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Primal Foundations Podcast
Welcome to the Primal Foundations Podcast! We will dive into what I believe are the 4 essential foundations you need to live a healthy lifestyle.
Strength , Nutrition , Movement , and Recovery.
Get ready to dive into discussions that will guide you on your transformative journey to unlocking your path to optimal health.
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Primal Foundations Podcast
Episode 36: The Carnivore Diet with Shawn Baker
Discover how Dr. Shawn Baker , a seasoned orthopedic surgeon and lifelong athlete, transformed his health and career by adopting an all-meat diet. Dr. Baker, who once struggled with weight and health issues despite rigorous exercise and traditional dieting, recounts his journey through various dietary approaches, from paleo to ketogenic, before fully embracing the carnivore diet in 2016. Learn about the incredible health benefits he experienced, including the resolution of long-standing knee problems and enhanced athletic performance, leading to world and American records in rowing.
In this riveting episode, Dr. Baker shares insights from his medical practice, where he observed remarkable patient outcomes from low-carb and ketogenic diets, particularly in orthopedic surgery. He details the impact of a carnivore diet on athletes, citing examples of prominent figures like Eddie Hall and traditional dietary practices of athletes from the past. The conversation underscores the critical role of adequate calorie intake and chronic adaptation to low carbohydrate consumption for maintaining peak performance.
Listeners will gain valuable perspectives on muscle building, nutrition, and the role of organ meats in a carnivore diet. Dr. Baker tackles controversial topics such as cholesterol, the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on health and nutrition, and the cultural biases against red meat. The episode concludes with an exploration of revolutionizing healthcare through personalized nutrition and elimination diets, highlighting the success of initiatives like Revero. Tune in for a candid and thought-provoking discussion that challenges conventional dietary wisdom and offers practical advice for optimizing health.
Connect with Dr. Baker:
IG: @shawnbaker1967
YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@shawnbakermd?si=yFHj2dJ6Bv_zDvQr
Carnivore Diet Book:
https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Diet-Shawn-Baker/dp/162860350X
Other links:
https://carnivore.diet/shawn-baker-links/
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Welcome to the Primal Foundations podcast. I'm your host, tony Pascola. We will dive into what I believe are the four central foundations you need for a healthy lifestyle Strength, nutrition, movement and recovery. Get ready to unlock your path to optimal health and enjoy the episode. Today's guest is Dr Sean Baker. Dr Baker is a physician, author of the Carnivore Diet and co-founder of the online medical clinic Revero. Welcome to the Primal Foundations Podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, hey, yeah, thanks for having me here. I'm excited to talk to you and talk to the folks in your audience, so thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:It's an absolute pleasure to have you on here. I always say if there was a carnivore Mount Rushmore, you would be on it.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I don't know if we'll ever see that, but thanks, appreciate that.
Speaker 1:To kick off the podcast, could you share with the listeners you know your journey of how you kind of started to embrace a carnivore diet and what sparked the shift of this new approach to nutrition?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean I am, so I'm, I'm soon to be 58. So I've been an athlete my whole life. Of course I had a career as a surgeon. You know I was quite busy and and somewhere in my I guess, probably early forties, I was just kind of feeling crappy. You know, I was like I'm getting older and I just kind of was sort of like I don't really want to feel old and I don't.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean, as a surgeon you think you know more about health than other people do, and maybe maybe you do, maybe you don't, but I was just not where I wanted to be. I mean I was, I was probably 200 and I don't know close to 90 or something like that. I mean I was, I was strong, I was fit, I man, I'm probably in retrospect, I'm probably pre-diabetic, I probably have metabolic disease, I probably have sleep apnea. I'm just not, despite all the training and stuff like that, it doesn't behoove me to be this big anymore. And so I think at 42, I said, okay, I'm going to start, you know, focusing on leaning out, playing with nutrition.
Speaker 2:So I went on this very kind of calorically restricted, lower fat high, you know fiber, you know lean protein diet and I did lose weight. I mean I was. I managed to drop, I think, 50 pounds in about three months time, you know. And I mean I was exercising like a maniac. I was literally working out three times a day. I mean you think as a surgeon I'd get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, get a couple thousand gel probes, go to work, see my patients, one shower. I might work out. If I was in clinic I had a little bit of a break, I could work out and then I'd come home and put my kids to sleep and play with my family, put my kids to sleep another couple thousand, you know, proceeded to death for several months, plus a pretty significant caloric reduction.
Speaker 2:And so I lost the weight, got lean and was absolutely frigging miserable. I was like this is not sustainable for me. And you know it was kind of funny. The nurses were like man, we really like the fat, dr Baker, because you're kind of an asshole, because that's how I grew up there to a paleo diet which was kind of in vogue this is back in the like 2012-ish timeframe, I think something like that and then I started to sort of look more into nutrition. I started reading about it. I read a couple of books that were of interest.
Speaker 2:I kind of got turned on a low carb approach, tried that, eventually went on a ketogenic diet somewhere in probably 2013, maybe early 2014. I can't remember exactly the dates now and I felt for the first time it was kind of a shift in my hunger. I was like, wow, I'm not that hungry Because I'd always been a guy I mean, I was a guy that was easily putting away 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 calories a day. That was routine for me. To go out there and crush and crush, just ate a ton. Because I crush, just ate a ton. Because I was active, I was working out all the time, training hard and eating hard, and to go from that to like, well, I'm not hungry was a weird thing for me. It was a weird revelation and at that time, right about that time, we kind of came to a consensus among the local orthopedic surgeons that we've got too many damn fat people to operate on and obese people have a greater risk for complications.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter what the surgery is, but with regard to like knee replacement surgery, higher rates of blood clots, higher rates of infections, worse outcomes in general, worse range of motion, and so we kind of said, well, we're going to try to discourage overweight people from having surgery, and so we would try to get them to lose weight prior to the surgery so it would make their surgery less likely to have complications and hopefully a better recovery.
Speaker 2:And there was no sort of guidance on like what you should do. It was just like figure it out yourself. And I was like, well, I'm doing pretty damn good on this ketogenic diet. So I started offering that to my patients and you know, like maybe 20% of the people would say, yeah, I'd try it. Most people aren't interested, they don't want to change their diet and of the people that did that, I would generally see them back in about two weeks. I'd say, hey, let me check in back with you in about two weeks, see how you're doing. And surprisingly, what really surprised me, there's a significant percentage of them who were literally on the schedule for knee replacement. They they basically exhausted all the other non-operative interventions or they'd had a knee scope or something like that. Nothing else left to them and they had clearly bad arthritis on x-ray and about you know,
Speaker 2:and and a significant percentage of the people would come back to me, you know, two weeks out, and said you know what, doc, I really I've lost maybe two, three pounds, but my knee doesn't hurt anymore. And I was like, well, that's pretty weird, because we've got you on the schedule for a knee replacement. So I started literally canceling surgeries because, like, you don't have pain anymore, there's no real reason for you to have this surgery if you don't have pain. So that was sort of a wake-up call to me. And then I kind of started talking to the hospital. I was the head of the orthopedic department at the hospital I was at. You know I was one of the busiest surgeons in the whole state and you know I started talking to the hospital administration. Hey, you know what I'd like to spend, you know, maybe half a day a week talking to people about lifestyle. And they basically flat out said, no, we don't want you to do that. And that really just kind of like you know, kind of set something off me. I was like, why wouldn't you need surgery? Well, it turns out, you know, because they want the money from the revenue from those procedures and that's what they wanted me there for.
Speaker 2:So I mean, you know, long story short, I eventually decided to just say I'm just going to get away from that type of clinical medicine and do my own thing, and so then, yeah, so then, a little bit after that, I was still very much engaged and interested in diets and low-carb stuff. And there was this wacky group of people online. It was called Zeroing In On Health. It was a Facebook group run by a guy named Charles Washington, and they had a few thousand members and they were all just eating meat and I was like what the F is this? This is nuts.
Speaker 2:But I mean, I was intrigued enough to where I kind of like followed along for like six months. I would just check in, ask a few questions, look at some of the material that they were recommending for reading, and I'd read the stuff and I finally, back in 2016, I said you know what, I'm going to try this. And so I, you know I started very slowly. I did like one meal, I said, and I didn't have my usual piece of whole grain toast or glass of orange juice or a little bit of fruit.
Speaker 1:And I was like well, you know, that wasn't that bad.
Speaker 2:I didn't really miss that stuff. And so then it went one, then it went one meal, then it went one day, then two days, three days and finally sometime later in 2016,. I did a whole month and I was on Twitter at the time and I had, you know, I had a couple. I had a couple thousand followers, not to the size that I have these days and I was just kind of goofing around and said, you know, I'm going to do this all meat diet that I kind of been talking a little bit about. I'm going to do it for 30 days. Surely I'm going to die. What am I going to die of? And I put a little survey. I said am I going to get scurvy? Is my heart going to clog? Right? Because you know the bacteria are mad because there's no fiber and they're going to eat my colon. And you know it was a joke. And I can't remember. I can't remember which poll won.
Speaker 2:I think somebody said my heart was going to clog up, but but you know, at the end of the 30 days, none of that had happened and in fact I felt freaking great. I was like, wow, this is literally the best I felt in gosh 15 years and I remember that I was, you know, still training hard. I trained, I've trained my whole life. I've never stopped that. But I mean I had some knee issues. I mean I had some pretty significant quad tendrinitis in my right knee and it would prevent me from training Like I want. Yeah, there were days I couldn't squat, there were days I couldn't run just because my knee would have been buggered, and I just kind of accepted that that. Then, you know, what I noticed is, you know, and I had tried as an orthopedic surgeon, you know, I kind of know every trick there is for tendonitis, how to treat it, different exercises, different.
Speaker 2:You know, modalities, nothing that really works. I kind of resigned myself to. This is just, this is what it is to be a 50 year old man I was almost 50 at that time. Within, like I remember, it was like within two months it went away completely. I mean one month it was going away and at the one month point I remember I was like, well, I did that one month experiment, I'm going to go back to my cause. I can't sustain it. Clearly, I can't sustain this. I'm going to go back to my kind of mixed diet. And so I went back and literally within 24 hours I started feeling like garbage again. I was like shit, my back's kind of just going to keep doing what I'm doing. My wife thought I was a little nutty. She's like how are you going to do this for us? I said I don't know, let me try for another month. And then it turned into six months and then a year, and then so, anyway, I, you know I go back to doing this and I'm feeling good and I had.
Speaker 2:I remember at the time I was doing I went from uh, uh. You know I played high level rugby, you know my in my twenties. And then I did some uh, some powerlifting, uh, powerlifting where I was, you know I was a pretty decent powerlifter. I was a, you know, nearly a an 800 pound dead lifter as a, as a drug free guy back, you know, one of my my, my early thirties and then got into doing some strongman stuff. So I was doing, you know, that kind of the world's strongest man type events. I did a couple of those. Then I got into Highland games, which is, you know, you put a kilt on and you just throw crap. You know, I don't know if you've ever seen Highland games or where that, but I won the world championship at that as a master. And then so I was like, well, I'm going to get into rowing and I, you know this is while I was on a ketogenic diet, I went carnivore and then, within like six months of carnivore, I was just smashing my times and I didn't.
Speaker 2:My training hadn't changed at all. It was just due to the diet that I was like. You know, I just feel like my recovery is better, I feel like I will have more power and strength, and so I was able to set, you know, several world. I think I set world, three world records at that time. That time it's like six, six american records or something along those lines. And so you know, I got uh, you know I was talking about this stuff I convinced like a hundred people online back in the day to try carnivore and we, we collected all their data.
Speaker 2:I mean we will build a website, for I remember there's another guy, um, that helped me out. He was a guy from la that was kind of with sabu web stuff and he he built and he was doing carnivore as well. It wasn't called carnivore at the time, by the way. That came later the name changed when I wrote the book. But so the zero carb diet and we collected data on a hundred people and we, you know, we didn't have any money, it was just like hey, voluntarily, you know, upload some data for us, track your weight, track your waist measurement.
Speaker 2:You know, record your heart rate. We'll have some subjective measurements. You know, rate one to five what your digestion is, what your. You know your mental health is, your sleep, is your sexual function, all that. And you know, I mean a hundred people, I mean the average person lost 30 pounds. The average person lost eight centimeters on their waist. Their heart rate went down by, I think, eight to 10 beats. We tracked their bowel, we tracked the number of bowel movements they're having. They were having like 1.2 bowel movements average per day, you know. So like every six days they would have five days they would have six bowel movements or something like that. And all their subjective measurements got better. And then I guess Rogan somehow got wind of some of this stuff and saw I thought I was an interesting guy, asked me to come on and you know I was living in California at the time and his studio was at that time in Woodland Hills in California. He said, hey, here's the address, just meet me on this day. And so I rolled in there and I didn't know.
Speaker 2:I really didn't pay attention to podcasts that much. I wasn't really into that stuff. I didn't realize how big of an impact he had at that time. This is back in 2017. Obviously, he's grown even more since then, and the second time I was on there was kind of a different experience. But so, anyway, that kind of got me on the on the radar of a lot of people. A lot of people didn't like it, particularly the vegan population. They thought I was like the antichrist. Oh my God, this guy's told people eat meat. How crazy is that? So I got a lot of just hatred and you know, I'm I'm the worst guy in the world. I'm like all I'm doing is trying to. I've got this interesting observation. I think it could help people. You know, that's where I'm, that's where I'm coming from.
Speaker 2:You know, now it's been eight years later, I guess. Gosh, eight years. Yeah, it was 2016 when I started, so I'm 2024. So I'm about eight years into this after I was on the road and said, hey, could you please write a book about this stuff? And I'm like man, I'm not an author. I hate writing, right, honestly, this is so frigging. I've got to sit down and write stuff.
Speaker 2:But I ended up I did it. They said we need you to produce. Well, I'll just write a book. I can do it in like one page here. Eat a bunch of steak, you know, done right, but that's the, you know. They said well, it's got to be 60 000 words. Oh shit, what am I gonna write for 60 000 words and so, but anyway, the book turned out pretty good.
Speaker 2:I mean, a lot of people have enjoyed it. I think it ended up, you know, I, I guess um, I try to be a little bit humorous, try to keep it, uh, you know, keep it educational, informative, science backed as much as possible and, you know, write in the style that most people can understand. So I think a lot of people have have enjoyed that book. So it's called the carnivore diet by by me, dr Sean Baker still doing well, still selling well, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2:Um, so anyway, um, now it's eight years later and I think, gosh, I think there are now tens upon, probably hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people that have been not only exposed to the diet but have tried it. Now, and in fact, I, you know, you probably know Eddie Hall, world's strongest man, has just started. In fact, I'm going to, I'm going to meet with him next week to discuss further information on, on on how I think I, how the inside, I know as an athlete, because I've been able to perform at a very high level on this diet, and so I'm sure he has some, some, some, some questions regarding that.
Speaker 1:So anyway, that's a long preamble. That Joe Rogan episode I'm sure you couldn't fathom that it was going to make such an impact and a lot of people to this day trace their lineage of like when they learned about carnivore from that one podcast and it just you couldn't even expect it to be so huge. But going on to that, the athletic piece you know, transitioning into that carnivore diet not eating as much, I'm assuming, as you used to like multiple times in a day, as being an athlete and training like that Was that kind of like a little bit of messing with your mind, a little bit of am I going to have enough energy for these workouts? You?
Speaker 2:know I don't, because I'd already been on a ketogenic diet so I was already used to the lower carbohydrate aspect of it. I don't know that my food consumption dropped drastically. I mean, I don't think it was that big of a change of what I was chronically adapted to. And this is a point I'll make. And I, you know, I had the honor or the privilege of speaking in front of the National Strength Coachings Association at Sorenex at Summer Strong, and it's not the official, you know, it's just like an unofficial national strength coaches event where all these top collegiate strength coaches. The point I make is that you know you're going to do best at what you're chronically adapted to from an energy source and it takes a while to adapt to that. So you know, what I saw was that I had already been adapted to a low carb diet for probably close to two years, so it wasn't that big of a physiologic shift for me. I mean, I think my protein quality and amount went up a little bit, which I think is generally helpful for athletes. I think this is one of the problems where a standard ketogenic diet and standard ketogenic diets as they've been tested in the literature probably are under-proteined, and so I think by bringing that protein, particularly the bioavailable, you know high quality protein that animal products provide in in, you know higher amounts, has a has a net positive effect on, on, on human, human physiology, particularly when it comes to athletic stuff. And so I didn't really, I didn't really think it was going to make me. I, I, you know, I, I thought in my mind I could probably get better on this, and this is, in fact, that's the reason I mean I should go back.
Speaker 2:The reason I started this diet was for athletic benefit. I thought it would provide athletic benefits to me based on, you know, looking at historical stuff. I mean there's historical accounts of you know athletes. You know a guy named I guess his name was like Art Shrub or something like he was. He was like around the turn of the 20th century. He was the world champion of running in like everything from 100 meters to like a marathon. I mean he won every event. He was just a monster. He was like 100 meters, 500, you know 1,000, the one mile, the 10K. I mean he was just winning everything. And his diet was basically meat. I mean he basically was on as close to a carnivore diet as you could have been back then he ate very little carbohydrate. You know there was history of, you know, boxers would be eating steaks and you know, some raw heart before they go back. I mean.
Speaker 2:So I was like I had some expectation that it would improve my athletic performance and I mean I didn't have any trouble eating enough and I think that's one of the issues a lot of athletes run into. They just can't eat enough. And I that's never been an issue for me. I can put it away, man, I can, I can. I mean I literally was, I'm, you know, I was, I was in, I was in this conference in Nashville, uh, two or three weeks ago, and had a day at a Tomahawk ribeye eating contest and I'm literally like trying to lean out. I'm like man, I'm not trying to eat much and I was like, but I mean they threw me in there there and it's competitive and I'm real competitive. Oh shit, I'll just do it and I won the thing. You know I eat like six pounds of steak in like 30 minutes holy.
Speaker 1:So I mean it's like.
Speaker 2:So it's like I can put it away. So I don't have an issue getting enough. Because, you know, even when you look at like the iss and the international society for strength and or international society for sports and nutrition, um just published a paper talk comparing, you know, standard carb diets versus ketogenic diets and they said basically that it's either neutral or negative. But the negative, most likely when it comes to a low-carb diet, is the fact that they tend to under-consume calories and energy. So I think if you, just because one of the benefits of a ketogenic diet, so to speak, or a low-carb diet, is some people will just naturally not eat as much, you know it puts them more easily into a caloric deficit, it's more easy for them to maintain. So if you can override that and make sure you can eat enough, then I don't think it's certainly inferior. I think in my case it's superior.
Speaker 2:I mean, I know how I felt before, I know how I felt now and you know the fact that I'm, you know, almost 60, I'm, you know, I've got dunking basketballs and running sub 60 second 400s and 13 seconds a hundred meters, and you know all these things on my menu cause I believe I can do those things just because of the way I feel. If you'd asked me that at 45, I'd be no way in hell I'd be doing this because I felt like garbage, you know, and my diet wasn't junk, I mean, it was. It was still high protein, you know, quality carbohydrates, um, and I just didn't feel as good.
Speaker 1:So yeah, you look at like a Zach Bitter, right, you know he's the 100 mile indoor record mostly a ketogenic diet, especially those endurance races, a lot of those athletes. You know it's really going against the grain to have a low carbohydrate diet on a high carb diet gel blocks, gel shots, all that stuff carbo loading. But I I kind of look at you know, after the racing. There's a lot of athletes that end up being pre-diabetic. They might be some of the top athletes in their events and yet when they get out of racing over the years and years of over-consuming, they're talking, they're pre-diabetic but they've been an athletic stud their entire life. So there's kind of all of this like you know what, what's going to be better for the long-term? Uh, but yeah, switching and building muscle is one topic that I always get um from people Like you can't really build muscle on on a carnivore diet. But I I always look at you and also like Dr Chafee. I'm like look at Sean Baker and Anthony Chafee, those guys are huge.
Speaker 2:They don't it doesn't seem like you guys have a problem putting muscle on in the car. Yeah, I'm 260.
Speaker 2:Right now I mean I'm 260. I, you know, since I've been on this diet, you know, and I started right before I turned 50. So I mean, you know, almost eight years now I've put on about 10 pounds of muscle, which I mean it's not that much. But considering I've got 45 years of training experience and I'm in my 50s and I don't take TRT, I'm not all this stuff that everybody's doing. Oh, you must be taking all these drugs. I don't do it.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, yes, there's a lot of training that goes in. I bust my ass. Anybody seen that? I mean, again, you know, when you look at the literature on muscle protein synthesis, I mean you know Stu Phillips has published on it. There's, you know, jose Antonio, don Lehman. All these guys I've interviewed all those guys, I talked to them. These are some of the top researchers in the world.
Speaker 2:They say, basically, it comes down. Number one training. Training is by far the most important lever. You've got to train consistently. Number two is adequate protein, adequate leucine, you know, complete amino acids. You get that.
Speaker 2:And then the next thing is just enough energy, and it doesn't matter if it's carbs or fat, it doesn't really matter, you can build muscle on either. Now it can be easier to do it on carbs because carbs taste good, carbs are easy to consume. You don't get full as easily on carbohydrates, so it's more easy for you to get into a caloric surplus in that situation. For sure, you know there's some potential benefits for performance. You know, like you know, some people will feel like higher blood glucose. Potentially intramuscular glycogen has some positive, you know, training effects, but you don't have to have that to do those things. You know and I think again this goes to chronic adaptation. You know, when we see the studies on low carb diets, you know there's only like two studies after, after, after they're more than six weeks long and so, like I said, it's what you're chronically adapted. If you've been chronically adapted to consuming carbohydrates for 30, 40 years, it ain't happening in a couple weeks or a couple months or even maybe six months to a year.
Speaker 2:It may take you that long to fully adapt to this. It's like learning a new sport. You don't become an expert on a new sport. Your body has to learn how to play a new metabolism in a way, and that doesn't you don't. You don't get really, really efficient at it. You can get some of the basics down initially, you know, I can. You know you can teach somebody to play tennis and they can, you know, hit the ball back.
Speaker 2:But they're not going to be, you know, entering the free and U? S open for 10 years. I mean it's so. I mean I think there's, there's some of this learning that occurs even with what we're chronically habituated to. So, you know, I mean it's interesting and we're seeing more and more part. Well, you know it'll be interesting how Eddie Hall does with this. You know, like you said, as I mentioned, you know he's doing this carnivore diet now. I mean he's doing it for the purpose of losing weight. But I suspect his performance, if he does it and implements it correctly and he gets enough calories, he'll be fine, or should be, you know, if he allows himself to adapt.
Speaker 1:Now going into like kind of the other aspect you know somebody who is metabolically unhealthy, right, that wants to transition to a carnivore diet not just the typical person that's already healthy or just wants to lose like five pounds. You know what are some of the significant changes or experiences that might occur when they start out.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean if they're chronically adapted to a high carbohydrate diet, you know a couple of things will happen. First thing is you know you will probably be exposed to lower amounts of overall insulin in your body. Insulin will cause the kidneys to retain fluid in water, fluid in salt, right, and so you'll have a natural diuresis, or naturesis, where sodium and water leave your body. So you will become relatively dehydrated. Potentially, if you don't mitigate that, so you might have to increase your fluid intake, increase your electrolyte intake or your salt intake. You will see a profound change in your digestive system. A lot of people report to diarrhea or just that they don't go to the bathroom as much, and that's not like you're constipated, it's just that you're not. You're no longer wasting, wasting stuff. I mean you're, you're literally absorbing everything you put in your mouth. And you know it's kind of funny because when you go on a plant-based, high fiber diet, a lot of that nutrition that you put in your mouth ends up in the toilet. It's just like it's almost like a waste of money. You're like you know you spend all this money on organic fruits and vegetables and a significant percentage of that nutrition ends up in the toilet because you can't absorb it and we sort of think, oh, that's a great way to lose weight. Yeah, like I guess. But I mean it'd be better if you nourished yourself and your appetite was less. I mean, that's what we tend to see happening here.
Speaker 2:The other thing that many people have to be mindful of is fat, because if you're not consuming carbohydrates, then all of a sudden you've got to get energy from somewhere. Protein is not the best source. We do have the capacity to turn protein into energy, either via ketone production or glucose production, but it's relatively inefficient. So fat becomes more important, and then, you know, some people will get in. Well, I got to eat all this fat and start eating sticks of butter and all this stuff. That, I think, is maybe sometimes over the top for a lot of people. Um, and so they end up with fat malabsorption, and so now they're crapping all the fat into the toilet, which is the same issue. It's like, why? Why you shouldn't be wanting to eat stuff where it ends up in the toilet? I mean, it doesn't make sense. I mean, I guess, if you're I mean it's kind of like a bulimia type of situation Well, if you know, if you just gorge and then puke.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you get the, you get the experience of eating a lot but it's not good for you. But we've, you know, we've bastardized the food system so badly that that doesn't work anymore. I mean we get, you know we eat stuff that doesn't nourish us and we're constantly hungry and you know we're over. You know fat people are malnourished. I mean that's just the way it is. I mean it's just like, even though you think they got too many calories yeah, they do, but they don't have enough. You know nutrition, you know, and there's a difference between the two. I think that you know you're going to be eating more protein, you know. I mean that's. I mean for the most part, the average American eats somewhere between about 12 and 16% of their calories come from protein. Probably the average person on a carnivore diet is eating probably between 20 and 40%. So you see a significant increase in your you know, relative protein percentage and absolute amounts typically, and so that comes with certain physiological changes that occur. I mean some of the good things you know you often tend to more easily retain, you know, or you have more building material to build muscle, to build skin, to build organs, to build bone mineral density or bone density rather. You know, sometimes NEAT goes up. So what I'm doing here, this non-exercise activity thermogenesis you just get more fidgety. You know you've got to deal with protein.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously a lot of protein goes to structure, some of it goes to energy and when you convert protein to energy, whether it be ketones or carbohydrates, the nitrogen that's left over has to be dealt with and that turns initially into ammonia, which is actually toxic to us.
Speaker 2:If ammonia builds up, we get all kinds of issues. But fortunately we have this urea cycle where we can convert that ammonia to urea and then we excrete it. We excrete it through respiratory vapor, sweating, urination, feces, things like that. The problem is high protein, particularly at night. I try to dissuade people from doing that because if during the daytime I have to get rid of this urea, I just walk to the bathroom, go to the bathroom. If I have to do it at night, it kind of jacks up my sleep and then I've got to wake up to go to the bathroom and then I may or may not get back to sleep and then I wake up the next day and we know that a night with poor sleep yields greater insulin resistance for the day, and so you end up having to deal with that all day long.
Speaker 1:So yeah, there's some of the things that are going on Now. Do you eat for you in particular, are you a fan of like the OMAD method, or you're eating multiple times a day, just kind of excluding that nighttime timeframe?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it depends on my goal at the time, you know, and for the vast majority of the time I tend to eat twice a day. I tend to eat relatively early in the day Most of the time, you know, like I said, I mean typically, for me it would be like, like I mentioned, I just had a, you know, a pretty nice size rib right before it came in.
Speaker 2:Six pounds, no no it was like a little pound and a half or something like that, but I will typically again. Again, this is me. For me, you know, I will eat. You know, because my schedule, the way my schedule works, I usually have meetings in the morning and stuff, so I have a break around 11 am and I usually crush some kind of steak or something like that and then I'll probably eat again. On most days in that situation I would probably eat again around 6 pm, something like that, and it would be something smaller, you know, and I would try to go to bed by 10 am or something like that. So that would be kind of a typical day for me. But I've gone to periods of times where I'll eat one meal a day. I've gone period of times where I'll eat three or four, depending on if I'm trying to gain weight on this diet, and there've been times when I try to do.
Speaker 2:You know, I went from I think I don't know where I got down an all-time low in 2020. I think it was down around 210. Gosh, it was so thin. I remember I was doing this experiment where I was playing with high fat, lower protein, just playing with glucose numbers and seeing how low I can get my glucose and I mean I just, I got really lean and then I got skinny and I was like, and then I was like I don't want to do this anymore. So then I started I'm just going to start eating back up. And so it took me like gosh.
Speaker 2:I remember I went from 210 to like 260, but it took me like it took me like three months. I mean I was just it didn't take me that long to put it back on. I was like, oh yeah, you know you. Just you just pick out. And so I've sat at about 260 for the last two years, got strong. I'm strong right now, man, I'm, like you know, like as strong as I've been in 15 years, at least right now you know, I'm pulling, deadlifting 500 pounds for a set of 10, you know, no belt, no straps, you know just hook grip.
Speaker 2:You know no bouncing, you know so that's, I mean that's, that's pretty good for for my age, you know, for, especially for guys that aren't taking you know, taking drugs and stuff like that. So, um, yeah, I mean I, I tend to, um, you know, kind of I can, kind of it's, it's kind of easy to shift it between. It's not hard for me to to, to fast longer. It's not, I mean it's just, it just makes it easier. I don't have to deal with tremendous hunger cravings and I can eat more if I, if I want to. So I, it's, it's not that much of a struggle.
Speaker 1:It's also lifestyle too, right, like if you're busy, you know, and you got to skip a meal for the day and you're going to have to eat a little bit later.
Speaker 2:Like you don't really have a problem of the the constant being hungry all the time, which is like when I travel, like when I feel like I'm on a plane and I'm when I'm on a plane, like like I got to get on a plane on Friday I'm flying to, I'll fly to Amsterdam, but I probably won't eat, I mean, cause I'm not doing it, that set setting. So I often fast on place because usually they come by and they bring you. It's like every you know, it's like every hour. They're bringing cookies here. You want a cookie, you want a snack, you want some potato? Like no, I don't want that crap. We get it, you know. Give me a glass of water, maybe, but yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean, it seems to be very easy to adapt to the, to the needs of the situation. And when I'm training like a maniac and my appetite goes up and then I just eat more and it just, it, just, you know, it just makes sense. It goes with how we're designed, you know, and, like I said, it's it's a very natural way to eat. You know, in comparison to the highly synthesized, synthetic food is designed to addict us and to make us overeat it. And you know, whatever I mean, it's, it's, it's it's a real problem that we have with our food system and talking about the types of of food in particular.
Speaker 1:You know some people. They think that carnivores exclusively. You're consuming grass-fed, grass-finished steaks from regenerative farm and you're eating organ. You know animal organs. Is there a significant nutrition difference between grass-fed and grain-fed? And also, like, how essential are animal organs for a carnivore diet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so those are great questions. So, yes, there are nutritional differences between a grass-finished animal and a grain-finished animal. Yes, organ meats have different properties. You know different concentrations of nutrients, but as far as what does that mean clinically for the average person? I've been very interested in this discussion. For many years I've asked this. You know, when Harvard did their carnivore study back in 2021, I specifically asked David Ludwig and Belinda Leonard, the researchers, to please include questions about grass-finished versus grain-finished beef, because I had asked that question to some 12,000 people on this diet and the outcomes really don't show much of a difference. I mean, there's like no difference between outcomes, like people reversing disease and losing weight. They can do it on either of them. Now, if you look at it on paper, you can say grass-finished beef has more conjugated linoleic acid, which theoretically is beneficial to the heart. They've got an absolute increased amount of omega-3 fatty acid, which could be potentially beneficial. They've got higher concentrations of vitamin E and some of these other things. But I mean, when we look at it clinically and there's been almost no testing ever done in humans on these, on these questions you know there was a study that Texas A&M did about 10 years ago. They looked at grass finished beef versus grain finished ground beef. They fed it to people for like six weeks and then they check some bite like like lipid biomarkers and they found essentially no difference. In fact, the grain finished people had maybe slightly better, higher HDL or something like that. So it's unclear that there's any major differences in there. As far as its effect on human health, there's guys like you know, stephan Van Vliet at University of Utah or it might be Utah State I can't remember one of those two, fred Provenza, who was at Duke looking at you know the unique differences between the way animals are raised. And again it's clear. I mean, and it's not just how they're finished, it's a breed of the animal, it's the sex of the animal, it's the age of the animal, it's the location of the animal, it's the time of year. All these things impact the nutritional profile of these animals. And so you know it's not just how's it finished. There's other things that go into this, but you know that's that's.
Speaker 2:You know where I'm at right now. I'm saying eat what you like, because whatever, if you don't like the way grain finish or grass finished beef tastes and a lot of people don't they say it tastes too lean or gamey or fishy, they're not going to eat it. So so any diet in which you, you know, you know, like I said, for any diet to be sustainable, it has to be one, the food has to be enjoyable. Two, it has to be you can't be hungry all the time. I mean, if you're hungry all the time or you're not enjoying the food, you're never going to stick to. That. I don't care. I mean, you can have the discipline of you know, jocko Willink, you know discipline. You're going to fail eventually at some point when you're hungry all the time.
Speaker 2:So it just doesn't about organ meats. Are they essential? My, you know, direct experience with thousands and thousands of people know is no, they're not essential. Could they be conditionally beneficial for some people? Yeah, I mean, for some, I mean, but, like I said, it's interesting how this sort of carnivore movement had evolved.
Speaker 2:When I got exposed to this, I was talking to people that had been doing this diet for 10 years, 15 years, some of them, in some cases 20 years, and that topic came up how essential are organ meats? And, almost without exception, all those people say they're not essential. In fact, most people that end up eating a bunch of organ meats end up quitting the diet anyway. Some proponents that came out and saying, oh, organs are essential and the greatest thing in the world, and see how these, these, you know these people in the, these, these indigenous tribes are out there eating monkey testicles and all you know. It's just all this sort of kind of crazy stuff to say, oh, this is what our ancestors were doing, when there's there's no way of knowing that. I mean, and in fact, if you talk to any hunter, what's the first thing they do?
Speaker 2:They gut the animal, throw that shit away and haul in the rest of the stuff they're not in there, like digging through and saving the lungs and saving the pancreas, most of it. You know, let some animal eat that stuff. I mean, that's what really has probably happened for most of them, because it doesn't transport well, I don't know. It's not easy to preserve liver out in the middle of the you know the woods for more than a few hours. I mean, then it starts going bad pretty quick.
Speaker 2:So, you know, I, I, I, I hate seeing people being feeling convinced that they must eat these organs to be fully able to thrive when there's no real indication that's the case. And again, harvard study, same thing, harvard university study, my and from my data, 12,000 people, both of us came to the conclusion organ meats made no difference in outcomes. Right, so you got people out there telling well, you got to eat these things that are kind of disgusting and you don't like and they don't taste good. You know, you can either freeze them or boil them in milk or do all these things and make them palatable, or you can buy my 3000% marked up pills right, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know. So you think you're getting all this benefit from this stuff and it's mostly just marketing BS. Quite honestly, I think you can do fine on steak and eggs, man, you know, or just steak, for that matter. And you know there are some people that say, well, I didn't, because I got cramps and I had to add fruit and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Well, most of those people were probably trying to be too lean and too skinny and not eating enough, and that's what I see a lot of times, you know is this obsession with being 0% body fat. I mean I'm kind of being a little facetious there, but I mean, you know, if you do look at any indigenous tribe, they're not ripped. I mean none of those guys are walking around at, you know, 5% body fat. I mean that's just not the normal human state, you know. And so to say that I want to be that, you know, and I get it, I mean, as an athlete, carrying excess body fat doesn't help you unless you're a sumo wrestler or an offensive lineman or something like that. But I mean, I think it's one of those things where it's a lot of marketing hype and I try to as much as I'm this crazy guy in nutrition.
Speaker 2:I'm very skeptical about most things and I'm very if you listen to me talk, I'm very much. I'm not here saying this is the best or that's the best, or you always got to do this. You can never do this. I use this, and the way I promote this diet is it is a therapeutic treatment protocol. From my perspective, my primary concern is not athletics even though I'm an athlete myself and I certainly feel it benefits me but my primary concern is disease. You know health as a physician. I mean, I'm trained to be a physician. I'm trying to do what I was trained to do, and so I look at it as hey. Do the diet for three months, six months, fix your damn health problems and then figure out what's sustainable for you over the long term.
Speaker 2:And it might be carnivore, it could be. A lot of people do, but a lot of people. What most people end up doing is they'll do this diet. They'll cure whatever problem, whether it's Crohn's disease or psoriasis or depression. They'll feel better and then they'll find some level of point where they can maintain it. Most people still eat a ton of meat. That's what they have.
Speaker 2:They're still like and this is the important part of this when you talk about this question, because so many of us have been propagandized to believe that red meat is killing us and it's bad for us and we should minimize it. And then you have people that only eat meat, only eat red meat, and their diabetes goes away and every frigging medical problem they've ever had in their life has gone away. They feel the best they've had in decades. Perhaps they don't believe that anymore because they're like if it's bad for me, why am I? Why am I so damn healthy now? It doesn't make sense. So you get those people to do that and then all of a sudden they're like okay, you know? I know one thing I learned about, at least in my body, that red meat is fine for me, and I think I think the majority of people would find that if they were to do that.
Speaker 2:Um, you know cause I? You know a lot of people are skeptical and doubtful, and you know, but I don't. You know, I get, I'm not here. I'm not here to say one diet is better than the other. I'm here to say this is an option to help you. Potentially. Maybe it'll help, maybe it won't. Hopefully it'll teach people that red meat isn't the enemy, you know, it's probably the process garbage which would make the most sense.
Speaker 2:I mean, we've been human beings, we've been eating red meat and that's debated. If you want to argue that homo habilis are the first humans and that was 2.8 million years ago and we've been eating meat since then, or you want to say homo sapiens 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, if you're a creationist, 6,000 years or whatever the Bible says, we've always eaten this product and we haven't always been morbidly obese, with diabetes and mental health issues and autoimmune disease and cardiac disease and cancers. That has been an infrequent finding through the vast history of man and now it is just all too frequent. You know we've got, you know, 70% of our population obese or overweight. You know 12,. You know 11% of our population right now is frankly diabetic and 50% are pre-diabetic. So it's, you know, we're in a we're in a really weird time. You know cause all the crazy food we have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just, it's just crazy. Just so happens that the industrialization of our food, all of a sudden, disease you know uh, spikes up dramatically. But, like you were saying before, we've been eating like this for thousands and thousands of years and going back to this fear as well. And that's why I want to bring up this next topic, which is the favorite topic when you talk about the carnivore diet, is cholesterol. Right, you know many people. They really worry about consuming large amounts of red meat because the concerns of heart disease or the raise in their LDL. So, you know, is the increase in the LDL something to be concerned about or is it not necessarily a bad thing?
Speaker 2:Well, it's not something to ignore. I'll be the first one to say that, and I never tell people to ignore that, because, you know, ldl cholesterol certainly can be a risk factor, right, and probably in the vast majority of the people it is a risk factor Right. The problem is, the vast majority of people are metabolically unwell as well, and I think that overlap drives much of the disease process. And so I think we sort of look at the things we can treat with drugs, and that's what we've been focusing on for the last 50 years. It's an enormous process. I mean statin drugs, for instance. That class of drug has profited over a trillion dollars at this point. It's huge, right. So I think that one of the things we're starting to look at.
Speaker 2:I mean, there was a great meta-analysis done by Adrian Sotomona back in January of this year looking at why do people that go on low-carb diets see their LDL cholesterol come up? And the most predictive, by far the most powerful factor was as people get leaner right, and generally, when you think about people getting leaner, it usually means, yeah, they're getting healthier, right, but that fact alone like if you're obese on a low-carb diet, very often, more often than not, your cholesterol will actually go down right. But once you start getting lean, you know, then we start seeing an elevation sometimes, and sometimes they're really high numbers. And so the question is does that in that situation, when you're lean and presumably metabolically healthy, does that increase your risk of cardiovascular disease? And I think the real answer to that right now is we don't know.
Speaker 2:Yet there's data coming out, there's studies that, like Matt Budoff at UCLA is doing, which are showing that maybe it doesn't cause heart disease. I mean because we know. I mean there's a huge study in Denmark in 2020, I want to say 2023, the Western Denmark Heart Registry Study. I believe it's done by Mortensen, and basically what they showed is like 60% of the population that had something called FH familial hypercholesterolemia these are people that genetically have super high cholesterol, right? 60% of that population with super high cholesterol from birth did not have increased levels of heart disease. So it's like well, if 60% of the people I don't have heart disease and you're saying that LDL cholesterol is the main factor, why did 60% of these people not present with heart disease? So to me it seems to point to the fact that LDL cholesterol or ApoB or whatever metric you want to use in that sort of framework becomes a dependent risk factor. So it means it depends on what else might be going on, and so we're trying to elucidate what are those other factors. And it could be that it's obesity, visceral fat, it could be triglycerides and HDL, and inflammation and blood pressure and absence of metabolic syndrome. All those things which are things we can control with diet, lifestyle and exercise. Again, those things, up to this point, have not been profitable.
Speaker 2:Now what you're going to see? My prediction it's already starting to come true, as these GLP-1 drugs you know, these ozempics and stuff like that are becoming wildly popular for weight loss and they were initially used for diabetics. Those are showing some efficacy with regard to cardiovascular disease, and so that is more of the metabolic side. You know, we're seeing that. You know that now that we have a drug that can do this, guess what the theory of heart disease is going to go? It's going to go to this fact that metabolic disease is just as important because they can make money off of it. This is the cynic in me, and I know it is, until they get a drug where they can make billions and billions of dollars. For until they get a drug where they can make billions and billions of dollars. For they're not going to. They're not going to promote that, that theory, but once the once the drug is profitable or potentially profitable, then there'll be like driving that theory really hard.
Speaker 2:You know, and and again, you can get many of the benefits from these drugs just by fixing your diet and lifestyle. You know, and I think that's something that you know, you got these people. You get these people that are such drug cheerleaders. It kind of a little way, it kind of sickens me a little bit to see these doctors. It's like, oh, this is like the second coming of Christ or something like that. It's like, oh, my God, this is the greatest thing in the world.
Speaker 2:And you know, meanwhile there's you know, I just interviewed a doctor today. I got all kinds of patients in my hospital that are being hospital. They're being checked in from side effects from these drugs. You know they're having intractable vomiting, they're having bowel obstructions, they're having horrible, horrible constipation where they have to get hospitalized, and so, you know, we'll see, we'll see how these things go. But in my mind, because they're very profitable, you know, $1,000 a month for a free nose epic shot, right, I mean, that's where we're going to see more and more of the science going, because the science is always there to support the money right? The money sort of drives the science in many ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just lifestyle change, man, Like that's the biggest thing, it's now that is the norm of give me the pill now, give me the quick fix now, versus. You know you're kind of bucking against the system If you're just like, oh, I'm going to eat healthy and I'm going to work out Like it's, you don't really have to always. We always joke with like people in my work. It's like my crew of people that I work with. Like we always say it's funny, we're in like the 1% of the most fittest people in the world and the people when we talk about that they're like that can't be right.
Speaker 1:I'm like no man, like we're probably in the top one percent of the whole entire world of fitness, like there's upper enchiladas of that. But it's just kind of crazy that this is going to be the new norm where you know I need the quick fix, I need the pill, give me the statin. Um and I've heard this too and you maybe can speak more to that people that that go on to statins like the extended of their life is like up four days or something like that. I don't know if you've heard that piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I've seen. Yeah, the mortality benefits about an extra four days of life. I mean it's, it's. You know, there's all kinds of stuff. There's just so much around statins that at all. I mean there's all kinds of arguments. I mean a recent meta-analysis showed that statins are significantly likely to increase your risk for insulin resistance and diabetes.
Speaker 2:And so it's like which is the lesser of two evils? And so, yeah, I mean it's always going to be the problem with lifestyle. Is you know the lifestyle that most physicians recommend? Is you know the USDA food pyramid? You know, eat more grains and fruits and vegetables and don't eat red meat. And that, for most people, is inherently dissatisfying. They have such dissatisfaction with trying to stick to that diet when there's ice cream and cookies and cakes and candies and all this processed food and energy that they're not getting on this other diet because it's relatively low in energy. They're like I can't do it, it's not sustainable for me. So then everybody ignored this. Well, everybody said, well, there's no point in this to give you the pills. But if you say, hey, let's eat steak and eggs, and you're like, well, shit, I can do that and I'm satisfied, and now I don't want the cookies and cake. But then the doctor said, oh, you can't do that, you're going to have heart disease. So it's like you know, it's almost like it's by intent, in many ways, to demonize this stuff, because if you demonize animal products and specifically animal fats, guess what, guess what the population substitutes it for? Well, they substitute it for a chronic disease.
Speaker 2:But I mean, from a food standpoint, they substitute it with highly processed food. You think about margarine and butter. I mean, butter was out and margarine came in. Margarine's just, and everybody realizes now margarine's garbage. But the same thing when we remove meat from the diet, we always replace it with. Now, you know, there's a few like oh, I'm a whole food vegan, I only eat. I mean there's a few like oh, I'm a whole food vegan, I only eat. I mean there's a few of those. But the vast majority of the people are just going to consume more processed slop. I mean every study that's looked at this shows that the more plant-based you are, or that is, the less meat you consume, the more you tend to make up for it with ultra-processed food, which is cheap, highly profitable and just garbage for our health garbage for our health, kind of transitioning into kind of your project.
Speaker 1:Now you know you initially had this kind of coaching program it was called MeetRx, if I'm correct with that, and evolved into Rivero and you used to have carnivore and coaching and fasting kind of certifications and then also a hub of carnivore coaches. You know why was there a move from carnivore coaches away from Rivero and what is the current focus of Rivero now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we realized if we were going to make a significant difference, like a real difference, we needed doctors on board. We needed to actually practice medicine. Because to get to legally be able to prescribe medicine, to deprescribe medicine, to diagnose and treat, you've got to the way, the way the healthcare system is required the state licensing say you have to be medically licensed. And because we felt we could make a bigger difference with that, we could actually get people in oversee their, because you know there are people that when they go on a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet, they're particularly sick and a lot of medications it can be potentially tenuous for them. They can actually potentially have, have issues which might, you know, necessarily need to go to the ER and things like that.
Speaker 2:So we want to make sure we have people that are skillful, that are clinicians that can handle that stuff, to know how to, you know to to to treat and deal with those things. And I think that is. You know it's much harder to do. I got to tell you, man, we had to set up like found like six different LLCs in different states and you know lots of regulations to get that stuff off the ground. So it's enormously challenging to develop an online digital health platform in all 50 states.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, the decision was basically where can we do the greatest amount of good, where's the greatest amount of need and how do we really change the paradigm for health care? Because I think the health care system in the United States I mean unfortunately, I think it sucks, and at least with regard to the treatment of chronic disease, I mean acute care, yeah, pretty good, if I break my leg, don't just tell me to eat steak. I mean that's, you know, take me to the damn ER so I get my leg frigging, plated or rotted or something like that. So I mean it's an effort to you know, as a physician, I was very frustrated, became very jaded with what I thought was a, you know, money ahead of patients sort of paradigm.
Speaker 2:And you know, that's not why I went into medicine. I mean, yeah, yeah, we want to get paid and you feel like you, you have an expertise and you should be paid well for that. But at the same time, you know, I was like gosh, I want to really make a difference and our healthcare system does not. It's not, it's not.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't even say optimized, it's not even interested in that. So this is a way to hopefully change the paradigm and I think my belief is that the market will dictate. You know, in a free market society which we theoretically live in, you know, if you offer a better product that actually helps people and actually gets them well, and not just chronically, into medical school. Back in 1989, the term disease management I don't think was common I don't remember hearing. I remember sometime later, a decade later, people started talking about disease management and I was like what is that? What is disease management? Well, what disease management means? Basically, you know, you just maintain people in a perpetual state of disease and you just medicate their symptoms. That's not what.
Speaker 2:I signed up for I thought when I was a naive 15, 16-year-old kid, thinking about being a doctor, I thought I was going to be curing cancer and saving people. And when it turns out and most physicians come to this realization, all they're doing is like a hamster on a wheel. Here's your next drug. Here's your next drug. It's incredibly frustrating. A is like a hamster on a wheel. Here's an extra, here's an extra. It's incredibly frustrating.
Speaker 2:A lot of physicians are sick of it. Quite honestly. We have hundreds of physicians that want to come work for us and as we open up and we add more onto the rules, I mean it's good because the practice is so much more fulfilling when you're actually getting people like, as an orthopedic surgeon, I replace somebody's knee and I'm like hey. And they're like hey, doc, look, I can do all this and I feel better. You know good pet stuff on the back.
Speaker 2:But it is nothing like what I see when I say people look, I was literally on my deathbed, I was literally suicidally depressed and now I'm back to my normal, I've got a life again. That is so much more, such a greater magnitude of personally fulfilling than some of the other stuff. You know it's not as financially fulfilling yet, but it's certainly personally fulfilling. I'm very happy that I get to do this and I'm very, I feel very fortunate and, like I said, I'm just, I'm excited for the future. I think that you know as we, you know as we grow. I mean we've got some like almost 13,000 members on our waiting list right now trying to get in.
Speaker 2:So we know the demand is there and I suspect you know hopefully we'll be serving not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands, even millions and even millions of patients you know over the coming years and I think that's how we will change the way our healthcare because you know, you look at, you know you look at our numbers across the rest of the year. We spend orders of magnitude more money on care compared to many other countries and yet our results are no better. In some cases, our life expectancy numbers are looking like terrible. Whereas the rest of the developed world is kind of trending up, we're trending down and our costs are you know.
Speaker 1:Four five, six, seven, eight, ten times more. Outrageous, outrageous. I think it was like $4.8 billion that you spent on health care.
Speaker 2:No, a trillion, oh sorry. A trillion dollars, yeah, four and a half trillion, that's like that's 2008 dollars. Yeah, so it's even more now.
Speaker 1:Jesus. What are some you know with you know Rivero taking off and everything. What are some upcoming projects or maybe even events that you're excited about?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm most excited about research, getting research done. Yeah, about research getting research done. Yeah, cause one of the you know, obviously one of the major criticisms about this particular diet oh, there's no studies on this I'm like well one. They cost a lot of money to do and so we've been. We've raised money for that. You know, our company's going to be doing some of that, fortunately, as we start to collect data and, to be clear, rivera's not an only carnivore company. I mean, we, we use nutrition, personalized nutrition, elimination diets, low-carb diets, various diets. Some people will go carnivore. I mean, we had a lot of carnivores in our membership, but I mean it's not like the only thing we do. However, I think the nutrition side, the research side on this is important. So I've been working and pleading and cajoling various funding groups, particularly in the Cattlemen's Association, because these guys, you know, I mean literally they have skin in the game. It's like, you know, there's people that want to put you guys out of business and most people don't know that, but every year something like 20,000 ranchers go out of business in this country. 20,000 every year have gone out of business and since you know, 19, the mid seventies, we had something like 1.3 million individual ranchers. Now we're down to like 600,000. I mean, so those numbers are dwindling and dwindling and dwindling and dwindling. And you know, at some point you know who's going to feed us. So we got to, we got to, we got to um, show that one not only is mean, healthy and useful and there's a need for it. But then we've got to, you know, figure out how to, how to, how to, you know, sustain it and make it going, because right now the average age of a ranch is like 63. There's there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of young folks getting into this. And so you gotta, you gotta, figure out who's gonna who's gonna be feeding me, who's gonna be feeding me when I'm an old man, you know, when I'm 90, or who's gonna feed my kids and my grandkids. So it's so I'm, I'm excited about getting some of that research. In fact, there's a study that we will be publishing here and probably, I mean it's submitted to the journal, I think it's getting ready for final approval. We should have it out, probably within a couple of weeks. You know, this is a study on a large case series on inflammatory bowel disease using carnivore. And you know, as you may know, people get better, significantly better. So so yeah, I mean it's a start. So that's one of the things I'm excited about.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've been asked to talk in a lot of different places, so it's cool speaking at and two different audiences. For years I'd been speaking among the low-carb crowd and you know I mean, yeah, they all get me Every time I go. When I first started going to these low-carb conventions ago or whatever it was and talking, I was kind of like the nut job guy talking about carnivore and there's a few other people. Now you go to those events and they're all. I mean half the damn audience is already on the carnivore diet. This is like you know, like how many of you guys are on carnivore? Half the people put their hands up. So it's absolutely, it's taken over that demographic, so to speak. But now we're seeing, you know, other people interested in that. So I'm getting invited to speak to various different populations, which I think you know.
Speaker 2:I think you know, whether you agree with me or not, at least listen to the message, you know. And I and I tell people don't, don't trust me at my word. You can, very you can. You know, do it yourself and see, I mean there's the problem. You know, we right now I mean we live in a place where there's so much, it's hard to know what to try Now with AI. I mean, who knows what's real now? I mean, they can make up anything, you know, I can see it. This politician said well, that's not even him, that's some made up AI figure, right. So you know there's a lot of gaslighting going on and so, but I mean it's hard to gaslight somebody on their own health because you can literally.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you lose that, no one can convince you that it's not. So the one nice thing is you know, rather than you like saying, well, is the climate getting warmer or is it not? I don't know, man, I got no way to tell you it's hot in the summer, it's cold in the winter. It's all I know, you know. It's like you know. So it's like you know things.
Speaker 2:And so if you don't believe what I say, and I don't expect you to you- know, or anybody says for that matter, I don't think you should, but but test it on yourself if you're interested, and then and then make your own conclusions, and either it'll work or it won't. If it works, great good for you. I'm glad you found something. If it doesn't go, find something else, no big deal to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I encourage people all the time. You know, if you do have some issues going on or you're looking to just kind of take back your health, eating red meat and steaks for 30 days isn't gonna. You know, I had 30 days of steak like, oh my gosh, like I would love. I love that, that's like my diet anyways, but just to go in to try that and if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. But, um, it's kind of almost like pulling people out of the matrix a little bit. It's really tough for people to grasp this whole concept.
Speaker 1:But everybody majority of the people that I've gotten onto carnivore within three to four days, they feel completely different. They feel way better than you talk about. The knee pain, aches and pains goes away and they want to stay on it. You know. But giving yourself the 30 days and the permission to try this diet is is a big thing to get over sometimes, uh and I know we got to wrap up because we're getting kind of to the time, but I want to end with a little speed round for you. So the first segment I'm doing this so we'll see how good this is this is a Sean Baker speed round, so I'm going to a rattle of questions, a few questions, and you got to give me your number one answer.
Speaker 2:Okay, few questions and you got to give me your number one answer. Okay, all right.
Speaker 1:Favorite cut of beef ribeye steak. Favorite strength exercise uh deadlifting favorite cardio exercise uh sprinting number one pump up song.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, that's a tough one. I don't know. I'd probably send from ACDC or something like that would be reasonable. All their songs sound the same. They figured out their formula right. They all sound the same. They're all generally good.
Speaker 1:Black and black.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I'm an old guy too, so I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so that's my generation stuff.
Speaker 1:Favorite movie.
Speaker 2:Oh man, god, I don't know favorite movie. My kids ask me about this all the time. You know, I'll tell you there's a funny movie. I used to like the blues brothers. That was a funny movie from back in the day. I don't know if you ever saw it, baby. That's a good movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right uh, and this one. You might have to think a couple seconds because you might piss off some people. Uh, what state has the best barbecue? Oh, texas.
Speaker 2:Oh, just flat out, yeah, yeah. Texas Central Barbecue. Central Brisket in Texas is Central Texas Brisket is unmatched in my view.
Speaker 1:Would you say, the best place in Texas for barbecue is then.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, I mean I think if you go to Lockhart, texas, that is the barbecue capital of Texas, they've got several in there. They've got Black's, terry Black's, they've got a couple other ones, so one of those in there, I can't say. I mean I'm partial to Terry Black's in Austin. I've had theirs quite a bit. It's always good they're actually. I think by the end of this year they will be the number one most profitable restaurant in America. Wow, I talked to the manager last time I was there a couple of months ago. He said they're doing something like I think they're projected to do like 60 or $70 million in sales out of this one restaurant this year. So it's just ridiculous. And they got it done, they got it going on.
Speaker 2:Man, they know how to. They know how to get that barbecue out there. They said they go through like 500 briskets a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've had. I love the beef rib.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's one of the beef rib. Yeah, the beef rib is awesome. Yeah, you can't beat that. That's tough to beat that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, dr Baker, you know just I want to thank you for coming on and thanks for all the work that you criminal work you're doing and continue to do. If people want to get a hold of you or follow you on social media, what's your social media handle for everybody?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Instagram is Sean S-H-A-W-N Baker, b-a-k-e-r-1-9-6-7. I'm on Twitter and it's S Baker, both in capital. So S Baker MD on Twitter. I'm on YouTube Sean Baker MD. I'm on TikTok Sean Baker MD, and what else is there? Tiktok, sean Baker MD, and what else is there? I guess. I'm on Facebook Same thing. And then, of course, reverocom R-E-V-E-R-Ocom. Sign up on our waiting list if you need a doctor that you're interested in, somebody that's not going to tell you to eat frigging cardboard and take statins. Our doctors are kind of dialed in a little better for this type of stuff. And I'm there. In fact I've got my meeting this afternoon. So once a week I'm in there with our patients and you know, giving them a little rah-rah, you know, trying to motivation sessions is what I try to do, so that's how you can find me.
Speaker 1:Nice, Awesome. Thanks again for coming on and thanks for everybody listening to another episode of the Primal Foundations Podcast. Thank you all for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, like and share. See you all next time on the Primal Foundations podcast.