Lessons from the Ketoverse
Welcome to "Lessons from the Ketoverse" In this dynamic podcast, hosts Stephen and Graham dive deep into the world of ketogenic and carnivore diets, exploring how these lifestyle choices can revolutionize your physical and mental health.
Stephen, a seasoned health enthusiast with a knack for simplifying complex nutritional science, and Graham, a former confused foodie turned informed advocate, bring you a blend of personal anecdotes, scientific insights, and expert interviews. Each episode, they unpack the myths and truths about low-carb, high-fat diets, discussing everything from weight loss and energy levels to mental clarity and emotional well-being. Both Stephen and Graham independently navigated the confusing world of food nutrition and came out the other side of that journey with some lessons from the Ketoverse.
It doesn't matter if you're a curious beginner or a seasoned follower of keto or carnivore lifestyles, "Lessons from the Ketoverse" offers something for everyone. Expect engaging conversations, practical tips, and a dash of humour as Stephen and Graham navigate the meaty (and sometimes controversial) aspects of these diets.
Whether you're looking to optimize your physical performance, improve mental clarity, or take control of your health, this podcast is your guide to unlocking the benefits of low-carb, high-fat living. With expert insights, real-world tips, and candid conversations with everyone from those that are just starting out, to experts in their fields as well as exploring the unique benefits of Keto for those who serve in the military. Stephen and Graham explore how these powerful dietary approaches can transform your life. Join us as we chew over the benefits, tackle the challenges, and share the transformative power of embracing a diet that might just be as old as humanity itself. Fuel your primal instincts and maybe, just maybe, get inspired to try a steak or two!
Lessons from the Ketoverse
What To Say To The Keto Carnivore Critic: Helping You Debunk Common Misconceptions
What happens when the world discovers you're eating keto or carnivore? Brace yourself for an onslaught of unsolicited health warnings, pseudoscientific claims, and strange looks across the dinner table. In this eye-opening episode, we dissect the predictable reactions you'll encounter and arm you with evidence-based responses.
From the infamous "heart attack" warnings to bizarre scurvy predictions, we expose how deeply entrenched nutritional misinformation has become in our culture. We trace these myths back to their origins—from religious influences to flawed studies by figures like Ancel Keys—revealing how questionable science transformed into "common knowledge" despite lack of evidence.
Both hosts share personal experiences with healthcare providers and family members who automatically assumed the worst about their dietary choices, only to be silenced by dramatic improvements in blood work, body composition, energy levels, and overall health. The conversation addresses practical concerns too, including the surprising economics of eating this way (spoiler: it's often cheaper than standard diets when you account for reduced frequency of eating and elimination of dining out).
The most fascinating exploration centers on our psychological relationship with food—how eating has transformed from nourishment into entertainment, social ritual, and even emotional medication. By shifting this fundamental relationship, keto and carnivore diets offer not just physical transformation but mental freedom from food obsession.
Whether you're already following these eating patterns or simply curious about why others choose them, this episode provides a refreshing counter-narrative to conventional wisdom. Ready to question nutritional dogma? Listen now and discover why thousands are embracing animal-based nutrition despite the skeptics.
Welcome to Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Join Stephen and Graham as they explore the keto lifestyle with tips, science and stories to boost your health. This podcast isn't medical advice. Consult your healthcare advisor for any health-related issues. Get ready to fuel your primal power.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Today, stephen and I are talking about the things that you will inevitably hear when people find out you are on the keto or carnivore diet. This would be things that people, once they find out that you have changed your eating lifestyle, they might notice that you've got no veggies on your plate, or very few veggies. You've got a big steak, but you know not the usual accoutrements that people generally fill their plate up with. Or you just ordered the hamburger patties and nothing else. Or people are asking you about you know what's changed in your life. The doctor wonders why your blood work is so much better than it was the previous year which happened to myself and Steven as well and they'll ask what your change in diet was and you'll tell them and you will inevitably hear certain things from them once you have let the cat out of the bag and let them know what your eating lifestyle is. Stephen, say hello to everybody.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone, good to be here again. Again, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your support.
Speaker 2:Yes, we sure do. All right, so let's talk about some things that Stephen and I have actually heard from people, or we have heard just in general reactions to when people find out your eating lifestyle is switched over to a keto or carnivore diet. This could be, like I said, professionals in your life and I know Stephen's got some stories there family members, certainly friends, your spouse, better half You're inevitably going to hear some of these things. So I'm going to kick things off with one that I hear all the time, which is oh, you're on the keto, carnivore diet, you're going to get a heart attack from all that saturated fat and cholesterol, and so what is the response? So the reason why people think this and we've covered this previously in podcasts there has been a vilification of red meat in particular and meat in general over the past 120 years or so.
Speaker 2:It started with a person named Ellen G White. You're welcome to look that story up. It's very interesting. It continued with the organization that she was a part of. Certainly, there have been religious interventions that have said you know, plants are wonderful, meat is not or is evil and you need to stay away from it. Ancel Keys in the 50s and 60s, telling everybody that saturated fat causes heart disease, even though he had absolutely no science to base that on. It was purely his wish that people ate less meat and wish that people ate more plants, and vegetables, specifically and fruits, and so there has never been an actual randomized control study. There has never been an actual randomized control study showing that saturated fat and red meat cause heart disease. It was only up until about 2015 when the website CDC, american Heart Association, started to actually uncover the fact that there is no link between saturated fat, red meat and heart disease.
Speaker 2:If you understand the mechanism that causes heart disease, and as Steven and I both believe that this is a result of insulin resistance, which is a result of too much sugar in the bloodstream, which is a result of too much highly processed foods and or carbs sugar but carbs turn into sugar or sugar itself. That gets into the bloodstream requires the insulin to spike to get the glucose into the cells and at some point, the cells just say you know what? I give up, I don't have enough room, you, I can't deal with all this extra glucose and the glucose ends up remaining in the bloodstream. Inevitably, you are much more likely to get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes as a result of that, and this is when some serious problems start to happen around metabolic health, around heart disease, all sorts of problems that can occur as a result. So, stephen, let us know your thoughts on you're going to get a heart attack from all that saturated fat and cholesterol.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I had a similar experience completely independently with two doctors on the weekend. One was a naturopathic doctor where I was getting a treatment with glutathione and I don't have a significant liver issue, perhaps a past history with non-alcohol fatty liver not to the stage of disease, but certainly a factor and often that's the case with with diabetics. Something is going wrong, uh, with your liver and we we're not doctors. I'm just expressing sort of my own experience. But right away I was told, as I was using a glutathione to to assist with hair loss, and um, she said, why are you concerned about it? And I said well, you know, vanity starts with capital V and incidentally, I'm on a keto carnivore diet.
Speaker 3:And she said how can you be both? They're not the same. And I said, well, because some meals are carnivore and some meals are keto. And she indicated that one, as you just said, that there is a higher likelihood, potentially with too much protein, that I could increase the potentiality for too high cholesterol and possibly a heart attack, which there's absolutely no proof of that. And, coincidentally, too, said that an excessive amount of protein could actually contribute to hair loss, which, again, I don't believe we fall into the excessive side of things at all, which, again, I don't believe we fall into the excessive side of things at all, and that it's relatively balanced. I think it's a function.
Speaker 3:I am 58, and a lot of men suffer from male pattern baldness by the time they get to our age. And again, it's just. Even with someone who's gone to school for seven years instead of three, like your typical GP, they're still only as good as the information that they last learned when they looked into it. And, coincidentally, at the same time, I dropped in and paid a visit to my optometrist at one of the big box stores and hadn't seen her in months. Last time I saw her, my sugar was really high. She could see it in my eyes and I flashed her my CGM, which at the time was 4.1. And I thought she was going to tackle me and carry me down to get a granola bar full of sugar because my sugar was so low. She said you know, if you go hypoglycemic you could have a heart attack.
Speaker 3:I was nowhere close to going hypoglycemic. The only time my sugar went that low ever in the last eight years was when I was on Metformin and went for a walk and I severely crashed. It's never repeated. The lowest my sugar has been is 3.8 and would only go there for, I'd say, five, 10 minutes after extended exercise and then it would bounce right back up into the fives. So that's my general perception of things and I always go with my own personal evidence from my CGM to say I don't believe I'm doing harm, I believe I'm doing good. And obviously hair loss could be just a consequence of old, being, getting older and stress on the body and so forth. And I honestly think that the keto and the carnivore core in the absence of those two, my hair loss would probably be more significant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great summary, and Stephen and I have done a lot of research on red meat, saturated fat, the mechanisms by which those interact with the body. Both of us are convinced that red meat and saturated fat are not bad for us. We're convinced that saturated fat is actually an excellent source of energy. Your brain uses it for ketones and your body can use it for energy. This idea that people need carbs slash glucose, which carbs turn into for energy, is simply not true. There are many, many people who don't eat any carbs at all who feel much more energetic than they did in the past, and so we always encourage people to do their own research and, obviously, listen to their healthcare providers. We're not here to get in the way of that, but we are both convinced that not only do we feel better eating red meat and saturated fat, we are fuller as a result, we have more energy, we're mentally more stable, our mental health has improved significantly on this journey, and so it is difficult to convince people, and I have found the older people are the harder it difficult to convince people, and I have found the older people are the harder it is to convince people and I'm not here necessarily to convince them.
Speaker 2:But people you know very quickly become food experts even though they've done absolutely no research whatsoever in their entire lifetime on anything to do with food as soon as your lifestyle questions whether their lifestyle is appropriate, and I find that very interesting. The way people react to food is the same way people react to politics. It's a topic that people jump into the Dunning-Kruger effect, d-u-n-n-i-n-g, k-r-u-g-e-r. I highly recommend looking into that. Why people feel that they're experts at certain things even though they've never looked into them and to me this is one of the biggest myths of our lifetime is that red meat and saturated fat are actually unhealthy, when Stephen and I both believe that that is not true. The next one on our list is something that I have heard personally from people, which is Stephen, you will get scurvy without vitamin C from fruits and vegetables. Are you still waiting for the scurvy to kick in?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So in my case, because I am a keto carnivore, in my case, as a diabetic, I am prone and have had them and vowed I'd never have them again. And that is I had kidney stones. I actually consume apple cider vinegar and lemon with water every single day and I've never had a recurrence on touchwood in the last several years from the production of kidney stones. So I would definitely not be a candidate for scurvy, given the vitamin C intake that I'm getting daily from fresh lemons Nothing pasteurized, it's all fresh. How about yourself? How's your scurvy coming along, since you're not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm still waiting for the scurvy to kick in. I think it was two and a half three years ago when I was told that I was going to get scurvy and I had dinner with that same person a couple of weeksU-E-L to eat, which was a horrible sort of porridge-y type food, very, very low in vitamins and nutrients that people need. They weren't eating red meat. If you go on a certain government websites and the FDA, I believe, is still saying this, uh, that they're saying there's no vitamin C in red meat. That's actually not true. There is vitamin C in red meat. Um, the body cannot make vitamin C. Um, it is important, but you can get uh, get vitamin C from red meat, especially organ meats like liver. We recommend you limit the amount of liver that you eat, but certainly in small amounts. It can be extremely healthy, and so vitamin C is important. There is vitamin C in red meat and I've listened to stories of people who have been on the carnivore diet for 10, 20, 65 years in one case, and they are all still waiting for the scurvy to kick in.
Speaker 2:So the Vikings, also on the high seas, did not get scurvy and they mostly ate red meat, did not get scurvy, and they mostly ate red meat, and so this idea that if you don't have fruits and vegetables, that you're going to get scurvy is another myth that needs to be debunked, in my opinion, and the more people who go on the carnivore diet and the more people who go on the ketogenic diet who don't end up with scurvy at some point, people are going to stop believing that that can cause scurvy in your life. It doesn't sound fun not happening to me, and I don't know a single carnivore that has been diagnosed with scurvy, and I've certainly looked. Next one on our list, stephen. Where is your? You're going to be constipated forever without plants.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so some interesting things to point out with respect to fiber. So one of the things that I follow from Dr Mandel and again I'll put a diabetic twist on this for those who are diabetic type two or type one is I regularly consume Greek yogurt, high fat and very high in terms of grams of protein, very low in sugar, and I'm quite particular about what brand that I purchased to make sure that it has highest number of grams of protein and highest fat. And then I supplement it with the phytonutrients either blueberry, strawberry in small quantities and fresh and washed and cleaned. And also what I do is I add chia and flax seeds for additional fiber, which will neutralize any of the or at least help reduce an offset. The fiber will offset the sugar, the natural sugar that's in the fruit. And what I noticed from my CGM is I don't get a significant rise in my sugar, especially if I'm consuming it as per the glucose goddess after I've had my primary protein. So first my salads, then my proteins and then my fat yogurt with flaxseed. Now, in addition to that building off of the chia, what I'm now doing, and you and I've talked about offline, is I'm soaking as per Dr Mandel. You can look him up talking about chia seeds, and Dr Berg as well and you float two tablespoons and eight ounces, an eight ounce glass of water of chia, and also, for us diabetics, is to add Ceylon, and the uptake can be further increased by adding fresh ginger to that mix. I'm not entirely sure what it is in ginger that causes the increased uptake of those nutrients, but I mentioned this to you, graham, as you recall, about two and a half weeks ago, and one of the prescribed outcomes of allowing the chia to fully absorb the water and expand is you're taking that mass in, which apparently will also reduce the oxidants that are actually in some of these plant-based seeds and essentially remove them, especially if you do them in hot water and then obviously let the water drain and then put it into cold water.
Speaker 3:And what I found over the last, I'd say, three weeks is my sugar is extremely stable at night. I'm not getting any ups and downs at all. The only time that I saw a spike was when I was forced to, because of commitments, to eat late, and the chia two tablespoons of chia in water with the Ceylon didn't do as great a job. But if I have three hours before going to bed where I haven't consumed anything. And then I take that I'm seeing the best results that I've seen in eight years applying that fiber and, as you know, as a candidate with IBS, I don't know if I should call myself a candidate. I don't like to call myself a victim, but by taking this additional fiber and increasing the amount of protein and completely eliminating ultra-processed foods, I have what would be described as a medically perfect bowel movement and I'm not going six, seven, eight, nine times a day.
Speaker 2:It's once a day and that's it. Yeah, and what Stephen was talking about with oxalates chia seeds is known to be high in oxalates, as is almonds, rhubarb and a number of other vegetables, and these oxalate crystals can be really damaging to the body over time and they build up. The body doesn't do a great job of getting rid of them unless it can bind to calcium, and so one of the ways to reduce the amount of oxalates in chia seeds is to boil them in hot water. You then get the benefit of the chia seeds um uh without some of the problems uh that you could experience. Uh with oxalate poisoning. Um highly recommend looking into oxalate poison.
Speaker 2:Not a lot of people know about it Um. All the food experts who tell me that you know I'm going to die of a heart attack or scurvy or something else um have never heard of oxalates. Most people haven't Um and so pretty important um uh to learn about them. Uh, if you're having spinach smoothies every day, I highly recommend looking into them. Toxic superfoods is a great book by Sally Norton Um she goes into a great amount of detail on oxalates. Highly recommend it. Um, it's a great thing to have in your sort of knowledge repertoire um that you can use and then adapt some of the foods that you want to eat, like Stephen's chia seeds, and make them a little healthier, potentially for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one of the things I wanted to add with chia is the fact that it does have calcium and a well-formed calcium oxalate. However, because the GFCs are a good source of calcium, one of the things that that binding process can do is it can actually be processed, interated, with a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar and a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice. So I don't run into those kinds of issues with kidney stones as a result of the oxalis. So some of these things can certainly be countered. So I think it's worth mentioning that what I'm trying to get from the actual chia is to help manage my blood sugar, and some of the side effects that you're mentioning, which are valid, can be countered with some of the other practices that I apply in my daily nutrition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something interesting that I've learned about fiber is I remember speaking to somebody again who believes she knows everything about food but actually hasn't done any research on anything to do with food. She's just believed what she's been told over the years and that's certainly certainly very common and I think we're all guilty of that to a certain extent and, um, she believed that she needed fiber, um, to have to be regular, as it related to, um, your bowel movements, and so there was a, a rather large study done and and you can google search this and look into it where they had people that were constipated, so their bowel movements, basically, were blocked off. The researcher that was talking about this had said you know, this idea that fiber is going to make you regular or it's going to cure constipation it's kind of like trying to cure a traffic jam by putting more cars on the highway, and I thought that was a really uh great way of putting it. And so he talked about this research where they had people that had, uh, suffered from constipation at the time of the study and they separated them into three control groups. The first control group kept eating, sorry. The first control group was given more fiber. The second control group was given half the fiber that they'd been eating up until then. The third control group was given no fiber for the amount of time that this study was going on and lo and behold, there was a 100% improvement in the bowel movements. In other words, constipation had basically ended for the people who had been given no fiber over the course of that study. The ones that had been given half the fiber had a slight improvement, so less constipation, and the ones that remained the same or were given more fiber had worse constipation.
Speaker 2:So the idea that fiber is required to have regular bowel movements Again another myth that people believe that they've heard for a very long time, but they can't actually tell you why they need fiber. They just believe that they need it, need fiber. They just believe that they need it. So another myth that I think we Stephen and I in our travels, have understood that it's a myth. That it's absolutely required Doesn't mean that it's not delicious and can't be a part of a diet, but the fact that it's required is something that, in my opinion, is not true.
Speaker 3:One of the things I wanted to mention, if I may, is you know we're talking about these things in a relatively binary way. It doesn't cause scurvy, it won't cause your hair to fall out, it won't necessarily take away from your blood tests as they relate to indices like your A1C. But what's interesting is you and I have been talking about this. I've just scanned Reddit and looked at some comments from people that had experienced any spectrum of the things that we've discussed thus far, including hair loss. And when you dig into it, when you find out which we need to be cognizant of when we're speaking to our larger audiences, well, what else did you do as a consequence of going down the route of carnivore? I'm looking at one person who commented and I think it's appropriate to say that he wouldn't be an extreme example, because I've actually talked to people who have done the same thing and I was even, for a time, considering trending to one meal a day, or what some people call OMAD, as part of accelerating my weight loss journey and believing that perhaps my body would appreciate the break given the IBS. The only issue there, as we've discussed in the past, is that sometimes you can send your body into an undernourishment and in that state of undernourishment there's all kinds of things that can go wrong, including hair loss, and for those that have experienced it, it takes three to six months for you to grow back your hair, because you're putting your hair in its final stage of shedding and you'll lose large amounts of it, as well as OMAD. You may not be getting enough protein and again, you'll send your body into starvation mode, which is not what the intention of intermittent fasting was ever designed to do. You're not trying to shock your system, you're trying to reduce the amount of oxidative stress that's in your body. So again, people have, for a host of different reasons, will take carnivore or keto and look at its basics, but then take it down a path that's extreme, that actually could result in undernourishment, which has nothing to do with keto, nothing to do to carnivore. It has everything to do with their decision about only eating, you know, once every three days, for instance. Or applying what's called PSMF, which is protein sparing, sparing fast, you know, for two or three days, and they take it too long and they start to have all kinds of issues. Or, as'm reading, one individual ate one lean chicken breast a week and that was it?
Speaker 3:So I mean, these are not what we're proposing and I don't think any of those things should be considered without talking to your medical practitioner whether it's a regular medical doctor, dietitian or a naturopath to your own liking and where you feel most comfortable, but this is still supposed to fit within a healthy lifestyle. It's not supposed to be something that you're shocking your system with. And if you start losing your hair and extreme things start happening, then if your mood suddenly is very aggressive, it's not the red meat, it's your method of applying it. That's an issue, because the evidence is just too strong, with literally hundreds of thousands suddenly it's very aggressive. It's not the red meat, it's your method of applying it. That's an issue, because the evidence is just too strong, with literally, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who who are using this, like you and I have have had good medical benefits, because I always go back to first principle, if I may, and when people have come up with these, these things, you know, including, um, um, the doctor that I saw on the weekends, uh, who, uh, is my eye specialist and had initially found, before I was wearing my cgm, that something was seriously wrong with my eyes. And then I went and had my sugar check put on my first cgm, discovered it was extremely high. I hadn't seen her like literally probably in a year and a half, two years. She remembered me. I showed her my cgm and it showed 4.1. And, like I said, she wanted to drag me out to the aisle and give me, you know, get a sugary granola in me.
Speaker 3:And meanwhile I felt fantastic and all I had done that day was I had fasted, I was traveling, I did not want to eat ultra processed foods, I did not want to eat something unhealthy and I was perfectly fine to wait an extra couple of hours and, um, and have a a really nice, sensible, healthy steak.
Speaker 3:Actually, I had roast beef at one of my favorites uh restaurants, uh, in town. And, um, I checked my sugar that night. Uh, I didn't bring my chia when. I did bring my chia when I was traveling, but I forgot to take it. So I didn't even have the benefit of that and my sugar was fantastic all night long. So again, it's, it's interesting you have to sort of dig in when people say these things and say, oh, you know, I read this, or I went on Reddit and I saw that this guy lost all his hair and okay. Well, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a sustainable lifestyle where you see incremental sustainable health outcomes that are their own reassurance in terms of the direction you want to take this thing, graham.
Speaker 2:How do you feel about that? What are your thoughts wanted to talk about, because I hear this reaction a lot and I'm going to throw it back to you, stephen, because you very eloquently have a great way of explaining the fact that what you'll hear from people and this is, you know, not necessarily people telling you you shouldn't do it the keto carnivore diet they're potentially saying why they won't be able to do it, even though you haven't told them to do it. No one's actually said you should do this. They're just saying I'm doing this, but people automatically assume that that means that we're telling others to do it. That couldn't be further from the truth If people want to learn more about it and they want to learn. You know the potential upside, because I do think there are, you know, a couple of different groups of people when it comes to keto or carnivore diets, and you could apply the same thing with religion or anything else that you know people tend to get heated about journey themselves. They're interested in the why, the how, the. You know. They notice that you have lost a significant amount of weight. You are telling them that you've never felt better. You feel 20 years younger. The arthritis is gone, the blood work is back to excellent All of these things that they know they would like to. You know experience in their own lives.
Speaker 2:So those people that, whether they're interested in changing their diet or not, they are interested in listening to you and I always enjoy those conversations. Sometimes I can't shut up about it, so I warn people that I could go on forever and they need to cut me off. But there's a second group of people who are just waiting to be able to prove to you that what you're doing is wrong, and that's a very interesting group of people. They're not fun to talk to because they're just looking for an avenue to throw out some of the things that we talked about today, just looking for an avenue to throw out some of the things that we talked about today. But the first group are very, very interesting to speak to and one of the things that you'll hear from them is well, I don't know if that lifestyle is sustainable.
Speaker 2:What they're thinking is they're going to crave carbs, they're going to crave veggies, they want more variety in what they eat. Or it might come across as oh, I could never do that lifestyle because I could never give up. Insert food here, right? I've heard ice cream, I've heard cookies, I've heard peanut butter, bread, pizza All of those things are delicious, by the way, and I've given up all of them. You've done such a great job, stephen, and I wonder if you can reiterate this about this idea that it's not that you and I don't love the idea of biting into our favorite slice of pizza. It's that we look at that pizza and understand where our health is inevitably going to go if we put too much of that in our bodies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's great. And that brings us right back to one, and thank you for mentioning that brings us back to one of the original episodes we did and you had asked me the question at the time, you know, and we actually joked about my nickname. When I was a kid I was called Cake Face, right, I mean. I mean, there was nothing that you could do in a dessert, with the exception of rhubarb pie, which I candidly believe my grandmother must have hated me because she nobody eats rhubarb pie. You can't even get a bear to eat that.
Speaker 3:But aside from that, with with that moniker, as a young kid I would even, by family, get teased and say, oh come on, you know, like your cake face, you know you're going to lose the laurels of first place cake face. And I said, well, you know it's crazy. I do love, you know, chocolate cake and I do enjoy a piece of birthday cake and that sort of thing. But what I enjoy more is no neuropathy, having all my toes not have an optometrist or ophthalmologist. Look at my eyes going. You're going to turn into your friend over here who had 35 for his trending numbers and now gets injections once a month into his eyeballs so he doesn't go blind. So I'm like, yeah, I don't know if even my most favorite Nona in the world could surpass getting needles in my eyes.
Speaker 3:So I'm highly I would say, negatively reinforced too, because, although things didn't get that extreme with me, my quality of life was pretty hellacious, especially during the periods of COVID when I had to rely on very limited number of public washrooms. And it's so interesting that we're talking about this, because this weekend I went away for a few days of R&R, for some recreational activities, and I was driving for like an hour and went oh my gosh, I used to do this drive and I'd already have mapped out do I have sufficient time to get to a gas station? Because I have that feeling and you can say, well, it's mind over matter, well, matter or not, because of the improvements I've made in my diet, I no longer have that urgency. I look at my sugar and go, wow, way to go. I don't feel this extreme desire or need to eat before noon or one o'clock.
Speaker 3:I ate today at 1.30 in the afternoon. Yesterday I ate at 7 in the morning. I got up and I had eggs and all the rest of it where I was staying, a nice healthy breakfast with sausage and that held me up for the entire day. I didn't eat again until 6 30 at night. So it fundamentally comes down to feeling like you're in control rather than being controlled, and that is far, far more nourishing and tasteful bite to take than any piece of cake I've ever had in my mouth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the last. When we did the animal documentary review, one of the things that we heard from one of the doctors in the documentary was that your ideal state, the state you're born with, hopefully and I'm not talking about you know certain health conditions that are outside of the influence of food, but we are. We are, for the most part, born as healthy human beings, and then we add damage to become unhealthy, and if you can remove that damage, you have a greater potential to get back to that feeling of healthy. And there's a couple of things here. I totally get when somebody says, oh, I could never do that because I like ice cream too much, and my answer to that is keep eating the ice cream. Maybe there's a bunch of things on the list that you eat because it's convenient, but you could very easily get rid of them if you were able to swap them with something that you didn't think that you may have thought was unhealthy in the past, that you now realize is not. Ground beef is an easy one, or eggs is an easy one, guacamole is an easy one, and so my recommendation to those people is don't stress out about giving up the ice cream. Maybe that's the last thing that you're ever going to give up, or maybe you're still going to have a spoonful or two every now and then and you're going to give up the six scoops of ice cream in a week. But at the end of the day, if you had a list of the ultra-processed foods that you eat and for the most part, ice creams on that list unless you're very careful with the ingredients or you're making it yourself there are probably a lot of things on that list that you could get rid of beforehand and leave the ice cream to the end if you want to go down that path. And so I would say, don't let this idea that you couldn't live without something get in the way of trying this journey, because you really do have the potential to make yourself feel so much better than you feel today.
Speaker 2:And if I had one wish, as it relates to you know the way Stephen, you and I have switched over our lifestyles to this keto carnivore way of eating is I wish everybody, even just for a day, could understand how good it feels to be of optimal health. Because if they did understand that, I think the answer wouldn't be oh, I could never give up the ice cream. I think the answer would be actually, I feel so good that I just don't want the ice cream. It's not that it's not absolutely delicious and I could eat a tub of it. It's that I don't want to feel the way I feel when I'm eating the ice cream and the pizza and the breakfast cereals and the you know triple decker sandwiches and the Subway subs and all the rest. I would rather feel the way I feel now, which is almost never hungry optimal mental health, optimal physical health, tons of energy, you know, going for walks every day. It's just a more enjoyable lifestyle.
Speaker 2:So not judging people that are, you know, hooked on ultra processed foods or ice cream or anything else.
Speaker 2:Absolutely no judgment. But I do wish people could, even for a day, understand what good feels like, because I think that could be such a big motivator. Unfortunately, the only way to realize what good feels like is because I think that could be such a big motivator. Unfortunately, the only way to realize what good feels like is to make a number of significant changes in your life. But what have you got to lose to try those things, to see what it feels like, to say, oh okay, this might be why the keto carnivore lifestyle is so much more sustainable than some of the other ways of eating eating, um that people have. The success rates are actually quite high, and I think the reason is it actually is an easier way of eating it. Um, you, you go from all the 800 things to you know 18 things, um, but it's the, the way you feel is ultimately the big motivator when it comes down to maintaining this lifestyle, and I wish everybody could feel that way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things I would say to people in those situations if I were to say to you and you and I used to use public transit and we sometimes would drive into work, coming from different directions into the city If I said to you, listen, I can get you to work 20 minutes faster and make it enjoyable. You'll enjoy it. The scenery's great, but there's a level five HF you know H5N1 virus on this particular car. You'll have it to yourself. It'll be all yours.
Speaker 3:No one else is going to join you. You know the scenery's great. Like I said, it's a nice smooth ride. We'll put you right in the middle of the train. What do you think You'd say? Absolutely not, wouldn't you? What would you say to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say I'll skip the train ride today. Thank you.
Speaker 3:And I would say well, you know, it's just the flu, right, like, you know, you'll be fine in a week or two. Well, I mean, really, that's food that's not good for you. That's. I'm not saying you're going to get H5N1 from a piece of pizza. What I'm saying is sick is sick. Ibs is IBS.
Speaker 3:I don't really care if it came from from a and you know you used to work with me we would have bagels, you know from from from downstairs, and and that would trigger me. I could eat an apple and it could trigger me because I was in such an inflammatory state. I got to a point where I think, if I sip water through a straw, I would have had a reaction. And I'm not saying that for levity or to be smart, but the point is, if you use that analogy, you wouldn't get into that train every day if it made you sick. Yet we do that with food and it's just as clear.
Speaker 3:Well, I don't even want to use the word food. I would say, from an inflammatory standpoint, it's not healing. What you're consuming is not healing you, it's harming you. And, like you said about the ice cream, if I may just swing back to that, I would propose that people do just the same as sit-ups, just the same as push-ups, just the same as running is push yourself a little farther. If you have a bad day and you fall off, who cares that that's already done? Uh, it's just start again the next day and progress, and you might have six great days and one off day. I don't believe in cheat days. I think that's, that's a counter mindset that I can't get behind. But I promise you, after a few weeks and I want to hear what you have to say about this too when you do try a piece of cake or you do try an ice cream cone, you won't one you won't eat an ice cream cone.
Speaker 3:Two, you will not eat an entire piece of cake. You may put one spoonful in your mouth and go. I can't believe how sweet that is. I can't do that. That's just like I've just swallowed entire maple trees worth of sugar and I don't like it. I actually don't feel good. And that's not a mind over matter thing, that's just a change in diet and I can tell you.
Speaker 3:All you have to do is use a relative and ask them somebody who does not like desserts and say, hey, what do you think of that? And they're going to go oh, that's way too sweet. How do you eat that? I used to hear that all the time. My father was not a sweets person at all, my brother either. And they would say all the time well, I just absolutely know I could eat that and I I could. I could inhale it in like a vacuum. Now when the kids will say hey, dad, do you want a little piece of my cake? I'll try it and it'll be the smallest possible bite, just to be polite. And I know that amount's not going to do anything. But I'm just amazed at how I don't need that, whereas before I could have argued a lifestyle living on vachon cakes and and ice cream and all the other horrible stuff. Like I told you, people didn't recognize me in the soccer field without a piece of pizza hanging out of my mouth, right. So here we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that I found kind of fascinating is, uh, I put sour. I try and buy the best sour cream that I can get. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to pick some up at the Amish farm where we get our eggs, and the funny thing is especially the Amish sour cream. When I taste it directly it reminds me of what cake used to taste like, even though it's nowhere near as sweet. So when I have something very sweet I actually have never really been a sweets person, but certainly if somebody puts a piece of cake in front of me, or ice cream or whatever, I would eat the whole thing. And now if somebody does that, I might have a tiny spoon fill. If somebody does that, I might have a tiny spoon fill, like you said. Just to say that I did. But one of the things that's interesting around this is if you ever go to a party with a vegetarian or a vegan, people will know that that's the way you're eating and so they will come up. They'll make sure, if they're being nice and hospitable, they'll make sure that they have a vegan or vegetarian option for that person. What I find very interesting is I'll go to that same family event where they know.
Speaker 2:For the most part, my wife and I are eating very similarly. We've gotten rid of almost all carbs and vegetables and fruits and that kind of thing, but the accommodation doesn't work the same way. So, you know, just as an experiment, I'll sit there, you know, at a cottage or whatever, and everybody's making snacks and you'll see. The number of times people eat in a day is actually quite mind blowing. I heard a stat on a podcast that I was listening to today that said that the average person eats between 17 and 23 times a day and it really made me think about that. And then I thought okay, if I think about sitting at the cottage and everybody's going back and some people are getting a bag of chips and some people are getting some fruit, and then they're getting fruit box and then they're getting, you know, a pizza slice, and it wouldn't surprise me that people are actually snacking 17 to 23 times a day. They might have three meals, but they're having significantly more snacks.
Speaker 2:And one day the vegetarian who was, you know, at the cottage and of course we always make sure we accommodate for this person to be able to eat I think it was the sixth time that day that she had asked me if I wanted to have a snack. So it was cakes, donuts, cookies, pizza chips all the things that I've given up happily, even though it wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I'm now very happy that I have and I just had to say really kindly to her this would be like me bringing you meat six times and asking you if you wanted it, and scenarios where, especially at the beginning, when you're trying to make adjustments, it's okay to let other people know this is a lifestyle that you've chosen. You are trying to get yourself physically more healthy and one way that you can help is not to be offering me these things. I know they're there, I can go get them if I want them. These things, I know they're there, I can go get them if I want them but by you putting them in front of me it's like, hey, I know you're an alcoholic, but how about one scotch for the afternoon? It's not helping anybody, it's not a good idea.
Speaker 2:But I wanted to jump into this next one, stephen, because it kind of relates to what we just talked about the, you know, because it kind of relates to what we just talked about the upteenth number of times people are eating in a day. Every time they open the fridge, they grab a little something of something, or a box of something or a cookie. They don't count that as meals. One of the things that you might hear from people is oh, I could never do what you do. Your diet sounds so boring. How do you not get tired of eating the same thing every day? And I think what they because they haven't necessarily asked the right kinds of questions is they're just assuming that you're eating a ribeye steak twice a day and that's it, and they're you know in their minds they couldn't possibly do that, that they need a ton of variety. How have you found the reduction in the types of foods that you are willing to eat? Equating to you know being boring, or you're just eating the same thing every day and it's not sustainable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a really good question and I think it's an appropriate one for me to answer. Just keep in mind, as we talked about in early days if there's folks that haven't listened to our preceding episodes I started for a while to try to address my health issues and health challenges by going vegan, because my wife at the time was vegan. By going vegan because my wife at the time was vegan and I tried valiantly to consume a vegan diet, thinking somehow that I might get improved health outcomes. And, of course, in parallel to that, I wasn't doing the in-depth studying at that point than you and I've done in subsequent years. But I was getting more and more sick and this vegan diet was highly ultra-processed. So again, as you alluded in, that previous example is people will typically accommodate a vegan with a vegan dish Almost 100% of the time. Anytime I went to an event like that, they're like oh, you're vegan, well here. Well, here you go, and it's noodles, and noodles are starch, starch is carbs, carbs is sugar. So here I am a semi-controlled diabetic. Basically, I might as well just grab, you know, a, a bag of sugar and start to down it because, yeah, of course, it wasn wasn't successful.
Speaker 3:I had a nice label called vegan, and I didn't have a moral dilemma I was looking at unlike my wife, who doesn't want to consume animals for that reason, and I highly respect vegans that feel that way but the reality was it was making me sick, and it wasn't the diet of a vegan per se.
Speaker 3:It was the options that were provided were actually exacerbating my illness, because I was consuming too much rice, too much pasta, too much this, too much that fake cheese, fake meat, and they were full of estrogen-based items and plant materials that were quite harmful, that were gimmicked as being healthy and in reality they were not. So you have to be an informed consumer, and you know the other thing that you had touched on, too, that I thought was remarkable what your earlier example, and I loved it when you said well, you know, if I was an alcoholic, would you continue to say hey, it's just, you know, have one drink, for instance? Because the reality is that and I think this is probably the most fundamental thing that we probably should talk about is why are you eating? What is your intention? What is your objective?
Speaker 2:If your objective is, yeah, if your objective is for entertainment or is it for specific health outcomes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I would say entertainment, I would insert that's a good one for alcohol for sure, but I would say it's a social comfort that people have. But the problem is that that is a very short term perspective to look at things, because I can promise you, yes, you will enjoy for that 25 minutes consuming that Big Mac. It's the 40 minutes to immediately follow it that will change your mind about how, how beneficial that is. And, of course, there's addictive qualities to these respective foods that'll still make you go back to the trough and eat that stuff and you'll get sick again. Um, you'll need to run into the woods and and and deal with it, or try to find a public washroom, pulling the door because somebody's already in there. I've been through all those scenarios. The reality is is that when your relationship with food which we probably need to have your wife and who's a psychotherapist and perhaps some other people come on when your relationship with food is such that, oh, this is a social process, especially with my roots being Eastern European. That's what it was about. But the reality is the food was really good because everything was home cooked. Now it's like, hey, let's get together, let's have a great social night. I'm going to go get those fake onion ring things. I'm going to go get those cheesy orange things. I'm going to go get some pizza. I'm going to go get some rye, I'm going to go get some vodka. There is literally nothing that I just mentioned that is even remotely healthy for you. So like again to use the analogy of the train or if I said, hey, I just built a poison chamber. Do you guys want to come over? It'll be great, we'll all get poisoned together. So your relationship with food and I'm not trying to be overly militaristic about it, but if you look at food as saying I'm only consuming this to make me better right now than I was yesterday or the day before, your whole relationship with food changes, because now I see it as trickery. I look at a food and go, hmm, I wonder how they've tried to trick me with this and I want to see what the ingredients are. And I wonder how they've tried to trick me with this and I want to see what the ingredients are and I want to study it and I want to understand is red dye good for me? No, it's not.
Speaker 3:Is this kind of derivative like erythritol is a good one? That is a big, big one that's being pushed right now for diabetics, because they know we're monitoring our CGMs and it doesn't give you a rise. But diabetics, because they know we're monitoring our cgms and it doesn't give you a rise. But studies have just come out to suggest that there's an increased likelihood, especially in higher volumes of erythritol. And they're in tiny little cans. You're going to have two, you're going to maybe have three and you're like, oh, it's kombucha, it's, you know, it's great, it's consuming all its own sugar. It's fine, it's full of erythritol which has huge vascular effects on you.
Speaker 3:So I'm weaning myself off of that now that I've learned that that's part of the process. It is its own continuous improvement process, your relationship with food and what you're consuming, the volume that you do it, and this is why I'm such a strong advocate, even for healthy people who use CGMs and folks. I get no endorsement from this, I'm simply sharing. The love is that when I eat something and eat something and I think, oh, I really enjoyed that, and then I look at my sugar, it's like, well, I'm never eating that again. There obviously was something in there that they didn't tell me about, because my body doesn't lie, my liver doesn't lie, they did and that's a big X for me on those foods going forward. So really it comes down to that relationship. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 2:So really it comes down to that relationship. How do you feel about that? I think this is such a brilliant point, to be honest, because too often people have a hedonic relationship with food. It is their entertainment and you know, let's face it, there's a lot of the you know people being with people. And what do you do when you're with other people? You either eat or you drink, or both. Very rarely, you know. Do you have a bunch of people over for a party and serve no drinks and serve no food? It's almost. It basically never happens.
Speaker 2:And so these two things go together. And so the question of what are you eating and why are you eating it? It goes back to things you'll hear like well, what about all these nutrient deficiencies, the vitamin deficiencies, the mineral imbalances without eating fruits and vegetables, balances without eating fruits and vegetables? And I know I'm one question away from them realizing that they actually don't know anything about any of the vegetables that they're recommending. They just believe that all vegetables are 100% wonderful, could not possibly be bad in any way.
Speaker 2:And the same people believe that red meat must be awful because I've been told my whole life it is. I've never actually questioned it, I've never looked into it, I just believe whatever people have told me, and sure, all of us again are guilty of that for lots of different things in our lives. But when I say, well, why do you eat spinach, for example? But when I say, well, you know, why do you eat spinach, for example, they say, oh, it's really high in iron. I'll say, well, one of the things that I learned that really kind of surprised me is there are elements inside spinach that will basically stop you from absorbing any of the iron from the spinach.
Speaker 3:Yes, ok, protecting itself it's protecting itself.
Speaker 2:It's protecting itself. Plants want to protect themselves and they've got lots of different ways to do those, and it's really interesting once you dig into that. And so I'll say well, now that you know that about spinach, that there's really not a whole lot, You're going to get some oxalates.
Speaker 2:I always hear, bacon has a ton of nitrates, right, yeah, okay. Well, a cup of bacon has about 10 milligrams of nitrates. And I'll ask him how much does a cup of spinach have? How much? How much nitrates does a cup of spinach have? Well, I have no idea. I don't. I don't think it has any nitrates. Well, a cup of spinach has about 40 milligrams of nitrates, so four times as much and only a cup.
Speaker 2:Most people aren't going to be eating a cup, a cup of bacon okay, now you're talking. But most people are going to be eating a lot more than a cup of spinach. And so I'll ask them how come you're never told about the nitrates in spinach? How come you're only told about the nitrates in bacon, even though it's a quarter of the amount? Isn't that fascinating?
Speaker 2:I found that fascinating and it made me want to dig deeper and made me want to uncover more information, because now I'm starting to realize I'm not being told the truth and I need to dig into this myself. And so, going back to the vitamin deficiencies, mineral imbalances, that kind of thing, um, I recommend to anybody go on, uh, any sort of um, my fitness pal, or there's a number of apps out there that you can track your food and um type in in one day, uh, six eggs and two pounds of ground beef and see if you have any vitamin or mineral deficiencies in the app. You'll be very, very surprised, right? Whereas the mental gymnastics you have to go through to try and figure out what vegetables, the quantity of vegetables and whether those vegetables actually have bioavailable minerals and vitamins is a near impossible task that I've found.
Speaker 3:Well it certainly consumes a lot of time, because I can speak to that from experience. Two things that I hear a lot, and I'm sure you do too, is hey, man, I could never go on that. It's too expensive. Meat's got way too expensive and I'm like have you looked at how much I spent on vitamins as a vegan? And I'm starting to wean myself off?
Speaker 3:I still do my magnesium, I still do my zinc, I do ashwagandha because it helps with my PTSD, it helps keep me regulated and, like I said, I'm doing Ceylon cinnamon natural cinnamon, healthy cinnamon. I'm floating chia for 30 minutes to turn it into that gooey pasty stuff which looks like fish eggs. That's probably not for everyone, but everything is measured on outcomes for me. What's it doing to my sugar? That's where I start. I've already hit my optimum weight. I'm in the gym. I'm stronger at 58 than I was at 40, 35 or 30 because I'm not fighting IBS and trying to build muscle. I'm in the gym. I'm stronger at 58 than I was at 40, 35 or 30 because I'm not fighting IBS and trying to build muscle. I'm not fighting PTSD and trying to build muscle. So my focus, my mental focus, my mindfulness, my meditation, all of it goes into play. Because the thing is, the crazy part about all of this is when you think about it, when you think about gratitude, having a sense of gratitude for what the body can do. How better to have that private, quiet, internal conversation with your body and saying, hey, I'm going to take my hand and grab this right now and you're going to really like it and you're going to feel good. You know and it's not a short um heroin like high, it is something that is going to give your body the nutrition it needs.
Speaker 3:I bought a giant, giant steak today and it was not a ribeye, it was not the highest grade steak. I bought it at the butcher shop. I have two days worth of meal. I stared at my wife after I tried to eat two-thirds of it and cried I'm not going to make it. And we got her to throw the last suit to save the drowning man because I was so satiated from it I wanted nothing else. Normally I'd have my yogurt after that with my flax seeds. I didn't have any room and so I had. I had what did I have? A little bit of fermented um, uh, uh sauerkraut. I had fermented sauerkraut with it to to get my stomach ready for for what I was consuming and and making sure I had the uh, you know, the bioavailability of my system be able to process it as healthy as possible. Those are the things I think about. That has nothing to do with oh, I'm at the steakhouse and I did this, or I'm I'm I'm at at a friend's house having a great time.
Speaker 3:I'm focused, literally on that self-love of making sure what I'm consuming is good for me, and I don't think there's enough focus that's put on state of mind when you're consuming.
Speaker 3:When you're in a state of inflammation already. Your body's in a state of inflammation and your body doesn't know real bullets from fake bullets and you're under the stress and you're trying to consume something that your body's saying, hey, I think we're getting chased by a dinosaur. That sounds way more serious than me focusing on steak right now. How about we just let that go and you're not going to digest it properly? So that's another important factor when you take the time to prepare your meal. I cook this giant steak. It took me eight minutes to get it to medium rare. It would take me when I was doing pasta. You know I would have to moonlight for my regular job because sometimes some of these, the meal preparations would take longer. It seemed like it was a day's worth of work. And that's another thing too, I find is people are attracted to what looks pretty and what appears to be trendy. So they go on H HDTV and they see all of these.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they see all these cooking shows and everything. Let's be realistic. None of us most of us don't have the time to prepare those. But if what you're preparing is relatively quick and you know when you're purchasing it, you're already in an alliance with your body to say I'm picking this, I know it's healthy. Yeah, I saw that other stuff that's in that lady's cart. I'm so sorry that she doesn't realize that she's going to end up like I was. If she asked me a question about why I'm only purchasing this, I will share it. But I'm really focused right now on what's going to be good for me, and that mindset plays well through the pre-meal, through to the meal and us even talking about it, like tonight. That's all part of the process of taking care of yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm so glad you brought up the total dollar amount of all 17 or 23 of those snacks and meals and equate that to what my diet is, which is eating maximum twice a day, sometimes once a day, but maximum twice a day very high protein, high fat, low carb meals, and so that might look like four to six eggs in the morning with some kind of protein, high fat, low carb meals, and so that might look like four to six eggs in the morning with some kind of protein ground beef, or even hot dogs I'll throw in, or hamburger patties the old 100% grass fed hamburger patties that I try and find and I am totally full. I actually really enjoy it. You know, I might throw some hot sauce one day, I might cook the eggs differently one day, so there's a bit of variety, but not much. I super enjoy it, you know. I know that I've just done something good for my body. I don't need that to be my entertainment, as you so eloquently put it. And then I'm going to go for a walk, and my entertainment is going for a walk, going to see the lake, listening to a podcast, learning something that I didn't know yesterday, and so just switching my entertainment, from snacks and meals to. That's just a chore that I need to get through, and I don't mean that in a bad way. You know, cleaning your house is a chore the results can be fantastic. Exercising is a chore the results can be fantastic. Chores the outcome of chores can be very, very, very satisfying, and certainly in our case, the, the food portion of it. You switch it away from the. This is my entertainment to.
Speaker 2:I'm going to do the minimum required in order to get the nutrients that I need for my body to be in optimal health.
Speaker 2:It turns out that I need very few foods and very, you know, relatively small amounts of foods compared to what I used to eat multiple, multiple, multiple times a day, right up until kind of 1030 at night, before I went to bed I'd grab a peanut butter sandwich, never stop eating. And then I'm up in the morning because of course, I have hypoglycemic at that point, and now I need to shovel something in my face like a bagel or whatever, to try and get that sugar back up to where it needs to be. I don't miss that life at all, and I think you so eloquently put it there that those two things are very, very connected it's. You know the nutrient deficiencies as well as the carnivore ketogenic diet is too expensive. Those for the people that are on those healthy lifestyles. They'll all tell you that that's just a myth and something that you'll find out yourself when you realize how significantly less often you're eating throughout the day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things that I noted prior to going vegan and then moving back to carnivore is to look at episodic parts of my lifestyle. So on a weekend, as my wife and I both trained in the same gym, we would always go see our favorite person at our breakfast place and I would have a coffee, maybe two. I would have eggs with what I thought was healthy, which was brown toast, and half the plate was potatoes. And I never understood why I could barely make it to the seven-minute drive down to the local gym without having to use the washroom. And I used to say to my wife this feels more like renting than it is nourishing my body. And what's crazy is you can look at it and go well, hang on you. You just talked about having six eggs. I have three to four on the days that that I choose to have eggs as opposed to a carnivore lunch and skip eggs and bacon entirely. But on the days that I have it, what's missing? Potatoes? What's missing Tomatoes? What's missing? All I'm eating is the eggs and the sausage. You know I'm not having a fruit cup. So, because the reality was the other stuff that I was having completely destroyed the good things that I was eating, because the inflammatory things that were in my diet overshadowed it and my body was like OK, this is one big giant mess in your stomach right now. We don't want any of it. So now I'm actually malnourished, I'm undernourished, we don't want any of it. So now I'm actually malnourished, I'm undernourished, I'm not getting the food absorption because my system is reacting to stuff that I should not be eating. Especially as an undiagnosed diabetic and I've said this before, most of us type twos were probably pre-diabetic you already were in a significant insulin rise, which means your body's already in a state of inflammation and you're already going to start reacting to food. I started reacting to food in my 30s, you know, and as a military person who had to stand on parade for a couple of hours. You can't have IBS and stand on parade. So I didn't have those problems in my youth with the stress of respective lifestyle, poor quality diet, looking at meals as something that I had to get out of the way, that was in the way of the other things taking the kids to their activities, et cetera. So you and I were always a footnote when it came to our own self-care, and I'm saying by reprioritizing that.
Speaker 3:I'm not interested in the bread, I don't need it. I'm fully satiated from the eggs and the bacon and the sausage. And yeah, I might have four giant pieces of bacon that are, you know, almost as long as my arm. That's how big my butcher cuts it and yeah, it shrinks and stuff. Sometimes I can't even eat four pieces because I'm already full from my four eggs. And my dogs love those days, right right, because they get fresh farmer's bacon it's interesting, um, talking about the price of eating a keto or carnivore diet.
Speaker 2:Um, I was having a chat with somebody who falls into that camp of uh, wants to learn about this lifestyle, has tried quite a number of steps to improving what they eat and has noticed health outcomes improve as a result. So he's really interested in kind of learning and whenever he asks a question I'm always there with an answer and I try and sort of let him lead the conversation. And so one of the things he did talk about was you know, how expensive is it to eat? And I think what he was looking at is we go to the grocery store and our grocery bill is already very high $400, whatever per visit, $300 per visit, whatever it is. And one day he turned around and he said you know one of the things that I hadn't really thought about. He said how often do you eat out? Like how often do you stop at your local fast food joint and grab some food? And I said I might go to Wendy's and get you know their Baconator with no bun and no toppings, so just the beef and the bacon once or twice a month, but that's about it and it's. You know, it's a pretty cheap visit and you know it can be very convenient, but that's basically it. I never go to any fast food place other than that because I know when I need to eat. The rest of the time I don't need to.
Speaker 2:And he said it dawned on me that both my wife and I he had said both my wife and I always ate at least one fast food thing every day. And he said when I added that to my grocery bill and I think this is where people don't necessarily take into account the fact that eating at a fast food restaurant or any restaurant needs to be added to your total food bill in order to figure out which is more expensive, you know we're each dropping $20 per visit per day I said that's $40. You know 21, call it 21, but call it 20 business days for easy math. That's a significant amount of money $800 a month should be added to the grocery bill. And so he said, now that I'm comparing it to you, you're telling me you basically never eat any fast food, you're only eating at home. Now I understand why it's actually significantly cheaper to eat the way you're eating than the way I'm eating. And so and I thought that was a really good revelation for him.
Speaker 2:I remember when my wife and I were, you know, really getting into the keto carnivore mindset and we just went through the um, our kitchen, and we realized half of this kitchen has stuff that never goes bad. Number one and that's not a good sign If food doesn't go bad, you really got to question whether it's food. And number two uh, we are. If we're going to continue this and we said we're going to, we love eating this way, we love the way we feel, we love our body composition, our energy, our mental health improvements, all the rest it's just not something. We're ever going to go back to eating ultra-processed foods. We threw away half the stuff in our kitchen, not threw away. We donated whatever we could. But we got rid of half the stuff in our kitchen, not threw it away. We donated whatever we could, but we got rid of half the stuff in our kitchen and have never replaced it.
Speaker 2:And so the fact is we have stepped up with more expensive versions of things. So I now buy the best sour cream that I can find, unless I can get it at the Amish farm. I buy eggs that are from the Amish farm that are actually the same price as the cheapest eggs at the grocery store, but they are significantly more nutrient dense and therefore I have enough money to be able to splurge on. You know, seven to 10 ribeyes a month and the best grass fed ribeyes I can find, and when I add up my total grocery bill at the end it's about the same as it was before, but everything else is better, and so I think that's such a an important topic and one that maybe dominates people's thinking when it comes to, okay, this keto carnivore thing. You know it used to be called Atkins and that was a very popular diet for a number of decades, and now it's called a ketogenic diet. But it's a very similar diet if you look at both. The fact is that that could be one of the biggest barriers to entry, until people realize they're eating a whole lot less. They're eating a whole lot less often and now they can be picky and choosy about tasting or buying the best quality, most tasty versions of what they actually would like to eat at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:I wanted to end off with this last one, stephen, and get your thoughts on it. I've heard this a number of times in different variants, but essentially it's. Essentially it's well. I read this dietician's article in mainstream media and they said there's never been any randomized control studies that say the carnivore diet is healthy. And my answer to that is please show.
Speaker 2:First of all, let me point out that the person who wrote that article is a vegetarian nothing against vegetarians.
Speaker 2:But I'm not sure that I'm going to trust that there's no bias as it relates to that article, because all she's pushing is a vegetarian diet.
Speaker 2:But why don't we ask her? Or if you can send me the randomized control study that proves that standard American diet, which a number of countries in the West follow, including Canada and the US, show me the randomized control study that shows that the standard American diet is actually the best for you. There is no randomized control study that shows that. It's all based on who spends the money on the research, as opposed to the randomized control studies, which are near impossible to do but certainly very expensive to do and nobody's willing to foot the $100 million to compare the standard American diet to, say, the carnivore or ketogenic diet. I know what I think the outcome would be and there certainly have been some studies to show healthy outcomes of the ketogenic diet. I know what I think the outcome would be. And there certainly have been some studies to show healthy outcomes of the ketogenic diet. So what say you? When it comes to this diet as a fad, there's no scientific backing to it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So my first response is I don't really care in terms of those studies, because I am my own chemistry lab. I've done, I've done my own work. I've read those, those documents. Um, I, I know how to do critical analysis. I have a master's degree.
Speaker 3:Candidly, I think the only thing writing a thesis taught me was how to debunk, um, crappy research. So, um, so, really, you know my, my, uh, my study is really focused on what's my body doing, what is my blood work, say Hard to argue. Unless they switch, you know, my, my blood with a pregnant woman, I'm suspecting I won't be surprised because I'm managing the outcomes of my, of my diet, and I'm being consistently. I'm showing similar or better numbers each time I have a check. So I don't really care about any of that stuff. If anything, it just irritates me because I see the contradictions coming from one article to another, saying this and that, and they're often not citing. They'll cite a doctor and there might be a hypertext to say who they are, but then when, like you said, you go in and dig in further and go well, how many people did they study? They studied 16 people for 20 minutes.
Speaker 2:It's not a proper study and again, or the study will be an epidemiological study, which is, you know, the, the, the, the nurse's study, for example, where they're tracking what people eat over like a 20 year period. Well, I, when you ask what they're, what they're doing is they're sending out a survey once a year that says what did you eat in the last year? No one can remember what they ate last week, much less last year, and one of the issues with that is there's a, a, a healthy bias. Yes, that's built into that. So you're not going to tell me you had 16 slices of cake last week. You're going to tell me that you had 15, uh, garden salads that you, you grew yourself because of that healthy bias.
Speaker 3:Go on and that's also very subjective.
Speaker 2:These studies are absolutely worthless when it comes to basing any nutritional evidence on the outcomes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and if you write 16 studies under a high degree of comparison bias and then use that as part of a meta analysis, it's, you know, meta analysis equates to a mass amount of garbage. It's now underlining the same conclusions through corroborative studies that really actually are not rooted in fact, and this is a challenge that we run into in society across the whole spectrum, whether it's politics, whether it's food, whether it's between countries, you name it it's a huge challenge. So all I'm saying is the power. You have the power in your own hands. If you can get to a doctor, get your baseline. You tell them what you want to have tested in terms of your blood analysis, and then if they say, hey, listen, we're not going to pay for this, we're not going to pay for that, then just pay for it. Get a baseline. You're that important. Consider it your Christmas gift to yourself. If that's, uh, something that you practice and um, and then just do it. And then, if you're still a little skeptical, or if they say, oh, you're pre-diabetic, we think we might have to put you on metformin. Um, then you have to make a choice.
Speaker 3:I made it. I felt every day like I had chewed glass when I was on that stuff. It made my ibs um to to a point where I I candidly didn't even want to be on the planet anymore. It was that severe the side effects for me, which was exacerbated by all the other things. But often we don't talk about the side effects. We just say, oh, this is covered, just take this, you'll be better. It's not solving the problem.
Speaker 3:I didn't reverse my diabetes for metformin. Metformin does not get credit for it. I stopped taking it. My blood results showed better outcomes and they said, yeah, we're going to just up the dose a little bit. I said, yeah, because so zero times, what is what they said? Pardon me, zero times, what is what? Because I'm not taking metformin and haven't for six months.
Speaker 3:I was immediately deemed as being medically defiant. So you know, the reality is we have the power because they're using what they're using meta analysis that's coming from pharmaceutical companies who are also in bed with this, with the same food purveyors that are often the same companies. And so, yeah, we got a pill for that. This food yeah, it's great, it tastes wonderful, which is full of sugar, as opposed to raw ribs like I brought today from the butcher, where you add your own dry seasoning to it. There's no sugar in it because you're controlling it.
Speaker 3:So take control of your own destiny. Treat yourself the same way as you would your firstborn and make sure you're doing the very best for yourself and you'll see the results. And it won't matter what NIH says or someone else comes out with a study. If anything, you'll be so healthy and so focused, with no brain fog, you'll be able to drill through the nonsense of those. Some of those, those studies that are not studies are not scientifically based, and at the end of the day, you just have to look at yourself and go okay, I used to go to this breakfast place once a week.
Speaker 3:15 minutes after I left, I used to be sick. I had to get to a washroom, and that's not usually what gyms are for. They're usually for working out, not for using the washroom. Now I go, I have more muscle mass, my sugar is under control. What is it I'm doing?
Speaker 3:Exactly everything that we described tonight is a keto carnivore. Sometimes I'm strictly carnivore for a meal, other times I'm mixing them. Yes, I do have concerns about oxalates, as you do. I try to mitigate that other ways I'm you know. I'm having great outcomes. I'm not getting kidney stones. So there's enough information that you know Graham and I are giving you where you can look at different options and you could be a hybrid of the both of us. But focus, reverse engineer from the result, nevermind the nonsense that's in the cloud with what people are saying. Look at how you are today, use that as a baseline. Look at how you're going to be in two weeks, two months, and give yourself time in your body, time to heal. You'll be shocked at how quickly your body will begin to heal and it'll start rewarding you with measurable results. Like you don't have to use a washroom, you don't feel nauseous after you eat, you're not hungry 45 minutes after you just consumed breakfast because you're not eating.
Speaker 2:Um, you know sugar floating in a cereal bowl yeah, I'll just I I couldn't have said it better myself. And I'll just sort of end it with. People will say have you had your blood work checked? Because this is a really strange way of eating and as well. I've told the story before, but I'll tell it quickly.
Speaker 2:I had my blood work done a number of years ago. It was going in the wrong direction. The doctor said if everything keeps going the way it's going, you're going to end up on drugs. And I knew those drugs were going to be permanent drugs unless I did something about it. And so I got the results triglycerides A1C, hba1c, hdl, ldl and a number of other markers. And you know where I was with things like vitamin D and all the rest. Pretty standard blood test results. But I got the actual results this time.
Speaker 2:Dug into them, used, you know, my knowledge of research to figure out what is the actual metabolic function of each of these. What causes, you know, blood sugar to rise. That kind of thing causes blood sugar to rise, that kind of thing. Learned all about insulin resistance and metabolic disease and how that's actually causing heart disease. And certainly when I started out I did not know I was going to end up in this carnivore, keto way of eating. In fact, if you told me that that's where I was going to end up, I would have called you crazy, and so I certainly wasn't guilty of confirmation bias, because I didn't even know that's where I was going to end up. I was a sponge. I was an open book when it came to learning, and I had to tell myself Graham, you don't know what you're talking about, so now you need to learn. And yet I understand most people aren't going to be able to do that. I go down a rabbit hole and I spend a year down there learning as much as I can, and when I come up I feel pretty confident that I've got the answer for me, and that was the case here.
Speaker 2:I went back to the doctor 14 months later after making some significant changes to the way I eat A lot of what we talked about today and in this podcast and over time I had increased my walking, but that was that, had really come near the end of that. So I the walking wasn't necessarily going to contribute to improve blood results, because I hadn't done it as much as I do today. And so you know when they say, well, there's no, I read here that this way of eating. There's no actual studies to show that it's healthy. I'll say, well, there's no studies to show that the standard American diet is healthy. But, as we learned in a previous episode, two out of 40% of adults have prediabetes. So it can't possibly mean that the standard American recommended diet is healthy if 40% of the people following that diet are considered unhealthy to the point where this is going to have a significant impact on the future of their health.
Speaker 2:But when I went back to the doctor and I got the blood work done again, he called me up and he said Graham, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I've got no concerns whatsoever. Everything is marked as excellent and we don't need to put you on any medication whatsoever. And I asked him if he wanted me to come in and explain what I'd done because I hadn't followed the advice he'd given me, which is eat more plants and fruits and vegetables. And he sort of said oh, thanks for the offer, I'll take it under advisement. Which made me sad he's a great doctor. Made me sad because I was hoping he would say no, come on, I want to learn what you've done because maybe I can get other people to get on a healthy lifestyle track, and so when people tell me there's no scientific way of saying, of showing that this diet is healthy, and I say well, the standard American diet also doesn't have any of these trials. But N equals one trial of me has solved almost all of my problems.
Speaker 2:Mentally I'm better. Physically I'm better. I have more energy than I ever have. Mental health is better than I can ever remember. My joint pain is gone. Even my rotator cuff that's been bothering me for 20 years is 90% better than it was, and so I don't need any randomized control study to tell me that what I've learned is appropriate for me, and if anybody else can benefit from learning what we've gone through or what we've heard from people, to me that is a great gift to give back to people with no expectations in return. Stephen, thank you for another wonderful episode. Really appreciate you joining and lending your expertise to the conversation. Thank you, graham. I appreciate it, you as well. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks for listening to another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse, and we will talk to you next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning into Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Join Stephen and Graham next time for more keto tips and stories to fuel your health. Subscribe, share and let's keep the keto vibes going.