Episode 37: Ancestral Nutrition and Modern Food with Dr. Bill Schindler

Can ancient food wisdom unlock optimal health in today's world? On the Primal Foundations podcast, join Dr. Bill Schindler, an archaeologist and anthropologist, as he shares his journey from unhealthy habits in the 70s and 80s to embracing ancestral nutrition. Learn how he merges ancient practices with modern insights at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen and the Food Lab to revolutionize eating.

We explore how technology, from stone tools to modern appliances, has transformed food safety and nutrition. Discover the surprising benefits of insect-based diets, the nutritional insights from Sardinia's Blue Zone, and practical advice on managing plant toxins. Tune in for a compelling conversation that connects ancient food practices with today's dietary choices.

Connect with Bill:

https://www.instagram.com/drbillschindler/?scrlybrkr=24524439

https://modernstoneagekitchen.com/

https://eatlikeahuman.com/book

Chapters

• 0:28 Ancestral Nutrition for Optimal Health
• 11:28 Transforming Food
• 17:12 Technology and Nutrition Processing
• 29:21 Incorporating Insects for Ancestral Nutrition
• 33:30 Evolution of Food Processing Technologies
• 38:12 Hidden Dangers of Oxalates
• 48:40 Understanding Plant Toxins and Nutrition
• 1:02:24 The Impact of Modern Food Accessibility
• 1:07:48 Traditional Village Diet and Longevity
• 1:19:27 Exploring Ancestral Nutrition and Practices

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:29

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 we're excited to welcome back Dr Bill Schindler. If you missed his first appearance, be sure to check out episode eight of the Primal Foundations podcast. Dr Schindler, welcome back.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Yeah, pleasure to be here. So what number are you on now? I was number eight. How many you were?

Speaker 1: 1:05

number eight. I think I'm on like 30 something now, so slowly but surely getting there. I actually had just interviewed Sean Baker yesterday.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Oh, wonderful.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Yeah, it was pretty cool. I've had Anthony Chafian, a couple of people, but you're one of the OGs. You're one of the first ones.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Wonderful. I'm happy to be back. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Yeah, it's been almost a year since we last talked and for the listeners who might not know you, can you briefly just share your background and focus in anthropology and archaeology?

Speaker 2: 1:35

Sure. So my background? I have a PhD in archaeology and anthropology. My focus is on ancestral technologies as they relate to food and diet and health. So academically, all of my work is rooted in the deep, deep, deep past.

Speaker 2: 1:50

But the past several years, in fact the past several decades what I've started to do is take that information and use it to try to help not only myself but my family more recently, the community. So we do, my family and I we conduct a lot of ethnographic research around the world. We live and work with indigenous and traditional groups, documenting their approaches to food, and then we bring them back here. Now we have two entities. We have the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, which is a full-blown restaurant here in Chestertown, maryland, where we apply everything that we've learned to create real, nourishing food entirely from scratch for the community, and we have a nonprofit called the Food Lab, which is through that we still conduct all of our research and we do things like podcasts and we write blog posts and we also teach a lot of classes to teach people, empower them, how to implement all these things into their home.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Amazing, amazing. Last time you were on the podcast, you helped map out this story of human nutrition, tracing 5 million years plus before the advent of technology, and all the way to the modern-day human. I want to kick off today of the podcast by diving into your backstory and health journey and exploring what led you to integrating ancestral approaches into modern-day food.

Speaker 2: 3:10

Oh, awesome, awesome, I'd love to do that. The quick background story we can dive as deep as you want into any of this is I'm a product of the 70s, where I was born in 1973, so I'm 51 years old right now. I was a product of the 70s, where all the information we're getting from doctors and nutritionists and the government and coaches and everybody else who were trying to influence how we eat and the food system in general, was we should take obviously saturated fat out of our diet. Um, if you were a good mother, you weren't breastfeeding. If you were, uh, if you're going to eat eggs, god forbid you eat eggs. It's literally. It changed every year, but it was usually like one egg a week. Maybe you're gonna have two eggs a week, and then it was no, no yolks, only egg whites. Get rid of all butter and replace with margarine. Whole grains are going to solve all the ills of the world and we started really to kick off towards that plant-based approach so many people have as well, and, unfortunately, we started to take the good things out of meat. Right. Everybody was focused on this very lean meat, so chicken breast was a very common thing at the time and they were even changing genetically changing pigs, which, if you ever saw a heritage beautiful pig that was raised on a proper diet, the meat looks like beef. I mean it's as red as beef. But because of this big kick towards lean white chicken breasts and lean white turkey, they started to genetically change pigs to be the other white meat was the way that they advertised it. So anyhow, I'm a product of that.

Speaker 2: 4:38

I was overweight my entire life. I suffered all sorts of digestive issues. I found athletics. In high school. I started wrestling and playing football and I really took to wrestling really, really, really hard. And because I was working out literally I dove in so deep two, three, four times a day. A lot of the weight that I was battling came off just because I was exercising so incredibly much.

Speaker 2: 5:03

But I wasn't healthy and I traded one incredibly unhealthy relationship with food, which was you know. I thought food was something that made me ugly right, made other kids make fun of me, made me feel bad about myself. I knew I had to eat. I was addicted to carbs. I was eating and eating and eating, getting heavier and heavier and heavier. But when I started wrestling, that weight came off. I took the appearance of an athlete because of the working out so much, but I traded that food is something that makes me ugly, not so much, but I traded that food is something that makes me ugly. You know, relationship to food is something I'm scared of because all of a sudden, now now I'm in the 80s and the 90s and I have to make weight. I ended up wrestling for Ohio State, which is an incredible it still is an incredible wrestling program at the time or second, third, fourth in the nation, and I was losing 20, 22 pounds in a day and a half every single week to try to make weight. So food isn't something I was scared of, and I say this because everybody listening has their own individual, unique relationship with food, and it isn't until, or wasn't until, the past I would say 10 years that I actually started to look at food as something that nourished me. Right, it was something that, you know, made me look a certain way or feel a certain way, in a negative way. It was something I was scared of.

Speaker 2: 6:19

As soon as I stopped working out and I was no longer a college athlete, all this weight poured back on. My digestive issues were insane. I had restless leg syndrome. I was sick all the time my skin was horrible and everything about my relationship with food was just going downhill. I had tried like so many of you listening so many diets and none of them worked. And it wasn't until I realized that all of my life's work, all of my research looking into ancestral diets and the technologies used, or ancestors used, to transform a raw ingredient from the environment into its safest and most nourishing form possible for the human body did I start to realize that I actually had the answers I was looking for. I didn't need a nutritionist, I didn't need a doctor, I didn't need you know, whatever. I needed to actually look into the past and take that information and try to make it work for myself in a modern day.

Speaker 2: 7:09

One of the things we talked about the last time I was on is that we're in a very unique place now as modern humans, in that our bodies are essentially 300,000 years old. The first modern day Homo sapiens literally our ancestors, who would have looked exactly like us, had the same size guts, the same size teeth, the same stature, the same biological needs appear 300,000 years ago and we haven't really changed biologically since. There's been obviously environmental factors that have influenced certain things, but biologically, we're essentially the same, so our diets, our dietary needs from a biological perspective, haven't changed in 300,000 years, but what has changed is the cultural context in which we're living. We're living in a modern world which changes, as we know, very, very rapidly. It changes not only within 100 years or 10 years or a year, but on a monthly basis sometimes.

Speaker 2: 8:04

So in order to be fully nourished, one of the things that I found in my past 20-year journey with this is that we need to find that happy medium where we are biologically nourishing ourselves to the best of our ability.

Speaker 2: 8:17

When I say that, I mean eating the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable, safe food possible on a regular basis and, at the same time, understanding that to be fully nourished as a human, it's much more than those biological needs. We have to meet our emotional needs or our cultural needs. For some people it's our religious needs or traditional needs, and the list can go on and on and on. But that's what we focused on for the past decade or so, and it really made an influence on my own health. I'm healthier now than I've been my entire life, and that includes the years when I was a division one athlete and then we started to incorporate it into our family, and then, more recently, we realized it was so incredibly powerful. That's why I wrote the book Eat Like a Human to share it. We started a nonprofit to share these approaches through classes, and then we opened up the restaurant in order to give access to families. That's incredibly nourishing.

Speaker 1: 9:37

That wrestling piece. I connect with that. I wrestled all through high school and I was coaching wrestling uh for for a long time and people that are have and just like you when I was younger you know italian family from chicago, I mean we ate, man, like we ate a lot, yeah, and it was uh a struggle with food and the relationship with food, and especially when you're going into wrestling, I did the exact same thing as you. I traded one thing for another, where I'm not looking at food how I should be, I'm looking at the scale more or less of the time, and that's kind of dictating what I can and cannot eat.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Am I going to be hydrated, am I not? And constantly working out multiple days, multiple times in a day, and you're kind of changing one extreme for the other. But like you look at wrestlers and you're like, oh wow, they look really fit, they look great. But you know, sometimes they're stepping on the scale before a tournament and they're like knocking on death's door and they can barely they're sucked down, could barely stand on the scale and that exacerbates that relationship with food and kind of nowadays you know, you're finding all these things and you're using different technologies to eat, kind of modern day. I kind of want to talk about the technology differences between animals and plants Right and in particular detoxifying plants.

Speaker 2: 10:51

Absolutely. And let me just real quick say one of the coolest things on a professional level that's happened to me in years is like the week before the world shut down for COVID. I was actually in Brazil at a conference speaking. It was a fantastic conference called Fruto and it was co-hosted by. One of the people that set it up was a guy named Alex Atala. If anybody's ever, he's one of my favorite chefs in the world. If anybody's ever seen Chef's Table, he was on the first season.

Speaker 1: 11:19

He's amazing.

Speaker 2: 11:20

He's just an incredible Brazilian chef and anyhow he's got this awesome restaurant. Usually it's one of the top 10 restaurants in the world rated every year. It's called Dom D'Olim, and after I gave my presentation about the role that technology plays in transforming food for humans into its most incredible, nourishing form possible, he asked if I could come into the restaurant before service one night and work with everybody on his team and have them just make a very simple stone flake. Because one of the parts of my presentation was the power of when our ancestors made their first tool and to transform their relationship with everything in the world around them and they no longer had to rely solely on their own nails and their teeth and their muscles. They now could make a tool to augment or overcome these obstacles. So I just made this simple flake. It's like I need you to please come in, come into the restaurant. And I was like of course are you kidding? And I was like, of course are you kidding. So I came in and his whole team came and all these chefs and they literally just we were in the restaurant, in the kitchen, banging on food and making. Everybody made their own little flake and what I wanted to, what I conveyed to them was, and what I want to convey to everybody listening to this as well maybe not on a commercial, you know top restaurant in the world level, but at your home, in your kitchen, where what you do in your kitchen is just as important for your family as what they're doing in this Michelin restaurant is.

Speaker 2: 12:43

We think about cooking as taking a raw ingredient or an ingredient or a group of ingredients and turning them into something that looks and tastes good, and that's important, but the reality is the role of what you're doing in the kitchen is so much more and the power of it is so much more.

Speaker 2: 12:59

You are taking nourishing your family because you're using the stove the right way, or the oven the right way, or the Vitamix the right way, or whatever things that you're doing. You're making a raw ingredient safer, more nutrient dense and more bioavailable than taking that and nourishing the people that you love. And that moment I thought it was so very cool to hear some of the best chefs in the entire world that are like going crazy, banging on a rock, and then realizing what they're doing is even more important than they thought it was. So, as far as technology is concerned, I like to give full disclosure. I was a college professor for over 20 years and one of the most important thing, the most important day of class every year, I thought, was the first day of class, and so many college kids right now are getting ready to go back to college and usually the first day or two are the oh, they call it, the syllabus days.

Speaker 2: 14:05

You don't even have to bring your books, you just sit there, they pass out the syllabus, they do some kind of icebreaker activity and then you move on. But the reality I thought that day was incredibly important, most important day of the year because I realized, as an anthropologist, it is absolutely impossible to convey information to another human without some sort of bias. Right, there's always inherently bias, even when youased I try to be, to relay information. They have to understand exactly where I'm coming from to literally cut through the BS, because there's always going to be a little bit of BS. So I think it's very important in these conversations, especially where we've gotten to the point now where there's literally these wars between carnivores and vegans and all these other things that are happening. I think it's very important for you to understand where I am, to kind of cut through it, any BS that I may be unintentionally spouting.

Speaker 2: 15:07

So one thing is my wife and I both follow a very, very, very low carb, ketogenic diet and we're in ketosis most of the time and almost the majority of the nutrients that we consume come from animal sources. But we do eat some plants and I am not an anti-plant person in any form. The plants that we eat. However, we carefully select for a number of different reasons, and we'll get into this a little bit deeper, I'm sure, over the rest of the time we have together today. But we intentionally choose low toxic plants, low toxic parts of plants, and then we always do something to those plants to make sure that they're not only as safe to eat as possible, but the nutrients in them are in a state that my body can actually do something with them. So this is not an anti-plant conversation by any means, but it is an anti-some plant conversation and I think it's very important for people to understand. First of all, no matter if you're coming at this I'm sure you have a already self-selected audience listening to this but whether you're vegan or vegetarian or carnivore or whatever you are, take please what I'm saying with an open mind, because some of it is literally going to transform your health. I can promise you that.

Speaker 2: 16:26

So, from a technological perspective, food coming from the plant resources and food coming from animal resources in several different ways, and they're very significant and it it really this is the foundation for the way that I approach these foods in general and think about. So, number one, if and all this is hunter-gatherer existence, and we're not talking about agriculture, we're not talking about modern commercial things, because a lot of it's thrown on its head but as hunter-gatherers for the majority of the time that humans and our ancestors have been on this planet, the vast majority of it let's look at the role that technology plays in actually getting resources from our environment. So, in other words, instead of stripping it out naked and throwing it in the middle of the woods and saying you know, what kind of food can you get with our fingers and our nails and our teeth and whatever Using tools, what tools do we need to get these things? A lot of technology goes into getting animals, like a massive amount of technology goes into getting animals. So we create things like throwing sticks and boomerangs and atlantos and bows and arrows and nets and traps and fishing hooks and all these things to overcome our physical limitations as humans, because we can't run that fast, we don't have huge canines. We, you know, our eyesight isn't like an eagle. We don't have huge canines, our eyesight isn't like an eagle, we can't fly, we can't do a lot of those things. So we need to overcome those physical limitations and actually get the animal Plants. On the other hand, don't require much technologies to access.

Speaker 2: 17:48

Now, again, this is pre-agriculture. So we need a digging stick to get at roots and maybe a sharp blade that cuts certain things, but for the most part we can collectively forage with our hands and get berries and get whatever you know shoots and leaves and those sorts of things. So we need a lot of technology to get an animal, very little technology to get the plant, but everything gets thrown on its head as soon as we have that resource and have to get it ready for our bodies to safely derive nutrition from it right and efficiently do it. So from an animal perspective, we don't have to do a thing. We literally eat a sharp edge and the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable parts of an animal the blood, the fat, the organs are in their raw state in almost every case are already as safe and bioavailable and nutrient-dense as they can possibly be, period. We just got to dive in and start eating the meat almost the same, and I know there's a huge debate about this, but one of my go-to people for thinking about the difference between cooked meat and raw meat is a guy named Richard Wrangham and he's a primatologist from Harvard.

Speaker 2: 18:52

He's written a fantastic, fantastic book about the role that fire and cooking play in our human evolution. And according to him and I tend to agree with this can humans derive incredible nutrition from a hunk of raw red meat? Absolutely. But can we get that nutrition without our bodies working so hard if we slightly chemically and physically process that meat? And the answer is yes. So when I say physically process, I mean give our jaws a little bit of break.

Speaker 2: 19:23

And probably everybody listening has chewed on a hunk of raw meat. If you haven't, you've chewed on a hunk of steak and you chew and it's just cooked beautifully. You chew and you chew, and you chew and you chew and then you finally swallow it. So things like, if you think about, you go to the best restaurant in the world and you order raw a hunk of raw red meat. It comes in one of two ways either carpaccio, which means it's sliced super thin, or tartar, which means it's ground up like hamburger and I know we don't think of that as processing, but it is.

Speaker 2: 19:53

Slicing it really thin or grinding it up already gives our bodies an advantage to access the nutrients in there. We don't have to chew so long, we don't have to chew so much. So a little bit of physical processing helps. And the second thing is the chemical part, the cooking. A little tiny bit of cooking actually helps the nutrients in red meat be more readily absorbed by the human body. So a great way to think about. I think a rare, medium rare hamburger is like the gold standard.

Speaker 2: 20:25

Like, if you literally, we're almost splitting hairs here. But if you're literally saying, okay, how can I access the all of the nutrients in that meat with my body doing the least amount of work, the all of the nutrients in that meat with my body doing the least amount of work, uh, a round up. You know ground for for being hammer, and then a little tiny bit of cooking can, can help. But again we're splitting hairs because, you know, a hunk of raw red meat compared to a piece of broccoli is, you know, night and day anyhow. But the amount of the point is the amount of technology needed to take an a dead animal and get all the nutrients from it is very, very minimal. Sharp edges is all that you need to get into the animal. But plants are the exact opposite. This is what people really, really, really need to think about. Even though it didn't take me much to get those plants, as far as technology is concerned, in literally every single case, to make those plants safe to eat, to make the nutrients in those plants available to the human body and we have an incredibly inefficient digestive tract we have to do something to those plants and, depending on the plant, depending on the toxin, depending on the nutrients we're trying to make available. There's a lot of different technologies that we've figured out over the past hundreds of thousands of years. Fer can is incredibly powerful in many cases drying, cooking a little bit, a little bit of heat some of these toxins are, are sensitive to heat leaching. Some of these toxins, um, uh, will you know, are water soluble. Uh, all those.

Speaker 2: 21:51

Maze is a great example of a plant that has nutrients in it corn, corn. If you consume that corn in any form other than going through an ancestral process called nishtamalization, then some of those nutrients will go directly through your digestive tract. I don't care if it is ground up corn, I don't care if it's polenta, I don't care if it's grits, I don't care what it is. There is a ancient process that's thousands and thousands of years old called n? Tomalization. That is required to, especially for the niacin, take the niacin form that's in that maze and turn it into something that our bodies can actually access. And the list goes on and on. So the point is and you have somebody like Anthony Chafee, who's a very good friend of mine, and I think his approach is amazing he says, well, why even bother? And I get it Okay, if it takes this much effort to make that plant safe to eat and make the little bit of nutrients that are in there actually available to our bodies, why even do it? So his choice has been I'm just going to eat meat, and it makes complete sense.

Speaker 2: 22:51

In many indigenous and traditional groups around the world for hundreds of thousands of years, they've made a slightly different decision. They've said, hey, I'm going to eat a massive amount of resources coming from animals, but I'm also going to include plants in my diet. And when I do, or when we do, we are going to make sure they go through these processes to make them as safe and nourishing as they can possibly be. And they've worked. They've done a fantastic job. Be and they've worked, they've done a fantastic job.

Speaker 2: 23:23

The two problems are one, the modern industrial food system, because a lot of these processes take time or labor or cost money. We've stripped them away and we're not using them anymore. And we've spread this message that if we're going to save the planet, we're going to have to go plant-based. And we've spread this message that in order, if we're going to save the planet, we're going to have to go plant-based. If we're going to be as healthy as we can be, we're going to have to go plant-based.

Speaker 2: 23:42

Some plants are good, more plants are better, and all of a sudden now we have this influx of all these plants, along with all their toxins and their natural toxins, including, obviously, things like glyphosate and whatnot as well. But all these toxins and the nutrients that are in there, because they're not processed properly, are passing directly through our bodies and our bodies don't access them, and it's a huge debacle. So what I hope we can get to and first off, we're talking millions of years of diversity and humans, after a certain period of time, spread literally all over the world. So there's a massive amount of diversity over millions of years and over the entire planet, and I'm trying to distill it down into one conversation that lasts less than an hour, so I don't want to have anybody consider the idea that what I'm going to say here is exactly what everybody did, because that's not the case.

Speaker 2: 24:41

But the image in general I have of the past is we were getting the most of our incredible nutrition from animal resources. I'm confident for the past 2 million years we've been eating the entire animal, so not just meat, but we're eating the entire animal and in many cases, in most cases, we are including plants at some level in our diet, but when they're in our diet in the past, they're always hyper-local, hyper-seasonal and have gone through some sort of technological processing to make them as safe, nutrient-dense and bioavailable as possible. I don't know many people today, even in the vegan and vegetarian world, that are adhering to those kind of principles around their plants, and as a result of that, there's a whole lot of health issues that are plaguing modern humans today.

Speaker 1: 25:31

And when you're talking about the whole animal too and this is one thing that gets kind of misconstrued a little bit maybe can share about. It is like all the organ meats, right Liver, heart, all those things A lot of people think that it's a necessity to have that, to have like this complete diet versus just eating animal meat. Is that something that you know? The whole thing is, oh, when you make a kill, the liver is the first thing that people are going to be consuming, because it's the most nutrient dense.

Speaker 2: 25:59

So there's a couple of caveats there. I will say, if you and I'm 100 percent convinced of this and there's people in the carnivore world that do disagree with me here the reason that you are adopting a carnivore or carnivore-like diet is because you are trying to eat in an excessively appropriate way. And if you're trying to maximize nutrient diversity, nutrient bioavailability and nutrient density, if those are your goals and I think for most people in the carnivore world those are the goals then you need to eat the entire animal. That's the only way to maximize all of it. It also checks some other boxes that are incredibly important to me and, I think, incredibly important to other people. It is the most ethical way to approach consuming an animal, because if you take an average beef cat and weigh it, butcher it, if you take an average beef cat and weigh it, butcher it and then weigh the pieces that end up on the grocery store shelves that are available to most modern consumers in the Western world, you're literally talking about half of that animal by weight makes itchering and consuming animals and you look at the archaeological record, what starts to appear is a completely different percentage we're looking at upwards of 90, 95, 96, 97% of the animal, by weight, is being consumed. So some of the arguments that we meat eaters have to address right, and the attacks are hey, how can you take an animal and, an all good conscious, kill it and only eat half, like you know? And then when you start doing the math and a lot of the math, that's attacking animal eating. Okay, this much water goes into raising a cow that produces this much meat, or this much food goes into that. Or you know, all these equate this much meat, or this much food goes into that. Or you know, all these, all these equate this much carbon, whatever a mission, when, when, if you're literally doubling the amount of food, the weight of food coming from that single animal, all those calculations change like literally, they change overnight. And on top of that, if you look at the nutrient density and bioavailability of the nutrients in the parts of the animal that are not typically consumed, it's a heck of a lot higher than the meat is. So even though we're talking about almost doubling the weight of food coming out of a single animal, we're more than doubling the nutrition that's coming out of that single animal. So from an ethical perspective, from a sustainability perspective, it makes complete sense. From a nutritional perspective it makes sense and truly from an economic perspective it makes sense as well, because we all know that those off cuts and the offal cost a lot less than you know ribeye and loin and you know fillet and all the other parts. So it makes complete sense to do that and I'm convinced that it's ancestrally appropriate as well for the past at least two million years when we started hunting. The other thing and I don't mean to derail this conversation, but I I feel the need to bring it it really shows. It really shows how we get into these little boxes and we set up these sort of limits and we think we're doing something extreme. But the reality is, in some cases we're not even that close and we need to be a little more open-minded.

Speaker 2: 29:22

One of the other conversations in the paleo world, the ancestral diet world, the carnivore world especially, is this anti-insect thing. It's this idea that, god forbid, somebody is suggesting that we eat bugs because they're trying to take away our meat. And I'm not saying some of that isn't happening right, that there aren't people that are saying, hey, eat bugs and don't eat beef. I'm sure there are. But if we can get out of our own heads and get away from these arguments that are made for us, that just kind of fuel our passion.

Speaker 2: 29:57

The reality is we have been eating insects well before we started eating meat. We have been eating insects for millions of years before we started eating meat and another million and a half years before we started eating the entire animal. If we weren't eating insects, we wouldn't be here having this conversation. And even when we introduced meat, we're't eating insects. We wouldn't be here having this conversation. And even when we introduce meat, we're still eating insects, even when we start. So we're eating insects. The majority of the nutrient density and bioavailability and diversity of nutrients in our diets are coming from insects Before we start eating meat. Then, three and a half million years ago, we create a tool and start scavenging meat, so meat gets into our diet. Then, two million years ago, we start hunting and we're eating the entire animal. This entire time, we're still eating bugs. We're always eating bugs. If we think about it, most indigenous groups around the world today are still eating bugs right now, this very moment.

Speaker 2: 30:51

Bugs are incredibly nourishing. They're loaded with protein, they're loaded with fat. When we prepare them the right way, they have incredible flavors, incredible textures and they're incredibly sustainable. So it's kind of like we get into this mindset okay, pushing boundaries, oh my gosh, I can eat ancestrally appropriate by including meat in my diet and all of a sudden I'm kind of bucking the system and I'm getting healthy. This is great.

Speaker 2: 31:18

But I'm like don't even talk about liver. I'm not there yet. Well, we need to talk about liver, we need to talk about heart, we need to talk about spleen, we need to talk about blood and all these other things that were an important part of the diet. It wasn't just the meat. We and just the meat. We kind of just cherry pick the meat out of the conversation.

Speaker 2: 31:34

But even for those of us who are many of us who are incorporating a whole animal approach to our diets, the idea of eating a bug is just, I'm not going to do it and I'm not suggesting that we need to start eating bugs.

Speaker 2: 31:52

Or I'm certainly not suggesting and please, I'm definitely not suggesting that we need to eat bugs instead of animals. That's not what I'm saying. But again, if you are, if the decisions that you're making about how you're nourishing yourself and your family are focused on things like I want to eat in an ancestrally appropriate way, I want to eat the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable, safe food possible. I want to be ethical, I want to be sustainable, I want to be economical. If you're trying to do all of those things, then bugs need to be a part of the conversation and we shouldn't distill it down to a crickets or filet conversation, because that isn't the argument that has been made up. The reality is, if we want to eat in an especially appropriate way, we really have to stretch our minds and say what were our ancestors truly eating on a regular basis?

Speaker 1: 32:43

there is a distinction here, too, of what you're talking about, because everything you're talking about mainly besides, like you know, eating bugs straight up would be there, are, it's processed. You're processing these foods, and there's a distinction between processed foods, which we hear, versus ultra processed foods. You know, that's it's.

Speaker 2: 33:01

It's a big difference so and I really, my wife and I've tried for two years to come up with a term that for processed food the way we're talking about it in in a wonderful, beneficial, you know, essential way for humans, that isn't processed food. Because as soon as we hear processed food the way we're talking about it in a wonderful, beneficial, essential way for humans, that isn't processed food. Because as soon as we hear processed food, we have this negative connotation and this negative image and we should, and I think the way you did it is probably the best. We have ultra processed food, which is the majority of the modern industrial food system, machine. And then there's processed food, which to me begins three and a half million years ago, when we start making stone tools and we can butcher and we can cut and we can slice and we can dice and we can peel and do all these magical things with just simple stone edge that we couldn't have done before. And then we invent technologies like fire we can cook our food and chemically transform our food through it, chemically transform our food through it. And then we create technologies like fermentation or initial normalization and all of these wonderful things that can take a raw ingredient and make it turn it into its safest, most nourishing nutrient dense form possible for the human body.

Speaker 2: 34:08

And for anybody who didn't listen to the earlier podcast where you and I spoke, one thing I want to make sure that everybody understands at the beginning of this is and it's foundational to everything we're talking about is the idea that we have an incredibly inefficient digestive tract. As humans, we absolutely require these technologies to take this raw ingredient and make the most use of it inside of our bodies. We have been creating these technologies simple but powerful technologies for millions of years, and it's on the back of those technologies that our bodies and our brains grew. So here we are in these relatively large bodies with massive nutrient-eating brains, left with a digestive tract from much earlier forms, a digestive tract that was of the size to fuel much smaller bodies and much smaller brains. And it's because of the other inputs, all of these technologies that allowed us to pre-digest incredibly nourishing food and detoxifying food before we put it into our bodies, that we could literally build these bodies. So we require these technologies. We've literally domesticated ourselves over millions of years, and I don't care how strong you are, how many edible plants you know how to identify and animal behavior patterns in the woods or whatever. None of us. There isn't a human on the planet in the past 300,000 years that could go into the woods naked, survive and nourish our bodies without creating some sort of a technology.

Speaker 2: 35:45

And if you look at any of these survival shows, I mean something like Naked and Afraid right, naked and Afraid, filmed for 28 days, and everybody's allowed to bring one tool with them and usually it's something like a pot or a knife or a fire making kit or something, and they usually spend time while they're there making other things to allow them to protect themselves through shelter or fire to cook their food or whatever it is they film. I've talked to people on the show. I've talked to producers of the show. People have filmed it and they they film the show for 28 days because it takes 28 days worth of content. And I mean there's two people. You have cameras 24 hours a day. 28 days of content it takes for them to get enough to fill a 42-minute show.

Speaker 2: 36:31

Because they do nothing Like they literally do nothing, because all they're doing is trying to conserve energy and survive. So that's with technology. None of us could fuel our bodies without some sort of a technology. So when you wake up in the morning and go downstairs and get into the kitchen, I don't care if it's the blender you turn on or the stove you turn on or God forbid the microwave or whatever it is you're using, like you open up the refrigerator. It microwave, or whatever it is you're using. Like you are open up the refrigerator, it's keeping our food cold. Those technologies are essential to taking a raw ingredient, turning it into something that can actually nourish us, and then we, then we can put it in our mouths and it goes to the rest of our really inefficient digestive tracts. Those technologies are the key to making the most of our resources.

Speaker 1: 37:14

Is there anything that you kind of start to stay away or stay clear? I know you said I'm going to be picking, uh, certain vegetables that you and your family enjoy and like, uh, is there certain things you like want to stay away from that, even though you're, like I even toxifying? I think. I even heard you tell a story about you were like with the school something foraging group, and then somebody found a mushroom and you're like, yeah, that's bad, but like spinach is like even worse. Like you kind of talk about that a little bit and like, is there anything you're clear of?

Speaker 2: 37:43

I forget where I was saying it and who was it. I think it was a meet my guys or whatever we're talking about it, and they and they cut it up and they put it on and they did a great job creating a little clickbait with it, yeah there you go, Brett. But the comments were insane because it was a little bit taken out of context. So if you cut this up, you've got to keep the context.

Speaker 1: 38:09

No, no, no, it's all. We're going to go full clip.

Speaker 2: 38:11

Here's what I said. So it was last year. I was doing a foraging tour for a local high school and campus. It's a private school and the campus is on beautiful wooded property on a river, gorgeous, and we spent about an hour foraging and we were going through the woods and we came across this one particular mushroom, a jack-o'-lan. That mushroom will kill you if you eat it.

Speaker 2: 38:37

And one of the students said, oh, would you say that that's the most dangerous plant then to humans. And first off, one of the a bunch of the comments on the thing were that mushrooms aren't plants, so splitting hairs here, but regardless from the plant world. Uh, I looked at her and I said no, I said absolutely not, because you just said that would kill us. I said, oh, yeah, it would. I said if I ate that mushroom and you guys saw me eat that mushroom you would see my liver shut down, my kidney shut down, I'd be in immense pain and then eventually I'd die. I said that mushroom was incredibly poisonous and scary and toxic to me, but none of you would ever eat that mushroom again, like to me. There's some sort of relative safety there because the immediate or somewhat immediate response to eating that mushroom that I shouldn't have eaten is not only apparent to me but it's apparent to everybody around me.

Speaker 2: 39:33

I said the most dangerous plants to me are the ones that you're eating them. And you're eating them and you don't necessarily immediately feel the effects of it. In fact, you don't feel it that day, you don't feel it that week, and then you continue to eat it, thinking you're in the from a relative safe perspective. Right, you're eating it and you're eating it. And then, or years later, because you've that toxin has been built up in your body over time, you, you start experiencing these symptoms and somebody might come to you and say, hey, no, that that pain that you're feeling, or that kidney stones, or that that particular type of gout that you have, or there's issues with your corneas, that neck issue that you have, it's probably because of that spinach. And you're like, no, it can't be that spinach. I've been eating that spinach for years. And then you're like, exactly, and would it be so hard for you? Because you spent years in this mindset. Your relationship with spinach or almonds or whatever high oxalate foods happens to be, is that oh, this is good for me. The media tells me, this is good for me. My doctor said eat more of this. And I'm eating it, and eating it, and eating it, and for years you've had this mindset that this is good for me, and you haven't felt a negative effect immediately after you've eaten it or within a day. And all of a sudden, five years later, you have all these issues and it's actually due to the fact that there's been low level poisoning happening for all this time.

Speaker 2: 40:54

So I told you earlier that the differences we look talk about differences between technologies regarding animals and plants. Animals require technologies to get them. Plants require almost none. But once you have them, animals are an incredible nutrient, dense, bio, bioavailable resource. All you need is a sharp edge sharp edge of a rock, sharp edge of a knife, whatever but plants. All the hard work begins once you've gotten those plants.

Speaker 2: 41:20

I've spent the last 20 years of my life studying traditional ways of detoxifying plants and making them more bioavailable, and there's amazing ways to do it. I was down in Bolivia and Peru working with indigenous Aymara and Quechua Indians, right where the potato was first domesticated, to understand how they detoxify potatoes. We've done fermentation stuff, all sorts of things the one toxin that I have never found a suitable way to deal with or mitigate the issues of for humans are oxalates. Oxalates are finally getting a lot more attention. There's a lot of people talking about them now. I credit Sally Norton to being the one who's really brought it to our attention. I've had my own incredibly horrible oxalate experiences. I was experiencing oxalate toxicity for many years of my life because I was eating massive amounts of almonds, massive amounts of nuts, because I was eating massive amounts of almonds, massive amounts of nuts in general, but massive amounts of almonds. That's what actually got me in trouble. For some people it's almond milk, for some people it's spinach and the quick story. I'm sure everybody listening has heard some version of oxalates, but I'll give you the very, very, very quick version.

Speaker 2: 42:32

Oxalates are produced by certain plants, in certain parts of plants, for two primary reasons. One is a protective mechanism, which is the main reason why plants produce most of their toxins, but also it helps regulate minerals distribution within those plants. So it serves a very important function for plants. When we eat plants that have high levels of these oxalates, the oxalates themselves look like little shards of glass under a microscope. They're incredibly sharp, incredibly dangerous, and when we ingest them, our body can deal with a very limited amount every day and get rid of it. But if we're consuming more than that, our body realizes how incredibly dangerous it is and stores them and sequesters them in other places of our body.

Speaker 2: 43:15

Usually it's in extremities. It can be an organ tissue, it can be in tissue that's experienced trauma before, but then they start to build up. It can be in your corneas. It can be sometimes in reproductive areas. There's a lot of issues. Females have a lot of issues with pain in reproductive areas.

Speaker 2: 43:35

I don't know that much about it so I'm not diving in deep to it, but it can cause all sorts of issues and over time it builds up and builds up and builds up and eventually you start feeling symptoms of it once you've gotten to the certain level of toxicity. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes years to get there, depending on several factors how much of it you're eating, what you're eating it with. But also some of us, it seems like and I'm convinced there's some sort of co-factor or co-factors happening that makes some people a little bit more susceptible than others. Now there is a probiotic gut microbe that helps us deal with oxalates. That helps us deal with oxalates that if you haven't been breastfed, if you've eaten or taken a lot of antibiotics as a child, there's a very good chance you no longer have that in your body any longer. That's one issue. The amount of calcium and magnesium and potassium we have in our body, which combined with it, can make a big difference. So if we're lacking in some of those, that can also cause issues. But regardless, these are incredibly dangerous and I've looked, I'm continuing to dive incredibly deep to figure out how to mitigate these issues. There has to be some way. I haven't found it yet.

Speaker 2: 44:48

There's several peer-reviewed articles that suggest that fermentation can help at some level, but at the end of every one of them then they're like look, the effects of the fermentation are like almost nothing, like it wasn't worth the effort because nothing really changed. Almost nothing. It wasn't worth the effort because nothing really changed. There's some suggestion that cooking high oxalate foods with dairy can make a difference. So in other words, spinach is one of the worst offenders of oxalates. Cooking spinach with cream or spinach with milk allows the calcium to bind the oxalate produce calcium oxalate and supposedly that form of calcium oxalate is something that'll pass through our bodies a little bit easier. There's some suggestions that supplementation things like magnesium citrate can help.

Speaker 2: 45:45

But no matter what, the reality is these, many of the things that are touted by the modern industrial food system today as superfoods spinach, almonds, kale, those sorts of things, beets are loaded with oxalates and I completely stay away from all of them completely in my diet and we serve none of them in our restaurant. We actually have a an oxalate policy here, so we do everything 100 from scratch here. We do all of our butchering, we do make all of our cheese, we make all of our sour. Everything's made 100 from scratch so we can control that process, which we've spent the last hour talking about, which is so important.

Speaker 2: 46:04

But because we can't use a process to mitigate the issues of oxalates, we're just keeping them at a very low level in anything that we do. So here's biggest offenders spinach, swiss chard, gru barb, certain kales, pine nuts, sesame seeds, poppy seeds many nuts in general are incredible offenders. Uh, believe it or not, one of the chocolate can be an issue. Especially dark chocolate has a higher concentration of oxalates because once you sort of dilute it down and you have your different milk chocolates and you're actually adding other things to dilute down the total level of oxalates.

Speaker 2: 46:43

I would refer anybody who's wondering about oxalates to Sally Norton's work. She's again, my go-to all the time for it. She's got a fantastic website. She has a book that came out about a year and a half ago called Toxic Superfoods it's incredible. And she just came out a few months ago with a supplement to it, a companion that is the spiral bound amazing resource, which has the most up-to-date information about the oxalate levels in different foods and it's sort of color coded. It's very easy reference. She's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 47:12

But the takeaway with this is plants are incredibly dangerous in many cases. A lot of those dangers can be mitigated through different technological approaches depending on the toxin. Oxalates are something we should just stay away from. In my mind, the plants that do have nutrition in them in almost all cases is very difficult or impossible for our bodies to access without some sort of some sort of help. So we stay away from high toxic plants in general. Uh, we stay away from plants that have a lot of oxalates in them and we use technologies like fermentation or cooking or healing to help mitigate a lot of those issues. A couple of very and I know it's people listening to some of this for the first time, may be overwhelmed by some of this information so kind of like, like, and I know the same thing. But when I learned something new and I get flooded with information, I sort of shut down. I'm like, well, I don't exactly know what to do now, so I don't, I'm not going to do anything and I don't want to send that message.

Speaker 2: 48:17

The first message I want to send is it is an incredibly complicated world around plants and it's worth that if plants are something, if you want to go the route and just eat meat, then do that If I actually love the texture and the taste of certain plants, and I do include them in our diet, and I do think that our ancestors, for most of our existence, have, have always included at least some level of plants in our diet. It wasn't the mainstay, but it was something that was in the diet. So I do include plants in my diet, but I always do something to them. So here's a couple of takeaways. Number one again, remember that it's a whole world to learn about and it's actually really interesting to dive deep. But first steps, the first thing you need to understand and I want to talk about the biology of a plant very, very quickly, because I think it makes makes a lot of sense. This way plants, the plants, are trying to defend themselves. That's it. They're trying to, um, survive long enough to reproduce and, uh, do whatever they can to allow their babies to survive long enough to reproduce and then, if all this works, then that species survives and if it breaks down, then they go extinct. So, since plants can't fight, since plants can't run away, plants use engaging chemical warfare, usually through the form of toxins, in order to stay safe.

Speaker 2: 49:37

If we think about a plant itself, just from a basic level, and I'll do a very quick version of this because I think it's a great way to create the framework in our mind to think about it. There are certain. We call these secondary compounds that plants produce. We call them allelochemicals. Most of these allelochemicals are produced to protect and keep things away. Some of them are created to attract, and we think about the role of different parts of plants. It can help us understand where the most toxins exist Plants in all cases.

Speaker 2: 50:06

Roots are incredibly important to plants. Roots are really important to plants that are perennials Because when there's seasons and parts of the above ground, part of the plant dies off. And even when it doesn't die off but there's less access to sunlight and the ability to do photosynthesis, then the storage part, most important part, of the plant is underground. So your roots, your quorms, your tubers, your potato-like things are very starch-rich because all that energy is stored down in there and the plant feeds off it during the time of the year that it doesn't engage in photosynthesis. So you can imagine, with that being such an important part of the plant, it uses a lot of effort to create toxins to protect that plant. So root squirms tubers are typically incredibly toxic and most of those toxins typically exist in the skin of the root squirms tubers because that's the interface between this important part of the plant and the outside world.

Speaker 2: 51:01

So skins peels of these things are usually very, very toxic because they're warding off insects, they're warding off fungus, they're warding off bacteria, diseases, all these other sorts of things, keeping other animals away from it. So if you do nothing else with a root, a corn or a tuber, make sure you peel it Like a potato. I will never eat a potato peel the rest of my life ever, and I actually just wrote an article for the Western Price Journal it's coming out this summer about the toxin load in potatoes and how to mitigate it, and most of the toxins exist on the skin. So if all you do is peel the skin, then you've taken care of a huge level of that. So peeling in general is very important.

Speaker 2: 51:43

The shoots and the leaves they can have various levels of toxins depending on the species and time of the year and a bunch of other factors. But when you start getting to things like seeds and fruits and flowers, it's very, very important to think about the function that they serve for the planet. Flowers are rarely toxic. In fact, they're typically very, very safe to eat because their role is to attract. Flowers are beautiful and they smell good and they taste good because they're attracting things to help with the way that that plant propagates itself. So things like pollinating plants are attracting bees and other things help in pollinating. So flowers are typically very, very safe to eat. Fruits are really interesting because the fruit itself is there to attract as well. I mean, the role of a fruit is to attract an animal to come eat that fruit, complete with all of its mature seeds, and the seeds go through the digestive tract of the animal, the animal goes off and the next day it goes to the bathroom and it deposits these seeds in a pile of manure Exactly what should happen. It's part of the way the plant reproduces.

Speaker 2: 52:50

So mature, ripe fruit is typically very low in toxins as well, but it only goes for the right fruit. This is incredibly important for people to understand. It doesn't make sense for the plant to attract the animal to eat it, for the seeds are mature. So in most cases, in most cases, a fruit that is unripe has higher level of toxin in it than the ripe fruit, and this even goes for stuff in the grocery store. I know people that are trying to eat less sugar or trying to go for the bananas that aren't ripe, and there's actually. If you look at the toxic load of an unripe banana compared to a ripe banana, it's literally night and day. Anybody in my part of the world. We have a plant here called an American persimmon. If anybody's eaten an unripe persimmon, you'll never eat another persimmon the rest of your life. It is the worst thing on the planet. But as soon as it becomes ripe it it actually shuts off the toxin and does everything it can to attract an animal to it. So fruits are typically ripe.

Speaker 2: 53:51

Fruits are typically low in toxins. Peels are another story, so I usually peel all my fruit as well. Seeds are typically toxic and seeds, nuts, grains and legumes the sorts of things that, until that seed or nut or grain has germinated, these things are keeping it dormant, keeping it safe. So the quick story is roots, corns, tubers are typically toxic, but you can mitigate a lot of the issues by peeling Stems and leaves are, depending on the, the plant season, give or take. Certainly I would say away from spinach at all costs. Fruits are typically. If you're worried about toxins, then fruits ripe fruits are typically very safe Seeds, nuts, grains and legumes if you're going to incorporate any of them into your diet, they should always be processed first at some level fermentation, sprouting, soaking there's a number of ways to help mitigate those effects.

Speaker 1: 54:44

That's a you named off like a ton of stuff of, especially like you were talking about, like superfoods Cause that, that kind of laundry list you made of, like spinach, kale, all those other things where we are perceived as, or we perceive as like oh, these are healthy things. Um, you know, I I got myself into trouble a little bit. I went vegan for a couple of years just because I thought that was ethical, uh, you know for my health, things like that. For about two years, as much quinoa and as, uh, spinach and kale smoothies that I've had, I ended up developing belferitis in my eyes, um, and that was just kind of an effect that was lasting month after month. Uh, and I ended up going on doxycycline. The doctors couldn't like. They were like, oh, hot compress, you'll be fine. Never worked. I'm on doxycycline for months on end and that, that being on antibiotics for a long period of time, that's other health issues that were occurring. Um, and I was lucky in it.

Speaker 1: 55:40

And when people hear this podcast, one thing I want to talk about too is you mentioned all Sally Norton's work, but if you are going to cut those things out, to do it slowly. I was lucky enough to. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I went from, you know, vegan to keto and so I did still have vegetables in my diet for a while and then I slowly went into carnivore. And as I went into carnivore, keto a little bit helped, but carnivore for me I just quickly realized that I didn't have belferitis anymore. I didn't have to take antibiotics.

Speaker 1: 56:13

But you also mentioned that. The calcium too. I think we have a mutual friend, james Lieb, in the Carnivorous, yeah, so he talks about how he does cheeses, uh, and things like that to help with that oxalate dumping, um, and there's things that can help mitigate that. But for people that are listening to this, they're like I'm cutting out spinach today. It's like all right, hold on. Like if you've been eating that for a very long time, definitely read sally's book. And also like it's a take a slower process, because there's things that could happen to you just from cutting cold turkey.

Speaker 2: 56:42

I'm glad you said that. Thank you, I forgot that. Yes, if you, if you. What happens typically is if you have, if you're experiencing major oxalate toxicity and you completely cut them out of your diet, the trend is your body feels awesome for like two or three weeks and then when your body realizes that you're not ingesting all these oxalates, it's a hey, it's safe to get rid of the stuff that I have stored. And then it starts releasing that and it can be at minimum painful or at maximum dangerous. So there is a way to do it.

Speaker 2: 57:11

Sally talks through it quite a bit. In fact, I would dive deep in the work she's doing, because she's even seeing that even when you've cut out and this happened to me as well when you've cut the oxalates out of your diet and you're eating a very low oxalate diet, about three years after you started eating low oxalate, most of her patients start experiencing some sort of oxalate dumping and that means there's like this massive release of these oxalates. Again, some people I had it, I had oxalates dumping out through the skin around my mouth. Some people have them dump out of their cornea. Some people have them dump out of their skin in other places. It's painful it's, it's it's unsightly necessary, but it happens. And if you read some of her work, one of the things she's found is when that starts happening, you may be up your intake of oxalates for a little while just to trick your body into not releasing so much so fast. But I tell you, this is one of those things where I'm not trying to sell you a thing. Neither of us are trying to sell you a thing. Neither of us are trying to put you on a supplement or anything.

Speaker 2: 58:20

If you are experiencing pain or discomfort that you don't understand where it's coming from and your doctor is making you feel a little bit silly because you've been in three or four times and they're kind of like, look, it must be in your head or at least giving you that feeling, and you haven't figured it out. And you look at the list of high oxalate foods and you realize that, hey, I'm eating a lot of these things like I, I drink a lot of black tea, or I eat a massive amount of almonds, or I'm drinking almond milk on a regular basis, or whatever. You've identified that then it's worth at least looking into, to say, hey, can I slowly start cutting some of these things out of my diet, it's not gonna cost you a dime, right? And then see if I feel any relief and I will tell you it's transformed my life. And I feel any relief and I will tell you it's transformed my life and I think it's. It's one of the largest, one of the largest things attributing to pain and discomfort today in the modern world, because it's it's such a huge. I'll give you another great example.

Speaker 2: 59:15

My wife and I were doing a presentation at a local event where it was for families that have experienced loss, for for kids that have lost a parent or parents, and we did some programming with them. And then we just programmed with the other adults that were there and we were talking about how important it is to take care of yourself before you're trying to take care of somebody else, and food is essential to that. And we got on this Oxalate conversation and people just took to it. They were asking all these questions because obviously many people there were experiencing things that very well could have been attributed to oxalates.

Speaker 2: 59:49

And one woman came up to me afterwards. She said that her 16-year-old daughter just presented with kidney stones two months earlier and we started to talk about what her diet was she was eating an extremely high oxalate diet. I mean 16 years old, order diet was she was eating an extremely high oxalate diet. I mean 16 years old, it's it's. It's it's an issue right now. That's just like, just like diabetes and and so many other issues are affecting younger and younger, uh, people. So is this?

Speaker 1: 1:00:13

yeah and I want, I want to transition to into and all these are they're connected. But, uh, making this connection back with your food and where it comes from. I know you're kind of talking about like what kind of got you into trouble a little bit was like massive amount of almonds and like, right, quote, unquote, almonds are a super food. You got to have some almonds in there. But what it would take to actually, you know, we walk into a supermarket and this is it's hard to pull people, it's like almost pulling them out the matrix right. You walk into a supermarket. You see all this food, the abundance is wild, the bag of almonds is huge, but what it would actually take for you if you were out in the wild to get that many almonds and consume it, it would be a lot of work.

Speaker 1: 1:00:54

But connecting ourselves back to where our food comes from is something that I'm passionate about and I'm trying to learn more myself. But you're doing something too as well with the modern stone age of is offering classes like, but like different types of classes also, like butchering classes and hunting. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 2: 1:01:10

Absolutely so. I will tell you that, that we do a lot of different things, a lot of different things, but I think the most important thing, or the root of everything that we're striving to do, is focus on the key word. You said it's connection, it's connecting. Connecting if we can connect to number one ourselves, our family and our community incredibly important and if we can also connect to our environment and connect to our ancestry and our past, we can probably answer almost every question we have ourselves about how we should be eating, how we should be nourishing ourselves. I mean, we have all of that intuitive in there. As long as we do that reconnection, because most of the forces in the world today are working very hard to disconnect us, and the more disconnected we are, the more somebody else can control the information flow and we become susceptible to things like advertising and marketing, because we have no fathom of what it takes to actually get that resource from the ground or from the woods or from the whatever and into the bag. But we have no idea, because I call them limiting mechanisms.

Speaker 2: 1:02:16

The limiting mechanisms that have been in place forever ensured that we didn't overdo certain things and um. So, for example, an example I think you were given was with the nuts, and the example that I always tell is when I was a kid we didn't have a lot of money and we didn't buy nuts. Like it wasn't. Nuts or nuts were very, very expensive and the only time that I really ate nuts was on christmas and we'd go to my grandparents house and they'd have always have a big bowl filled with nuts, like the mixed nuts, but in the shell. So there were almonds and Brazil nuts and walnuts, I remember, and pecans, and they had one of those little Crackers.

Speaker 2: 1:02:53

Cracker things and I'd sit there, happier than heck, for hours cracking, cracking, cracking. I'd get a big handful of nuts. I'd eat them and that was kind of my nuts and that's what I ate not for the entire year, but that was the most amount of nuts I'd eaten. Anyone sitting for the entire year was at that moment and it took me hours to crack all these nuts and it was fun. But I didn't even collect those nuts. And what most people don't understand too is on top outside of those shells of those nuts are a hole. So if you were to get nuts from the wild, first of all, none of the nuts that I ate out of that bowl are wild. They've all been domesticated and genetically transformed and become the domesticated versions they are today. Almonds, for example a wild almond is incredibly toxic, and the bitter almond, and it's been detoxified slightly through progressive domestication events, detoxified slightly through progressive domestication events, the English walnut, all of these things. So I'm sitting there, I'm crushing and crushing and crushing these things, but I don't even realize that if I were to collect those nuts, I would have to go find the trees at the right time of the year when the nuts are falling. I'd collect the nuts and I have to take the hole off and I typically typically would dry them or roast them. Then I have to take the hull off, and I typically typically would dry them or roast them not always and then I'd have to crack the shell off of them and then I have to pick out the nut meats on the inside and then I finally have some nuts. Incredible amount of work. So it limited my nut. It would have limited my nut consumption to the season that they were falling, my ability to collect them, my ability to take the hull off, my ability to crack them, my ability to take all the nut meats out, and then again, typically I would do something like roast them or something on top of it. A lot of work, a lot of limiting mechanisms. There. Nuts would have been at a very low level in my diet and so then growing up I was limited to Christmas at my grandparents' house because of an economic reason, right, because nuts were very expensive. But now you can go to Whole Foods or BJ's or one of these other big box stores and buy a bag of shelled almonds for almost nothing, and most people in the world can afford the bag of shelled almonds, and we're being told by the media that almonds are amazingly speedy Almond this, and if we're gluten-free, it's almond flour, and then almond milk and all these other things. All this and all these almonds all of a sudden are in my diet. That, physically, could never have been in my diet before at that level.

Speaker 2: 1:05:10

And I could say the same thing about spinach. 150 years ago, 100 years ago, even decades ago, you would only have access to spinach during the several weeks of the year that you could grow the spinach outside in your area and look spinach itself a couple of times a year, no big deal. Spinach, every day becomes a huge issue and we've created a lot of these issues because we've become so disconnected. The food system has changed. All the parameters, all the limiting mechanisms are going to change. All the parameters, all the limiting mechanisms are going to change. And now we have all of these resources at our disposal from an economic and temporal perspective and things are getting shipped in from all over the world. And then we're being told that we're being lied to. We're being told eat more of this, eat more of this, eat more of this. And then all of a sudden, we have these issues that we've never had before from that particular food because we never ate it at that level.

Speaker 2: 1:06:11

Another great example, just because I'm reading the book right now I did a blog post on it on monday. But uh, there's something called the drunken monkey hypothesis, which suggests that uh, an anthropologist, university of california, berkeley, came up with with the hypothesis. It suggests that mammals in general, with primates, uh, seek out alcohol naturally occurring alcohol whenever possible, and a lot of his fieldwork was looking at primates. That you know, when the fruit, the sugar-rich fruit, falls to the ground, it starts spontaneously fermenting because there's wild yeast in the sugars, and that these primates in general will go out and seek them out whenever possible. So that low-level alcohol consumption was a part of our diets for a very long time.

Speaker 2: 1:06:49

But eating the fermented fruit conveys all sorts of nutritional advantages. It was kind of his hypothesis. But then he says that's one thing In the past when you have a little bit of fruit flowing a few times a year and it's fermenting and you get a little bit of it. It's one thing In the past when you have a little bit of fruit flowing a few times a year and it's fermenting and you get a little bit of it. It's one thing. But now, if his hypothesis is correct and we're prone to being drawn towards alcohol. And now, all of a sudden, we can walk into a liquor store and buy whatever we want any time of the year in massive, concentrated quantities.

Speaker 2: 1:07:17

We don't have the mechanisms, there's no more limiting mechanisms there in place, and it can result in all sorts of issues with without all and, and I think there's a lot of that.

Speaker 2: 1:07:27

If, if we reconnect, we reconnect to our food, where it comes from, how to process it properly, then we can um, a lot of the issues will be solved literally overnight. And I just want to give you one other very good example, because I know you mentioned wanting to talk about the blue zooms, and this part of the issues will be solved literally overnight. And I just want to give you one other very good example, because I know you mentioned wanting to talk about the blue zones and this part of the conversation with a dramatic example. So about a little over a year ago, we were in Sardinia doing research, and the research we were going to do was focused on a particular kind of cheese. But we ended up and it was completely unintentional we ended up in a village called villa grande, on the east side of sardinia, and it turns out that that is the epicenter of the first blue zone ever identified.

Speaker 1: 1:08:11

Is this, this particular village, in this particular and can you mention what, what didn't, uh, what kind of dignifies them in it or specifies them as a blue zone, like the sedentarians?

Speaker 2: 1:08:22

if anybody anybody's ever seen the Netflix special Blue Zones or the Dan Butner books on the blue zones, dan Butner had identified certain locations around the world that has the longest living populations and he's identified them as he's called them blue zones, and there's several. You know a bunch of them not a bunch, but numerous ones around the world, and one of the narratives that he's putting forward about the blue zones is that the reason that these people eight years to set this research up, the particular research I was looking for and I finally, a couple of years ago, got in contact with an amazing woman. Her name is Gisela Rubio and she's a native Sardinian, but she's also a food historian there as well and she lives in this village and we went to visit and she connected us with the and she lives in this village and we went to visit and she connected us with the most traditional people in this village. So just remember, we're going in there not with the whole film crew, but we're going in there through the contacts of a food, a local food historian, and we were literally with families that are eating still eating in a very traditional way, which is fantastic. So we're there and we experienced several different things. First off, we realized that, yes, my gosh, the age that people are living to in this village is literally unbelievable. Regularly we came in contact with people over 100 years old, and the other cool thing about it is they weren't you know. It wasn't that we went to a nursing home to see people bedridden on oxygen and what have you to see people that were over 100 years old. No, we saw people over 100 years old walking up and down the mountains on a regular basis. The guy next door to the family we were living with for several days was 100, I think he was 103. He lived on the second floor of the house. Up and down the house, up and down the steps. Every single day was going and moving. It was unbelievable. And everybody became in contact with their minds. Were, I mean, some of this is anecdotal, but everybody became in contact with their minds. Were there, I mean, it was. You looked and felt like you were engaging with somebody that was 20, 30 years younger than they actually were. So that part of the blues on pieces is correct.

Speaker 2: 1:10:43

But when we started eating with everybody, a couple of things became very important, very apparent. One is that vegetables are almost non-existent, like there were not many vegetables there whatsoever. It was very animal based and the animals I didn't say meat based, animal based they ate every single part of the animal. That cheese was a huge part of their diet. It was always fermented. They weren't drinking milk, they were always fermenting it into different things, typically these wonderful cheeses.

Speaker 2: 1:11:12

And the connection which is the main part I want to have here, the connection to their food, was something I've rarely experienced anywhere in the world. I mean it was amazing was something I've rarely experienced anywhere in the world. I mean it was amazing. So we sat down to meals, incredible meals, with multiple families, but this particular family, the Maru family, is the one I'm thinking about multi-course meal, food everywhere, and there wasn't a thing on the table Sorry, there was one thing on the table for all this food where there was an ingredient that it was comprised of that somebody at that table didn't have a complete connection with and I mean complete connection.

Speaker 2: 1:11:50

It's not like they went to the grocery store, bought these ingredients and made whatever it happens to be. They grew it, they raised it all, they harvested it all, they processed it all, they butchered it all. They cured it all, they processed it all, they butchered it all, they cured it all, literally every single thing on the table except for the wine. Somebody at that table raised grew, harvested, butchered, fermented. Whatever cooked at that table, there wasn't a question. It was the most connected meal I've ever been around in my entire life and the wine came from. Gisela's brother, I think, made the wine.

Speaker 1: 1:12:25

So he wasn't sitting there, so the one thing.

Speaker 2: 1:12:27

He, he, he, he. He grew the grapes, he harvested the grapes, he fermented the grapes, he made the wine. But he just didn't happen to be there, but his sister was. It was unbelievable. So a couple of things came out of this experience. Number one the narrative that these blue zones are focused on plant-based diets is completely wrong.

Speaker 1: 1:12:45

In fact, the percentages that they're putting out there are completely wrong, I think I've seen up to 95% plant products in these areas.

Speaker 2: 1:12:56

If anything, it's the exact opposite. Again, this is somewhat anecdotal and I don't have the numbers to put in there. I would say 80% to 85% animal and 15% to 20% plant, and it wasn't like this huge diversity of plants. I mean, there were tomatoes, there were eggplants, there were olives, olives and olive oil, there was onions and garlic. That's it and the entirety of the animal, the other that, and this is what I think, and it's a great tactic. I, if you watch the, if you read the books or you or you watch the netflix special or anything else, in the blue zones, they do throw out a lot of truths in the beginning, um, and then they kind of build your, your trust, and then they throw this dietary part in there which is wrong, and he kind of slips it in there and you already trust them, so that some of the things they're saying are completely right. Number one people are just wonderful, they're nice, they're amazing, they're, they're, they're communal they.

Speaker 2: 1:13:57

It's wonderful experience to be around everybody that's there. So that's that a piece. They're exercising regularly. There's no gym I didn't see one gym in the entire village but everybody's out walking all the time up and down and harvesting and working and walking.

Speaker 2: 1:14:12

All of that is, I think, very helpful as well. They are very animal-based, which is the opposite of the narrative. But the other thing that is, I think, really important is not just what that food is made of, but their connection to that food, and their deep connection makes it so that they don't have to ask any questions about their food. Nobody had to ask a question about anything at that table because they were all so viscerally connected to all of it. But the other thing that happens when you have that deep connection is those limiting mechanisms that we just talked about that are no longer in much of the modern diet are there. They're forced to eat local, they're forced to eat seasonal, they're forced to know that when they harvest this, they have to go through all these processes and they take time and they take effort and they take, you know, whatever in order to make them happen. So these things are when we're in a world now where we can walk into the grocery store and buy literally anything we want and have to ask the questions how much of this, how much of this should I have, how much of this should I have At that table? You didn't ask that question because they could only have so much of whatever. They only had so much meat compared to how much organs they put into it. Right, because they killed that animal and did whatever they did with it. That's what they had to work with.

Speaker 2: 1:15:27

So those ratios, those weird things in our modern diets like we can go into the grocery store now and listen to somebody that tells us we should eat nothing but lean chicken breast and go into the grocery store not see a chicken, not see a chicken thigh, a chicken liver, a liver, a chicken, anything, and walk out with 30 pounds of chicken breast in a package is really, really weird and odd. It's equally as odd to say, oh my gosh, I, I know that I need to start eating more waffle and liver is an amazing superfood. And you can go into a store and actually go in there and buy containers of nothing but chicken livers and walk out with no other part of the chicken. That is equally as weird. But that table we were sitting at had only what they could put in, and literally I don't want to say natural proportions, but the proportions that made sense given the season and the time and the resources that were available to those people. It was absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 1: 1:16:20

It sounds like an amazing experience. That's awesome, and I think I even pulled this and this is what I want to talk about too, because I always get questions like because people know me, I'm more. Again, 95 percent of what I eat is going to be red meat. You know more animal based, meat based type deal, so I'll add some different things in there too. But people ask me about blue zones all the time, like oh, do you know about blue zones? Like you know they're more plant-based and they live to a hundred. I was like I don't really even think that's. I think there's a lot of misconceptions around it and even like I pulled this from the website too. It was this from a Harvard study or somebody from Harvard was saying that they don't know the meat is like a radiation. I don't know if you've heard this. It's like meat is like radiation. We don't know what the safe level is. That's directly from their website.

Speaker 2: 1:17:08

It blows my mind. It is really, really interesting to me. I do think the Blue Zone narrative is a very intentional, deliberate message that's being sent to try to you know further this plant-based sort of agenda. Yeah, but I will also say it is more complicated, because one of the things that, uh, we found very quick.

Speaker 2: 1:17:32

So every time we visited a house or or came downstairs to see people or whatever, the first thing that happened was they went and got. No matter where we were, they went and brought out all this amazing, uh, cured meat from their own pigs and it didn't matter what family it was and a whole bunch of cheese that they made and they put on the table, maybe a couple of hours, whatever, but always, that always. And this happened day after day after day after day. And then there was a sunday where we had this huge meal the main meal I was just I was just referring to, uh where they um had this entire animal that they were roasting and then all the intestines were um roasted on this other thing and we ate this whole. It was beautiful.

Speaker 2: 1:18:12

So the next day that was on a sunday and the next day I I flat out asked all right, how many? You know how often do you eat meat? And they're like oh, usually about once a week. What are you talking about? I've been eating meat every single day since I've been here. I don't understand what you're talking about. No, no, no, once a week.

Speaker 2: 1:18:35

And through the translation, what I realized was when I was saying, how often are you eating meat, they were referring to that big, huge barbecue that they had on Sunday night, which was a big to do, and it's a very regular thing on Sundays and they do it very often and it takes all day to prepare it. So that particular interaction I had. They came back and finally we realized that they were referring to that big event. Now they eat the rest of that animal all week long. They have all this cured meats they bring it all the time. They have all this cheese, they bring it all the time.

Speaker 2: 1:19:11

But that particular event when I say eating meat, they mean barbecue. So meat was in the diet every single day, but the answer to that question was one day. And I don't you know. You're really talking about people that are untrained anthropologists, that are going into places asking a question already with an agenda that they're trying to support and walking away with some of this information and the reality is something very, very different, from a number of different levels. There are traditional blocks that make it such that people from an outside world don't get to see the reality of certain things. There's issues with linguistics and language and dialect all sorts of things that can prevent the actual, genuine message of what reality really is getting across. So I'm not trying to suggest that there's these unintentional things that have created this narrative, but there are unintentional things that I think impact our ability to get real information as well.

Speaker 1: 1:20:09

And going into kind of the end, this a little bit. I want to talk about the modern Stone Age kitchen and we kind of talked about a few real briefly, but some different things that are coming up and some things that you're excited about to be offering.

Speaker 2: 1:20:22

Sure, absolutely. So. We're located here in Chestertown, maryland. For anybody that knows the area, we're on the eastern shore, so on the east side of the Chesapeake Bay, beautiful little rural, historic area, but we're only about an hour from Washington DC, about an hour and a half from Philadelphia and about three hours from New York City. So if you're in any of those areas, we'd love to have you, love to see you. We have two entities here. One and the one that we're really, really focused on empowering people to nourish themselves and their families through is the food lab. So the food lab is we continue to do research. We actually just got back last week from the Republic of Georgia doing awesome traditional fermented dairy research and some things on wine, but that's another story. So we continue to do research and use that research to help empower people through things like podcasts and blogs and I'm working on another book right now and a bunch of other things as well as classes. So we have a whole host of classes. Typically, every weekend, we have at least one class here in our teaching kitchen. So we do everything from cheese making to fermented dairy to butchering sourdough, breads, all sorts of things. And we also have online classes and on demand classes as well Downstairs, and one of the things that we found is that we do our primary goals to empower people to do things for themselves, do all of these things for themselves and incorporate it into their life.

Speaker 2: 1:21:45

But we do also realize, like I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, that even though we're 300,000 year old bodies, we're in a completely different cultural context and between work and the other issues of modern day life, sometimes doing all these things in your home is not always as easy. So we decided to open up and it slowly grew. But we have a restaurant downstairs called the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, where we make food only according to the rules and regulations that we've already outlined to make food as safe, nourishing, nutrient-dense and bioavailable as it can possibly be. And the cool thing is we're not just doing a bunch of weird things that people would think are weird. Our mission there is literally to take familiar food and make it as nourishing as it can possibly be. So you can walk into our doors and see everything from a ham and cheese sandwich to a pizza.

Speaker 2: 1:22:37

But since we've done everything entirely from scratch, using ancestral approaches, that all of our grains are 100% wild long-fermented sourdough I don't care if it is a loaf of bread to a croissant, to pasta 100% wild, long-fermented sourdough. We butcher everything in-house. We use a nose-to-tail approach. We make all of our cheese, all of our fermented dairy. We don't use any industrial nut or seed oils. We don't use any industrial nut or seed oils. We don't use any refined sugar, or fake sugar for that matter. So we only sweeten with honey, maple syrup or muscovado sugar, which is just literally dehydrated cane juice, and there's a host of other things as well. But the idea is you can come here with your family, everybody can get something to eat and you can leave comforted, knowing that it was the healthiest, most nourishing version of whatever that food happens to be.

Speaker 2: 1:23:26

So other things coming up.

Speaker 2: 1:23:28

We just were leasing property nearby, here, just a few miles away, and this fall we are starting some experiences to do exactly what we talked about earlier to connect people to some of the most visceral things that we ever did as humans, and that's and that's hunting.

Speaker 2: 1:23:46

So you can go a lot of places around the world and spend a lot of money to go hunt and go kill an animal. Our focus is on everything but that piece like that. We know that's a necessary step, but to me, the most valuable parts of hunting the parts that I think about all the time and I remember hunting my father and my son or whoever I was with it's everything leading up to the point that you've killed something and everything afterwards. So everything from understanding animal behavior patterns to setting up a tree stand to those sorts of things we're going to spend a lot of time working on that and everything from as soon as that animal is dead. So things like how to field dress an animal with the intent of eating the entire animal, how to butcher that animal, how to cook all the different parts of that animal, how to do other things with the parts of that animal that you're not using as food, like brain tanning, deer skins and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1: 1:24:44

So we're piloting a few programs this fall and hoping to launch very, very soon a whole lot of programming around incredible connection to something that we as humans have been doing for at least 2 million years. That's awesome. I mean, I'm a city boy, right? I don't. When I go hunting, I go to the store and get ribeyes. So like I need to learn these things and get more connected to the food and something that I've been trying to chip away at and do, and I'm, if I'm going to be in that Maryland area, I'm definitely going to be coming, so how can people find you and connect with you?

Speaker 2: 1:25:09

So we have a couple of different ways you can connect with us. My Instagram and Facebook is at Dr Bill Schindler, so at Dr Bill Schindler. Our nonprofit is at ES Food Lab, so the Eastern Shore Food Lab, and the kitchen, the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, is at Modern Stone Age Kitchen. As far as websites are concerned, we are working. We're in the midst of consolidating and doing a little bit of rebranding, but for right now and for the next several months, we have modernstoneagekitchencom and you can find out everything you want to find out about the restaurant how to order, how to come in and eat and what kind of offerings we have. And then eatlikeahumancom is where our blog resides. Anything pertaining to the nonprofit you can find there as well.

Speaker 2: 1:25:52

Two other quick side notes we do now have a bed and breakfast next door, so anybody coming outside. We've approached that bed and breakfast from the same approach that we have for food. We've done for lifestyle in general. So we have really, really high quality natural linens. We have blue light, blocking light bulbs in the bedroom, all those sorts of things that anybody that has this sort of focus to food probably would enjoy having in other parts of their life as well. We are also engaging and launching in a capital campaign in November. It's going to launch on November 9th and this is going to allow us to really take that next step to connecting people in every way possible to themselves, their family, their community, their environment, their food, their health and we'll have more information about that coming up as well. But keep an eye out because we could use the support and I think we're doing really incredible work.

Speaker 1: 1:26:50

Yeah, I think you are as well and you know and thank you for all the work that you're doing and helping people and, like you were saying, nourishing the community and making the connection back with your food. I'm definitely going to put all these stuff in the show notes and I appreciate you again coming on and taking the time.

Speaker 2: 1:27:06

Truly my pleasure, always good to see you and happy to talk anytime.

Speaker 1: 1:27:10

Awesome and thanks for everybody again listening to 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.