A yoga instructor and professional equestrian turned personal trainer, Kem Minnick noticed a decline in her physical and health after years of veganism.
Her personal quest for health revealed the importance of tryptophan, which is necessary for the production of serotonin in the brain. She realized that insufficient serotonin was a root cause of her chronic physical ill-health and lack of mental clarity.
Further personal experimentation proved to her that her vegan/vegetarian practice was the cause of her low serotonin.
Something had to change.
The Original Carnivore Swedish Bikini Chef, ex-Playboy model Kem Minnick talks her journey from being a cannabis user and vegan/vegetarian, tryptophan deficiency, why a carnivore diet helps produce serotonin, and how she was introduced to the carnivore diet by the man who was not only the brains behind the Grateful Dead's massive wall-of-sound speaker system, but also the country's largest LSD distributor, Stanley Owsley.
Quick Guide
1:03 Introduction
03:24 What is tryptophan and how it functions in the body
12:38 The relationship between carbohydrates and serotonin
16:49 What her research with Wurtmans of MIT led her to discover
20:57 Stanley Owsley
25:57 Her switch from vegan to carnivore
40:44 Lessons from her research to write a book on serotonin
49:29 The wisdom of Temple Grandin
Get to know our guest
The Swedish bikini chef, Kem Minnick became a Playboy model at age 41. She advocates the carnivore diet and celebrates being marijuana-free for 12 years. She shares her journey in her book, "Eat Meat, Be Happy! Recipes for a More Meat Diet."
“There are two different types of iron, non-heme iron, heme iron. We only get heme iron from animal proteins, meat, red meat, lamb and beef are our best sources. We've got to keep that in the female diet. We got to keep it in the diet of children in elementary school, junior high school, and we need to start talking about the absolute importance of it in preventing depression, in preventing anxiety with young women today.” - Kem Minnick
Connect with her
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kemminnick
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kemminnick/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7pd88HGD0hXf0fVjR6E0eQ
Episode snippets
4:
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
A yoga instructor and professional equestrian turned personal trainer, Kem Minnick noticed a decline in her physical and health after years of veganism.
Her personal quest for health revealed the importance of tryptophan, which is necessary for the production of serotonin in the brain. She realized that insufficient serotonin was a root cause of her chronic physical ill-health and lack of mental clarity.
Further personal experimentation proved to her that her vegan/vegetarian practice was the cause of her low serotonin.
Something had to change.
The Original Carnivore Swedish Bikini Chef, ex-Playboy model Kem Minnick talks her journey from being a cannabis user and vegan/vegetarian, tryptophan deficiency, why a carnivore diet helps produce serotonin, and how she was introduced to the carnivore diet by the man who was not only the brains behind the Grateful Dead's massive wall-of-sound speaker system, but also the country's largest LSD distributor, Stanley Owsley.
Quick Guide
1:03 Introduction
03:24 What is tryptophan and how it functions in the body
12:38 The relationship between carbohydrates and serotonin
16:49 What her research with Wurtmans of MIT led her to discover
20:57 Stanley Owsley
25:57 Her switch from vegan to carnivore
40:44 Lessons from her research to write a book on serotonin
49:29 The wisdom of Temple Grandin
Get to know our guest
The Swedish bikini chef, Kem Minnick became a Playboy model at age 41. She advocates the carnivore diet and celebrates being marijuana-free for 12 years. She shares her journey in her book, "Eat Meat, Be Happy! Recipes for a More Meat Diet."
“There are two different types of iron, non-heme iron, heme iron. We only get heme iron from animal proteins, meat, red meat, lamb and beef are our best sources. We've got to keep that in the female diet. We got to keep it in the diet of children in elementary school, junior high school, and we need to start talking about the absolute importance of it in preventing depression, in preventing anxiety with young women today.” - Kem Minnick
Connect with her
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kemminnick
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kemminnick/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7pd88HGD0hXf0fVjR6E0eQ
Episode snippets
4:
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
S3E28 Kem Minnick
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
serotonin, tryptophan, eating, carnivore, meat, book, animal proteins, lsd, talking, diet, vegan, life, people, years, called, homocysteine, folate, anemia, drug, works
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is Fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:36
And we're live and apparently, there's something wrong with my picture and we'll deal with that at another time. This is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast, Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm the co-host, Jack Heald. And Phil, this is, I know, in the two years we've been doing this show, we've never had a Swedish bikini, a carnivore Swedish bikini chef. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about our guests?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:03
Yeah, I would definitely say we've never had one because I believe our guest is the only one that I know of at least, maybe there are more out there. But Kem is really, I just love the way that she is spreading her message. And it's a message of positivity. And she is really just, a fascinating person, I've been really fortunate to connect with her and talk with her. She has an upcoming book and a film project that we're going to talk about, but excited to introduce our audience to her. So Kem, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit tell our audience tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to be a carnivore Swedish bikini chef?
Kem Minnick 01:53
Thank you, doc. So, Hi, I'm Kem Minnick. And I switched to a more meat, what I call a more meat diet. And my book is Eat Meat, Be Happy! Recipes for a More Meat Diet. I'm a chef. I'm not a doctor or a scientist, I don't even play one on TV. So, I came into this as a yoga instructor. I made a leap from being a professional equestrian at the age of 30 into physical personal training. And I moved from Texas to Colorado to take a job with the City of Boulder teaching yoga and being a personal trainer. So, when I got here, and I got very serious about a yoga program, I was told by my very spiritual yoga teacher that we all had to be vegetarian. I got here feeling really strong, super happy, super healthy. And I tried a vegetarian diet, and my health just slowly went downhill. And then I tried a vegan diet at 37. So, between the ages of 32 and 37, I had five years of vegetarianism before I went vegan raw food, and then I was so sick. As Dr. Ovadia and I were talking, I developed ventricular tachycardia. My body was eating its own heart on a vegan diet. So, I had to, my wonderful cardiologist told me what was wrong, but he didn't tell me how to fix it. So, it was before Shawn, Shawn Baker, and Ken berry it was and I wasn't even online. So, I just had to come up with a diet plan. I call it the tryptophan diet plan.
Jack Heald 03:24
Okay, I love it, the tryptophan diet plan. So, expand on that. That sounds fun.
Kem Minnick 03:31
Oh, sure. Thank you. Well, what I was experiencing as a 39-year-old woman getting ready to turn 40 who was practicing a vegan, vegetarian, raw food diet for two years from 37 to 39, I just got so sick. And at 39 was when I went to the cardiologist, and I still waited two more years before I made the switch. Problems I started to have were the heart palpitations, not knowing I didn't have any iron. I went to a very expensive osteopath with a very expensive stool sample and selling me, wants to sell me very expensive all kinds of everything. And I'm taking this Thorne Zinc that's giving me anemia because it's attaching itself to non-heme iron.
Jack Heald 04:19
Attaching itself to what?
Kem Minnick 04:23
Non-heme iron. So, a zinc... The things that I learned about, the process after being so sick, the motivator for me, the big motivator, and I write about this a little bit humorously in my book, women will tell you, we're okay with starving, right? We're okay with being lightheaded as long as we're thin and beautiful. What helped me change was depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I was just... The obsessive-compulsive disorder towards the end of the four years that vegan raw food diet was so bad. I joke in the book and say, I couldn't sit through a movie because I thought I left the stove on, it was that kind of OCD.
Jack Heald 05:07
Hold on, hold on. Did the OCD manifest prior to the veganism?
Kem Minnick 05:14
The veganism caused it because vegan diet’s tryptophan-deficient diets. What I found out...
Jack Heald 05:23
Okay, okay, I gotta tell you this is fun because, in almost two years of doing this show, we've never had a healthcare provider even talk about tryptophan. So, it's kind of fun to have a yogi, equestrian, ex-vegan bring that up for the first time. Please tell us more about tryptophan, veganism, vegetarianism, and how it affected you and this is fun. I'm digging this.
Kem Minnick 05:55
Great, right on. Oh, thank you so much. So, Dr. Ovadia is probably aware, some scientists say tryptophane. Colloquially, in the news in the media, we do say tryptophan. And I liked the idea of the tryptophan diet plan. We switched to eat meat, be happy. But so, what happened is I had OCD. It was horrible. It was just consuming me. In my book, I am very lighthearted. I talked about how small my butt was and how beautiful and skinny I was on vegan, but I was crazy. So, nobody wanted to have sex with me. I do try and use a sense of humor about the experience. But what ended up really happening was I was so depressed that I was just crying and crying. And I simply was upstairs, I remember in my bathroom like we all are sometimes with our phone. And I just Googled obsessive-compulsive disorder and nutrition and tryptophan came up. Tryptophan deficiency as being the...
Jack Heald
Interesting.
Kem Minnick
Yeah, so tryptophan is an essential amino acid that for humans is only available in animal proteins, the only plant-based food that has even minute quantities and they are so minute, it's referred to as ND or nondetectable is soy. Soy is an excellent feed for animals. They can absorb tryptophan and increase the tryptophan content in their cell structure. So, what I did is I went down the rabbit hole of tryptophan serotonin, I called the Wurtman Lab. In my first couple of weeks of research, the very first thing I learned is I learned that a pure meat diet does not provide brain tryptophan and that humans evolved on carbohydrates 7500 years ago for brain tryptophan induce serotonin, that was the first thing I learned.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 07:45
So, most people think of tryptophan as what makes us sleepy after we have Thanksgiving dinner and we're always told it's in the turkey and it makes us sleepy. So, unpack for us a little bit because here you're saying lack of tryptophan makes you depressed. It's true. But that would seem a little counterintuitive to everyone who's only heard that tryptophan is what makes you sleepy after eating a whole bunch of Turkey.
Kem Minnick 08:16
Sure. Great way to because there are two different types of serotonin. There's brain serotonin and blood serotonin. The essential amino acid tryptophan is only in animal proteins. So, in order to produce blood serotonin, we must have it always for life. Humans, all humans evolved on meat. We know this from science, it's considered the first step in the evolution of the human brain out of a primate-type brain is the consumption of animal proteins on a regular basis. Dr. Richard Wrangham out of Harvard further elaborates in his book Catching Fire how cooking made us human, how we started cooking meat in order to develop, the more meat we ate, and the more we worked together as a community, the more we induce dopamine. He doesn't talk very much about tryptophan or serotonin. Tryptophan in and of itself, we always get from animal proteins. Tryptophan is the only substance that makes serotonin. Serotonin is the only substance that makes melatonin. Melatonin controls our sleep, in tune with circadian rhythms of the sun. And sun coming in tonight. So, I was not so much into dopamine. I learned about dopamine when I wrote Eat Meat and Be Happy and I have a whole chapter on dopamine. But for me, I just wanted to get better. I wanted to heal the OCD. I wanted to heal the depression, but the OCD is consuming not unlike anxiety that I had when I was younger. And anxiety is also a low-tryptophan disorder. So, what I learned is tryptophan deficiency, the number one reason people have tryptophan deficiency is malnutrition. A lack of animal proteins, a lack of dairy, and a lack of eggs will cause tryptophan efficiency. Tryptophan is the only substance that makes a B vitamin niacin. So, our body will use tryptophan, available tryptophan to make niacin before it will make serotonin. So, when we talk about insomnia, depression, and even the inability to turn the appetite off, that's low-serotonin, low-tryptophan. The second way people deplete tryptophan from their system is through consuming alcohol. So, alcohol washes tryptophan out of the liver through a process called the tryptophan fire release. And there's a tremendous amount of research in this area.
Jack Heald 10:36
This is not the interview I was expecting.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 10:41
That's why I love talking to Kem. So, to continue to unpack this a little bit. A lot of people will be familiar with serotonin as the happy hormone. It's often the love hormone and it makes us feel good. So basically, what you're explaining is that lack of tryptophan leads to lack of serotonin can is going to lead to depression and other problems.
Kem Minnick 11:13
Yes, including obesity and overeating. So, when you, earlier, I'll go back and answer that to clarify, when you were discussing, and we're hoping to get the book out this fall so we can do it at tryptophan time, right? What we understand about or what the Wurtman Lab and MIT understand about serotonin and tryptophan, again I earlier said we have blood tryptophan, we have blood serotonin, and brain serotonin. Humans have always had blood tryptophan, right? We've always had blood serotonin. It's formed in the digestive system when we eat our food. It's in our intestines and it's in our bloodstream. In order for serotonin to be induced into the brain, hence the sleepiness after Thanksgiving, glucose-bearing carbohydrates have to be consumed, or we have to engage in intense exercise. Those are two ways to induce serotonin into your brain. It has to do with the blood-brain barrier. And what I find fascinating about serotonin and dopamine, all humans evolved on dopamine first, because it's the survival neurotransmitter. Dopamine is a fight, flight, and duck, or shall we say procreate, fight, flight, and procreate. Oh, it's pure Bible. But from evolutionary...
Jack Heald 12:35
There was wordplay there, folks.
Kem Minnick 12:38
Well, you know when you're typing, there's just, yeah. I read several years ago that when you use wordplay, people tend to remember more. So, I somehow have accidentally integrated itself into my whole spiel of the Swedish bikini stuff, right? So, with serotonin and Thanksgiving, it's yes, yes, people tend to eat a lot and they're eating a lot of Turkey but they're also eating mashed potatoes, glucose-bearing carbohydrate, yam, glucose-bearing carbohydrate, right? Pumpkin pie, glucose-bearing carbohydrate. That is going to send serotonin right up to your brain. But it really is intense exercise and the carbohydrate consumption. 7500 years ago, human civilization took off as we know it, because we brought glucose-bearing carbohydrates into our diet. It induced serotonin into the brain. We stopped being quite so survival based. And we settled down-home, marriage, monogamy, the human family, our brains had enough energy now because we were consuming small amounts of glucose-bearing carbohydrates guys. Not MSG. Not high fructose corn syrup. Okay? Not maybe an oil. We were consuming ancient wheats. Pure the Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, we brought those bread into our diet and that gave our brain more energy, gave it serotonin.
Jack Heald 14:11
I think it's important to stop here and differentiate because it's very easy for us to go too far in either direction. There's a ditch on either side of the road, we can fall into both of them. Humans have been eating grains without getting sick and fat for thousands of years. We know that. That's just an indisputable fact.
Kem Minnick
Yes.
Jack Heald
So, it's not necessarily the grains with small g that are the problem. It's that something has happened in the last 40 years. And our grains are one of the things that has been affected by it. I'm sorry, that's just kind of a big deal to me. I've been thinking about this a lot since Dr. O and I've been doing this show. And I ate boatloads of junky food, what was junky food when I was a kid. And we all did. And we weren't getting obese. And then in the early to mid-80s, it was like somebody flicked a switch. And if we go back and we look at agriculture, we look at what's happened in big agri. Big Food, I guess they call it, it starts to be obvious what happened. So, I don't know if I should follow this thing that she just opened up, Phil, a little bit, but it's fascinating to me this idea that because of the change in brain chemistry or body chemistry that affected the brain, that's why we were able to stop being hunter-gatherers and build cities. I think that's what I'm hearing you say, Kem?
Kem Minnick 16:08
Correct. Guns, germs, and steel. Correct. It's called prosocial dietary evolution.
Jack Heald 16:17
I'm gonna look that one up. I love this. Okay, so continuing on with getting serotonin into your brain, the various ways and means, and so forth and so on. And back to your story. So, you're doing all this research. You're learning about what's going on in your own body as a result of depriving yourself of animal proteins. So...
Kem Minnick 16:45
And what happened next, what happened next?
Jack Heald 16:46
What happened next?
Kem Minnick 16:49
Well, I just remember making an announcement at an all-woman sort of hippie, raw food vegan potluck one night in September of I think 2011. Or was it 2010? It was 2010. It was the fall 2010 Because it was New Year's Eve 2010. I almost died of anemia. I woke up the next day and had barbecue, felt better. So, it’s healing by barbecue, and I was at a friend’s house who is a quite famous and lovely human being. I mean, these people mean well. It's not like vegetarians and vegans don't mean well. They mean well, they believe their jive. They grok it, they got it, they want it to be real. So, I'm at this house with like these luminary amazing artistic women. And I made this announcement and I said, you know, I'm 31 years old, and I was chosen to be in Playboy, I'm going to write a book. And everybody... I just started getting claps. And I decided to write a book on serotonin and eating meat. So, I just started researching. I connected with Dr. Wurtman, Doctors Judith and Richard Wurtman of MIT. The Wurtman Lab was formerly the foremost serotonin lab in the world. They received lots of funding. Serotonin controls the appetite. And what they were getting funding for at MIT was to make a diet drug and they couldn't do it. And these are two Ph.D. MDs, okay, who are the foremost... You know why you can't make a diet drug from serotonin? Because you can't make life in a laboratory. Tryptophan is life. It only comes from animal proteins. And when it has been tried to be genetically manipulated or not manipulated, but produced, people died. People died from it. So, tryptophan for me, I guess I'm just like the Joan of Arc tryptophan for some strange reason. It just became my world, and everything got better. my whole life changed. I've been smoking marijuana for anxiety. I gave that up entirely. I just celebrated 12 years marijuana free. I don't drink alcohol. I took up coffee, but I can't drink coffee because of my anemia. I think that the things that people, women need to hear about, more particularly than men, is the absolute importance of keeping red meat with myoglobin with heme in it. Heme iron. There are two different types of iron, non-heme iron, heme iron. We only get heme iron from animal proteins, meat, red meat, lamb and beef are our best sources. We've got to keep that in the female diet. We got to keep it in the diet of children in elementary school, junior high school, and we need to start talking about the absolute importance of it in preventing depression, in preventing anxiety with young women today. So, the vegan and vegetarian diets are tryptophan deficient and the only way we can get the essential amino acid to produce serotonin, this prosocial inhibitory neurotransmitter, is through the consumption of these animal proteins. And even taking it one step further and learning about substances that deplete serotonin, heroin, and cannabis are both serotonergic drugs and they deplete the endocannabinoid system, endo opioid system that's now being coined the endocannabinoid system, is the body when you take the alkaloid in that's in cannabis, and this was the area I looked into last because I didn't want to know this to be true, I wrote a chapter and I was like, oh, gosh, darn it, gosh, darn it, when you're on that search, and you find something you don't want to know. The endocannabinoid system is the active alkaloid in cannabis, what it does is it releases serotonin from your cells, and it sends it to the endo opioid system. Because it thinks you're dying. So, we're tricking your body.
Jack Heald 20:57
Oh. Pot. I know we've got cannabinoid receptors.
Kem Minnick 21:03
Yes, sir. Same thing. They're the same thing.
Jack Heald 21:08
All right. And what pot does, just run that whole thing by me again, it triggers...
Kem Minnick 21:15
If you want to change gears because I remember I was talking to Dr. O the other day and I got to rein me in.
Dr. Philip Ovadia
No, this is good.
Jack Heald 21:23
This is different, Kem. Nobody talks about this on this show. So, there's been a dearth of serotonin and pot talk on the show, and we need to fix that.
Kem Minnick 21:36
Well, when I'm talking about it, it's if we look at... Because I was a deadhead. I mean, I saw... I was on tour for years. And I knew Stanley Owsley that progenitor of LSD as we know it. He ate nothing but rare meat, raw meat, red meat, and rare meat. He ate nothing but meat. He was a true carnivore. And I remember I met him in 1991. And I was sitting on a like, on a concrete thing waiting for the show to start and he walks in, he goes, hey, do you wanna go backstage? And I said, sure. And he’s telling he’s Owsley and I don't know who he is. And he introduced me to this guy, Cosmic Charlie, and they took me backstage. Anyway, at the end of the night, Owsley’s got this giant tray of meat that he's just cutting into and eating. And the whole hippie movement is vegetarian, vegetarian, and vegetarian.
Jack Heald 22:26
And Owsley is a carnivore?
Kem Minnick 22:28
A pure carnivore.
Jack Heald 22:31
Oh my God, this may be the best thing I've heard, certainly this year.
Kem Minnick 22:37
And you know why he was a pure carnivore?
Jack Heald
Please tell us.
Kem Minnick
Because LSD and marijuana both release tryptophan and serotonin to go to your endocannabinoid endo opioid system, whereas LSD... LSD works more on the brainstem type, amygdala, as well. It's a little bump up from cannabis. And it's a little dope up there. I don't understand the whole thing about how LSD works at all, but I never asked him. I didn't even use LSD back then. I didn't try LSD for the first time until 1993 at the Philly Spectrum when they broke out with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I'm pretty sure it was orange sunshine from cosmic Charlie. But the interesting about Owsley, again, he ate nothing but meat. And he talked to me about this, and I remember him saying,
Jack Heald 23:25
Was he still making LSD?
Kem Minnick 23:28
We no longer have LSD because he got killed in a bicycle. I think he was hit by a car while he was riding his bicycle. He was in a car accident. He died. We no longer have LSD. LSD is gone as we knew it, it's gone. It died with him.
Jack Heald 23:46
Okay. Carry on.
Kem Minnick 23:49
Yeah, died with him. He died. I think he died before Jerry. Maybe he died after Jerry, I don't know. And it hasn't been my world for a long time. I remember flashing back on Owsley telling me about why he eats meat. And he was talking about tryptophan serotonin and replacing how important it is to get those vitamins in your body especially if you're going to use drugs. And he didn't like cannabis at all. He thought he thought cannabis was not a good drug. But he thought LSD was God's drug. And he has solid muscle, solid, no fat. His wife's gorgeous, solid muscle, she was a carnivore too. They look like superheroes out of a Boris Vallejo book. They looked great.
Jack Heald 24:33
Oh my god. This is... I read the Technicolor... What is it? Tom Wolf's book about the, whatever trip... The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip Yeah. And this mostly is a minor character in the whole story, but he's obviously central to the whole thing. And it's just, it's mind-blowing that this guy figured out the nutritional, counter balance, I guess we could call it.
Kem Minnick
Exactly.
Jack Heald
To his particular hobby.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 25:28
Yeah, I gotta jump in and say of all the reasons that I've heard to go carnivore, all the benefits to being a carnivore, this is a new one to me, kind of counteracting the nutritional effects of LSD. But I think it kind of shows us all of the benefits of eating animal proteins.
Jack Heald 25:51
My god, it's incredible.
Kem Minnick 25:53
You can... that info.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 25:57
Yeah, this is amazing. So, I guess, let's shift gears a little bit. But I want to really continue with your experiences, your stories. So, you go from basically vegan to carnivore, and you're probably the third or fourth guest we've had on has made that switch, done that 180, and kind of tell us about that experience. And what kind of response you got from your community about that, and you can kind of fast forward to today, anyone that follows you on social media will see that you're often being attacked by the vegans and kind of fighting with the vegans. It's typically pretty amusing because you're not a reserved, shy person so you do it in a very entertaining way. But tell us a little bit about that part of the journey from vegan to carnivore.
Kem Minnick 27:02
Sure, well, my whole life was this hippie Yoga wealthy, white, hippie drug-using older people. The dead seeing crunchy crunchy, we call it. And I have nothing to do with that anymore. It's gone. 100%. Really my experience with just eating meat, I think I did a lot of barbecued chicken thighs, to begin with. Just a lot of barbecue chicken thighs, because I really love thigh meat and which has more iron and more zinc because it has more myoglobin in it. The dark meat is pretty mild with myoglobin. And of course...
Jack Heald 27:39
And it tastes better.
Kem Minnick 27:41
I know, right? It's delicious, especially with the skin on. Oh, so what I did is I followed this thing called, that I was calling the tryptophan diet plan. And in order to produce serotonin, there are what are called nutritional cofactors. So interestingly enough, beef, meat, chicken, beef, meat has almost all of them. So, the only nutritional cofactors that are not in meat are vitamin C, folate, which is one of the eight B vitamins, potassium, and magnesium. Now, you talk to carnivores, and they'll tell you that they get all of that from me. And I think that's great. And especially women as we get older, dealing with our autoimmune stuff with our myalgia and our pain and that meat just is healing people left and right. Dr. O sees it. We see it all the time in our carnivore community on Twitter. It's so wonderful to hear that. My focus really was to make serotonin. So, I made sure that I listened to Dr. Wurtman, 79-year-old Dr. Wurtman who's like, “Now, Kem, you can't just eat meat.” She's this adorable little Jewish one. So, I have always kept fruit a part of my diet. And the beginning I was eating carbohydrates, I was eating Immaculate Baking Company cinnamon rolls and stuff. And as time went on, I just started letting go more of carbohydrates. I do eat carbohydrates when I want but now I eat 80% animal protein, meat, 200 to 400 grams of red meat a day. Egg. I don't overdo the eggs. I'm not a big overdo the egg thing. The egg thing kind of gives me a headache if I eat too many eggs. Yogurt every day, but I have fresh juice grapefruit, because I learned that these are the foods you have to have to produce serotonin. So, I like Pâté, but I'm not going to sit here and eat raw liver with a fork. I don't want to. I like to juice grapefruits right and eat grapes. So, my focus really is on how to produce serotonin. And science tells us that nutritional cofactors are necessary for neurotransmitter production. Interestingly enough, I want to hear what Dr. O has to say about this, something I learned about when I wrote the book was homocysteine and methionine is an essential amino acid found in greatest quantities in meat, animal protein. Folate, it requires both B12 and folate to reconvert, where you convert, homocysteine is a byproduct. It's called a waste product. But our bodies are so efficient, it will reconvert to usable protein with sufficient quantities of folate and B12. So, things that were important to me were how to maintain B12. Well, B12’s water-soluble. So, I do rami, I eat a lot of rami. I eat Raffaele. I shop at Whole Foods. I know the farmer who produces the meat for Whole Foods. He's a friend of mine, we talk every day. I'll be filming him in my docu series. And he's the largest producer of natural beef in the western region for Whole Foods. So, I do a lot of raw tartare because I want the B12. My whole focus is I want to make serotonin. I remember what else he told me. I know what I've gone through in my life. Tonight, I'm gonna have some homemade organic pancakes because I didn't sleep very well last night. I know if I eat carbohydrates around four o'clock, I will sleep through the night very well because I've got enough serotonin. If I do pure carnivore, I'm like, let me look, I'm on fire anyway, right? If I pure carnivore, I'm through the roof, but I think the homocysteine for heart health, and cardiovascular health is really important. Folate is very, very important. Folate is called folate from the word Foliot. So, I know that lots of carnivores say I get it from the liver, I get it from the liver and that's cool. But I like to get my folate from grapefruits, oranges, tangerines, and lemons.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 31:35
Yeah, so to expand on that, homocysteine, when it's elevated, that's a significant risk factor for the development of heart disease. And the reason it gets elevated like you were talking about is typically B12, or folate deficiency. And again, we see this oftentimes sometimes can be an absorption problem. And B12, folate deficiency can also lead to anemia. So, there's a linkage there. But homocysteine is definitely an important molecule when it comes to heart health. Keeping that in proper balance.
Jack Heald 32:29
Okay, all right. So, I want to go back to this party where you announced that
Kem Minnick 32:38
Oh, yes. Thank you.
Jack Heald 32:40
Yeah, let's go back to the party. I believe it was New Year's 2010 or 11, you said?
Kem Minnick
Yeah.
Jack Heald
So, you got all these friends around you who are all morally convinced vegetarians or vegans. And you dropped a turd in the Punchbowl, I'm guessing.
Kem Minnick 33:01
Dropped a turd in the Punchbowl? What a great analogy. Spiritually, my peer group has been for most of my life, spiritual seekers. And really great people. I mean, amazing people, people that hung out with Terence McKenna and Tom Robbins. I mean, just brilliant, brilliant people, we've read and we love and, and this was their peer group. And I said, yeah, I'm gonna do this, and I lost everyone. I'm not friends with any of them. I do have a spiritual group that was an offshoot of that with most Seagull and so Celestial Seasonings. And so, but everybody eats meat, there aren't any weird dietary restrictions. What happened was that fall, I just began researching and writing the book. I started talking to Dr. Wurtman exchanging emails, I started talking to Drew Ramsey, Dr. Drew Ramsey, who had written a great book on healing depression with fat and meat and talking about serotonin formation. He wrote a great article in The Atlantic on seed oils. And the switch from tallow to seed oils, it's a really good article, if you can Google it, I'll send it to you. I quote him in the book. I quote that article in my book, so he and I talked, I spoke with Dr. Frank Milliner. I just really went for it. I went through three areas, human health, animal welfare, and the sustainability of harming animals for food, pure research, that following I think, like it was another I think it was another year of like, I just let everybody go I just
Jack Heald 34:43
Okay, real quick, real quick. So, what was the transition from vegan to, well, not vegan. What was the physical experience? What was the emotional experience? What was the mental experience? And how long did it last?
Kem Minnick 35:05
Well, it was me getting in my land rover and driving to Whole Foods and buying filet mignon.
Jack Heald 35:13
Yeah. Well, but you said you said you almost died of anemia on late 2010 or something. And I’m guessing that was a triggering event.
Kem Minnick 35:24
2009 switching to 2010. That was a triggering event. That summer I had a stroke on cannabis oil and mushrooms.
Jack Heald 35:34
December prior or the summer of following?
Kem Minnick 35:37
Summer following because I was dying of anemia on Christmas, I had a stroke. In the middle of the night, I woke up half my body was paralyzed, and I was blind in one eye.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 35:47
And you were still...
Jack Heald 35:48
You waited 35 minutes to tell us this?
Kem Minnick 35:54
Well, you asked a question. It was the chronological answer.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 35:58
But you're still pretty much vegan at that point.
Kem Minnick 36:01
I was going back and forth. Because I think the point that's being made here is the social support structure was my life and my friends and I was also using substances with them because I was a cool kid hippie with all the cool kids. And I remember feeling so emotionally awful earlier that summer. I remember because I read an article in Vanity Fair that Eric Clapton wrote, and he was talking about how he had given up drugs because giving up my vegan-vegetarian peer group lifestyle was about giving up marijuana. And I wanted to give it up, but my whole life was that of my friends, my identity, my music, everything, aesthetics. And he wrote, he said, his child had jumped out, accidentally jumped out. It's great, I bought his book. It's a great book. He said he got down on the floor because of his girlfriend, it was when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant with that little boy that sadly lost his life. He said, I got down on the floor, I beat the floor and I said, God, I don't ever want to use drugs again. Well, I did that and didn't work. And not that disparaging. I love that passage from Eric Clapton's book. And that was the beginning of me really wanting to change my life. I didn't understand that the vegan vegetarian lifestyle wasn't providing me with the raw materials for my brain, for my mental health. For my, I didn't have any serotonin. I was losing it. It was going way faster on the vegan diet because what happens as my cardiologist confirmed is for women as you're aging, we are sucking the life out of our tissues literally. And on a vegan vegetarian diet. You are sucking tryptophan, heme iron, and zinc out of your tissues, B vitamins. And that's, if any goes how nutritious and hard it is to eat, if your body doesn't go to your cellulite on your butt, I joke about, it wants nutrition, it's going to eat this. Cara Otis, the famous supermodel suffers from a hole in her heart from it, from anorexia. She writes about it in her book. But I had a stroke and I woke up in the middle of night and I was paralyzed on one side of my body because I remember going to sleep after eating this chocolate mushroom that my beautiful hippie friend gave me and I took this cannabis tincture her husband had made with kerosene on the hood of his G Mercedes wagon. I mean, it was just ridiculous. And I like half my body doesn't work. I don't remember which side and I had a puppy at the time. And I had to take him out because he was crying. It was a Newfoundland, so it's a lot of pee and a lot of poop. So, I remember crawling down the stairs. I felt like the creature from The Ring. And crawling outside. It was July and I mean I was trippin' like everything was green. And like there were you could see the fairies popping up. And I'm just laying there on the grass while he runs around and pees and poops. He, bless his heart, he just licked me and love me. I came back inside. I laid on the couch and I said, God, if I wake up, I'm gonna lay here because if I get an ambulance, I’ll have a heart attack, and I can't leave the dog, and I'm a seasoned drug user, so I just laid on the couch, woke up and I was fine. I was fine. So that was the moment where I knew something had to change. And I remembered Owsley. I remember how much meat Owsley ate. I just got in...
Jack Heald 39:26
I'm sorry. But here we are talking about metabolic health with a cardiac surgeon. And the pivotal moment in your life...
Kem Minnick
Yes.
Jack Heald
Is from the guy who became the world's biggest LSD manufacturer and distributor and for all intents and purposes, brought it into the culture and he's the guy who showed you, his memory inspired you to get metabolically healthy. This is, Phil, this is we need more guests like this. This is awesome.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 40:04
You never know where they're gonna lead you. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah, so let's, we want to definitely get the rest of it out though. So, you basically realize you have to change, you start eating meat, you start incorporating meat into your diet. What improvements did you get? How long did it take? What was that, was it really a quick kind of I went from vegan to not vegan or was it kind of more of a gradual transition?
Kem Minnick 40:44
When I was chosen for Playboy at 41, I announced to my friends that I was going to write a book. And I remember sitting in front of computer not even knowing how to write a book right. So, I decided it was going to be on serotonin. Research really became so much fun. And talking to all these luminaries such as Dr. Mulliner, such as Dr. Ramsey, such as Dr. Wurtman, meet scientists from... I just had such a good time doing this. And when I started in September, I remember February 14, I went to a like Grateful Dead concert with this really handsome, really good-looking guy who was not someone I was going to date but really handsome and really good-looking. But he wasn't the one and I remember it was Valentine's Day and I'm just thinking, I don't want to be here. I want to be home with a Newfoundland. And I took a hit and I hadn't smoked in months and I took a hit. I'm like I don't want to be here. It gave me my OCD again. As soon as I took a hit on, I didn't understand the serotonin meat cannabis thing. I didn't understand that I was losing serotonin every time. It's why people die from heroin, they run out of serotonin and their heart stops beating. So, I just had a horrible panic attack on February 14, 12 years ago. So, my 12-year anniversary, and I came home and I just said that's it. I'm done. I'm doing this meat thing. I am just I'm not smoking marijuana anymore. I'm totally going to work on making my body healthy and making serotonin naturally. And what I ended up reading in my research is two things really helped me. One thing that I talked about in my book is 50-50. Nature- nurture's 50-50. So even if we've wrecked our body, we have a 50% recovery rate because we're like weevils. I use the weevils euphemism. I think I'm older than you. But we're close to the same age, I think. And when we were little, we had weevils. So, I think you have to think of our health as a weevil and serotonin is going to keep you upright. And that nature-nurture is 50-50. So, I really love that nature-nurture concept. And it was when you're doing research, you go down a rabbit hole, I mean, we are now I think we're into 2012, I had a whole year of research and writing. And just really focusing on serotonin in my diet. In my studies, I learned through eating disorder recovery is it can take a woman 24 months to reuptake tryptophan, B12, serotonin, and heme iron.
Jack Heald 43:29
You mean get back to the point of normal, of what the normal biochemical processes are?
Kem Minnick 43:38
Yes.
Jack Heald
Okay.
Kem Minnick
What studies have shown, and this is Walter Kaye, there are two he came out of Pennsylvania, which by coincidence, I believe it's the oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. I can't remember their names. Students of Richard and Judith from MIT also have a serotonin Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. K moved from Pennsylvania to San Diego. But he still works with them. This woman is on I want to say, Furman, it's not Furman she's on the Today. She used to do speaking engagements on the Today Show. Their area is diet, right? We're all, everybody's trying to make you lose weight with serotonin but no one's come up with a solution. So, I talked to Dr. Kaye and I looked at his research what they discovered with women who have eating disorders, eating disorders, or tryptophan deficient disorders, so it’s suicide, is whoever, whenever someone commits suicide, it's because they have extremely low tryptophan. They know this by pulling spinal column and fluid testing it. Eating Disorder, women will lapse back into eating disorder behavior in as little as six hours if they're tryptophan deficient. So, we're talking about the most important nutrients to human life is tryptophan. And the food we get it from also has B12, also has zinc, also has heme iron. So, why would we ever give up meat dairy, and eggs? Why? We can't. It's impossible. It's wrong. It's biochemically invalid. And, for me that whole first year was great. I had more energy, I felt better. My hair grew. My hair wasn’t really growing yet. I was drinking a lot of coffee. I quit drinking coffee at some point, but it was great. Everything was going really, really, really well. And I quit. I was two years into quitting marijuana and I met a really nice man and we had a relationship for six years and he's financially supported me so I could write my book. And it was really great. Like a lot of really good magical things happen without drugs and with eating meat.
Jack Heald 45:55
Wow. Okay, so what are you up to today?
Kem Minnick 46:00
Gosh, I have a couple of phone calls and a little bit...
Jack Heald 46:03
I don't mean today, today. I mean, what's going on in Kem Minnick's life now?
Kem Minnick 46:10
I pretty much eat meat. Like I have a freezer full of beef, and, or lamb. Duck? I think about phenylalanine. If I'm mispronouncing it Dr. O, please thank you. Homocysteine, thank you. Dopamine is created through phenylalanine, duck meat has a lot of phenylalanine, lamb does. I love to learn about the nutrients in the food. As a social media person with Eat Meat, Be Happy I'll be producing a docu-series this spring and summer. And that'll be really fun to tell the story, to debunk vegan and vegetarian myths. So right now,...
Jack Heald 46:54
You're gonna make more enemies than you have.
Kem Minnick 47:00
It's been crazy the past three years. It's been pretty, yeah, it's been pretty bad. Yeah, they're bad. But that's low serotonin. Right? That's low serotonin.
Jack Heald 47:09
I love that explanation because one of the things I've noticed, we've got a guest coming on in a couple of months, who I just stumbled onto. She goes by the handle of Recovering Vegan. Yeah, she appears to be from all intents and purposes, a kind and lovely woman who genuinely cares about her health and the health of her friends. And the amount of vitriol that I see on her on there in response to the things she says is just, it's awful. And to have an explanation other than these are horrible human beings. I really like your explanation that they're serotonin deficient. Of course, they're hungry and depressed and...
Dr. Philip Ovadia 48:06
Yeah, I mean, and to bring that kind of all around, we've had Christopher Palmer on who's a psychiatrist and talks about the relationship with mental health and curing serious mental health problems with ketogenic diets. So, it all adds up. It all really comes together and tells the story well, and I think you can't get away from the fact that meat is essential to the human diet, and we should not be shying away from eating it.
Kem Minnick 48:44
Not at all, especially when it's such a sustainably produced food. I had been trying to work on a documentary film called Eat Meat, Be Happy for years, and I could not, but like, I just couldn't get it off the ground. And finally, I was able to and in the post-COVID world now, it's Docuseries, which is great. I'm totally fine with that. And it will be really fun, being a lifelong equestrian and being outside most of my life is going to be showing people how sustainable beef is, how sustainable lamb is and how ethically, first of all, I say there are no factory farms and Temple Grandin agrees with me. I've interviewed Temple. There's no such thing as...
Jack Heald
Really?
Kem Minnick
Yes. Oh, yes.
Jack Heald 49:29
Oh, real quick. Tell the audience who Temple Grandin is.
Kem Minnick 49:32
Temple Grandin is a scientist from CSU here at Colorado Springs, and she was born autistic, and she has autism like Rain Man autism, okay? She doesn't have, “my parents sending me to a special school because I don't get along with the kids sitting next to me” autism, which and I'm not being glib, but I'm simply stating that when you sit with Dr. Grandin, you're talking to Rain Man from Rain Man. But her savant clique is animals. And she feels and understands them. So, Temple Grandin, Dr. Temple Grandin, redesigned the slaughterhouse system for McDonald's. She is consulted on all; she's done with animal welfare a little bit like what I grabbed with serotonin. Only her, she is just, she's such a fascinating person to talk to. First of all, if you ask her a question, she doesn’t know the answer to, she says, that's not my area of expertise and I need to look into that before I can get back to you. But she really understands behavior such as hugging, and it works on dogs, you've got to hold them tight, they need to be hugged. And she talks about how it works with horses. The release of oxytocin in an animal's brain through loving touch is only possible through feeding them, she understands the importance, which is kind of in our carnivore community, Dr. O, the importance of feeding grain. You know why we feed grain to animals; it allowed us to domesticate them. You know why? It puts serotonin into their brain. So, Grandin is clear on the biochemistry of animal behavior, and the importance of feeding grain. If we don't feed them grain, they're wild. They kill us, they won't come near us. They're scared. The grain calms them down. And she understands this because of her autism. So, she's a brilliant human being, and it was such a gift to sit down with her. I had 15 minutes, and she loved me. So, she gave me 45 or an hour or something. I mean, she wouldn't stop talking. Her handler had to, you know, because she just adored me. But it will be really great to be here in Colorado, and I'm gonna be traveling from Colorado through Nevada, to a ranch, a huge ranch in Nevada, where this couple has six kids, right, five boys and one girl, and they are all on horseback. They're homeschooled. They're all out there. Show people the beauty of nature. And being outside every day with the animals and how well cared for the animals are. It's really important that people see the truth of nature because the farmers truly are the caretakers, they are the stewards of the environment. And to farm is the most noble profession, because they're feeding us
Jack Heald 52:24
Maybe we should probably differentiate between farms that engage in regenerative methods and giant multisection farms, where they have a mono-crop that destroys everything and a few years. Hopefully, that goes without saying, but...
Kem Minnick 52:47
Yeah, the last chapter of my book is on organics. So, I've been pro-organic since I've been 18 years old and did research on how the defense system, the chemical warfare system was dumped into the agricultural system and the Bosch method, et cetera. But that's a whole other world.
Jack Heald 53:06
I'm gonna start a different podcast, just so that we can get all these other stories. This sounds, this is really fun. This is fascinating. Okay, so you've got a book in the works, called Eat Meat, Be Happy.
Kem Minnick 53:23
Recipes for a more meat diet.
Jack Heald 53:25
Recipes for a more meat diet. Right? You broke up there just a minute say that, again.
Kem Minnick 53:33
I just said I'm a chef, not a scientist or a doctor.
Jack Heald 53:36
All right. Well, frankly, we've opened up so many really interesting subjects. I could make this, I could keep asking questions. Partly. because these are things I've never even heard of before. I love the serotonin-centric approach. That's fascinating to me. Never heard that before. I don't know if it's legit or not. But it's certainly fascinating. I dig it. Phil, how do we wrap this up?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 54:13
I don't know how we wrap this up, Jack. But just, I mean. I can't wait for the book. I think it's going to be a different spin on carnivore and why it's so beneficial, which will add to the very long list that we already have. And the Docuseries. All of that should be great. And just yeah, thanks for a great conversation Kem. This certainly went places that I didn't expect, but all fascinating stuff. And like Jack said we could probably continue this for another two hours going down some of these rabbit holes. So, tell people where to find you.
Kem Minnick 55:00
Oh well, you can find Kem Minnick on Twitter, Kem Minnick on Instagram, the Swedish Bikini Chef on Tik Tok. I have a new website coming out soon. And I'll have that link up on those three sites. We're getting ready to glow up level up. YouTube. There's nothing much on there now, but I'm out there, you'll see me.
Jack Heald 55:22
All right, very good. Well, Kem, it's been an unexpected pleasure. I didn't know what to do. I had no idea what to expect here. And I was, frankly, I was blown away. I think that the LSD guru. But there's a movie just in those handfuls of seeds that you painted for us there, totally unexpected, probably fiction, but nevertheless. All right. Well, thanks for being with us on The Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. For those of you who want to know more about Kem, we'll have that information in the show notes. And for those who need to dig a little deeper to take care of your own health, to take responsibility for yourself. Great place to start as a doctor Ovadia’s website, ifixhearts.com You'll find his metabolic health test there where you can do a self-evaluation and kind of get a score. How am I, how much better do I need to be? Why do I feel crappy? And I'm going to put in a plug for Kem's book, keep an eye out for Eat Meat, Be Happy. Soon, I hope. I want to three print version as soon as you could get it to me.
Kem Minnick 56:38
We hope this fall. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Let's talk again. All right.
Jack Heald 56:43
That'll do it for today. And we will talk to you all next time.
Kem Minnick 56:47
Thank you so much.
Jack Heald 56:53
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to Ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia's operating table.
Jack Heald 57:21
This has been a production of 38 atoms