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1:25:26 · Mar 13, 2023

Get Healthy & Lose Weight w/Carnivore Cookbook Author Craig Emmerich!

Craig Emrick, husband of Maria Emrick and co-author of carnivore cookbooks, shares his family's 20-year journey from standard American diet to carnivore lifestyle. Craig explains how his wife Maria's health issues including PCOS, IBS, and acid reflux led to their dietary exploration, while his own Lyme disease diagnosis ultimately pushed him toward strict carnivore eating to manage chronic pain and inflammation.

The discussion reveals the science behind plant toxins and anti-nutrients like oxalates, which can bind to essential minerals like zinc and calcium, preventing absorption and potentially causing kidney stones. Craig demonstrates how eating oysters with black beans reduces zinc absorption by 50%, while corn tortilla chips completely block zinc uptake. He emphasizes that people with autoimmune conditions often need the most restrictive carnivore autoimmune protocol, starting with just beef and salt before gradually testing tolerance to other animal foods.

Craig introduces the concept of protein-sparing modified fasting (PSMF), where people eat high protein with minimal fat and carbs 1-3 days per week to accelerate fat loss while preserving muscle mass. He recommends starting at 100 grams protein for 5-foot men (adding 5 grams per inch of height) and 80-90 grams for 5-foot women. The conversation also covers how modern fruits and vegetables have become less nutritious over time while being hybridized for higher sugar content, making nutrient-dense animal foods increasingly important for optimal health and brain function.

Key Takeaways

  • Start carnivore autoimmune protocol with only beef and salt, then gradually test tolerance to other ruminants, seafood, dairy, and eggs in that order
  • Plant anti-nutrients like oxalates can block up to 100% of mineral absorption - oysters with corn tortillas provide zero zinc to bloodstream compared to oysters alone
  • Most kidney stones are calcium oxalate stones caused by oxalates binding to calcium, not excess calcium consumption itself
  • Protein-sparing modified fasting uses 100+ grams protein with 20-30 grams fat maximum, done 1-3 days weekly to break weight loss stalls
  • Target minimum 100 grams daily protein for 5-foot men (add 5g per inch height) and 80-90 grams for 5-foot women to prevent muscle loss and hair thinning
  • Modern fruits contain 30-60% fewer nutrients than 50-100 years ago due to soil depletion and hybridization for higher sugar content
  • Newborn babies naturally maintain 0.5-3.0 blood ketones while breastfeeding, indicating ketosis as the natural metabolic state for brain development
  • Beef contains more vitamins and minerals across all categories compared to kale, apples, and other supposed 'superfoods' with superior bioavailability
  • Craig Emmerich's Journey from Beer Brewing to Carnivore Diet
  • Maria Emmerich's PCOS and Health Issues That Started Their Journey
  • Lyme Disease and Ankylosing Spondylitis Pain Management with Carnivore
  • Carnivore Autoimmune Protocol - The Ultimate Elimination Diet
  • Plant Toxins and Oxalates - Why Vegetables May Not Be Healthy
  • Zinc Absorption and How Anti-Nutrients Block Mineral Uptake
  • Protein Sparing Modified Fasting for Weight Loss
  • Protein Requirements and Fat Minimums on Carnivore Diet
  • Client Success Stories - 20 Years of Helping Chronic Disease
  • Why Vegans May Improve vs Everyone Getting Better on Carnivore
  • Government Dietary Guidelines Rate Watermelon Perfect, Beef Dangerous
  • Kids Need Fat and Cholesterol for Brain Development, Not Sugar

This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

welcome to the plant free MD podcast with Dr Anthony Chaffey where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys hey everyone this is uh Dr Anthony Chaffee here again with another episode of the plant free ND and today I have a special guest Mr Craig Emrick who is uh as most people know the husband of Maria Emrick they've both teamed together to put out some really great content and a number of cookbooks as well so Craig thank you very much for coming on well thank you for having me on Anthony yeah well it's a pleasure um so can for people that don't uh don't know about you having come across you before can you give us a little bit of background about yourself and what you do yeah we have a kind of a long story but I'll make it short uh my wife about 20 years ago 22 years ago uh had some health issues um she had PCOS she had acid reflux IBS and extra weight that she just couldn't get rid of even though she was following all the traditional advice of you know healthy whole grains and low-fat and you know uh running marathons exercising more just couldn't lose the extra weight had all these health issues that never went away she went to the doctor and they said these are the cards you're dealt and that was it you know like here's some medications to take you know for the these symptoms uh and literally that same week after going to that doctor our dog was losing patches of its hair and so she she took it into the vet and the first thing the vet asked was what are you feeding it and it was like a light bulb moment for her my doctor never asked me what I ate not not one question you know it just offered up these prescriptions and so she started going down this Rat Hole of just every piece of nutrition education Studies books she'd get her hands on um she started reading them she went to school uh University for nutrition but that was a lot of the same food pyramid and that kind of talk so she uh mostly on her own educated herself implemented on herself and she saw huge improvements you know when she started following low carb and eventually all the way to carnivore on and off now just kept seeing Health improvements and you know we've we started helping clients uh 20 years ago and maybe 12 12 14 years ago started writing books about it and the rest is history yeah very good and and you I understand you came you sort of had a transition over to carnivore that was quite interesting as well uh you didn't you know um necessarily have all the same problems that that Maria did but can you walk us through your yours or Journey there yeah definitely that was you know she had the pressing need because of the health issues at the time and at the time I had no health issues I had you know 20 30 pounds of extra weight I probably could have got rid of but wasn't too concerned about it I was you know I had my German background I loved brewing beer and these things that uh you know I didn't really want to give up yet uh and so I just uh just ate what she would make for me and then on the weekends you eat whatever I want and I just it got to the point where I just realized how crappy I felt on the weekends you know and after I don't know four or five years after she kind of started down this uh diet lifestyle I came around finally and just started eating this way all the time that you know lost lost the extra weight I had the extra energy you know all the things that you know mental Clarity and the things you can you know of a keto type diet you can see or carnivore um about eight nine years ago I started having this pain in my back and it moved up through my back into my shoulders neck and around that time we I started researching carnivore more and uh you know some of the uh I I you know long story short but uh I found out eventually that I had Lyme disease um and I reached in my researching uh we found out that uh Charlene Anderson as somebody I came across who's been kind of over I think I don't know 20 years now she's been kind of and it was started to deal with her chronic lyme disease pain um so I you know I didn't eat a lot of plants at the time so I just decided let's eliminate the rest of the plants and see how it goes and I had a big Improvement in my pain um and so it ended ended up kind of evolving for myself to finding my solution for my issues and and for me it was carnivore yeah and then that seems to have helped your your Lyme disease are you feeling it has helped uh well you know what's interesting about it it's almost like a blessing and a curse a little bit in that we have clients all the time that we come to us with Lyme disease and just going from standard American diet to keto they see big improvements right and I think what happened with me is it it enabled me to go so long without really addressing the issue and the thing with Lyme disease is if you don't uh get it right away that's when it becomes chronic and you get all these other issues that creep in heavy metals mold you know all these problems um and because I was able to manage the pain for so long because I was already keto for you know I've been keto for I don't know 15 years or something that I think made it worse than it needed to be and so by the time I you know started going carnivore it does help for sure with the pain but it's not addressing the root cause right it's not getting rid of the Lyme disease it's not getting rid of the mold issues uh and so I've been down a path of last three or four years doing you you absolutely name it of every treatment traditional and non-uh for Lyme disease uh I and uh myself I've actually recently been diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis which was I I believe was derived from the lime because the lime the chronic inflammation uh that it was happening having and what happens with a lot of live patients is it triggers autoimmune reaction because the the immune responses is like in overdrive all the time and then eventually that starts attacking healthy cells and you get autoimmune reaction and you know a lot of people get Ms or other things that really started with a lime issue Yeah well yeah I mean you know I don't treat Lyme disease myself but it's um it's something that you you're aware of this is a very very difficult thing to treat and most people just have to suffer with it their whole life so at least this is something that you know is at least getting some Headway on and hopefully we'll we'll clear up eventually I'm very sorry to hear that but um it is it does give you a um you know a much more stronger reason for for eating clean because you know presumably if you sort of step outside of that you'll have worsening symptoms is that right absolutely yeah if I if I introduce too many plants I'll my my pain will flare out my joint pain will flare up it yeah I definitely notice I didn't know that kind of feedback's great to keep you on track but it's also you know and it kind of sucks but um I you know one of the things we wrote in our book uh when we you know this around around the same time as we I got diagnosed I was doing all this research um uh with lime we started writing this book uh the carnivore cookbook and it's not just the cookbook like half the book is science and we we even uh talk about our carnivore autoimmune protocol which is basically an elimination protocol which when I look at carnivore I mean there's a lot of great benefits to you know animal proteins and I'm sure you've covered you've covered a lot of that on your show in the past and the nutrient density and all these uh of the protein but um one of the things I look at it is it's a great tool as well for those with disease right and you know there's one aspect like Dr Sean our friend Sean Baker he's uh you know doing incredible performance and you know things incredible things with carnivore from from that perspective but it can also be a really great tool for chronic disease and great tool for Digestive issues and you know Lyme disease and all these other conditions um and so we wrote In This Book uh kind of about uh it's like a the ultimate Elimination Diet right you start just with B beef and salt and then maybe you had to add in some other animal proteins and start working your way up the tree of what can my body handle you know given my current state and so it was it was close to home for me because I you know I kind of had to do the same thing myself to find what I could tolerate yeah when I think I think you're exactly right you know that um that it is it is the ultimate elimination it just gets down to just the pure Basics what this is what we need for life and then you can sort of branch out from there and some people can handle more than other people and some people yeah I mean I'm not very sensitive to a lot of things I could eat a lot of it I can certainly eat all the meats I don't have a problem with dairy and you know some spices and things like that mix in I don't have a huge problem with it but I don't feel as good as I would my face may get a bit itchy or a stuffy nose or something like that and I just see that as a sign it's like okay well that's doing something in my body that I don't want and even though it's not giving me Lyme disease I'm not it's still something I don't want um but you know some people really really have to be very sensitive and that's something I've noticed as well with people with autoimmune issues especially quite often they really can't even stray away from just beef I mean they they have quite a problem with pork and chicken even and certainly Dairy is that something you've noticed as well yeah definitely you know we have uh we know people that uh treat the uh bipolar and they treat it with carnivore and right they can even get into the spice like you were talking some of the spices too much of that will start to trigger symptoms that were basically in remission you know eating just the uh animal proteins so yeah it's definitely and that's and that's why we you know talked about in the book we created three levels to start with for carnivore and you know novel one is beef and salt and it's like okay now you're you're at the most basic level and you know a lot of people who talk about Carnival and being carnivore are really kind of carnivore adjacent you know they'll include you know mushrooms or they'll include some you know ketchup on their burger right that's Tomatoes you know those kind of things right um and when you get to chronic disease you really gotta you gotta Define it as I'm starting with beef and salt and that's our level one and then we had a level two which you move into which incorporates you know the other animal proteins and sometimes you even gotta go as basic as starting with other ruminants you know start with elk or venison or bison and and work up that way and then maybe some seafood or fish or you know and then start working through those uh and then you move to for us we Define level three as adding Dairy and eggs because those are two that you know certain people can have issues with especially Dairy I mean dairy's one of the most common allergens or sensitivities out there um and then uh level four is like you know you start introducing maybe some spices and those kind of things and so this book if you have autoimmune conditions and certain uh things like that we really stuck to that with this book in that there's a lot of recipes that are just you know proteins and salt and and we're real mindful about that about not adding too much because we we do know that it can affect people oh really good and um that's interesting you go you go into the science about it too and sort of explaining this I know that you did a talk um there's ketocon 2020 it was like when it was like virtual and yeah yeah yeah and you spoke actually so that's you know that's obvious near and dear to my heart which is all the different you know plant toxins and anti-nutrients that exist in there um you know that's something that that so many people uh are really becoming newly aware of but that was that was the reason that I went carnivore you know 22 years ago was because there's just like well these are these are awful I don't want any of that stuff in my body um and it's great that you you uh have come you know looked into that as well because so many people look at me and be like you're just making this stuff up it's like there's an entire branch of of biology called botany that this is this is this is a hard science this is these are just facts um yeah how did how did you come across that yourself and and you know can you tell us a bit a bit more about that I think uh gosh I don't know how many years ago it was now seven eight years ago I think the first introduction I had to is Dr Georgia Eid who it's become a good friend of ours um she she uh I saw one of her initial presentation on vegetables just saying are these really good for us kind of thing you know I'm talking about all those compounds right uh you know oxalates and glucosinolates and all these compounds that are in these plants that you know maybe they're not the best thing for us and and granted uh you know if you've got a strong immune function again if you if you know if I didn't have Lyme disease and I didn't you know earlier on in my my life when I have these issues I can handle more of those plant toxins and my body could detoxify them and get rid of them because they they're they're anti-nutrients because they're not used by the body that's you know definition of anti-nutrient right the body has to get rid of them and so at some point it's got to detox and get rid of these things these compounds that it doesn't need or want and so uh people uh can tolerate different levels and if you start getting to metabolic disorders uh you know autoimmune conditions different things like this where you've already got a depressed immune function or you've got these issues going on adding another load and then that's my theory on why it inflames me more is because I already have this load of issues and inflammation I have to deal with when you add another incremental amount of inflammation and things to detox and deal with in the body in the anti-antine nutrients it's just too much you know it's just too much for the body to handle and the pain flares up and all these issues creep up yeah and then you know and and also some of these things will cause direct harm and direct damage as well as um you know blocking certain nutrients and being like a you know an anti-nutrient in the sense that it actually stopped us from Gaining nutrition normally from from the food that we're eating as well so exactly you know the in that presentation I had the chart of um showing zinc absorption so there's a uh This was done where they checked blood plasma so they look at the blood and after eating and they checked it a couple times different intervals and they looked at how much zinc was actually getting into the bloodstream because it's you're not what you eat you are what you absorb right and if you're not getting into the bloodstream and it's going right through you or you're not absorbing it into the bloodstream you're not eating it right you're not you're not actually getting any benefit from that and so they looked at uh oysters which are a great source of zinc and they uh if you just ate the oysters you had this nice increase in uh blood zinc levels where you add a lot of zinc coming into the bloodstream if you ate those same oysters with black beans it was like half as much zinc that actually got into the bloodstream and then when you ate corn tortilla chips none of the zinc ended up in the bloodstream it was like a flat line that none of it got in and so what happens with these anti-nutrients especially like oxalates they like to bind to things uh like magnesium like calcium zinc and then they bind to them as they're being detoxed out of the body they rob the body of those nutrients and so um that's one of the big problems yeah like like you point out is not only can they be harmful in in and of themselves they can actually Rob the body of essential nutrients yeah and um and one thing you mentioned as well in there there was actually cases where people had toxic levels as in fatal levels of just oxalates and and yeah and that's what people don't don't understand they the other since this is becoming a bit more well the information has sort of been a bit more spread out there and people are understanding that there are these natural toxins in Plants there have been people in this space you know running counter to this this sort of uh message saying yet look they use these defense chemicals but they're really nothing they don't cause a problem they're really not a any sort of issue um and they you know this is really just you know more uh hysteria and getting a bit out of control but you know when when you're talking about something that you can actually have a fatal dose of just by eating green smoothies that that's clearly uh you know more of an issue than than people are trying to make it out to be exactly and um one of the things that was interesting for us and we you know I think one of the reasons we have a really strong following is we don't stick to any Dogma or you know like any method just by uh because that's what we promoted in the past uh we go over the science kind of leads us and we're always learning you know I coming from an engineering background I was electrical engineer for a lot of years and one thing I learned real fast in that field was if you didn't study up on the latest technology coming out six months you're out obsolete like you guys got to keep up on it and that we've tried to do I've tried to do that you know in this nutrition space as well and one of the things you know early on in the days of Keto promoting keto we would we always wanted to prioritize protein we always kept that you know as a as a principle but we you know we would create a lot of you know almond flour desserts and you know talk about eating lots of dark leafy greens and you know and when you think about keto a lot of people that is Keto right you're eating your almond flour based you know cakes and desserts and muffins and stuff and and you're eating your your your kale or your spinach those are some of the highest oxalate Foods there are and you know when we learn this we really evolved away from a lot of a lot of those ingredients I think they can still be you know an occasional treat you know like in in Christmas time and if you're especially if like us we have kids and when we want to keep them low sugar and and low uh grain grain and all that kind of stuff and so you know we use them with our sons you know as treats uh but it's not a daily thing it's not even probably a monthly thing you know around here uh you know it's it's a special treat and I think that's where you need to treat it and and if you've got autoimmune conditions and issues it's it's you know off limits and so I think that you know like you said they're learning that there's actually a toxicity level and plus you know a lot of people uh we started connecting the dots on with kidney stones you know most kidney stones are calcium oxalate kidney stones and they blame like calcium like it's the problem here and it's like no it's the oxalates are grabbing onto the calcium yeah and they accumulate in the kidney and create the stone uh it's the oxalate that's a problem uh and so my wife actually had it happen to herself she had a kidney stone and she started she switched from almond milk and and some of these things to you know other sources of lowering oxalates yeah um that's a funny thing too I've never really thought of kale as a treat you know it's just like once a year like I'll have some kale as a treat like that's it was a treat when I didn't have to have kale generally yeah well we did when they were real young we made kale chips where you'd like dehyde them put salt on them they weren't too bad then the boys kind of like uh crunching them every once a while but we don't eat them anymore yeah yeah um yeah I noticed that too that when when people will go keto they'll they'll eat more vegetables than they've ever eaten their in their entire life because they think that okay it's like oh wait well I'll cut out the car the carbs and Grains but you know this is where I'm gonna get all my nutrients is all from the greens and everything like that and uh and I I think that some people actually that well they talk about a keto flu I don't know um what your thoughts on that are but you know I think sometimes when people are eating just so much more of these you know oxalates and other sorts of Defense chemicals that they might actually make them feel pretty crummy and obviously you can have withdrawals from from sugar and different sorts of things but I think it might actually be part of that is that they're eating so much more of this stuff that they've never exposed themselves to and it makes them feel kind of gross well in it and you see a lot of the keto flu they might get a rash or break out you know on their skin that could just be oxalate dumping and like you said from those situations but I think a lot of time the the bad the actual bad feeling that people get with keto flu is typically electrolyte electrolyte imbalance you know carbohydrates retain water into the body and then you flush out the uh you you stop eating the carbohydrates you flush out that retained water which is good you don't want all that water retention but with the water it goes any water coming out of the body electrolytes go with uh and so you uh people if they are more mindful about their electrolytes when they especially in the first couple weeks starting out usually that helps as well okay well it's good to know too um so you were talking uh as well about um these guys do a version of like a protein sparing it's a protein sparing modified fasting am I saying that right yeah yeah uh this is another one interesting it's it's kind of a medical term uh that was developed but you know we we we're doing this with our clients you know 15 plus years ago but at the time we didn't know the medical term of protein is very modified fast and Marie just called them pure protein days you know do a pure protein day but it's basically little to no carbs uh a lot less dietary fat but lots of protein so you're still hitting your you know protein goal where you're getting enough protein for your lean mass and size because the protein intake is very variable by based on the person activity level goals so you know somebody a five foot tall woman is gonna have a way different protein goal than you know a six foot tall man who's a bodybuilder right I mean it's gonna be so you really got to base it on the the lean mass and the size of the person but protein sparing basically hits that goal and then the fuels right protein by itself is usually not used as a fool it's only used as a fuel in Last Resort meaning you're not eating any fuels you're not eating any carbs fat or alcohol and you don't have a lot of fuel on your body so if you're a lean person and you're doing protein sparing where you're eating almost no fat carbs the body's forced to turn that protein into glucose to get some fuel right that's the only time it really uses protein in any significant amount for to make glucose um if you have enough body fat I.E you're trying to lose weight doing a protein spray modify fast will just force the body to tap more body fat for fuel um and it's a really you know it's a powerful tool for speeding up weight loss for breaking a stall uh if you've been stalled for a few months you know with weight loss um we don't recommend it for everyone you know like I said if you're a lean person you shouldn't be doing them uh if you maybe have uh some certain conditions like Alzheimer's or bipolar or certain things where elevated blood ketones may be beneficial so more dietary fat you know leading to to the higher blood ketones it's probably not a good tool for you either um but for a lot of people uh that are looking for weight loss which is a lot of people in this community it can be a powerful tool but we also limit it in that we say add maybe one to three days a week of protein sparing days and then your kind of regular weight loss macros and maybe even an overfeeding day in the week because it is pretty low calorie I mean you know a typical person with 100 grams of protein um for a say a five foot two woman it might be shooting for 100 grams protein that's 400 calories if you're only getting 30 grams of fat with that you know you in 10 grams of carbs say you might be 700 calories and that's a really low calorie day so you don't want to be doing that all the time just we look at it as uh a substitute for a water fast some people will do you know nothing but water for a day or two days well in place of that and to prevent your body from losing muscle you do protein Sperry modified fast which is where the term comes from you modify a fast to spare your body's protein yeah it was actually um you know I wasn't quite interested in in the differences between actually fasting actually you know depriving yourself of nutrition and just being in a so-called fasting metabolism which I don't I don't think is a faster metabolism I mean you eat 4 000 calories in ribeye you're obviously not fasting so and why are you still in a fasting metabolism it's not a fasting metabolism I think that's our primary metabolic State and I think we just get a lot of benefits from being in that that metabolic State and then you derange that by eating carbohydrates um and so some of these things we have a lot of studies looking at fasting and obviously shows a lot of benefit and then some people that are detractors of Keto or carnivore they say oh well this is just mimicking fasting and we know fasting is really good for you and so you know that's all it's doing it's mimicking fasting it's like or fasting gets you into the metabolism you're supposed to be in any way and you would be in if you were eating your natural diet really yeah yeah you know there's a lot of there are certain little aspects that you know there's been studies that show that keto increases autophagy autophagy's holidays process for breaking down cells and building newer younger cells with those uh with those parts um it does increase autophagy which is something that increases a lot on fasting too so I mean there are some little parallels there but it's not fat I mean you're not mimicking a fast it's yeah when I think of a fast I think of it from an energy standpoint right and that's why a protein sparing modified fast is kind of mimicking a fast from an energy standpoint because energy in the diet's way down yeah yeah and and I even looked at some of those some of those studies to try to look at you know because there are like the fasting mimicking diets and they they okay does this get the same effect as as fasting quite a lot of them have not only the same effects as fasting is it just depriving yourself of nutrition but um actually have better do better than than the fasting group and one of them was uh in a group just you know just you're talking about you know having 100 grams of of protein just sort of you know maybe remember this uh where it spoke about actually fasting and then sort of like a modified fast where they would at least sort of gives some protein and um and they found that that with as with at least 100 grams of protein a day that that sort of you know kept people pretty healthy for more extended fast and the longer fasts where they didn't have any any protein or anything at all uh that was where people saw more issues some side effects such as like hair loss not everyone was getting this but there was just an increased prevalence of these sorts of uh of side effects is that is that something you've uh been aware of as well definitely you know one of the things with keto that we see all the time is people when they go keto a lot of times they will have some hair loss um some of it is you know any major change in diet you you will a lot of times you'll see some hair shedding um so it's kind of just a big diet shift and your body starts the hair follicles are pushing out the old ones and it's kind of a process the body goes through with the big big change in diet but a lot of times it's because they're not eating enough protein um you see a lot there's a lot of Keto promoters and people out there who talk about you have to have 80 of the diet being fat and that's a therapeutic approach to keto or carnivore where you're treating it it originated with epilepsy where kids needed you know like 80 fat from the diet to treat that place and that's some of the original keto diet um and and that that has application for those situations but if you're in a weight loss situation not only does 80 fat not help as much with weight loss because the fat in the diet is going to end up in your fat cells anyway uh it also lit ends up with people especially a lot of women uh not getting enough protein and so they'll end up eating you know 50 grams of protein and now they're start losing hair because they're not getting enough protein in the diet and then most of the time those uh women when they up protein they may be 100 grams um and cut down the fat a bit because you know you can only eat so much uh they end up having a lot less hair loss and see improvements there yeah that was what um uh I was speaking to coach Bronson about and the sort of the way he approaches say hey you you don't need to get this percentage or that percentage you need to get enough protein you need to get enough fat whatever that shakes out to be percentage-wise is what it is but you need to get enough of these things we're a huge proponent of you know grams of macros versus percentage because the percentages are so prone to error based on calories right I mean if you're eating 4 000 calories a day because you're really active and all this stuff you're you know 10 carbs are going to be way different than somebody trying to lose weight and they're smaller woman and they're you know eating you know 1400 calories or something you do it you figure it out you're eating a vastly you know 10 grams of carbs versus like 80 grams of carbs or something you know so uh you know definitely put on the air if you're if you're just counting percentages yeah North goals like you're saying like a goal should be I need enough protein for my body yeah whether I don't hear what the percentage is based on how big I am and how much muscle I have I need this much protein yeah so what would be some some you know grams per weight I'm assuming that that you would have targets for people typically you know we have a calculator on our website that kind of takes a bunch of different factors into play but a real easy kind of rule of thumb for a Man start at about 100 grams of protein at five foot tall and then add like five grams of protein per inch above that so if you're five foot six uh it'd be an extra three so at least 130 grams of protein a day you know would be your goal as a man for women we say about maybe 80 to 90 grams protein is a starting point at five foot and then add above that okay and do you have any any sort of fat minimums as well or is it mostly focused on on protein you know you do for us it's uh too kind of two-pronged uh on protein sparing days we never want to go below like 20 30 grams and again those are very occasional only it's only a tool if you're trying to break a stall or whatever because you need about 20 30 grams of fat just to get uh vitamin absorption you know Ade and K to absorb fat soluble vitamins to make you know certain certain hormones you need some dietary fat even when it's a pulsed you know uh transient of one day doing it you still want to get some fat um as far as day to day then we look at it more from a calorie standpoint because uh you don't want metabolic adaptation happening where you know if you're eating really low calorie for extended periods of time um you're gonna start down regulating your metabolism and these studies like The Biggest Loser study you know you've seen all that information so we kind of look at it more from that perspective but in any case it's hit your protein keep carbs you know to a minimum and then just take your fat and adjust it based on your goals you know that becomes the only variable left right and so you you know if you want to lose more weight down down a little bit if you want to maintain dial out up you need more energy dial it up a bit if you're active you know that that it's as simple as that okay great and um and so when you guys uh because I understand you guys um treat clients uh online just from from all over the place and sort of and you're and you're coaching them in you know whatever Direction they want to go what's sort of uh is your your normal clientele is this is a lot to do with weight loss chronic disease or who are you normally seeing uh we see the gamut uh everything uh I would say you know almost uh gosh 95 plus percent do want at least one of their goals is weight loss right you know that's you know most people that come into this want to lose some weight but the thing that's really interesting and this has been true for the 20 years of doing this people stick with this not because of the weight loss they stick with it because how they feel the you know energy they have the mental Clarity they have the you know improvements they see in all these uh autoimmune conditions or pain chronic pain fibromyalgia you name it digestive issues all these improvements they see in their health is why they stick with it the weight loss is kind of a side bonus you know to just how good they feel and we actually have on our our blog excuse me we have a success stories I put a little link right on the top and if you click on the success stories I put a page together of just a sampling of all these testimonies we've gotten over the years and again 20 years you accumulate a lot of you know testimonies from different things and so I started keeping them in this folder of ours and at some point I was like we gotta get some of this out there for so people will see what can happen with this it's not just about weight loss and it's the first half is like weight loss stories of you know we have like a 250 pound Club people have lost over 250 pounds over 200 pounds like there's dozens of them and we got to the uh 150 or 100 pound club we couldn't even list because we just run out of paid you know it's this huge page Rarity uh but then below that I put Health stories and so we put uh it was originally from our slides but I put the you know Snippets of the client testimonies of all these different health conditions from Parkinson's to Ms to you know uh all obviously Alzheimer's and seizure control and diabetes you know things you typically think of but uh there's also all kinds of uh digestive things like IBS Crohn's acid reflux we in a lot of times you know people say well you lose weight you're going to see Improvement house and in general that's fairly true you know for most situations uh but there's we have testimonies on there of people gaining weight and having huge improvements in health one is one example is one of our clients had really bad uh cases of Crohn's and they were underway so they were like 89 pounds and had to gain weight well and they did they gained weight and all their Crohn's symptoms went away right so it's not just the weight loss right there's more to it there's a lot of Health improvements you can see and we've got I don't know tens of thousands of these now and I can literally just go in that folder now and type in a condition and get half a dozen testimonies it's just it's incredible it was really amazing and um and it's it's you know it's nice that you have that database that you can refer back to as well even just for for data collection uh purposes as well because that's I mean tens of thousands of people that that that's an incredible uh I mean that'd be a career for some people you guys are still going um but that's a huge amount of people that you've helped and it's really really important to uh have that sort of collated data so that you can say like hey this is we're seeing this in these numbers and you know like all of our all these people that and they're all responding in the same way obviously that's not the same as like a randomized control of trial or anything like that but you know but a very large you know robust case series can still um you know show a lot of very good information to people and it's just just more data collection to get to get this word out there yeah exactly that's why I originally started putting it together because I was like this is pretty powerful if we can you know have three or four eight or ten examples of this situation and they all saw this Improvement you know I I worked uh in my later years as an engineer I worked in uh uh Healthcare informatics and then into uh Imaging uh software uh and we did you know PET CT type imaging software I actually I actually did a calcium score myself once on our software and our training you know uh and and what I found is that you know doctors you know one thing I don't like in this community's certain promoters in keto will be like uh you know doctors are just want to keep you sick and keep you on a prescription and you know that kind of a thing that some people get into and that is not the case on 99. whatever percent of doctors they want to help they want to see better outcomes with their patients and a better outcomes mean they left me in Better Health and in better shape than when they came and they're not given the tools in most cases you know there's been a there's a study in California it showed doctors on average got 24 hours or less of nutrition education in all of their schooling residency Etc right and a lot of that is okay how much glucose do I have to put in an IV to keep somebody in a coma alive right like you know so they're not doing those the tools right and but they they do want to help and so by providing these kind of outcomes we've been working with our friend Dr Eric Westman to get some of these out in case study papers because you're right you know n equals one n equals many or a few it's a good example and it's it's there's something there to that should pique people's interest yeah I was just going to ask if you were if you uh were looking to get those published sometimes it's hard not being like as as you know attached to an institution that's running these sorts of uh series uh but it would be great I mean if you have so many space I mean you just you just pick these different uh maladies like Crohn's you'll say okay well we have 78 people with crohn's and and these are the these are the the the the results of all of those people you know you can at least sort of get these things out there and uh and then people have something to refer to in the literature and then all of a sudden they'll have to start thinking like okay well wait a minute this is showing up more and more maybe we should maybe we should look into this further yeah Dr Westman has been trying to do some more of that uh in his own patients but also work with us and other people because that's kind of what he's trying to do is get the info we don't have you know I'm not able to fund and run a big study on this so let's just get some case studies out there get some stuff in the literature so that you know doctors going out there and looking and they see oh look at a couple case studies here uh there was one just recently by Dr Georgia e with Dr Westman I believe that talked about uh all these improvements with uh all these patients were having bipolar and different uh issues that medications weren't helping with and all of them in this I think there was 36 in this uh of of cases also improvements across the board with diet changes and so that's kind of thing if you get it out there at least it's there for people to find and pique their interest yeah yeah I saw that as well yeah it was like it was bipolar schizophrenia major depression anxiety OCD and they were all and interestingly enough these were just just normal people that happened to have this malady they were all refractory to standard of care so the counseling and medications had all failed them and then they put them just on a ketogenic diet not even a full carnivore diet um although I think sometimes now to just to get the the study passed they're calling it a keto diet but it's actually carnivore and so yeah it is a keto diet and so yeah but um you know there's nothing in the literature yet with carnivore on it but it's also sort of a a less scientific name I guess you could say but um yeah yeah uh but they they all they all improved all all 30 I think yeah 30 something 32 yeah they all improved just by dietary changes alone when they were refractory to traditional treatments well which is which is should turn some heads uh you would help absolutely and and and everybody should want that right because that's essentially free right you've got to eat something so if you're just deciding to eat these Foods instead of these foods and you see huge improvements versus a medication that might cost you thousands of dollars or cost the Health Care System thousands of dollars a month I mean we should all want that yeah and you know in in certain places you know that's it's going to be hard to get those studies out there because obviously you're not going to have a pharmaceutical company that's going to spend millions of dollars to show that you don't need their pharmaceutical um yeah but um but you you would imagine that in in in you know University institutions and especially like around the world like I'm in Australia and you know they have you know socialized Healthcare here uh a lot of drawbacks to that system one you would think would be that they would want to spend less right because the government does as much as they can to not spend money on you and that ends up being uh you have six-year waiting lists until you come in to see someone in uh you know Surgical Specialty to you know to help you with whatever problem like actually like actually six years like I'm not making that up like this is actually like USSR like wait times you know where you put your money in ahead of time and it's like okay I come back in six years you'll get your car um that's not happening with cars but you know that is happening with health care and uh but you would you would imagine that you know because they're looking for every opportunity to not pay as much or even insurance companies as well they don't want to pay for these these really expensive medications you'd think they would be in their best interest to look at these options say hey we don't have to pay anything you just change your diet and um and so I think that that might be an angle but I think everyone has their influences as well and yeah definitely well and the problem is back to the you know what the doctor is seeing day to day in the US anyway uh I know doctors who they when they they see this in their practice where if they spend 10 minutes with a patient and give them two prescriptions versus an hour talking about diet talking about lifestyle they'll get reimbursed more from insurance from the 10-minute visit with two prescriptions and they will from the hour spent on lifestyle and diet you know recommendations so you're incentivized to do the right thing and spend the time you know to do the right thing it's crazy yeah I ended up I ended up just staying late unfortunately and just because like I you know I think that it's important to talk about these things but that's actually why I started uh YouTube channel was just because like I thought you know it's not really the place for me to talk about all these sorts of things when I'm seeing somebody um or or I don't have the time and we have and we have to cover other things and so you know I have this as as a resource for people to to just check out and and see what they think and um you know come to their own conclusions but uh yeah you're right you know it it's the incentives are in the sort of the wrong direction you're incentivized to sort of just just write a prescription get someone else door and just move on to the next patient as opposed to really sit down and say okay hey this is how you need to address this and this is and this this will help you yeah it's it's really upside down you know you're we're in uh Band-Aids on symptoms you know with prescriptions versus treating root causes yeah and never going to get you know the Band-Aids is always going to be required if you don't treat the root cause you know and so you end up on a lifetime of prescriptions when if you treat the root cause you could be off not only reverse the symptoms but you know not require any medication so it's a win-win for everybody if we can go that route it's just hard with the system the way it's set up yeah it is there is um uh Professor Thomas seifried from Boston College he was saying it's like as soon as we figure out uh and and economic model that would incentivize these sorts of conversations you know just you know just talking about like hey you know do these things and you don't need health care you know that's when we that's when we'll be able to uh be able to to sort of grow this sort of idea of these dietary Lifestyle Changes radically changing our health which which is you know that that's that's something that we understand I mean think about it this way like we we talked we've been talking for the last 50 years eat less move more right and then we'll lose weight so if that hasn't worked you know we've been eating the wrong things and um and you know probably moving about the same but you know the um the the idea that fat and saturated fat caused heart disease that's been under that's been you know thought to be true for at least 50 years so the idea that some of the food that we're eating is causing these chronic diseases is it isn't a new one we just need to sort of change the direction of ire and um and understanding as well because it's not that it's it's something else yeah uh in our book keto book that we've wrote like eight nine years ago I started out with a kind of a a overview of a case of how the sugar industry Lobby or paid for all these studies to be done and and these are out now actually even more of them uh these letters and and data has come out since we wrote that book of how they funded they knew that sugar was the problem they knew that sugar was one of the big causes of heart disease they would they needed the finger to be pointed at someone else so they funded these studies to get the connection to saturated fat to heart disease and and it was like you know the the cigarette industry level of you know we know where the problem what we're going to misdirect this and we you know 30 40 years later we're we're still in that place right with a lot of Health Care and that which is absolutely even though all this has come out now uh that they were actually Mis uh leading people to go down the strong path you know and and from a you know what you talked about incentivizing you know to go that way in the U.S we still spend billions on corn subsidies right so we're actually artificially lowering basically High features corn syrup because that's what where most of the Corn ends up right because basically just turns into starch and then they use make corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup from it we're making that an artificially cheap thing through subsidies we should be doing the opposite right I mean we should be adding cost to corns corn and corn syrup and you know D using that money to uh you take protein and beef and lean protein or animal proteins and reduce the cost but you know we're going the opposite direction a lot of stuff yeah um I saw a uh someone said you know sent me this this video and and asked me sort of well how would you approach this there was a doctor and it was very Earnest and and I'm sure very well-meaning and she said that you know before she was a doctor she was a patient she had lupus she had all these problems and you know going through all her medical school and you know training and you know Advanced degrees and genetics and all that sort of thing so she couldn't figure out how to actually just be healthy and then you know 15 years ago she turned to a vegan diet she's never had a problem since she's been off for medication she's helped all these people and the point that I made to them was that well there are plenty of people that are on a vegan diet that are overweight and very sick and have Lupus and have all these other things what the difference is is that when you talk to someone who goes vegan they have and they have improvements in their health it's not they're not just dropping meat they're not still eating ice cream and cookies and cake and drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes they're they're eating Whole Foods they're not going out to eat they've cut out sugar they're not drinking sodas they're not drinking alcohol they don't smoke and so obviously there are more changes being done there and what you can see is like you know there are some vegans vegan is just a meaningless term it just means don't eat meat but it doesn't mean what you do not yours what you're supposed to do and so you know some people go vegan and they're just as sick or even more sick and then some people get better but basically everyone who gets everyone I know I've heard of Google's carnivore gets better as well so what that means is you're cutting out certain plant foods and you're getting better some of these things are triggering uh these diseases and these these chronic uh disease mostly the sugar of processed garbage and carbs and things like that and that you can you can eliminate those things out through either method but you are still eliminating out the plants and the sugar as opposed to meat the eliminating meat isn't going to get you there it's eliminating the plants well the the pro yeah the processed foods and the sugars right you know you go from the standard American diet to pretty much anything else that's Whole Foods based I don't care what it becomes but anything Whole Foods you're going to see Health improvements you you are I mean you're basically going from the worst possible diet out there to the standard American diet to something that's Whole Foods which is better um you know I I would argue that I don't think anybody can truly Thrive for the long term without animal proteins um and it's not just the complete protein you know that is so hard to get in the Plant World Without a lot of you know compromised foods like soy with uh phytoestrogens and those type of issues with it um but also because of the vitamins and minerals and this is something that we've been putting in our books too uh a whole chapter I put dedicated to this in our keto book like eight years ago because at that point I had been in nutrition for quite a while and I didn't even realize how much vitamins and minerals there were in just beef right like it's not it wasn't you know eight years ago nobody really understood that a steak has more vitamins and minerals than kale or blueberries or any of these superfoods you've never been older are these superfoods and so we started I just it just blew my mind so I started making these charts and I'm like okay let's let's take uh beef and compare it against kale and and apple you know apple a day it keeps the doctor away right and and all these things and it was just blowing them out of the water on every like the 13 most essential vitamins and minerals across the board and then you add something like beef liver and it's like the big flavor is probably nutrient intense food on the planet and you talk about health and you talk about healing and what's going to help with that it's going to be nutrient dense foods like you give you give me a plate and don't tell me what's on either plate but you say they're both the same calories one of them has like almost no vitamins and minerals maybe like one vitamin that's high and the rest are nothing another one that's really high across the board all vitamins and minerals same calories which one is going to be healthier for you the one that's more nutrient dense and that's beef that's your animal proteins and this other thing over here is kale it's got like one vitamin really high and everything else is you know that are like an apple that's got like vitamin C and then everything else is very little you know so uh that's why we started putting these charts together and it really opened my eyes and uh again back to what's going to help you be satiated and what's going to help you be healthy and heal if you've got issues it's going to be really nutrient dense foods and it's going to be complete proteins because what's healing what's building ourselves a lot I don't know that's protein and so I look at the animal proteins as essential for those building blocks of amino acids but also for all the vitamins and minerals that come with yeah and that's something that I I always think about as well just sort of getting on the first principles just you know the basics is what are we trying to do when we we're trying to build and maintain meat so what's going to have everything that we need to do that meat right you'd think right so this is animal animal tissue and and some animals are able to convert plant tissue into animal tissue and that's that's miraculous we're not so great at it I mean we can but it's not it's not we're not perfect that and I think that brings us to uh you know the issue of bioavailability which is that these the the kale and all these other things may have all these nutrients in them but they're not necessarily accessible to us is that right exactly like uh for example spinach everybody's like oh spinach really high in calcium well that's that's great guess what it's also high in oxalates yeah well the oxides dude rob you of the calcium at all and they bind to it and cause kidney stones right like you know it's that whole you know what you absorb is what's important not necessarily what's in the food yeah and that's uh and that's another sort of indication as to what we're supposed to eat and what as you know and what we're biologically adapted to eat we can get everything everything out of meat whereas in Plants you have you may have you know thiamine and calcium and and all these sorts of things Avail you know in there but because they're they're bound up in in certain chemical bonds we don't have the enzymes to break apart those bonds and so what does that mean that means we are not biologically adapted or fit to eat and consume that product and that seems to be a lot of these nutrients in plants yeah and there's a lot of uh compounds too that just aren't in the right form right like iron iron from beef your the absorption rate is through the roof you know Iron from like lentils is like a hundred times less absorbed you know available right and so you know the what you it if it's got a lot of a compound that your body can't really use how does that help us right yeah exactly that was um that was a great a great example of that was uh uh when I was speaking to Dr Bill Schindler he gave an example of corn which has you know a ton of thymine in it except that it's bound up in a certain way that we can't we can't extract it and so people were dying on mass around Europe and America uh from pellegra which is a was a thymine deficiency which is which is ironic because there's a lot of thymine in corn it's just bound up in a way that we can't we can't access it exactly yeah um so that's sort of you know brings me to my next point is that the plants that we're eating now a obviously we're not biologically adapted to eat them because we can't even extract basic nutrients from them um and sometimes you can you can cook them or put them through you know initialization like with corn and put some chemical reactions to bring bring out these nutrients and people say well that's that's how we consume you say hey it's not always but B uh if we are biologically adapted to eat them we should have the mechanics to break them down and extract them we should not have to use a chemical process or even heat extraction to to break apart these defense chemicals and extract these nutrients um but either way these plants didn't exist 20 000 years ago they're all they're all you know bioengineered in some form or another um can you talk about that I mean because obviously you know if our ancestors weren't eating this twenty thousand fifty thousand years ago why are we eating them now yeah that's you know not just the uh uh Natural Evolution but also the hybridizing and cross breeding and all these things we do you know even to this day that we're still doing you know I just not too long ago they came out with cotton candy grapes that are uh almost twice the sugar of normal Grapes of today right you never see a less sweet bitter fruit or vegetable that they're hybridizing right they're they're cross breeding and making these things always sweeter less nutrient dense packed with sugar um but also you know like you said going back even I think that what we strawberry of today it was like less than 200 years ago that they found this strain and they cross-bred and they ended up it used to be something uh you know every two years I believe it it fruited and it was just a little tiny thing and now you get one's the size of your hand so it's you know not just a volume it's a volume same thing where you're getting more sugar per volume and the volume itself is huge compared to what it used to be I remember we were up at uh my father-in-law's cabin and we found some wild strawberries that grew up actually naturally in that area and they're like these little pea-sized things and you had to forage you know for equivalent of one strawberry in the store you had to forage for a half an hour to find enough and they're pretty bitter you know they weren't very sweet at all and so that's a one factor in it but I also just recently saw a study I can give you a link if you want to put it in the notes uh there's a study that showed that in the last 50 to 100 years the fruits and vegetables that we consume just in the last 50 to 100 years have gone down in nutrient nutrients by 30 percent in some cases 40 50 60 less nutrients because of depletions of the soil and all these uh issues and so you know we're just naturally getting this fruits and vegetables are getting less and less nutrient dense uh and they didn't start out that great you know compared to something like beef so well I like having the animal do the uh concentrating for me of those things yeah me too and and uh filtering out all the the toxins as well um yeah I was looking at the the dietary recommendations in the U.S and now that it's come you know all across the world as well it's now made it to the shores of Australia and to the hospitals here so those dietary recommendations in the U.S that are pretty appalling they're now the official recommendations in our hospital system here and I took a look at that and I you know me being me I had to write an email like yeah you actually you know I've been saying this for a while I would just say I have a couple issues with these sorts of things and and you know cited things and put references and links and things like that and um in the green zone basically the green zone was that you could eat as much as this as you want whatever just go to town I'm in the yellow zone was like still good for you but you know using moderation uh and the Red Zone was like don't just don't have this stuff or if you do just have it very sparingly um so in the green zone well I'll tell you the Red Zone first was obviously you know ground beef butter eggs right everything I eat basically exclusively what I eat and um and then in the green zone first of all number one was watermelon so out of a rating of a hundred a hundred points watermelon had 100 it is the perfect food right but this is this is this is apparently according to these people because that 100 out of a hundred what would that mean I mean like this is what's a biologically most appropriate for us this is our optimal diet you know you have you have animals in the zoo you know like this is what they eat and this is what they should only eat so this is watermelon for us apparently according to the United States uh government and the and the HOSA and now the Australian government as well watermelon we are watermelon of Wars that's what we should be eating that's the only thing we should ever eat get back to Evolution right it used to be a thing with a hard shell you had to crack it open like a chisel it was like one day that's what a watermelon was until we read this thing that's filled with sugar right yeah I would love to know though where did they get that like what's the thing in watermelon that makes it so special I mean is it the sugar yeah I mean what what there's no protein no there's that's just incredible yeah well there's nothing useful you know and uh yeah I have no idea and and I don't I don't know what their what that number means what is it what is that show your work you know I mean like we we've been doing this since kindergartens like hey you don't get any credit unless you show your work all right how did you come up that a hot watermelon was a hundred you know and so 100 okay so how are they figuring that out I have no idea but it gets better than that because number two with 97 uh out of 100 was canned peaches tan punches all right peaches high fructose corn syrup mixed together yeah scanned with with sugar syrup so I think I think we know why I think more sugar in it the better because number three which I thought was very special was frosted Corn Flakes oh my God that is not even Corn Flakes but frosted corn yeah frosted Corn Flakes was higher than Cheerios unfrosted Cheerios right so the sugar made it better was there like a Kellogg's you know made this list at the bottom or something well I think there I think there was uh in you know the other list because yeah I mean they're not showing their their influences at all and they're not showing their but you know frosted Corn Flakes was was above Cheerio so it was normal Cheerios and then frosted Corn Flakes was above that so the only difference between those two things is the sugar so more sugar made this thing better which I guess is you know tell you where the canned peaches and watermelon uh scores are coming from just insane just insane and people listen to this garbage you know because well that's what the government says I mean they just work the best for us don't they I'm like I think we've we've learned by now that that no no actually no they don't uh we should never assume that um the beaches thing made me think of kids and what we do to kids and we wrote this sugar-free kids book a few a couple years ago and uh you know our kids have been raised this way we just eat what we eat you know and uh we always get the oh yeah Maria gets beat up on Tick Tock all the time why don't you give them good sugar like they're like brighter like why wouldn't you why aren't you gonna give them this uh and cocaine what's wrong yeah exactly like they just it's crazy but uh you know I I made this little kind of meme picture it was our son eating this you know they had some vegetables lots of protein in it was like an Asian stir-fry kind of dish uh and next to it said uh you know are you sure keto's safe for kids and then below that's like one of these pictures of like rainbow of Skittles and the crap kid eats and it's like uh next to that I put let's let them be kids right yeah yeah like you know this kind of all led into us doing the sugar-free kids book and I did a lot of studying on this as well but as far as you know kids biology and what they need and all that and uh what's really I found was incredible is that um first of all kids need a ton of protein right and they you know amino acid you can't build cells and stuff out of no amino acid I mean you got to have them right um but when you look at also when they're young and infants they have a huge brain right and this brain is an energy hog right and proportionally for an infant to an adult their brain is much bigger emotionally to their body right and so that's why actually a newborn a baby is born with blood ketones of 0.5 even in a Fed State and they quickly within like one to two hours will go to 2.0 or 3.0 blood ketones because you need all this energy and the brain is an energy hog and it and it loves to run on ketones so while breastfed a baby is always in ketosis but suddenly this becomes a crazy diet you know once they're not breastfed anymore right like you ask anybody what's the best food for a baby breast milk well breast milk has a lot of fat in it and it's got a decent amount of protein as well and when you what do we transition these kids to when they come off the bottle canned peaches and pee it's it's like fat devoid of fat and very low in protein and all these anti-nutrients you know we basically are changing kids to practically a vegetarian diet in a lot of cases if you go to the you know crap that you get in a can for babies it's just insane to me I mean it's they need fats for their brain they need protein to grow yeah and high sugar I mean that's the thing because a lot of these these you know pea paste all that sort of stuff is disgusting and you know and you have to you have to cover it up with a lot of sugar yeah you got to add sugar to make it palatable so a lot of most that's just a load of a sugar too yeah exactly and my and that's the thing you know kids braids are growing and they really need those those fats and and ketones ketones can cross the blood-brain barrier and reconstitute into fatty acids and that's actually the structural component of the brain uh is coming from that so you actually really need ketones but in cholesterol the brain is the biggest explosive cholesterol in the body yeah exactly and and obviously for hormonal development and maintenance as well and so this is I think this is most vital when when kids are growing when kids are developing after you don't have the substrate they will not develop the physical structures to their genetic potential that they would have otherwise and that then that and then that's it that's permanent they don't they can they can maintain and optimize what they've what they've developed into but they will never develop further well they never developed what they could have done which I think is is a shame exactly like is that all sex hormones are derived from cholesterol and so you know if you're not getting in the diet the liver's got to make it and it's a that can really put a load on the liver and I mean I'd rather get some eggs and get some cholesterol in my diet and uh give my liver a break and feed my brain you know yeah and uh what people don't realize as well you know me when I was a kid we didn't have that at all in our house my dad was doing the whole pritikin thing or it's just like no no heart healthy fat everything everything was was also no sugar though and so that was probably a Saving Grace and so but my mom remember telling me is like well when kids are young you would always drink you know non-fat milk but which I actually really liked and um but they said when kids are young they should have whole milk because it's good for their brains or even then you know they're aware of that well kids should have fat and then all of a sudden something changes but it doesn't really you know we what we use to build our bodies and our brains we now need to use to maintain the structures of our brain and our body you still need those ketones to go into your brain and to fuel your brain and to and to rebuild these structures and maintain them and so when we have people you'll get older getting Alzheimer's and you know we look at MRIs all the time in you know my work and of of the brain and you always see people that are older their brains shriveled it's like a shriveled Walnut whereas like a kid's brain it's packed in you there's no space it's just it's just full of brain and and then we get older and it's just like oh these are these are normal age-related uh atrophy and it's just like and every time I see that I'm like how can that be normal that is I mean they've lost half the volume of their brain they're half the person that they used to be that that is tragic you know that can't be right and I think that's why we're not maintaining our brains we're not maintaining the structures uh that we have spent so much energy and time building and and that's one of the major ones is is continuing to provide the the fats and cholesterol that we need to build and maintain our brain absolutely and and you know for a long time I've I've uh believed that Alzheimer's essentially dementia's type 3 diabetes it's insulin was defense of the brain and what happens when you can't use burn glucose in the brain as well it atrophies right and and ketones are the other source of fuel that can really feel the brain and that's why you really see brains of people with Alzheimer's and Dementia wake up when they're getting you know more blood ketones in the body uh from eating keto or carnivore yeah absolutely and and that's um yeah exactly right you know there was a study looking at that and they found that people with full-blown Alzheimer's using ketogenic high fat ketogenic diet as a treatment model for people with Alzheimer's they found that it was uh they had better outcomes than every single Alzheimer's medication ever trialled yeah which is which is I think pretty incredible and the fact that more people don't know that and aren't saying okay well why don't we why don't we do this is the same thing like a Medicaid high priced medication that you're going to take forever versus just eat these Foods instead of these Foods it doesn't really cost you anymore like you know it's just crazy that we don't do that more yeah I think so and um you know there are and it would benefit it would benefit a lot of these these um you know basically treatment facilities that have end stage Alzheimer's Parkinson's patients uh you get them on this sort of diet it will actually help them and you may you know knock on wood potentially get these people home as opposed to being sort of end-stage terminal cases that have gone to this hospice sort of facility to you know to die basically and it's very very sad when they get to that point but it could help them it could help these people and um and so I think that's that's something that it would be great to get more people on board with you I mean there's even even studies looking at um higher saturated fat diets and higher LDL cholesterol just people with higher LDL cholesterol have lower rates of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's yeah yeah what are we doing here this is such a major major issue you know I I don't you know when when I you know talk to my parents my you know my my grandparents when they were still around when they were kids no one had dementia no one had Alzheimer's no one was going to these old folks homes now it's the only thing you do now it's to say you get to a certain age mom you know Grandma's going to a home you know that that's it you know and I was even told in medical school if you live long enough everyone will get Alzheimer's and I just thought uh that doesn't sound right because I have relatives that were born in the 1800s that lived over 100 years they died at home fully composed mentus yeah yeah I know uh uh Maria's uh grandma on one side she always had her lard next to the you know she cooked in large she always ate eggs and all this stuff and never had any cognitive issues she at like 70 some years old she opened the door to the basement thinking it was a closet or something stepped fell all the way down the stairs uh I think she was 73 or something didn't break a bone jeez wow okay good yeah you know I yeah I know it was it was caught it was a while ago and this was quite a while ago but uh you know the sheath of the bones and the all the protein and the fats that make those up and keep them healthy uh you know I I we've just gone and in there on the other side tragically her grandma died of Alzheimer's you know her her husband my uh wife's grandfather uh died at like 60 of a heart attack and so she was margarine and you know avoiding you know cholesterol in the diet and all down that path for ever since her husband died because that's what she was told right yeah and she ended up with Alzheimer's so I don't think that's a coincidence no I don't think so either and you know the prevalence of these of these issues have gone Sky High they've all increased dramatically since the recommendation that we stop eating fat and cholesterol when we stop eating animal fats and so we go on this low-fat heart healthy diet and first of all heart attack rates have tripled so that didn't work and and also Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and uh you know other other forms of dementia have increased dramatically since then so I think that we are we are really really really hurting ourselves uh by doing this and you know people in you know in you know young adulthood or or middle age you know you're in in the prime of adulthood you you can you can get away with a lot more um the extremes of age obviously developing you will never develop properly unless you eat properly uh and then you're you're stuck the rest of your life um but also you know when you get older you just sort of run out of options you you've built up a lot of damage over the years and you haven't been maintaining things and things are you know the wheels are starting to fall off you don't have as much room to mess around and so it's very important but before you ever get there you know before the wheels fall off in the first place you know you can you can keep and maintain your body and your brain so that it doesn't become a problem that you have you're having to chase at that point exactly and I it is something that we need to invest more time in even as parents early on to educate our kids on what is the right thing because you know that was the thing that really uh drive me crazy too like uh in our book we tried to talk about this is something you need to teach your kids about you you spend so much money and time on sport and on you know education and all of these things which are great but we don't talk to our kids about nutrition we don't talk to them about what's healthy what food is you know you always see these shows like I think as Jamie Oliver did a thing and these kids are addicted to french fries and stuff and he holds a potato out and they don't know what it is we eat breakfast all day long but they don't know what a potato is when they see it right like you gotta we gotta teach our kids what is healthy you know kids don't magically just turn 18 and suddenly boom okay now I know how to eat healthy you know I spent all my life eating candy and letting letting them be kids and eating junk and now suddenly they go off to college and they're just gonna figure it out like we gotta give them we gotta educate them and if you want to do something good for your kid give them lifelong health and that's going to be way more important than any sport or anything else you invest time and money into yeah definitely I was I was lucky that I that I did have that my mom always almost an amazing cook I'll definitely show her your cookbooks because you know she she literally she has well over 500 cookbooks she has read all of them she has used all of them like she just she loves cooking she just loves you know just the the you know the experience of it you know the chemistry experiment of putting all these things together and making something wonderful and she uh that was a big that was a big hit for her going carnivore because she's just like I can't cook anything and she was really bummed out by that but now she's looking at different carnivore options and things like that and adjusting like that was one thing when when she married my dad when they if they were married in their early 20s my mom was cooking all these like Julia Child recipes and all that sort of stuff and and then it was just like oh my God that's bad for you're gonna get rid of all this stuff and she was never able to cook or Julia Child recipes again she was so sad because she like loved these things and and I told her and I was just like hey you can do you know modified Julia Child now yes and she was all happy with that but you know I always always grow we always grew up watching her cook you know she was she was an amazing cook and so we knew what food was we knew how to prepare things and we were we were taught that but we were taught the pritikin style of of healthy eating which you know and which is like meat we definitely meat you know you wanted sort of everything you know you wanted your meat your protein uh and your your greens and you wanted your starches like that's how we were and lean you know that was that was eating good so we we ate good you know uh from that standpoint uh there really wasn't ever any sugar things in our house just ever it was never had soda eating juice that was very rare and um you know so that that I that was that was a good foundation for me but now I just you know so now I always had that in my head like I wanted to eat well I wanted to eat things that were good for me and be healthy uh but now I've just sort of readjusted what that means to me and so I I agree with you that was very very helpful to me if I didn't have that basis I I wouldn't be able to have made the conclusions and that I've drawn since set yeah and just the the whole cooking process and everything getting kids involved in that and understanding what goes into their food and uh you know end of every one of our videos on YouTube Maria has our son if he's helping uh he always ends with cook with your kids because you know that's gets them involved to get some uh they they tend to be more they want to try something too like if they got out of hand in making it they want to try it you know and see the results too so that's a great way to get them involved if there's something that you're not sure they're going to want to like have them help help you cook it um so yeah I I big believer in that yeah and also you know they you know this is this is a real skill that uh yeah that has been lost in most of the adult population now I think that's probably part and parcel with this whole you know food industry takeover of of our health is that they've they've made these hyperpalatable easy to make ready-made meals or actually uh originally they were cheaper than the constituent parts that you would buy on your own so I was like well okay what's the point why I've got to buy all these ingredients myself spend three hours cooking it and it costs more you know and so you know they just went to that and then yeah and then you have an entire generation or two now not seeing their parents cook not learning how to cook and they have no idea so now they're beholden to that and they're always going out to eat going out to restaurants buying all these things I had friends of mine you know who are having kids they've never cooked a meal in their life and like and like talking to them about this and they're and they literally like every day is ubereats every day for three meals a day for you know them and their kid is is ubereats and and I'm telling them it's like hey well this is you know and they were like yeah like whenever they were you know would be visiting or whatever they see what you know I was eating they're like I wish I could do that I don't know how to shop I don't know what to buy it's like just buy meat it's just it's just that's it but you know yeah that's it you know just buy a steak cook the steak how do you not know how to cook a steak it's three minutes done yeah you know yeah and that's the thing too is it can be a lot quicker a lot easier I mean by the time you order it and you or if ubereats is one thing but if you go to the place to pick it up and drive back you could have grilled the steak ate it and cleaned up and it'll cost less too so I mean it's just crazy and it's a steak you know like you're getting you might get some fajitas for that you know it's like the like the St you know it's it's a much much better quality meal as well yeah exactly great awesome well Craig thank you so much for taking the time it was absolutely great talking to you that was that was a lot of fun yeah I had a great time thank you yeah and I think that uh people get a lot a lot out of that and um can you tell us where to find you and uh and Maria's working to to learn more about you and also find find your book that's something I wanted to talk about more but um you know I think that's great that you're coming out with with those carnivore ideas because that's something that that so many people ask me is like what what recipes do I put for me it's as simple as just cook a damn steak but like but some people need more than that and so that's great to come out with that well and that's what my wife Maria is so amazing at is she creates these recipes and she's like like you talked about the chemistry experiment you know one of the things is uh this pudding that which she started which was originally started with my son Kai who's right over here uh who did not eat eggs and we tried everything when he was a baby when he was young to get him to eat eggs because we knew how good healthy they were for him and how good they were for his brain and everything and he wouldn't eat we scrambled over you'd name it hard-boiled nothing so she started um experimenting throwing it in the some hard-boiled eggs in a blender and she put some cocoa powder in there a little bit of sweetener blended it up and it turned into the best chocolate mousse you've ever had starting with hard building right and people still can't believe that recipe uh Holly Berry did a little live cooking video with with my wife very cool recipe and before she's like uh we're on the live like this and she's like Maria I'm not eating pudding made from hard thanks but the annual is done she's taken out the whole thing she's like this is like ganache it's so good but you know that's thinking you know thinning the ingredients and techniques and the little chemistry experiment is what she's so good at uh she's got a bread that's just from eggs with uh egg white powder you know different things like that I think can really make it a lot easier and approachable for more people um but back to the original thing uh ketomeria.com that's the best place to start this keto maria.com has got links to our blog and all our books and all our social media everything kind of one place there awesome we'll put that up in the in the description as well I didn't know you guys did something with Halle Berry did she she doing keto or what is she doing yeah she's a diet she's a type 2 diabetic and she's been doing she's been eating low carb for like seven eight years yeah oh wow we did a couple videos with her and did some other stuff too it's pretty cool that's really cool yeah let's see if we can get her on the on the carnivore I think I did see something about her you know doing doing some sort of you know dietary thing and that's how she's you know that's where her Hollywood secret into you know staying young and things like that that'd be cool is she she doing mostly mostly keto or she Carnival yeah ish yeah she's been doing keto like I said probably seven eight years she's got all our books and yeah yeah well that's really cool well that's that's fun to see and you know the more people in those in those circles they're obviously very influential people look up to and admire and then say like okay well how you know she's must be in her I guess 50s by now and still looks like she did when she was in her 20s you know so like and people look at that and just be like okay well I'll whatever she's doing let's do that for sure yeah we we are very much in the rising tide lifts all boats you know the more people that honor hear about this and see what it can do the better for everyone yeah I'm I'm right there with you great awesome awesome great thank you so much I hope we hope we can do this again yeah awesome thank you [Music]
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