Special Guest Interview with Dr Shawn Baker, MD!

all right hello everyone uh this is dr anthony chafee and i have a very special guest dr shawn baker is joining me today uh dr baker thank you so much for coming on yeah man appreciate it man appreciate you having us great great catching up with you again yeah you too so um i i think uh everyone knows uh who you are but if you want to give uh just a just a brief rundown um of yourself and and uh how you came around to carnivore and what you're doing now i think that'd be great yeah yeah so sean baker i'm a you know orthopedic surgeon by training i spent you know several decades in the sort of conventional medic medical system i was also been an athlete my whole life i always spent time as a military guy as well i used to launch nuclear bombs and then i was a trauma surgeon for the air force i went to afghanistan and stuff and i you know somewhere in my mid-40s i started to realize that uh you know i need to start looking after nutrition so i started playing with different nutritional strategies to get me from svelte 300 pounds or 290 down to two i think i got down to 230 but about six years playing with different diets and like back in 2006 i think it was i came across these crazy people eating an all meat diet and they called it zero zero carb diet at the time and i i we got a pretty sort of morbid fascination with this group watched him for a while and said what the hell i'll try it so i tried it you know for a couple days and you know miraculously i didn't die and nothing bad happened so especially got the courage to do it for 30 days you know back in 2016 and uh um you know i literally felt the best of it ever for my life and then i you know i kind of went back on to a regular kind of a mixed at that time a ketogenic diet and immediately noticed i felt worse and said well i all things given all things being considered i like feeling good so i went back on kind of the all meat diet i've been on that basically for now pretty much six years uh i wrote a book called and i named i actually named it this the carnivore diet you know i kind of just that was my contribution you know kind of helped sort of popularize this all meat approach i'm not certainly not the first guy to do it but you know i guess i guess the creation of the name the carnivore diet you know i i guess i'll take credit for coining that but uh yeah it's been a fun place to be it's an interesting space obviously very controversial but i think at the end of the day the results are uh you know the results are you know what what's what we're seeing and i think you know we've been able to put our i know you also are a proponent of this and uh i think i think the result results speak for themselves and so yeah it's been a lot of fun yeah absolutely and you you when you were um in your practice with orthopedics this was something that i believe you tried to incorporate into your practice as well is that right i yeah i definitely try to incorporate diet and i wasn't you know i wasn't a carnivore back then i was more practicing ketogenic diets and so i was putting patients on ketogenic diets or at least the ones that were willing to do so and what i was finding is you know some of the surgeries that we had scheduled were no longer necessary i was canceling knee skirt and knee replacements and shoulder surgeries and you know carpal tunnel releases because the symptoms went away which i thought was really really cool and i thought that was a great great thing unfortunately in the u.s the hospital system would prefer you operate on people because it's much better they get much more money for that so i uh you know i eventually became you know it became a sticking point between me and our and the administrators at the hospital i went through quite an extensive sort of legal couple year legal battle over this eventually i ended up leaving practice and uh you know i've gone on to found a company and you know and just become an advocate for lifestyle uh and and i think and thankfully so i think for me it's been it's been a much a happier life and much more rewarding life uh doing what i'm doing now yeah yeah i've certainly noticed that as well like i mean obviously you know um you don't get into surgery and don't go through these things unless you love operating i'm sure you loved operating and uh and love operating and i do too and um you know when i was sort of out and doing different things i was always thinking about you know wanting to be in the or again and um but since since doing this and like and and talking to people and helping them coach them through different health issues and and just you know maybe it's not easy and it's not easy to rearrange their whole life but it is simple it's straightforward if you do this you'll get these results and they have these wonderful results i think it's very rewarding and so now i'm sort of trying to trying to balance both because it's absolutely rewarding as hell to see people dramatically change their life and their health for the better um by doing something so simple and then they get control of their lives back yeah i mean you're right i mean operating is fun i mean it's a blast i mean you know you you know any surgeon you ask any surgeon they don't want to be in the clinic they want to be or i mean this is what you're trying to do it's like you're kind of like a thoroughbred you want to be racing and it's a lot of fun there's a lot of you know like technical demands and i mean certainly i don't think surgery's ever going away and we'll always need surgeons we've always needed skillful people to do that i mean there's even the best diet in the world is not going to preclude every operation so that's still it's still very valuable skill and they're very valuable people to have in society um you know what i found with what i was doing interestingly as an orthopedic guy i thought and i selected orthopedics because i felt that you know i can just make such a difference in people's lives i don't have to worry about this lifestyle stuff you know leave that to the family practice guys you know they're not going to listen anyway they never lose weight they never take their medicine so this is what you're kind of you kind of kind of you get kind of jaded going through the medical system at least i did in the united states and so i didn't want to be part of that so i'm going to be a surgeon and i'm above that i don't have to deal with that i just take care of people in their broken bones and they're blown out acls and whatever but what i came to realize eventually was that uh most of what i was treating as an orthopedic surgeon was just lifestyle stuff it was just it was just the metabolic consequences of chronic disease manifested as orthopedic problems and most of that was also avoided when had i been a truly you know good doctor most of the people that i would have come in contact would have not needed that second knee replacement i remember i used to i pride myself i would do somebody's knee replacement and then two years later they come with me for their other side because i made their knee feel better but what i failed to do was prevent them from needing a second knee replacement which is what i should have focused on and i think i think that's clearly doable for for many of the people out there and so yeah i mean but like i said operation operating's fun do i miss it sometimes but would i trade it and go back to that and not do what i'm doing now no i would not yeah you know and and that's the thing like uh things that uh i've seen going on with rivera health are very exciting um you know if people don't know uh you know rivera health is is the company that dr baker founded and and uh this is just going out and trying to to treat people um and and focus on well i you know to put in my own words focus on you know uh you know addressing the underlying uh causes of different different diseases and and getting people back to normal health without having to to use expensive medications that are going to have side effects having you know unnecessary you know potentially unnecessary surgeries as well and just get people healthy again and i think that that's uh absolutely you know the paradigm shift that we need to make in medicine and start focusing on actual health and and developing people's health as opposed to just managing diseases and and you know helping them die slowly over several decades of pain and misery you know and um and that's unfortunately what the majority of medicine is now is is just dealing with these chronic diseases and and finding up new and and more and more expensive medications to you know sort of mitigate these problems that just don't need to exist yeah i mean thanks anthony for giving me the opportunity to talk about this because you know i think that um you know if we look at you know physician going to work today you know and you and most of them are very good wonderful caring people hardworking people smart intelligent people that want to do the right thing but they're not going in with the mindset is today i'm going to reverse disease today i'm going to get people off their medications that's not sort of their you know their their their driving standard operating procedure whereas at rivero that is going to be our our goal is like every day the goal is to get people off medications wherever and whenever possible treat the root cause actually reverse disease you know put the disease in remission whatever you want to call it so that they are actually healthier happier better doing what the patient would want to have done no one goes to the office thinking i want more medicine i want different i mean you know maybe they're happy to get a medicine because their symptoms get better but they're not wanting to be on medication no one wants to be on medication and i think if we realize that and we've lost our way because medicine has so much been uh sort of uh been dominated by the pharmaceutical industry and you know and there's some of the procedural the orthopedic implants i mean all that stuff you know great it has its place but i mean we've kind of lost our way as physicians and i think until we take a real hard look in the mirror and say why the hell did i go to medical school in the first place did i go to make a bunch of money and have prestige and drive a fancy car and live in a big house or did i go to medical school because i want to make my patients happy healthier and happier and is there a better way for me to do that and i think for the ones that answer the question yes i want to make these people as good as possible then this is the rivero paradigm and and you know like i said we've you know secured five million dollars in funding to start doing this stuff we're going to start building hiring physicians starting this and then you know you know with with hard work i have no doubt we're going to continue to grow and this is going to be you know this will be a significant viable alternative to what we have out there with the standard of care health care system and i think we need that i mean if we look at the results for how much money we spend on health care you know in the united states and you know i mean australia is a little bit different you know but essentially we are a disease management system and we are just basically creating more and more sick people we're maintaining these people in some degree of sickness with symptom mitigation and and that is not a very good it's not a sustainable paradigm it's not a good paradigm physicians are frustrated by it patients are frustrated by it you know maybe the hospital ceas ceos and some administrators and some companies are happy with that situation but i think most people are realizing this this is not where we need to be and so we we look at you know i've been talking about it i've been trying to do something we finally got the resources to start to do something about it so now we're excited to be able to do something about it yeah well that's great and then at the moment are you taking on patients is is it mainly yourself sort of taking on patients or and having coaches work with people and do your different classes and courses and groups in rivera or or do you have doctors um treating people at the moment so right now i mean right now the model has been coaching and lifestyle and just it mostly died a lot of its carnivore diet based that's been our model up to this point um we are we have physicians that we have in our you know that we refer people to that are on board with with a philosophy we will we have to build we have to we have to form a pc you know a a private corporate or sorry a private corporation so that we can you know effectively take on patients higher physicians and again that's what we raise money to do so we'll be hiring physicians someone will be part-time they're going to be in different states we'll probably start in some of the more populous states to start with and then the plan will be to expand nationally and then eventually globally and so so as of now we don't have any actual physicians that are currently working for us that will change over the next several months we'll probably have our first physicians you know sometime later this year and then we'll actively be taking patients on we can we still take care of patients and people we just can't be prescribed and actually provide actual true medical care although we do get people healthier and they do come off meds regardless but we want to have you know the physician support in the back up because as you probably are aware some folks they need pretty much oversight whenever if they're particularly sick and they're on a lot of meds they need to be able to have that uh tapered appropriately so they can avoid you know potential negative and potentially very you know uh problematic uh outcomes yeah absolutely and so so would this be uh more web-based online sort of tele-health uh appointments with uh with your team or would be for you know brick and mortar uh it's gonna be pretty much 100 digital i think i don't know if we'll ever have some sort of just because of scalability i mean it's so much more cost effective to just do it digitally we're in an age where yeah well that's what that's where things are going anyway it's so expensive to build a hospital i mean you're talking you know hundreds of millions of dollars and you don't really need to for what we're doing and we've got pretty much most of things can be done remotely with rare exceptions for the times when we do need we'll refer people in and we'll have places we can send people to but for now it's i mean what we're planning to do is scalable digital uh and that's gonna be allowed us to serve the most most people nice yeah well you know um you know full disclosure for everyone like is that you know i've invested myself because i absolutely believe in this model and i absolutely believe this is this is a very very healthy direction for uh you know medical care to go to and i think it's a very necessary step you know the you have a lot of different systems all around the world like i'm in australia we have a public system as well as a private system and these have merits and demerits to both but you know anywhere you go every system is getting overrun every system is is getting overwhelmed with you know more and more more and more issues and we're spending literally trillions of dollars uh treating you know diseases that that don't actually need to exist and so you're going to overwhelm any system uh if we if we continue on like we are and people are only getting sicker uh you know it was like it's like nine percent of americans are diabetic that accounts for 75 percent of the medicare costs and 40 percent of of other you know the rest of americans are uh pre-diabetic you know so that's going to be a problem you know when those come to fruition um so i think that uh you know what what you're doing is is you know exactly the direction uh that we need to take it um i was gonna say too um yeah we we didn't really talk about this before like i've been on on your podcast a few times but i've already actually got to really uh find out more about your rugby career i know you went down to uh new zealand how did you get into rugby in the first place and um you know and uh and then and then what made you want to head down to new zealand as well yeah i mean i was i was basically blackmailed into playing rugby you know i was i was a university of texas medical branch in galveston i was in my first year i was working out you know i was in the gym working out and this guy the owner of the gym whose name was paul mccartney he's not a beatle but he's nice he was he was a pretty good luck pretty good little rugby player he would end up being a chiropractor and he said hey man if you want and it was sergeant rock's gym i remember he said hey man if you want to keep working out here you need to come play rugby and i'm not going to let you look at him he was kind of half joking but i said oh that sounds good you know i'll give it a shot so i went out there and this is my first year of medical school and um so i went out there and you know i was a pretty big guy pretty strong pretty fast could jump pretty high i got and i picked it up pretty quickly and then uh pretty pretty quickly i was selected for the all texas team and then i was on the westerns the u.s western you know all western u.s team you know then within my my second year uh and and then um at that time it was kind of weird i was i was i was married i just went through a divorce and i was just kind of like ah you know i'm just not and then i got offered to go play rugby in new zealand by one of the professors one of the professors at university of texas mary he was a physiologist and he goes hey i know a team i've got a team at home they usually pick up they usually take an overseas guy every year usually they take south africa and sometimes they've taken americans would you like to go and i was like all right i'm working i'm done with medical school let me just drop out of medical school and go play rugby so yeah i got picked up i went down to uh the wycado in new zealand uh nice late at the premier league you know premier league i got to play against a lot of the new zealand all blacks um i was kind of throwing i was only like two years into rugby i barely had two years in so i'm playing against obviously this guy's been playing they were four years old basically you know they got cleats on and i had a great time it was a great great learning experience got to play some high level rugby came back to the united states you know i just like probably running your visa only was only good for so long and so they kicked me out of the country i came back i was like well i want to keep playing rugby and this is back in the early 90s and i looked around and where i where it was good and back then there was not much very good quality rugby in the u.s one of the best places to go was the military so i went in the u.s military on the air force i ended up being a nuclear weapons officer but i ended up playing rugby for the air force team and then the all-armed services team i did that and then i played for various you know decent teams in the us and denver barbarians and some of these other teams westerns and and i had i remember i was invited to the itt's for to try for the u.s team uh but while i was in new zealand at the time and i was like no i'm just going to stay in new zealand because it was the level of rugby new zealand was so much higher than it was in the u.s particularly back and i just kind of stayed there but yeah i did it until i was i think i was about 30 years old and i remember i was playing this tournament in las vegas i was playing for the denver barbarians and i was i think i'd score like three tries i was having a good game but i was laying on the bottom of pile this you know i was in a ruck and i'm laying the bottom and this guy was just just kicking me in the head over and over and i just went coming up my ears i'm 30 years old i'm like you know yeah i'm kind of tired medical and i'm i'm kind of done so i walked away at 30 and uh you know went on to just a bunch of other sports you know since then so but that was my rugby thanks for a great time i miss being able to run around and stiff arm people and sometimes the context so now i'm doing jiu jitsu it's kind of the same so at least you're getting that physical you know contact it's it's it's wonderfully stress relieving i guess at the same time you know sometimes you don't feel too good like yesterday i was going with a uh this kid who's like a 270 pound dude he's he outweighs me by about 30 pounds he's a you know uh division one football player wrestler mma guy and you know i held my own with him but he got me and he gave me his big neck crank and my neck is kind of sore today oh yeah yesterday but anyway i'm having a lot of fun with this stuff yeah that's awesome and then so you said you uh you took a break from medical school to go down to new zealand or was that after medical school no that was in medical school i literally laughed like just at the beginning of my second year of medical school i said i'm gonna go play rugby i'm done i quit and they and you know the professors thought i was crazy because i was a good student and and i was like you know i'm just going to play rugby and so it was kind of a kind of a crazy decision but i mean i've i've i've had a lot of crazies in my life i suppose but yeah there was a there was literally a seven year period between when i started medical school then i re-commenced and so i had to start over yeah so i that the year i did i just had to restart so i ended up doing an extra year basically okay at that time i just you know i was a good student i was graduating you know basically near the top of my i was pretty much the top of my class you know i think it was top five or something like that and then you know got into orthopedics and you know did that stuff and you know here i am today yeah nice and then um so yeah so when when did you stop playing rugby like what year what year was it uh so i was 30 so i would have been in about 1997 is that okay i think it was 97 yeah 97 would have been when i quit yeah was the year i started so i just i just picked up the torch yeah oh there you go man yeah well that's the thing you know people don't know you know people even people that do know rugby and watch it now like in the us that's a very different game than what what uh you and i play you know like um that there's actually rules now that are abided by and penalties if you if you go against them now you know whereas like before you know usually talking about getting kicked in the head totally illegal not allowed to do that but you got away with it so many people i seem getting stomped in the head i when i was um 18 i was just back from touring new zealand um with the with the junior national team and i was at the bottom of a ruck and we're playing against this canadian team and i'm literally a child you know i'm like well barely barely an adult and i'm stuck at the bottom of this rock and this you know playing as grown ass men and all of a sudden i feel this just this finger sort of snaking in and like wiggling its way into like into my eye socket and i start thrashing around trying to thrash around but i am stuck i have bodies all over me and i can't move and all of a sudden i was just like i'm i'm gonna lose my eye like i'm about to lose my eye and he just started just digging in and like it was about to be very bad and then all of a sudden his fingers just slipped out and his nail like like cut a gouge in my eyelid i had to get six stitches in my eyelid and and that was how close i came to to losing an eyeball and this is like this is a game that we were playing you know at a park you know with like children around you know what i mean and it was like it was actually a high-level game because that's how it was in america you know we would be playing like a high-level game in in the canadian premiership at a park you know because like we didn't have stadiums we didn't have the professional setups we actually had a very high level games um you know where where one shouldn't shouldn't exist like you know you're talking about the itt's i played with the um you know pacific coast grizzlies um for a number of years in in collegiate and men's and you know and we won a few of the years and one of the years we won we won in double overtime i think against uh west and um and this absolute bruiser of a game when it you know won it in double overtime and it was literally at a park and had some random you know uh you know sports sort of uh park at uh in florida and there's just random people just walking by with their dog going oh what's this over here you know we're winning this you know big national championship it was hilarious and like you know some of these games you really you really did take your your life and your health uh into your own hands and just you know and it was just it was just an absolute brawl which was actually part of the fun you know yeah i mean it's kind of people that don't do that maybe don't understand that i can remember um playing i was playing uh for denver again we played against the dallas harlequins and uh uh i was playing i remember i just gotten back from new zealand and i was playing i think it's playing eight or maybe on second or i can't remember but anyway i was doing well in this they had this big uh samoan number eight and i was getting the better of him i think in the lineups and so he cheap shot of me just punched me right in the chin and split my chin open and after the game i had to go get stitched up and then i was in a tournament so i you know i got sick so came back the next day i'm playing again and i got popped in the head again and i opened up another cut just next to it i mean the stitches held and another cut opened up so i'd go back to the same er the same the day later and they thought i was some freaking nut and then i had to fill out an insurance claim you know i was in the military at the time and so it was tricare and they couldn't figure it out i mean they couldn't figure out it was two separate claims i was just like you know back in the year two days was basically the same thing and it's just kind of goofy but yeah i mean it's it's it's i guess it takes a special breed of person to do that but at the same time i think to some degree we're meant to do some of that stuff you know i mean we're not delicate we're not supposed to be delicate creatures no and i think that that's you know part of it obviously you know we get in the military and we go to war and we do do those sorts of real things you know um but this is this is i think maybe a you know a distilled uh civilized more civilized version of that where you can still get your you know your fighter killer instincts out on the field and uh it just does it does sort of feel natural and you're sort of pitting yourself physically against you know other people and seeing how you shake out and i think there's a there's a lot uh to be said for that you know your jiu jitsu being exactly in that in that ballpark as well you know yeah definitely it's you know it's kind of fun coming into it at 55 years of age and i still get in there with the 20 year olds and mix it up and having a great time and you know more often than not i get the better of them which which you know certainly makes me feel good though yeah yeah well that was like herschel walker like just decided to do mma uh when when he was in the late 40s or something 40s yeah yeah and he was he was kicking ass too you know yeah but he i mean and he had a martial art i think he was a he had a had a judo or kung fu or something background i know he'd been a martial art for most of his life so it wasn't that novel but but he's a guy that's you know phenomenal athlete incredible one meal a day guy i mean he's got one meal a day famously and just you know a thousand push-ups a day and whatever whatever his routine created i just you know i remember i've done these like 300 push-ups a day and just this is so time-consuming i'm like we're going to have a thousand push-ups a day plus a thousand sit-ups and a thousand pull-ups or whatever he claims he's doing i'm just like yeah he must spend six hours a day working out or something i don't know it's kind of yeah probably yeah well i think i've read something he said that he wakes up at like 4 4 30 in the morning to start doing his push-ups like gotta get up in the morning just start doing my push-ups you know it sounds like it's a lot of his day it's just doing push-ups like uh yeah so i actually did um sort of mixed martial arts as well sort of in the same area but down in down in kirkland with uh amc kickboxing did pancration which is you know different form of uh you know grappling you know submission wrestling um you know some of the best you know times in my life i really regret not being able to do that and rugby ended up sort of giving that up uh when when things started moving with rugby um because i did i didn't feel that i well i didn't really have the time because there were certain training sessions that you sort of had to be in in order to uh compete and fight out of that gym and you know they conflicted with rugby and i was like can i just miss you know one of those days a week and they're like yeah we really can't you know we just made the rule we can't just you know make exceptions for it uh right away and so um i i really wanted to compete i really wanted to fight and and so i like well i couldn't fight so i ended up you know just doing doing rugby but then sort of looking back i was like well why the hell didn't i just keep training you know i could have just kept at least training i didn't think about that i didn't you know because my end goal was was to to be able to fight um but it was some of the best uh you know training fitness conditioning uh you know a a rugby tackle is a double leg takedown and so like you know you know wrestling uh and uh and ground fighting those sports just lend themselves to rugby and then you look in your body position and you're just having being able to deal with people physically is such an important thing in rugby in all sports really yeah absolutely it's a blast yeah i mean but at the same time it's hard to be really good you know and not focus on one sport i mean it's it's really difficult to do that i mean i've always i mean you know i've had multiple world championships in different sports whether it's you know uh uh highland games or rowing or you know setting national records and powerlifting i mean i've always focused on you know i mean lifting's always been part of that you know as you know like any sport so you kind of have a mixture of the basic base baseline of fitness and strength and then you have your skill specific stuff with that sport so i continue to do that so try to match the uh you know you know trying to match like right now the jiu jitsu to maintaining a decent level of strength and other fitness but you're right i mean the fitness side of it when you know when you have somebody laying on top of you where you can't breathe it's a different type of fitness you know it's like you know not only you have to be in shape but you got to be able to shape and not not be able to breathe at the same time which is kind of interesting yeah absolutely um so what are you doing now for your workouts you're doing doing the jiu jitsu um you know we see you know you put out workout um tapes on instagram things like that as well are you are you lifting every day or are you doing something every day or what is your routine now yeah it varies a little bit it's you know i i generally do a couple days a week of pretty dedicated strength training whether it's deadlifting or squatting or some kind of pressing you know basic you know the basic lifts i do i do a lot of hit conditioning stuff i do a lot of bike sprints or rolling sprints i'll do some explosive work while doing a lot of you know jumping and throwing and trying to maintain that that's that's that's basically the foundation it's it's not i would say it's not really structured to where like i'm trying to you know get to this point i basically kind of just generally try to keep things at a certain level like if i haven't worked on this in a while i start working on this for a little while and get it to a level i want it to be and then i focus somewhere else you know and it's just part of it you know it depends on what i feel like you know and where i where i uh sometimes i get motivated to be lean sometimes i get money get strong and it's just this never-ending uh i guess this is this sort of i don't want to be complacent so i never get complacent i'm always like can i do this better and then when you do this better something else you know goes the fun thing i'm finding with carnivore though is even if i don't focus on something for a very long time i maintain it pretty easy i don't drop very much it's just like you know if i go in there having bench press for a while i'm usually within ten percent of or even five percent of where i left off and you know so i just kind of maintain stuff you know and it's like that's pretty nice you know particularly as we get older because you know it's very common for most people to you know you know pretty pretty steadily decline and i really haven't seen that much at all uh you know over the years which has been good you know and i've been like i said the last six years doing this diet so it's been good yeah and have you noticed your workouts you know changing uh dramatically over the years and and uh getting better i mean i certainly have my exercise tolerances far better than what it was just before this and even in my late 20s when i came off of a carnivore diet and you know inadvertently uh yeah i mean i'm able to train at a high level you know as much as i want it's a matter of wanting to you know and and uh uh in and of course it's the time you know the time type of thing like today i was you know today i have been very quite busy and so i've been i'll see doing sprints intermittent sprints throughout the day i just walk out of my garage my bike out there i was zip through a bunch of sprints and then come back up and you know uh tomorrow i'll be doing some dead lifting and then uh you know i've got jiu jitsu tomorrow night so i mean it's it's uh i i really my my focus and my intensity has always been high and it has not slowed down with age nice yeah and um obviously you have you have kids yourself um what's you what's your approach with kids you try to sort of encourage this or how do you balance that out with them i i talk to a lot of parents that have a lot of problems they want to they want their kids to get the benefits of these sorts of diets but they don't want to push it on them they don't want to have them sort of revolt and push back what uh what do you what's your approach with your own children well i mean you know i i think educating your kids on first of all that nutrition does matter it's really important it has a huge impact on as you know overall health mental health performance confidence all those types of things and so it's i just you know just just from an early age i've taught them that nutrition matters i taught them how to read labels when they could read i said you know look for things that have you know a bunch of junk you know it's got too much sugar or too much of this and so they were they were reading labels at you know whenever five years old six years old whenever they started reading and you know i mean they understand that you know meat is extremely healthy uh they focus on that that's that's something that's non-negotiable at our house it's like you know you're eating and it's usually not as strong i mean they usually like it i mean i mean they have they have different one kid likes this more than that and one kid prefers steak one kid prefers you know fish and so i try to you know balance that out with them uh but they eat a lot of these a lot of meat my daughter you know like i said my daughter just she's an eighth grader just won the state championships for 400 meters she ran a one-on-one which is pretty greater awesome so i mean you know you look at you know looking at the you know for a d1 scholarship you have to put up a 57 and she's at 101 in eighth grade so i mean she's got to take four seconds off and she's just starting track wow and her i remember specifically she was a kid that from a very early age you know and i and all my kids were doing strength training at young ages you know five six years old they're throwing the medicine ball around and jumping and you know you know carrying you know lifting dumbbells and stuff like that they you know that's been a part of their uh their life from early on and you know as you probably aware i mean the literature showing that you know weight training for kids is bad as it's non-existent i mean it's the opposite i mean it shows that their athletic performance level is going to be better than really they start strength training now again it's got to be supervised and structured and not doing stupid stuff but i mean given that uh with those caveats in place i mean it's wonderful for kids to get stronger and so and then nutrition builds upon that and you just kind of you know it's kind of just kind of and you set the example the other thing is you know being you know you they they they see you know they this doesn't take long for them to figure out hey why is billy billy's parents so beefs and why are they always tired and you know and then you know why are you guys so on the run and fit well it's because we eat you know we eat we eat nutritious food and so that's been that's been my approach and you know i don't like i said i don't necessarily force a diet on anybody but i mean you know like i said i'm not gonna at the same time you know if you some kids use a lot of meat they would eat nothing but ice cream and cookies all day long and obviously that's not sustainable i mean that's not that doesn't make sense and yet there's parents i mean i get this parents will say well my three-year-old refuses to eat anything but you know cheddar gold think goldfish and garbage i mean he's a three-year-old you know he should not be dictating the nutritional policy of the house you know i guarantee if if you just let him get a little hungry he'll eat whatever you put in front of his face eventually you know particularly if it's you know nutritious real food like like meat or eggs or something like that yeah yeah and then and that's the thing too is just not having that available in the house like the three-year-old's not doing the shopping and you know and they're not it's not like a teenager who can go out and buy their own food uh they're three and you know so it's you know you dictate what happens in the house and you just you can just not have that be available in the house or just really slowly weaned it off i would imagine i mean i don't have kids so it's easy for me to say that uh you know you could just do x y and z and i've never actually had to do it but i i would imagine that there are ways and especially with someone who's quite young yeah i mean whenever you're really wrong you you generally when they're really young you probably you generally have 100 control of what they're what they eat you know as they get older of course when they go to school then you can't you can't monitor everything you do but like i said that's where you give them the education early on and you start from an early age and let them realize that nutrition has such an important role on basically your life's trajectory i mean if you come out of i mean there's so many kids that are coming out you know 14 15 year old kids that are either clinically obese or they're pre-diabetic or they're depressed or they're anxious or they have all kinds of issues most of which are directly attributed to to their nutrition so i mean if you you know if you can just kind of show them that these are the things that make a difference they they're they generally will get it i think and you know you know again the other thing is knowing how to cook i mean as a parent i mean it's a skill i mean if all if your cooking skills are are basically limited to opening a package and pressing a button on a microwave i mean that's not very good parenting in my view i mean i think you need to know how to know how to make food taste good yeah well that's one of the things too is the um you know different different you know people have suggested i know you know dr robert lustig has written about this about how you know the food industry is has basically manufactured it so we've had generations of people that didn't grow up with a parent that was cooking and so they didn't then learn how to cook as well they had all these packaged pre-packaged meals that were actually cheaper than buying the constituent ingredients and then making it yourself so it was like saved you three hours in the kitchen and it cost less that's like well you know have to be stupid not to do this and then all of a sudden they got now obviously you have like a whole generation of people not cooking and the kids are growing up not learning how to cook and then they grow up into adults and you know their kids certainly aren't going to learn how to cook from someone who doesn't cook and then you then now you're holding on the on the food industry to cook your food for you and yeah and then and then people are stuck but it's actually quite satisfying you know to cook and to cook a meal that's actually very very uh you know tasty and you know better than any restaurant i mean it's not it's not that hard either you know i'm sure like the steaks that you make are going to be you know better than than any steakhouse that you can go to i mean you know most i mean you go to these super high-end top ones and spend you know 300 bucks on a steak or something ridiculous amount you get a pretty nice steak but yeah i mean it was kind of weird mother's day the other day and i'd you know i'd made a nice reservation for a brunch for my for my better half and she said honestly i'd rather you just cook because you do better than what they do and you know she's very particular as she makes her steaks and so i get it just like she wants it and you know every time we go to the steakhouse she'll get there and it's like it's not cooked like she likes it and she's just like uh you know i'd rather stay home so yeah i mean and i and and it's you know as you know on a carnivore dye god it does not take a long time i mean it's the simplest thing in the world i mean it's just i mean i'm you know i it's it's minimal time i spend so little time cooking and eating uh it's it's it's not the three-hour commitment to to do stuff when you're making these elaborate recipes and so but even if you're doing that i mean i mean to put a kid to give kid to give kid a uh eggs for breakfast some scrambled eggs i mean literally it takes you two minutes to make scrambled eggs in a pan i mean it's it's you know it's very fast i mean it's not much quicker to pull up pour a bowl of cereal i mean it's arguably you're saving a minute or two but i mean for the amount of nutrition you get i mean it's not even a contest yeah absolutely um so what are you eating these days you just is it just steaks you're mostly doing uh beef or what what's your preference yeah i mean my diet and you know i like i said over the years i've kind of you know it's it's almost always been 95 red meat i mean that's what i feel best on that's you know i mean i know there's some people that are saying well you gotta have honey and fruit and all and i've never found that to be the case um for me and uh i eat you know right now i'm eating basically steak and eggs i mean a lot of eggs and a lot of steak and i mean when i eat a lot of eggs i'm eating you know a dozen as a minimum sometimes two dozen in a day and you know two three pounds of meat sometimes four pounds of meat um that's probably ninety percent ninety-five percent of my diet that's what it's been for the last five years sometimes i'll put dairy in there sometimes i'll take it out you know it's kind of all those things where it kind of goes back and forth um i like i said i i tried to include fruit a few times and i generally just don't feel as good it must have been just i start to get more achy so i mean it's just not for me i mean this is i mean pure meat is what i feel best on i mean whether that translates to everybody else you know who knows but i know it works for me yeah i mean i certainly feel the same way and you know one of the one of the reasons you know i'm so you know uh attached to this personally is because like you i've i've sampled things back in my diet or maybe something slipped in i'm like oh do i want to pick it out or like let's just see what happens and i feel different you know i feel it's a detriment and maybe that's only transient maybe i just feel a bit crummy for you know half an hour or a couple hours but sometimes i i feel like my back hurts like if i get a bit of rice or beans mixed in with something when i was out at a meal once and i didn't wasn't able to scrape all of it off my back in crippling pain for four days i had difficulty getting out of bed i could not lift i couldn't do anything that put more weight through my back so i was like you know squats were out deadlifts were out i i i could sort of eek myself onto the bench and just do some some bench but like that was really it i was i essentially missed out on sort of three four days of of working out because i was just in so much pain it was just a little bit of this stuff so like that's just you know not worth it to me even coffee a lot of people like coffee i just find that i get sore you know i'm not as sore as i would be eating a normal diet but all of a sudden i'm sore after working out i'm normally not short and so i know that's doing something to me and i end up feeling worse off so it's just it just reaffirms what i'm doing and uh yeah so i've just noticed the same thing that i just it just keeps coming back to beef for me yeah i mean and particularly as i'm older i mean i'm 55 and you know like i said you just i think you just have less tolerance over time and some people criticize and say well maybe you made yourself overly sensitive to these foods and fair enough that may be the case and maybe you develop a tolerance just like alcohol you know sort of you know build up lactate dehydrogenase and alcohol dehydrogenase you know to deal with these things but if you don't have these defenses built into these insults then yeah you're probably more sensitive to it is that a good thing or a bad thing maybe it's a good canary in the coalmine type of thing so yeah yeah i mean you know like i said i people ask me all the time and still to this day you know what i mean you don't eat vegetables no i don't need them i don't like them i don't like them anyway and i was never a cop i just never liked coffee i had to be in it like four o'clock in the morning as a 14 year old kid you know it's kind of like it doesn't really go too well with being 14 but anyway i remember going one time and i looked particularly i guess particularly tired that day and the sh the cook said here you go kid and handed me this cup of coffee and it was probably from the day before for all i knew i don't know but i remember just taking a sip of that so this is a god-awful most disgusting thing at least in my life and then i never you know never wanted to have coffee after that i just never got it even during my even during my surgical residency when you were just i mean working you know 120 130 sometimes 140 hours a week with 40 hours straight you know i was just i just never took coffee i just never wanted it so yeah interesting but i but my experience with carnivore is many people give up coffee and they notice a significant improvement there's some people that say they don't notice a different but many people do for sure yeah yeah yeah it's it's a very tough one for people to cut and people say no i need my coffee and then the ones that are able to quit it i invariably you know uh i've heard them say that they're so thankful that they did you know and they they feel dramatically better uh when they didn't when they when they when they got rid of it so i mean i certainly noticed the inflammation in me so i know there's something going on there and i feel better without it so you know without without knowing all the exact specifics as as to why it's doing that you know i know it's doing something anyway you know well i mean obviously it has an effect i mean you know whether it's a good effect or artifact i mean like anything there's there's pros and cons anything you have to outweigh the pros and you got to think about you know if you're addicted or not you know yeah yeah keeping repeatedly doing something that's bad for you is kind of the definition of an addiction and so yeah but i mean i mean you know i find a lot of people when they transition to carnival i tell them generally just don't mess with caffeine initially just because you know you're going to be dealing with catholic withdrawal migraine you know not migraines but caffeine withdrawal headaches and vascular headaches uh from the caffeine withdrawal and so it may be something to to stave off for a couple months until you've actually got used to the food change but yeah makes sense so so on that that sort of note what what when you're helping people you know get onto carnivore or coaching them you know what what are some some tips tips or how would you sort of outline people getting into a carnivore diet uh from uh from a normal standard diet yeah well i mean most people coming to this are trying to deal with something and you know and why they have a health issues probably because of the food they're eating what are they eating and they're probably eating some garbage that they're more or less addicted to and i you know i really try to encourage people to you know change their relationship with the food and and see food for what it is it's nutrition it can taste good you can be delicious you can crave it it can be wonderful and you can make that through an animal-based diet undoubtedly uh but you know rather than focusing on i want to i want to get off this pill or i want to lose x amount of pounds or you know put 20 pounds on my bench whatever first thing i try to do is you know let's make sure we are over the other stuff so we've kind of dealt with that and usually the way to do that is just to eat plenty of meat you know i mean it sounds goofy i say eat meat like it's your job and it kind of is in the beginning you just want to make sure you you know like how much should i how much meat should i we'll eat enough so you don't want a damn cupcake you know that that's been my sort of initial thing and then after that you can start to say well you know how much fat do i need how much protein do i need so in the beginning i'd say just enjoy yourself make you know economy meals you enjoy don't count calories don't count macros just count the number of meals you really enjoyed and and make things you want to eat you know and and uh you know in the beginning some people will use dairy to kind of help and treat you know cheese on some meat or maybe they use a little bit of seasoning in the beginning just to kind of get them through the transition point and then they can kind of say do i really need the dairy you know is that pepper a good thing or the hot sauce a good thing or a bad thing for me given my gut issues and on and on and on and then they kind of find out where they need to be and i like to see people you know i mean what i found we collect a date on you know 12 000 people doing the diet we saw about three months was a kind of the inflection point for most people they get through 90 days most of the issues that they're dealing with see significant impact you know whether it's joint pain or skin issues or you know mental health issues by three months if you get three to three months in i you know ideally you get three pretty good solid strict months and and then kind of see where you need to go from there and like i said some people will elect to stay very strict uh for indefinitely and i think it's completely fine i think it's sustainable i think it can be a wonderful um uh way to stay healthy for many people and many people are happy with that it's simple i mean it's just so damn simple just eat meat uh what could be you know it's a very it's you know whereas a lot of people like to make diet so complicated even within the carnivore space you're people that are like you need to specifically do this and this and eat this much liver each week and this much kidney and you know add this in and i'm just like man i don't think it needs to be that hard but yeah yeah people some people like that some people really need it they need to they need the the you know the stepwise every detail uh that's just their their sort of the way their brain works but you know for most people you know to say hey just go eat some meat that you like you know that you enjoy and go to town and see yeah three months and see how you're doing yeah well yeah and that's that's um i think a really important part of this is is you should keep it simple because it is you know it's just it is it is a straightforward diet and you just just eat meat and that's it yeah well i mean you look at any other animal out there i mean they don't have a they don't have an app to help them eat i mean you know you think about it so you know it's kind of funny because we have a company where we're going to use all this feedback and biofeedback and and you know like i said there's so many people that are so um so far gone that they need so much support uh to to sort of break break free of this stuff that you that some people need that but at the end of the day um you know i mean again we are just a different species of animal and gosh i mean our our diet does not need to be complicated i mean i think the problem is we don't have any wild humans left i mean all the well humans are gone yes we just have domesticated animals that are living in all well in our climate controlled environments eating our packaged food and you know we're basically zoo animals at this point and so yeah yeah right yeah yeah well that's why i sort of equate myself to as like a you know as a human in captivity you know because like my my life is essentially sedentary i don't i don't uh get a chance to work out as much as i'd like to but i still you know maintain it and and people say well how can i how can that be as i said well have you ever seen a lion in the zoo you know you ever seen a fat lion or a fat giraffe or a fat zebra you know they live in a box they're the definition of a sedentary lifestyle but they're eating the appropriate diet and so they look good yeah yeah yeah and so you know this is this is a sedentary human this is what well and you know the the interesting thing is you know if you look at some of these captivity animals they usually live longer too which is an interesting thing lions in captivity a little longer than they don't because they're not getting killed i mean yeah not doing dangerous things so it's yeah and so there's there's you know there's people who will say well look at that you know i don't want to live a tough life but i mean you can you can mimic the uh the benefits of being active you know that's what exercise is right that's what all these things we do these hormetic stressors uh and and also get the benefits of being protected you know and and avoiding the infectious diseases or the the traumas that that otherwise humans would have been subject to more frequently yeah absolutely um you know you mentioned you mentioned the you know the honey and fruit people um the i think i think the former uh carnivore advocates that now advocate for a high carbohydrate uh intake higher and higher as is surprising to me i think um some of these guys were saying they would get uh 40 of their calories just from orange juice not even like oranges but orange juice uh 40 i thought that was pretty wild um and um the obviously you know these people say that they were having problems after sort of a year year and a half on carnivore and they were having specific hormonal issues and electrolyte issues that they attributed to not getting exogenous carbohydrates and what i think of is people like yourself people like myself people like humans living naturally you know wherever you might find them like you know the inuit or the or the maasai and they're not eating these or or all the people that have been doing you know a keto diet for 15 years straight and have not been eating any carbohydrates they don't have these same problems so to me that means that they're doing something different than we are and that difference is not carbohydrates because we're not eating carbohydrates and we're not having these these problems would have you sort of thought about that about what might be going on there well i mean you know sometimes this is justifying i like i like sweet stuff and i want to keep eating it and so this is my justification for doing it that may be part of it um i think you know uh the supposed mechanical they say well chronic cortisol expression from low carb diets well that's been shown to not be the case it's usually a transient effect maybe three weeks you know joseph whitaker just published a paper on that showing three weeks is what the cortisol you know elevated cortisol is and so that that that sort of thing i know there's um i think that you know again i think someone who is very lean and very metabolically fit has has a higher tolerance for carbohydrates than than most people that were out there now so i think most people and some of it may be you know age-related there may be something to go with that um where you know maybe earlier on you know you have a greater tolerance for this stuff but at the same time um i clearly they're not necessary i mean whether or not they're beneficial or conditionally beneficial beneficial or different people that's that's that's a really hard argument so to refute but to say that they're absolutely required or absolutely required for all people clearly that's not the case i mean otherwise people like you myself and and countless others would not be not only surviving but i i would argue very much thriving and just like you pointed out you know what sammy you know messiah mongols all these people were not taking in fruit juice and fruits and also some of the some of their advocating for sucrose and you know uh you know table sugar i mean i've seen that being advertised within this kind of repeat community uh you know coca-cola mexican coca-cola and that type of stuff and so it's kind of it's kind of gotten a little bit bizarre and uh but you know i mean i mean some like i said some people i mean they really um like sugar and they like the way it tastes and i understand that i mean we have this uh you know i mean i think historically had humans come across some ripe fruit they would have likely eaten it and they would have gorged on it but the opportunity to do that would have been very very small a very minor window and only in certain parts of the world you know at certain times and that's not the normal condition normal say by no means is it necessary i mean animals are always available or always have been available and you know it's kind of interesting when you look at species diversity i mean geographic diversity humans are it i mean we are the most geographically diverse species on the planet the second most geographically diverse species is a wolf and for the same reason we have a similar diet so we can we can occupy anywhere in the world because we have access to meat and it's not because we had access to an orange or whatever you want to make make make an assertion because i don't think oranges grow in the yukon i mean maybe i'm wrong but i i you know yeah it'd be the first yeah it could be there but it'd be uh it'd be a surprise to most yeah um yeah and that's a very good point you know you know people saying that it's like no no you have to eat these specific plants but obviously humans have been all over the world on you know at least visited every continent if not if not actually you know had civilizations there these plants haven't existed in all these different places they've had very different plants and they've had obviously certainly fruit i was not available in in these temperate regions and then going into the arctic and antarctic areas and obviously we we've lived through a number of of ice ages and most of the planet was covered in ice and we did not have fruit or honey during that time a lot of people argued like oh no no but humans you know went went uh more towards the equator and they weren't living in these icy planes i was like oh well that's not actually true maybe some were but you know the ones that weren't yeah i mean we clearly have skeletal marine remains that were populating these ice you know isis europe and clear clearly evidence of human human existence and yeah i mean if we believe in evolutionary theory and i know some people will push back on that but i mean you know we've got evidence of homo erectus you know 1.5 1.8 million years ago leaving africa into you know europe and asia during ice ages and yeah i mean that's pretty clear it was cold and it's one of the one of the arguments for the control of fire but it's dating the control of fire back that time because it would have been hard to survive in those cold climbs without the ability to control fire and so that's yeah for cooking versus raw and i think you know we've probably been cooking for a long time yeah i think so too and like and that's the thing too they say oh everyone was living down south it's like well then how did people get into north america so i'm pretty sure they went across the land bridge between uh you know russia and alaska during the ice ages yeah i mean it was interesting there wasn't there that was called beringia you know where the bearing straight where they did they call that beringia there was thought that it was more temperate than we think it was but it was still extremely cold and we know that the climate was not tropical and not even subtropical it was definitely you know yeah a polar area and people inhabited that and and as they still do today and so i mean they probably live in much the same fashion you know killing marine mammals and you know the whatever animals you know were adapted to live up there the caribou and you know whatever else yeah yeah it's interesting you mentioned about fire that when i when i looked into that the oldest um fossil record that i that i found that was reported was something some of the range of 790 000 years old which is just pretty incredible even just getting back that far you know that's half a million years older than then homo sapiens have been around so you know we've been we've been cooking for a very very long time and you know as you say you know it sounds like possibly you know much uh earlier than that and um you know and then you look at you know every every civilization even even those like the australian aboriginals uh they've been separated off for you know 50 000 years from from other humans they had fire you know and and and then for a very long time they all have different fire myths all the different cultures have very very similar um well at least at least they had myths about you know the gaining of fire as well as a very very uh important uh hallmark in in human uh development um and it could have absolutely been the difference between life and death in these in these ice age areas and that's that's almost certainly one of the one of the adaptations that allowed us to live uh in these in these horrible conditions yeah i mean if you look bill schindler is a good again when you might want to reach out to him for an interview he's a good guy he talks about that he's you know he's uh he spent a lot of time with indigenous tribes we've done a lot of research on um you know this stuff and talking about the fire and you know you know basically i mean i think there's actually fossilized records of what clearly appears to be a human human human control of fire even 1.5 million years ago [Music] so yeah i mean i think i think we've been cooking for a long time i think uh you know obviously we've we've inhabited these northern environments you know if you look at the you know you probably i'm sure you're familiar with the work of guys like uh uh michael richards at uh max planck university with all with all the uh uh ice you know stable radioisotope data you know looking at prehistoric you know europe and clearly the the records indicate we were you know more carnivorous even than wolves uh you know and we were top-level predators and you know picked off the big giant woolly mammoths and mastodons and that was our that was our food of choice until we ran out and then we ended up you know you see mickey mendors work you know looking at uh as as as the megaphone populations decreased and then we had to start to figure out how to use weapons and bow and arrow and we started eating leaner and then eventually you know we ended domesticating uh animals and developing agriculture and kind of the human being downhill ever since from yeah from health standpoint you know apparently yeah yeah i think that would that would have been amazing uh to be in like the times of the megafauna and just you know just going out and hunting these messages i mean i've seen like there's a nice article it's called elephant hunting i believe in the pleistocene and it's uh or something along those lines you read it it just talks about all the evidence for this this elephant hunting and they made up a significant portion of our our diet um and it was you know well the statement in the abstract this says basically humans perform this unique and daunting task at will which means we basically kill elephants whenever we wanted so it wasn't like we were and you think about it you know how do we grow our brain from this you know 300 cc relatively small australopithecine to you know a 1 500 cc uh you know crow mania you know or something like that or 1300 homo sapien um or 1700 cc neanderthal and it was because we had a constant steady supply of high quality nutrition it wasn't that's why i kind of pushed back against the you know we were always fasting because i don't think we were i think we probably had good access to quality food and that's what allowed us to develop as a species now later on we probably ended up you know after like the megafaunal extinctions the mass megastomp following things and then we're kind of struggling because now we've got to chase these quick animals that are hard to catch you can't you know you can't just walk up to a deer i mean an elephant you can kind of you know they're not they're you know particularly naive elephants like when humans left africa and went into asia those elephants looked at a human said well you're just a little puny little thing what are you to do to me and then all of a sudden you pull out and you know yeah in the gut and then it's a different story so they weren't ready for us and so we were able to do that interesting thing there's another book out there called uh i can't remember it's uh ed edmund's dad who wrote it from south africa it was something about paleolithic or the megaphone extinction they're talking about some of the early earliest food that these early humans or these early yeah humans ate particularly like [Music] homo erectus were these big giant tortoises and we went out there seems to be these all over the place these giant tortoises and they don't they're not very fast obviously but they have a very good defense mechanic they suck into their shell but humans were able to figure out how to flip them over and just pry their thing open with tools and so we had just basically all you can eat tortoise meat which apparently is very fatty and very good and you know on and on and on but yeah obviously it's not on the it's not on it's not on those restaurant menus you're not get any tourists meet but apparently that's what we did you know early on and we we made many of them extinct unfortunately that was one of the downsides that we just went over over predation you know and killed these things yeah well that's um yeah that's one of the things that you know they when humans go into a certain population is like you know the numbers of the megafauna and these different animals the extinction rate goes up uh quite significantly and then there was this mass extinction episode event something like 13 to 15 000 years ago um and it was this just everyone's got just got hunted out um just at the same time you know maybe maybe not but you know it uh more likely probably you know some sort of you know asteroid krakatoa sort of event maybe maybe wiped them out yeah i mean it's controversial i think most of the evidence points to human human intervention i mean there were some obviously there were some you know large asteroids destruct i know there's there's uh that i can't remember the name what they're calling it there but i think it's cheryl miller i think that's her name dr cheryl miller university of new mexico has done a pretty extensive thought and looking at you know it's kind of interesting looking at the average size of animals it used to be like the average size of an animal you know across species was something like 500 pounds was the average size of an animal you know 150 000 years ago and then it went down to like nine pounds because all the big ones got killed off and we were left with you know a lot of mice and a few deer and you know the average size is about a 10 pound animal but it used to be 500 pounds so we had that much more food that's why looking at modern day hunter gatherers and say oh look they they get honey and they eat some you know uh little little nuts you know magongo nuts and whatever yeah is not a good representation of what it would have been like if you just had all-you-can-eat buffet now if you had you know it's like it's like saying i've got you know i've got the salad bar and i've got the brazilian all you can eat buffet which one am i going to pick you know you know yeah i think humans early on would have would have went for the you know just just a matter of you know just efficiency standpoint if i got to kill one big megaphone animal and it takes me you know maybe one day but i'm going to eat for the next you know month or two versus chasing chickens around or gathering berries or digging up roots you know i mean yeah i would do the easy thing and you know it's it's i mean it's clear that's what they did i mean there's so much overwhelming evidence that we chose to do that uh by and large until we couldn't do until that was no longer an option yeah well and that's the thing you know the yeah there's a lot of evidence to the you know to suggest that you know like the native americans did in the plains running herds of buffalo over cliffs and then you have you know you have your food for the year you're feeding your whole tribe for the year they're doing this with with mastodons and uh and mammoths as well and so you have you having you know several of these things go over and crash and burn and then i mean you're really not going to run out of that meat anytime soon so like it's not like you don't have a warning it's not like hey you know you suddenly oh well there's no meat left i mean you yeah you know any like they're they're just as smart as we are and they can look yeah yeah i've only got like a week's worth of meat let's go kill another elephant yeah i mean it works hard and the thing is most people assume it was they were preserving meat you know 100 000 years ago with either drying or you know if it was in a cold environment you know sticking in the cold or even underwater they had underwater preservation so we know that those things were there so they were able to maintain that for long periods of time and so i doubt they were starving any any particular time at all most likely once they figured out how to hunt well yeah well yeah and that's and that's um a great point because you know people say well you know this is this is a this is a fasting state this is a starvation state this is this metabolic state is only there for uh those purposes and you and you have to go sort back and forth and you're going to be not eating for a period of time and so it's actually good for you to not eat for a period of time i haven't really seen uh too much data on uh you know any benefits from fasting further than it gets you away from eating uh you know a western diet and even even like the fasting mimicking diets that are essentially just a ketogenic diet have much of the same benefits um to to the different sort of health outcomes that that they're going for i think i think most of the you know caloric restriction or fasting i think that's relative to someone who's obese i think if you're not in that condition then it probably provides minimal to any any significant kind of for most people i know there's people that do the periodic fasting cleanses where they'll do a five day once a quarter once a year something like that but i think you know most of the benefit again you know the longevity benefits for calorie restriction are almost completely obliterated in a non-obese animal you know a lot of the data comes from lab rats and lab rats just about always overeat by about 30 in the laboratory setting and so when you reduce them back to normal dietary intake which would be considered caloric restriction but it's actually what they're supposed to eat the benefits are basically basically gone at that point so i mean i think i think uh you know uh again but i mean the long j i don't like that you know the longevity arguments to me and humans are always like show me your results and i'm yet to see 120 year old people walking around fit and lean and happy and healthy i mean the few hundred years old people i've seen have always been demented wearing diapers smelling of urine with a broken hip i mean that's that to me has been my experience with hundred-year-old people and i mean until you start seeing something different you know i'm not going to sort of take too much stock into into some of these longevity experts because i think you know where you know can you give me a money-back guarantee i mean you know it's a lot of it's a lot of wishful thinking and i think a lot of it's going to be just i mean you can make you can make a good money and you can dupe rich wealthy old people into thinking they're going to live a little longer than they would otherwise you know also you buy my xyz supplement or use my magic program or let me prescribe you this dr specific drug cocktail and it's unfortunate but you know hey you know somebody's got to make money on it i guess yeah that's true um so you mentioned that do you think that there's a role for fasting in obese patients i think there's a goal for not not eating so frequently i mean i think i mean yeah i mean i think there is i mean i think you know i mean i think there's some caveats to that i mean uh i mean if you're so obese we're losing lean mass is less of a detriment than losing a huge amount of fat mass and probably not a big it's probably beneficial i think that just reducing the meal free for most most of the obese people generally are not eating two meals a day it might be multiple meals and snacks and so you're just getting rid of that stuff is very i mean probably you and i will probably i eat twice a day typically probably you're probably similar to that that's what a lot of people in carnival end up doing i think that has a benefit i think that um some people's appetites they just really protect you know it depends on what diet they're on i mean if they're on a standard american junk food diet then yeah fasting from that like you mentioned earlier if i just stop eating the standard american diet for any period of time that's going to be beneficial you know and the problem is because you're you're constantly hungry on these diets um it's it's challenging to do some people need that sort of external um you know stopwatch that says okay i can't eat now they just need that whereas you know i mean because the diet i'm on i mean i'm just not hungry i'm not gonna eat when i'm not hungry and so it kind of naturally sets that up for me and i don't care whether it's you know like i i'll eat a you know relatively early dinner and then i'll wake up the next morning not particularly hungry i won't eat till i'm hungry which might be 10 a.m it might be 2 p.m i don't know what it's going to be and usually i'll you know i got to juggle my schedule a little bit but uh but it kind of naturally lends itself to that so i mean i guess it depends on the context of what your background diet is yeah where you are health-wise where you are psychologically can you actually recognize when you're hungry or not because some people don't a lot of people because they're bored yeah and i mean i think a lot of people do this to you well nothing to do let me eat you know at least just something to do in that case you know you probably need to you need to do more with your life yeah if the only thing relieves your boredom is eating then you're probably not doing enough yeah yeah true um so what about in the context of carnivore diet say someone's someone's already on a carnivore diet but they've been told oh you should you should fast uh as well especially if they're overweight in in that context you know someone who is uh quite overweight um and they're on a carnivore diet do you see any benefit past being on a carnivore diet in those cases i mean certainly i mean certainly yeah i mean there's people that will anecdotally say they do better with fasting and i'm not gonna you know i'm am i to discount someone's particular antidote i think if you're going to use that strategy gosh i'd really like you to make sure you get enough protein gosh i'd really like to see you do some resistance training at the same time i mean we know those things are our formulas to maintain lean mass and so uh i mean you can mitigate some of the potential downsides by you know again those things i just mentioned protein and resistance training so uh for some people yeah it certainly is a strategy that works i think once you get down to where you want to be body composition wise health-wise and then you get a diminishing benefit you know and i think there's a little i mean i talked to jason fung who's you know the one of the big proponents of fasting and i talked about hey about athletes and goes yeah i don't really see a big benefit in athletes i mean that was from from his perspective and i i kind of feel the same thing i mean i've gone days where i haven't eaten i mean usually it's like if i'm like like traveling and there's i'm only stuck on a plane all day and rather than eat the crap they serve me on the plane and i'm and i'm sitting there i'm not doing anything i'm literally this is one of the times you can't literally can't exercise i mean unless you're doing push-ups in the island you can't even do that you know you might have to do some isometrics in your chair but i mean you know i rarely i mean i think of the times i've missed a meal and intentionally like where i missed it i think i've done that once or twice i think i tried i did a 148 hour fast one time just to say i did it i remember because i interviewed cole robinson the snake diet guy and we were and i said well i'll try 48 hour fast and i did it and what i did was i ate enough in one meal to last me two days which was eight pounds of food in one meal which was interesting experience because i was i was miserable i was like five pounds in like and i kept going and i was like and i got to eight pounds and i was like i felt like i was a snake that just swallowed a goat and i laid on the couch for like four hours couldn't move and then i fasted for two days and i was like okay but it was not a pleasant experience for me i mean i'd rather just eat you know probably once or twice a day and do that sort of stuff but but yeah i mean i think that uh again it can have its benefits i think there's some caveats to that i think that uh i think at the end of the day um you know i mean if we had some people that started out their diet you know as a kid and started eating an animal-based diet their whole life i don't think they'd ever really need to fast i don't think they'd ever struggle with obesity i think they'd be very healthy individuals and i'd like to see them exercise and you know get stronger as well i think yeah great i i definitely agree um just just hopping back just to one um thing there you mentioned obviously fire we've been cooking for quite some time which i've always taken to mean that you know cooking meat is just fine but there there are quite a lot of people who are or uh you know doing doing raw stuff i mean i cook things you know quite rare and i every now and then i'll eat something raw off i'm just like just too uh impatient to like cook a steak let's just like slice up some of it uh raw but um from your experience and what you've read is there is there any particular benefit one way or the other uh from a nutrition standpoint with raw versus cooked i mean that's controversial i mean you can find literature either way i mean you know you know protein availability i mean there's a there's an interesting study on pigs and eating ribeye steaks so it's kind of you can look at this up pigs and ribeye steaks there's a study actually they fed pigs pigs and they were looking at absorption of nutrients particularly protein and they found that pigs eating i think it was medium ribeyes and i can't remember what it might have been raw ground but i can't remember but there was different variations on different absorption characteristics on these things but it wasn't raw meat was necessarily better in all cases i mean some people maintain after cooking after a certain temperature it you know destroys some of the nutrients i think that's controversial i mean i know that um for instance i know of several people within the carnival community that went raw for a while and got very very sick from it so that that's just a candy out here i don't think there's anything wrong with eating raw meat in general i have no problem with people doing i'm just saying i would much prefer people just see hot sear real quick and then if the inside's raw i mean you know to me that's probably a wise way to do it um but yeah i mean you know you know steak tartare beef carpassio you know obviously all the different fish the sushis and stuff like that they're all serve raw and most people do fine with so i don't think there's a major problem with that does it give you superpowers does it make you super better than everybody else i'm not really seeing seeing that you know i mean you know there's some people that you know oh i feel super strong when i get that i i tried i mean i did i did like two weeks of just straight up raw meat and i i just didn't like it man i was just like i didn't i didn't look forward to it i was like oh man and i mean it's easy way to lose weight because i'm just like [Laughter] so i mean yeah i mean i guess there's some advantages on that but um i just i just think you just have to be uh cautious you know because like like for instance ambro hearn who's i think a very very intelligent incredibly smart logical woman in the karma community been doing this stuff for longer than most people i think she's 12 13 years in she did some raw meat and got extremely sick it took her it took her over a year to recover from she still has some of the effects in her gut from that and it's been you know so there's just just be cautious of the uh potential downside i know there's people in there eating fermented raw chicken that's been sitting in a jar for six months and you know swearing it's great for them and yeah i just you know like i said i think there's there's some potential downsides to that yeah and they got the um the native alaskans where they do uh fish heads they put them in the jar and like put them on and then bury them for six months or something like that and that one sounds yeah i mean you know i guess that some people think it's a delicate well it's a different it's probably a unique taste for sure whether it's a delicacy and delicacy means you have to build up a tolerance to eat it yeah yeah but that's i mean i mean yeah clearly i mean if you look at like staffons and if you if you listen to uh i mean stefansson will say some of the meat was eaten raw but very often it was cooked and so i mean you know there's there's proponents on either side and i i'm like i said i i am happy to say i don't know what the best answer is uh you can experiment just but when you're on on the raw meat side just be aware that you could get very sick from that and that's if that's something you want to risk that is up to you yeah and i think i think that's especially important in uh non-western countries as well um even western countries things can get contaminated or have parasites some of those you know uh vanishingly rare at this point for you know farmed uh livestock in america um you know they're very very careful um quality control tests and uh that people go through or that these things go through but you go to another country and and they you may not have that and so you can certainly run into more trouble with that as well and um yeah and then they have like a high high meat and they they sort of let it rot and then sort of like that which i think is whatever you're doing it's better than like uh with these people drinking their their piss or something like that that's a new thing i've seen more and more people are like like like drinking their own urine and like one guy was actually just like leaving it in jars and letting it like just just brought for a month it was like dark brown it was like it was like a dark like like stout beer color and these guys oh yeah i posted it on my social media i was kind of crazy i think somebody's doing it for attention quite honestly i mean it's it's uh you know if you see the people they're just you know just doing this stupid stuff if you get to a point where you think drinking urine is good for you i i would seriously just to say look you need to evaluate where you are in life i mean yes you know well you know and what what loss to that you know what was he doing that was so horrible for his health that drinking his own piss that had been sitting there rotting on a shelf in the sun for a month was better than that it was better than that you know that that's what i i'm kind of curious about like what the hell was he doing before that awesome well uh dr baker it's been an absolute pleasure i'm you know i'm conscious of your time i don't want to take up your whole day but i really appreciate you coming on it's been it's been an absolute pleasure um can you tell us uh where where we can find you and how people can can follow you and support you if they don't already yeah sure so rivera.com i'm there every day doing a zoom meeting anybody wants to come we hop in there and i if you want to ask me questions directly you can do that uh you know i've got social media so uh instagram is shawn it's shawn baker bakr1967 uh then on twitter i got sbakermd on youtube i've got a channel sean bakermd and i'm even on tick-tock at sean baker md so those are those are where you can find me relatively reliably awesome well great i will put all those up in the show notes and and i encourage everyone out out there to follow your stuff and check it out if they don't already which i'm sure uh most people already do uh dr baker it's been an absolute pleasure thank you very much for coming on thanks brother all right have a good one man i gotta run man take care no thank you nobody no problem about it you too