and not allowing meat into the population that they were trying to suppress to keep them weak and control and yeah and easier to control if they're just healthy and virile they're you know the thought was that they were going to be more likely you know to try and buck the system that makes a lot of sense and like also uh with mental health as well you can imagine like you know if you're trying to invade someone how easy would it be to get on top of the whole population if they start to doubt themselves and get angry and fatigued and all the bad things anxious and depressed yeah yeah exactly terrified and all that stuff yeah so you know we you know going back for a long time that people use you know meat was the main main food source yeah we supplemented them with other things generally when people were poor this is why fatty meat was called rich food because wealthy people were the ones that could afford it right often than others but you know that's what oh this is very rich food oh that was that was a you know something that was very special and it's it's now used in like a derogatory term it is which is frustrating oh this meal is so rich yeah it's delicious it's loaded with meat and fat yeah well was that was the thing it used to be you know people say that you know people that were wealthy would live longer and were healthier and so forth like you know part of that had to do with them not having to work in the coal mines without masks but you know uh you know a lot of that had to do with breaking work yeah yeah but a lot of that had to do with that they had access to better nutrition and you know you're not going to break down and wear out as fast if you were getting the proper nutrition and the rich people were able to do this meat was expensive and this is what was called rich food especially the fatty foods fatty meat was was absolutely the most sought after and now it's the most reviled but that that really needs to change i mean this you know this is this isn't new stuff as as we've said before this is this has been well known well documented well studied well-described in the scientific in scientific peer-reviewed literature going back you know hundreds of years this is this is a very very important concept that we have had people paper over and subvert and it's cost people it's cost people their health it's cost people their lives in a lot of cases because they've died of heart disease cancer diabetes you know strokes autoimmune disorders you know dementia and alzheimer's these are things that did not need to exist you know like these these are all preventable and you know as i've said before but i really really feel these are not diseases these are poisoning toxicities and this is a this is a there's a poison response relationship we get exposed to this toxin and we get a toxicity but the the best way of getting rid of that and coming overcoming that is not making some novel pill for two billion dollars but by removing the toxin and then you don't have the exposure anymore and it goes away now maybe there's some medications that can help you you know get that stuff out of your system and protect your body while it's getting out of your system but the the only real cure for this is to stop the exposure in the first place um yeah maybe to add to that deficiencies as well like toxicity efficiency because with the alzheimer's one when we spoke about that it was very much a sort of double pronged attack of toxicity plus not enough cholesterol to help here to heal the brain yeah yeah absolutely so that i mean that's that's sort of how i phrase it is you know that the modern diseases modern chronic diseases are not diseases per se but a combination of toxicities and malnutrition toxic buildup of species inappropriate diet and a lack of species-specific nutrition namely too many plants not enough meat and that's that's very clearly evident and you know we've seen in the literature going back to the 1800s that if you just remove these toxins and then reintroduce optimal human you know appropriate human nutritions you know biologically appropriate species specific nutrition which is meat fatty meat then you will reverse these these issues because they're not diseases you know they're toxicities and malnutrition and then you know i mean again you know then you're you're eating these sorts of things mostly it was it was because people were very poor and they knew they weren't getting the right nutrition but you know when we can see with the the bioavailability there's there's a huge lack of you know even the even the the nutrients that are there are not actually what you think they are now these are missing copious amounts of nutrients you actually have to have choline carnitine vitamin you know b12 you know d3 k2 k1 all the the essential fatty acids you know dha epa the 20 and 22 chain fatty acids which just don't exist in plants and we don't really make them ourselves um just i mean the list is so long of these of these nutrients that are just simply not available in plants or fungi you cannot argue that this is our optimal diet you know we can use this as a stop gap to not die but that's it that's really it because you you will cause yourself significant amount of harm um you know even just just fiber we were talking about people say that fiber is so important you have to have fiber and i've i've had people ask me can you please do uh you know a video on fiber talking about like you know is this something that we need or don't need you absolutely don't need this you have you you do not need this oh but how are you going to go to the bathrooms like how do 66 of all species of animals go to the bathroom 66 percent of animals are carnivore how do they go i remember you you've really helped me understand what fiber actually is and one of one of the key things you said was that we can't actually absorb fiber yeah uh and you know i just never thought about that before but when you said that um i i just sort of started thinking about fiber in a whole other way and then you also drew a connection between fiber and basically being wood it's just like like that that's what wood is it's made up from fibrous plant uh and so when you consume that fiber you don't absorb it into your body it just clogs up your system and scrapes the inner linings of your bowel intestines uh like a block of wood yeah well that was that was actually the argument you know in the 80s of why you should eat fibers because people still say yeah you can't you can't get any nutrition from it and it fills you up is the bulk and so it feels like you're full and you're tricking your body into thinking that it's full but actually you're getting like no nutrition and now that was a good thing for some reason and you know at first it was talking about that well this is this is a diet sort of sort of thing you want to lose weight but now they're saying no this is an essential nutrient you have to have this why would you have to have something that you you can't absorb you know like you can't break it down you can't do anything you know it's just like oh but it but it fills up space and it feels like it feels like you're full so why don't you just need a plastic bag then you know it's going to do the same thing you know it's not available it has no nutrients and just eventually go through yeah but you know the the reason that you shouldn't eat fiber is the same reason you shouldn't eat a plastic bag it has no nutrition you can't break it down and it causes harm and that's what fiber does and yet people don't think about that you know they don't think about like you know oh would you eat a handful of sawdust you know like well obviously not but that's actually what they put in processed foods to increase the the fiber percentage or the fiber uh content it's actual sawdust so you know trees are cellulose that's what fiber is and there's you know soluble insoluble fiber and so forth but you know that is actually what they add into into uh foods is this insoluble fiber in the form of sawdust it's not good for you you know cause we have you know copious studies showing that this causes uh you know microabrasions and you've got lining increased mucus secretion and you know and dysregulation of your immune system and and is likely uh involved in autoimmune dysregulation as well you know we we rest people's bowels in medicine you know they have surgery on their gut or they have an appendicitis or a diverticulitis that we're we're treating conservative conservatively with antibiotics we say rest the bowel well what does that mean i mean don't eat any fiber well i thought fiber was good for you i thought fiber did did really nice things for your gut one fact no it doesn't these are all suppositions these were all claims they were never they're never never backed up so um in that scenario do do they encourage the patients to fast or do they encourage the patients to just not eat fiber what what's this johnny fiber yeah so low low residue diet basically just no fiber and i mean what what what plant foods don't have figure my ignorance what plant foods would be low in fiber are they telling people to go carnivore or what what are they saying well no i mean well that and that would be the obvious choice for me but just kind of just like white bread things like that i'll just take white bread yeah white bread and jam yeah basically sorry i forgot about sugar that'd have sugar that's all good and fruit yeah yeah yeah it's just that yeah the fiber fibers of that one but um but you know but fiber also blocks the absorption of your nutrients which was also an argument for this you know it causes a physical barrier in between your enzymes which are now blocked from the protease inhibitors and the you know the the food that's you can get some nutrition out of and so this includes meat so it blocks that it can't the enzyme can't physically get to them to break them down and then if they do their their physical barrier in between the nutrients and the borders of your of your intestine the lumen of your intestine to then absorb through through that wall and so you end up absorbing much much less of the nutrients that you've eaten so again crude protein bioavailability a lot of these things are not unacceptable like gluten and there's protease inhibitors now you're eating and you're eating fiber on top of that like the amount of nutrition that you're getting from this stuff is miniscule and then that all goes into your colon and then you have the gut bacteria going to town on them and this is where people say like oh my goodness you know this is when you eat meat then you have it gets into your large intestine you get tmao and oh my goodness um it's not gonna get there in the first place if you didn't eat fiber you would liquefy and absorb it in your small intestine long before it ever got into your intestine and also you know the gut bacteria your intestine are going to be very very different if you're eating plants and fiber and so who's to say they're even going to have the right gut bacteria to turn meat into tmao if the meat was there which it isn't sorry what's what what's tma oh give me oh it's it's just it's the you know the the boogeyman of the day for meat eaters where many you know they say all this has been this has been uh you know associated with increased you know cardiac events and and heart disease so forth you know it's again it's this epidemiological garbage you know there's no studies that show causation there's no high level evidence showing um that that tmao does anything uh harmful in your body this is all this is all correlative associative uh sort of assumptions and and and stuff with animal models uh as well that that again aren't very strong um but there's also talking to professor bart k as well he was a professor uh university professor you know 26 years and done tons and tons and tons of research you know he was a peer he was one of the peer review uh bodies for all these sorts of things and you know and and helped um mentor 30 people getting their phds and doing their dissertations guys this guy is a serious academic and then just recently the last few years left academia because he didn't have academic freedom his deans were telling you can't say this you can't teach this like the hell are you talking about and so he just said yeah screw this and then now he's you know reaching more people uh through his online platform and actually being able to say what he you know what he wants to say and what he knows to be correct what was his name again what's googling bart k kay yeah professor bart k yeah really nice guy very very knowledgeable um actually um yeah i've spoken to him a couple times now i've have uh an interview with him on his channel and then i'll be putting one up on my channel as well but he was thought i was talking to him the last time i was speaking with him he was actually talking about how there are you know different gut bacteria when you eat meat and especially when you're eating a keto and and carnivore that actually devour tmao so even if even if tmao was a problem when you're eating a lot of meat when you're especially when you're eating carnivore first of all the meat's not really getting to your colon in the first place but you have bacteria in there that are now going to yum up a lot of that tmao so you may not even absorb any of this stuff even if you were you know creating it in the first place so again these things are are not there's no hard evidence to say that you know meat even creates any amount of tmao that you absorb and there's no studies or no evidence to say that or even suggest that tmao once in your system is going to cause problems which there's again no evidence that to show that it does so it you know the list goes on and you know you know they're talking about uh fiber you know they say oh you have to have fiber you know dr lustig who i love by the way absolutely just absolutely uh just love everything that that guy has done you know he talks about how how fiber actually you still do need this and he's talking about it from actually he was talking about you know fructose that fruit is uh is okay because the fiber actually slows and prevents the absorption of a lot of that fructose so he's even arguing again in that case of actually hey this this stops you from absorbing nutrients well it's stopping you from absorbing other nutrients as well and you're still absorbing some of the fructose so you're not you're not going out unscathed you're just getting less of it and he's saying that this then takes that down into your gut and in your colon and you know and it gets eaten up there and you don't absorb it that's fine but you know i guess that mitigates you know the effects of fructose if you're eating fruit with fiber obviously fruit juice isn't isn't going to protect you there but he you know he was saying in one of the talks i saw him give which was an excellent talk uh he was saying that that that fiber you still need fiber it's not food for you but it's food for you know your microbiome and your gut as well but one of the main arguments as to why that is and this wasn't this was lustig's argument he didn't really flesh that out on exactly what um you know what the benefits of this was but one of the one of the one of the arguments and suggestions is that fiber you can break down a little bit of the fiber you have some of these gut bacteria that sort of break it down and you and you make you know butyrate and butyrate is it protects and nourishes your enterocytes your your colonic cells so the cells in the lining of your gut um and obviously when we had a four foot long cecum which is now our appendix just the size of your finger that is where the stuff would pack in it would be there longer and just sit there because fiber wasn't supposed to move quickly if i were supposed to sit down and not move until you could break this down slowly over a long time and get these short chain fatty acids as a byproduct of the bacteria eating the fiber that this thing that you still do this to a small degree because you know those bacteria are in there we just don't have enough time to actually do anything real with it and you'll get a bit of this butyrate and butyrate's really good for your enterocytes but what they fail to mention is that you know butyric acid is a ketone body and when you're in ketosis when you're on a carnivore diet you're producing a lot of this it's one of the most abundant ketone bodies that you produce and so you're actually feeding your enterocytes and protecting them from the inside out because this is in your which is in your bloodstream and your your intestines are very very vascular you're getting a lot of blood flow through there and so you have no end of butyrate also something i learned again from talking to professor k where do we get the name butter from butyrate because there's actually a very very high amount of butyrate in butter so if you're eating butter this is also you know feeding your intestine as well so you really don't need fiber from any direction yet you look at it and it causes harm and it prevents you from from absorbing nutrients and maybe if you're eating a bunch of poisonous crap that's a good idea but i'm not and so it's not benefiting me it's going to it's going to cause harm for me and think about this from an evolutionary standpoint why would that make sense why would we why would we have a system of of stopping our absorption most animals are starving to death and dying from this in the wild it's killer be killed out there it's absolutely hard life and why would you have a system that you made it harder on yourself to absorb nutrients most most animals they spend their life trying to get nutrients and and now we're trying to do things to screw up our absorption of nutrients well well could it be i'm just sort of you know thinking out loud here could it be that the the fiber in whole fruit is blocking some of the most harmful um anti-nutrients or poisons i i don't know because i'd otherwise like like you say why would you eat something that's you know got a few nutrients but then it's also got something that's blocking some of those nutrients you know i think that i think that it's i think that it's a you know a fair assumption that you know if fiber is blocking out nutrients it's also blocking out anti-nutrients just from that physical barrier effect but you know any any but i and and so you know i i think this this will again not you know the lesser of two evils is not necessarily good right so just because you're eating something with fiber and that fiber confers some sort of protection against the the harmful components in there that doesn't mean that that's still good it's not doing it enough and and and and providing any actual positive benefit is just less of a negative i think this is more of a demonstration of why juicing vegetables and fruit are a really bad idea yeah yeah totally yeah if you're if you're going to eat this crap that you know the fiber might actually you know be a bit beneficial but fiber causes its own problems too yeah and it's possible it slows you down and yeah and it can you know you know causes actual physical damage to your gut lining and causes you know huge blocks of wood to get stuck in your colon and get impacted which is really not what you want um so yeah i i you know so there are different ways of eating plants that are less bad for you but you know i have yet to see a strong case for them being good for you in any circumstance where you're not starving to death okay um let's talk about fat soluble nutrients this is a term that i've heard thrown around and i kind of you know instinctively assume that when you eat certain nutrients with fat or certain nutrients that are in fat they're they're more easily absorbed by us as humans um can you sort of am i on the right track there yeah well some of these things get emulsified in fast and then live in fat and will bind uh into fat and so so you know the main thing with uh with fat soluble vitamins is that if you're if you're only eating meat lean meat you're not going to get the fat soluble vitamins that live in the meat and so you know fat isn't just our most you know nutrient-dense caloric dense food source but it's it also has very very vital nutrients you know you know retinol and vitamin d and vitamin e and a lot of these other things that are fat soluble and so they live in the fat and then you need to eat that part of the animal as well to get those vitamins you know it's it's nice to get vitamin d from the sun vitamin d is absolutely required this is a this is a pro hormone uh it has hormonal effects in your body and is a precursor to other hormones in your body this is vitally important and vitally important for your immune system as well the cdc actually published a couple papers looking at the coronavirus and vitamin d and found that people above you know a certain level of vitamin d uh serum vitamin d basically it didn't have any any long covered sort of problems or long lasting effects from covid and if it got or sorry above a certain level they didn't the the death rate from from the coronavirus was essentially zero and if you got above this other threshold it was i think there's something like double that it was you didn't even get long coverage you didn't even get long-term uh consequences from the coronavirus as well so vitamin d is a very very important molecule and we've been telling people as doctors and and mostly the media stay out of the sun stay out of the sun the sun's gonna kill you oh goodness you only need 15 minutes a day and then you're that's not true you need more than that and where everyone's getting maybe they're getting 15 minutes a day but they're just dumping sunblock on themselves which is actually quite harmful there's tons of chemicals in there that you don't want and also people may be washing this stuff off when you make vitamin d it makes it on the surface of your skin and then actually has to get absorbed in so if you wash yourself take a shower it actually washes that off you don't absorb that it takes i think it's something like six hours from a study i read i don't know 15 years ago so this is is this even if you're not wearing sunscreen you're just out in the sun wow yeah so yeah it it it's created on the surface and then it has to sort of soak into your body and you can wash it off and so you don't want to do that so i think it takes something like six hours to come to completely absorb so it's not it's not cut and dry also spf you know just as on the side of the the sunblock anything over spf 15 is you're getting diminishing returns and you're and you're actually getting a lot of harm i did a post about this and talking about other things to do with sunscreen on my instagram but uh just just briefly when i was in medical school the professor of dermatology just told us point blank that anything over spf 15 was a really bad idea it just didn't make any sense because spf 15 sunblock blocked 98.5 percent of the uv light there's not too far to go from there so you get up to spf 30 and you're getting like you know 99 and then spf 50 is 99.3 and then you know 70 and 90 spf you're getting like 99.7 percent you're getting not much bang for your buck and you are using five or six times the amount of chemicals in in that to get that that very minuscule effect and it's just it's just sitting and it soaks into your skin this actually does uh harm you this these are not benign chemicals these are these are chemicals these are this is not something that you actually want on your body and in your in your system they don't just sit harmlessly like a coat of wax on your skin this soaks into your body and you have effects from this uh she also said that uh just a on a side of an aside that vitamin e and i haven't seen any studies on this this is purely just what we learned in class that vitamin e is very good for your skin very good for scarring but you want to be careful with when you apply it because if you go into the sun while the vitamin e is still on your skin it can actually be mutated by the uv light it can actually turn into a harmful substance that actually is uh i think there's like a 20-fold association with skin cancer from from topical vitamin e when they go into the sun which you know skin cancer rates melanoma rates are way up and and sun exposure hours are way down but most of these sunscreens put in tons of vitamin e so maybe that's something that people should think about but all i know is that that i don't i haven't seen any studies on that that's just that's just what i was taught in medical school from professor of dermatology uh but i've certainly you know looked at things it's tocopherol um t-o-c-o-p-h-e-r-o-l or tocopherol or tocopherol acetate is what you'll see on it may say vitamin e as well but that's what that's what i look for and if there's some sort of you know moisturizer or you know sunblock or what i don't really use sunblock but you know i i for other people if they're going to use it i would always check that and see if there's a vitamin e or tocopherol or tocopherol acetate on there and just say hey you know i would just avoid that if i were you just get one that doesn't have that if you really want to use it um but yeah and so you know but vitamin d is very important and so that's another reason why i don't yeah you know use sunscreen but also on a carnivore you're just not sun sensitive we talked about in the the other other podcasts about you know how harmful plants are the plants are trying to kill you episode that there are some of these things that are photosensitizers and a lot of things in plants and vegetables that actually cause you to be more sensitive to uv light and and damages your skin more how about seed and vegetable oils there's a lot of chat uh online about them sort of you know making you burn more easily from the sun what are your thoughts there i think i yeah i haven't seen any any any sort of hard science or studies on that but yeah you sort of just think about these things as a process seed oils they you know they break down a lot of free radicals especially when you cook with them and that causes a lot of you know inflammatory dysfunction and damage to your body and that's what sunburns are and so if you have all this these free radicals and inflammatory molecules in your body because that's that's another problem with seed oils is they have you know some of these things have 300 you know 400 600 times more omega-6 yeah omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6s break down into just known inflammatory compounds that we actually take aspirin and advil and you know cox 1 and 2 inhibitors to inhibit these specific molecules from causing inflammation in our body and pain and and and you know pathological inflammation that's what those those medicines do they block the downstream products of omega-6 and so omega-6 and omega-3 are metabolized by this with the same enzyme in the and in the body and so you know when you're when you're when you have an abundance of omega-6s it actually uses up all of that enzyme and you you're actually even if you have some omegas omega-3s it doesn't really matter because now the enzymes are all used up with the omega-6s so you're really just not getting any of the end products that you really really need from from omega-3s and so it could be that you abuse you have just a lot more inflammation and you have a lot more free radicals and oxidative stresses why we take antioxidants it's for the oxidants the reactive oxygen species and free radicals you have a lot more of these in your body you're going to be causing a lot more skin damage and so if you get a burn or you get red which is just blood that's not actually indicating that you're you're going to peel or that you've done irreparable damage it just means that like you worked out now your body's like okay we got to get blood here because we want to we want to patch that up if you have all this inflammation if you have these photosensitizers if you have more reactive oxygen species in your body that damage is going to be worsened and this is why why some burns hurt is because of that inflammation and and the damage is going to be harder to repair and so this is why sunburns hurt the redness goes like oh my god that's going to really hurt and you're in pain for days after this and then it starts to die and peel after that that's because it's been irreparable damage i don't get that people on carnivore don't get that we go into the sun we go in the sun as long as we want i make it red i make it like just dark red i have lobster red i was like carrigenia which is just gorgeous canyons up up north in western australia just blazing sun i didn't have a shirt on the entire time i was i was bouncing around there next mouth for like two weeks 10 days two weeks i didn't i did not have i just like people thought i did not own a shirt and i just want to get as much sun as possible i was like brick red and at the sort of end of this i was on my last day i was just leaving the some of the pools and carigini uh sort of natural uh waterfalls and little ponds and things like that people swimming and i was walking up this guy looks at me like um your back is uh really red and i was like it'll be fine he's like no it's like it's like really red i was like it'll be fine like it's you know it'll be a tan you know tomorrow he's like are you sure and i just looked at my my arm was like like a lobster and i just went yep like that he visibly cranked oh yeah like it doesn't hurt it's fine it's just red because the blood's there and it's and it's healing it but it's actually not damaged and it just faded you know and it just eventually after a few days it turned into like you know just a deep tan if i really overdo it i'll p peel a bit but i really have to overdo it and it still doesn't hurt and it's just like a very very very mild thing so um you know so i get a lot of sun you know carnivores get a lot of sun in general and they and and it's safe to as well you can overdo it though you can overdo anything but you know you can you can do a lot more than other people so you know to to get back to where i started that um you know inuits and people in the northern northern reaches you know for nine months out of the year even in in like seattle and england and you know melbourne or or new zealand nine months out of the year there are simply not enough rays of light getting to you to get enough vitamin d from the sun there just aren't and so you have to get this from something else well it exists in other animals in their fat and so like the inuit you know would eat a lot of blubber and a lot of seal fat and whale fat and they would you know that they would get all the vitamin d they need because there's an abundance of vitamins that might be that might be one of the reasons why we crave rich foods in winter you know we want foods that are more high in fat because we're not getting that vitamin d from the sun could exactly will be that that case and likely is because you know things taste better if we need the nutrients in there totally yeah and so i mean this is where you have to have late you know pregnant women with pica you know where they're so picas is is just eating things which is completely inappropriate to eat yeah and um you know they'll go out and they'll eat dirt because they're so iron deprived and they're so anemic and their body's saying like look your kid's going to die they're going to study you're going to die if you don't get iron in your body and so they're eating to germs it and you know so and then eventually it doesn't they just go oh my god what did i do my math said but they need to do that yeah exactly and um honestly i think about this sometimes i just i really want to talk to one of these women who's unfortunately experienced that they're like what did it taste like why did it taste so good and because at the time it would taste good but obviously other times it tastes like dirt yeah yeah but that's that's that's that's why and so yeah i think you're i think you're on to something that that you'll want more fat food and butter butter is a great source of vitamin d that will you know that will you know you'll you'll need more of that because you're not getting the sun exposure yeah i i love some color i love some butter i add it to most things yeah what uh what are you eating uh at the moment anthony what's uh what are you enjoying eating oh yeah so i'm still predominantly eating uh beef and you know in that being being rib eye so i still do uh i still you know wet age you know the big cryovac packs of um ribeye scotch filet and then cut them up into big thick steaks are usually about two pounds around a kilo and and salt them put them on racks and dry them out and cook them up after they've aged a bit and that's still mostly what i'm eating i still eat ground beef as well uh you know maybe like you know fried some you know last night um fried up some bacon until it was crispy cut into little chunks and then fried that into ground beef yeah yeah and add a couple eggs on that with a bit of sour cream yeah i i that sort of meal all the time that's what i've had for lunch yeah yeah well it's good ground mince bit of bacon yeah yeah and that's the thing you know people who are uh you know on a budget that's a very very good and nutritious meal i think bacon's really affordable so are eggs so is ground beef yeah and and you're a bit you know if it's very lean as it's uh it's hard to get fatty uh ground beef mince in australia and new zealand and england it's just it's very very lean here like has it wait we have it it's uh it's 15 fat it's really good okay so fifty high enough for you man fifteen fifteen percent fat is like the leanest it gets in america like that's that's like the lean as it gets maybe you can get ninety percent in some some places but usually like eighty-five percent lean yeah exactly we do ninety-five percent yeah that's just it's just cardboard man you know it just it just tastes so bad all right add some butter add some ghee add some bacon fat yeah but yeah and so and so yeah if you're if you're getting these lean these lean um cases of mints then then uh yeah you just just add a bit of butter add some tallow ghee or sour cream sour cream you know every now and then if people can handle it not everyone is is okay with dairy and that's fine but you know i i find that a bit of dairy as a condiment every now and then i mean every few weeks or months is is fine i definitely feel better without it but i don't feel bad i don't feel i don't have a bad reaction uh to it i don't have autoimmune issues uh or other sort of issues that are that are more sensitive to those sorts of things so i find that i can use that you know on occasion but i never eat it on its own it's just it's always a condiment to me what about also what about raw milk for a trade yeah but i mean it's a treat though yeah and i wouldn't i still wouldn't just drink it on its own like if you had a glass of raw milk and raw milk of course is a very different thing to pasteurize homogenized milk it's much more healthy but it's you know it has carbohydrates and these can raise your insulin and will shut down your metabolism and and do things that you don't want it caused you to store fat as opposed to utilize fat in a healthy productive manner and [Music] and it's you know people like the maasai you know drink milk basically their whole life uh it's a little different milk i think their milk is like eight percent milk fat as opposed ours is like around three point five to four but you know it's you know some people have have issues with that there's you know different casein proteins like you know people are starting to hear more about a1 and a2 proteins in milk a2 can cause a lot of inflammation this is why people with autoimmune issues generally do have problems with they're one of the reasons why people with autoimmune issues can have problems hu is better but it's it's not perfect it still causes inflammation um i think that historically when when a mother uh when someone lost their mother or their milk dried up and they had had a breastfeeding infant you know if they couldn't find a wet nurse you know someone else who was who was also breastfeeding uh they could sort of add on and say hey can you breastfeed my child for me they would um you couldn't give them cow's milk because the casein ratios was too much it actually would uh kill the kid you couldn't they couldn't survive on that but goat's milk apparently would work so that was closer to human milk that's goat's milk you have to deal with the taste but yeah it's a little closer yeah it doesn't taste as good as breast milk yeah oh yeah i wouldn't know we all want to know yeah um but oh it was just a total total random thing there was a there was a gordon ramsay episode that was actually pretty funny because he was talking about he was talking to this guy in california california is so fatty you know they'll have they'll have so many fans oh yes this is the new fad this is the new super food this is the thing every week there's something there's something different i knew that because i you know i grew up in in southern california and then when i my uh you know my best friend growing up i moved to california i was visiting him and you know we're seeing all sorts of things i was just rewarding like because this is just the thing this is what they do here there's a new fad every week don't don't get caught up in it and we saw this thing on gordon ramsay where one of these guys were talking about breast milk cappuccinos and it was i swear to god and so they i don't know who they were sourcing this stuff from suspect as well someone who's selling this stuff they've made some mistakes in their life i would say and maybe they're they're trying to come up for makeup for now um and he was talking about how that you make a breast milk cappuccino and he's like oh yes make this cappuccino like all the ladies after the pilates classes would have the cappuccino and so gordon ramsay was just like he's like oh oh okay okay um he's trying to gear himself up to do and he's just sort of tasted a little bit of he's like it's really sweet she says oh yes it's very sweet and then this then it starts going off and rams you're like nope nope can't do it too weird no you can't do it and just like bolts out of there and uh no i couldn't do that particularly or like a random person yeah but it was um we ended up uh messing with this poor barista like that day like down at huntington beach um my buddy jonathan and his wife were in front of me and they didn't know we were together so he made his order and was standing over to the side and then i went just asked her with a complete dead face it was like hey did you guys do breast milk cappuccinos and she was like what uh what and i was just like and she was just looking around for someone to be laughing and i was just like so serious um uh well i mean i mean if you if you have something i mean i could i could put it in i was just like i was like well no it's like it's like you know it's like the new super food it's like obviously it's like you know the milk is human milk so obviously it's like better she's like yeah i mean that that that makes sense i guess and then right then like jonathan just like perfect uh you know straight man on the comedy act just looks over he's like oh yeah i saw that on gordon ramsay yeah what the hell is going on so confused this poor thing and you know then i told her obviously i was joking she's like oh my gosh she's so relieved by this but uh yeah it's so funny and so um uh but yeah you know you don't need milk you don't need dairy you know we're adult mammals certainly need us need this early on uh that is absolutely appropriate food but we don't need it you get everything that you need from meat if you if you want to use dairy sometimes as a condiment that's fine but it's not as good as meat it's okay i don't think that it's you know something that's really going to harm you unless you have a particular you know aversion to it or it causes a problem with you like a lot of a lot of autoimmune uh sufferers have issues with dairy but you know if you if you like it and you enjoy and it's not causing you too big of a problem then you know do what you want but just remember that there is enough lactose in there to raise your your uh blood sugar and to raise your insulin which will derail your metabolic system and cause you to not up you know process fat appropriately and process energy appropriately and it will you know it has a lot of nutrients but it doesn't have all the nutrients so it's not really a complete source of nutrition as well goat's milk might be closer but it's you know it's not it's not perfect it's not ideal and so you know i i always try to talk about things in the the ideal metric the optimal you know what is optimal and if people don't want to live off to me if they want to do something else and they feel fine it's not too much to differentiate them that's totally fine you know i i'm not saying that you can't do this or you can't do that you shouldn't do this do whatever the hell you want like i'm just trying to you know relay some some some you know some arguments and data to suggest you know so to see what i see think is the optimal way of living the optimum way of eating for optimal health and longevity and and people can can use as much or as little of that as as they want i choose to be as optimal as i can be every now and then i'll sprinkle in a bit of dairy just you know as a condiment but it's it's really only as a condiment and 99 of the time i'm just eating beef okay cool um all right well perhaps we we wrap it up there uh in our in our chat about bio bioavailability of nutrients um so some of the some of the key points are that you've got to eat a shitload of um fruit or vegetables to get the same amount of safe protein and key nutrients um as if you was eating meat and even if you do even if it does say 15 grams of protein on the back of your soy milk or what have you you're not going to absorb that as effectively as you are if you're getting it directly from meat and fat fat has a heap of nutrients in it so that's that's something to sort of look out for and include if you're just eating straight meat you you're totally missing out on vital nutrients that you need so meat and fat is the key you don't need fiber um don't fiber either you don't want fiber yeah yeah fiber it might make your gut swell and making it take a but it's doing damage and it's also blocking other nutrients anything else you want to add to that yeah well you know just just when you're talking about with um you know you're having to eat a lot of this stuff yeah i think yeah you've got costs as well people say that that it's very expensive to do a carnivore diet and you know it's expensive you you can make things as expensive or as affordable as you want for vegan carnivore omnivore anything you want to do there are expensive things and there are less expensive things and some of those things are equivalent nutritionally so like ground beef mince is equivalent nutrition to a fatty ribeye essentially as long as you're getting a similar fat cholesterol content so you know getting your butcher to make fatty mints it's going to cost you the same a lot of butchers don't even charge for fat i know a lot of butchers in america just experience that they don't they don't charge for fat uh because people won't want it they're gonna you know they're not really gonna use it they throw a lot of it out and so you know they they don't charge for that so that it can actually be cheaper and you know or you can buy you know you know wagyu you know aged dry aged ribeye yeah and you can you can spend a fortune on that but you don't have to and you'll get just the same nutrition um just eating you know eggs and ground beef but think about how many you know how much plants you have to eat you know just to get the same amount of nutrition on the label which as we're as we're talking about here has maybe you know 10 percent of that being actually absorbed into your body you know maybe more but like you know in the case of wheat probably not and so you're going to spend a lot more money now think about how much does a kilo or a pound of ground beef cost compared to a pound or a kilo of spinach spinach is not cheap and you know it doesn't have all the nutrients you need you are lacking nutrients and how much more nutrition better nutrition are you getting from a pound or a kilo of of ground beef you know than you are from spinach and spinach goes bad all these things people talk about meat just going bad and just you know dropping out there's schools here in australia saying don't put meat in your child's lunch because like by the time it gets we have no refrigeration so it could just be spoiled and rotten by the time you have three hours later while when they're eating lunch well that's that's that's an absolute load of because it is we compare that to how you're aging your own steaks and your fruit yeah anthony wet ages them for like three weeks and then and then puts them on the racks with salt for like another up to three weeks right yeah and that's you know that's food surviving in your fridge for six weeks you get a pack of spinach and stick it in your fridge after a week it's just you know it's dark green and it's lucky yeah and it's yuck so that's um yeah that's a lot of yeah it's disgusting and so we have we have um there were cases of pemmican which is just dried meat mixed with rendered fat that the native americans used using and likely our ancestors were using for hundreds of thousands possibly millions of years uh with like the big mammoths uh and preserving you know mammoth uh carcasses and meat and so forth they um they found and people use this as iron rations and all the great armies going back thousands of years was basically a version of pemmican and dried dried meat with fat and so they found uh stashes of pemmican that the uh british colonial army was using in the in the revolutionary war you know in the 1780s um they found it 50 years after the war ended and it was still good it was it was like the day it was made so this stuff stuff actually lasts a very long time if i make a brisket like i don't put it in the fridge i just like sleep on the counter and i'll just just cut off chunks of this stuff i i like it better at room temperature i don't like it all cold and hard it's easy you'll pressure cook it first well i'll put it for a brisket i'll like smoke it or slow cook it okay javascript i just have some stuff is sterile at the end of that right yes sterilized it's been the autoclave you know and so you know there's not really much growing on it anyway but obviously things can be introduced from the environment but it does not go bad so i'll like you know i'll occasionally make a brisket for myself and i'll just have it on the counter and i'll eat this thing over the course of a week it does not go bad also brisket's very affordable cut brisket chucks yeah mints like sausages if they're clean sausages and they don't have any filler i think that's also a good option for people i've got to be careful with those though most of them have yeah my storage preservatives or um some meal in there yeah yeah yeah you can get super clean ones from some you can um yeah all these cuts are cheap and uh and like like you were talking about before like a pound of ground mints um might cost you like eight bucks or something but yeah as a non-super active person male or female that can be enough nutrition for a whole day yeah um that's that's the difference anyway we're we're probably preaching to the converted in terms of the people who listen to our stuff but um yeah well it's also good to think about you know especially for for people to to know that you know this isn't this isn't something that you only people that that are well off can do it's not really not food anymore in fact a lot of the plant foods and acai berry bowls are way more expensive than just eating zero nutrition yeah and a bunch of crap that you you don't want and you know and there's always chicken you know chicken's cheap as hell and you know so is pork and they're very nutritious yeah like beef is is the best i love beef you know grass-fed beef if you can get it if you have access to it and and can afford it is absolutely the best number one but you know everything else is better than anything else that you will eat on earth yeah so don't break the bank you know just chasing after you know perfection when you know you've got you've got the second best option on earth available for you for very very cheap and very affordable on on that i s i heard someone talking about a study where um they surveyed like a thousand people all from different levels of income basically like demographics uh to gauge their interest in eating organic and quality and highly nutritious food and it's completely scattered across all income levels or um whatever you call demographics so it's not just you know wealthy people who are really interested in in this everyone is there are people from every single class interested in this so yeah the points that you're making i think is so important yeah and i mean this is this is the most important aspect of our lives really because this this is what fuels our life and you know if you don't get that right then everything else is going to be a lot harder as well you're going to be sick you're going to be tired you're not going to develop properly your brain's not going to develop to its potential it's not going to be as powerful it's not going to be as large and it's not going to run to its maximal capabilities when it has developed and it's going to degrade and you're going to die young and you're going to lose your wits and you're going to lose your capacity your mental capacity and that is that's you know probably the most frightening thing for most people is losing our mental faculties and it doesn't have to happen it just doesn't have to happen and it you know and it's something that you can do that anyone can do there is affordable meat and and again when you compare a pound of spinach with a pound of even ribeye i you know the spinach is going to be comparable and you're not going to get nearly the the nutrition from the spinach as you will from the steak it's just it's not even it's not even possible to consider that and you know as you say you know you eat one big steak and that's it that's all you eat and or you know rib eye or sorry or ground beef eggs your eggs are cheap you get a lot of eggs for not that much and and you'll be fine you know so it's this is definitely affordable and it's it's in the long run you're going to be saving a lot and you're on medical bills and and different health related problems down the road and in the short term you're going to be fueled to the best of your ability to your best possible degree and you're going to your brain's going to be working your body's going to be working you have better energy you'll have better mental clarity you'll have a better you know disposition you'll feel better you'll feel happier you'll feel more satisfied you'll be able to handle more stressful situations without a concern you know some things really bother people and used to really bother me and now it just happened to me like okay yeah we'll deal with it that's like who cares and you were wondering like are you okay is this him like yeah it's just like it's a thing just deal with it like it is what it is let's just let's just do it you know um that that's something that you find you just you find that you're much better equipped to deal with life and to deal with the world at any stage in life and it will absolutely pay dividends in the long run and it can be cheap and affordable in the short run as well awesome so well said i mean that sound bite is exactly what we're about and that's the whole point of of what we're doing so don't need to add a thing to that um all right anthony thanks so much thank you thanks until next time i'll see you then buddy