Carnivore is Best Diet Depression and Anxiety, Says Amber O'Hearn

I thought my life wasn't worth living a lot of the time which is a terrible terrible way to live and then to have simply a change in diet have that profound an effect to go from that to feeling optimistic almost every day of my life is just it's hard to even imagine if you have an experience - mm-hmm now at that time were you seeing conventional treatment from a psychiatrist or neurologist yeah did you tell them come to get off these meds because I changed my diet I had a really lucky turn of events I had started the carnivore diet or the CC diet as in common at the time and I was on a low dose of medication I was also on thyroid medication and shortly after I started the carnivore diet I got pregnant I did end up going back on the carnivore diet as soon as my baby was born and I was still nursing so I didn't have any more meds and I just never needed them again and so I never went back to psychiatrists should write her a letter if she's still practicing like believe it yeah yeah my my ex saw her on the bus one time and there told her the story she was kind of speechless no no I mean what would you say it sounds ridiculous [Music] today's show with Amber's brought to you by our pals over at blue blocks calm the leaders in blue light filtering protective eyewear it actually looks good and fits nice and snugly on your face that can even be made and customized if you need prescription lenses for your blue light filter and glasses so why should you care about this the data is out showing that screen usage not only causes digital eye strain but it can actually affect some of the neurons and literally rewire your brain in a negative way so if you're like me and you're spending a lot more time whether it's good or bad on your screens because you can't see real people and you know we're distancing ourselves from other humans I think you should be protecting your eyes using blue light filtering lenses that have been validated in comparison to all the other cheapies that are 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unfortunately at an all-time high with all this uncertainty so it's a timely discussion I really hope you enjoyed it and if you do please hit that like button and let's cut back to it with amber amber thank you so much for coming on thank you for having me yeah we're in this beautiful do some b-roll shots but we're just north of Boulder just outside of LA beautiful country so you must get a lot of like creative insights here just like seeing all that there's a lot of cattle around us in just beautiful mountains so I was telling you offline I used to live out here and I just really miss you you know in Boulder you know it's beautiful it's very light there's a lot of sunshine here it's known for that yeah and coming from you grew up in Nova Scotia so that not kind of the opposite right you're so far north yeah it's very foggy and moist and cloudy all the time must be pretty though I mean you're it's gorgeous in green yeah yeah yeah yeah so is it I consider you to be an innovator and in the whole carnivorous diet field you started this and I want to get into your story a little bit in 2009 which so 2009 I think it was like three or four years after the whole Paleo diet things started to come online and I think that is it's really like it's really you know courageous of you to just realize that maybe these anti nutrients were these these fibrous compounds and vegetables may not be so good for me so what kind of inspires you and how did you get motivated or you know so curious and to just kind of eliminating all vegetable matter in your diet back then well I didn't really go willingly like that I didn't think my way to it I had to start thinking about it after but what happened was I was just really frustrated and where I was with my health I'd been already eating a low-carb diet for about a dozen years and that was really good for me but over the course of a decade or so I'd gradually gained weight again and I was just looking for some missing piece and when I came across just a very obscure forum where some people were were eating only meat I thought well maybe that's maybe I just need a kind of tune-up where it's where it's really more strict low carb and that's all I was thinking of it as I didn't really put the pieces together that plants might actually have something that was detrimental to me and it took me a long time to get to that but what happened was I tried it and it was just so incredibly effective and beneficial for my health in so many ways that then I had to say wait a minute maybe some of my assumptions are wrong so this was like an online forum yeah back then do you remember the website or was it just yeah it was called zeroing in on health okay it was mainly it was run by Charles Washington and Dana Spencer was also an admin at the time okay and it was very small and it had been an offshoot from a sub forum on Jimmy Moore site where they had decided they wanted their own space and their own sort of control over what was being talked about and so there was just like a ragtag group of people who had decided they were going to try this and we're starting to notice not only was it helping people who had a background like me that is they had been on low-carb but they just weren't getting everything they wanted or had gotten to a stall or who were just kind of curious about it and had tried this approach of just eating meat and buy meat I mean like animal foods so the eggs and some people are eating dairy but it was just dropping the plants and so it was interesting that they were calling it zeroing in on health because there was always that emphasis that I didn't really appreciate it at the beginning like it's not wasn't zeroing in on weight zeroing in on health but almost everyone who came there initially came for the weight interesting yeah now going back in your story a little bit didn't you were you vegan for a little while and there's a while I was so I was brought up vegetarian and I think it was good vegetarian like not it wasn't this kind of strong man like you know just positive yeah my my parents were poor and so we ate a lot of greens and legumes in part for that reason but also there was a sort of ethical component about kindness to animals and so we didn't cook meat at home almost ever we had eggs and milk and I wasn't disallowed from eating meat so I did get it from time to time at my grandparents house or out at a restaurant but basically I was brought up with a vegetarian ethos and a vegetarian diet mmm so that must been hard initially to kind of grapple with mentally right like the you know well I want to do what's best for my health but what about these animals and I think that is a big stumbling block for a lot of people and I think it kind of creates some sort of confused and a lot of emotional resistance when when people on the internet say hey I'm gonna try a carnivorous diet or a zero carb diet and so forth and for my health a lot of people react to that with well what about the animals what about the environment you know and so how did you kind of mentally navigate that in 2009 well in 2009 I was already a meat-eater I think that for whatever reason the ethical animal arguments weren't that compelling to me I never saw it as you know torture any of these things because I think that you can give an animal a beautiful life and and gently take their life and use it to support your own I don't think those are necessarily at odds of course they can be and I think it's important to care about the animals that your life depends on but for me the biggest stumbling block was just that I had this idea that even that health had to depend on plants and that it was just a more natural thing for us and I didn't I don't know where I really got those ideas they hadn't been things I had examined critically it was just something that I sort of Bose Moses took into my worldview right I mean I think a lot of us naturally I don't even know where it comes from but plants are healthy these we need these fibers we need the phyto nutrients we need antioxidants and so it's you know when when people hear that you're gonna have a diet as devoid of those things they there's a lot of resistance that comes up so yeah what do you think that comes from is it just schooling just something that we've heard over and over and Gani I think repetition does make a lot of it yeah so there's the official kinds of education about whole grains being the basis of a healthy diet but I had already of course by the time I got to the zero carb forum had already given up grains and legumes but not from a kind of paleo standpoint you had mentioned that paleo had become quite popular by this time but I wasn't very persuaded by it yet I thought that paleo in fact I thought the whole reason it worked was because of the carps that's how deeply I had internalized the idea that carbs were the source of the problem and I think that's because ditching the carbs had such a profound effect on my own weight and health when I did that that I thought why do you even need any other explanation so but I do think that the greens and the legumes is the basis of a diet is a big it's part of just things that we think we know and we're told from a very young age and it takes a long it takes a bit of work to to rethink that right it's challenging I mean sometimes I admit and I struggle with I'll go like weeks with no fibre but then there's this little thing in the back of my mind like I shouldn't I have fibre I mean what about this what about that so it's very it's very interesting but again I want to weave in a little bit more to your story and then get into some of these nuances of the diet but mental health I think was a big reason to us as well and I think the people that I've heard at least on social media that benefit from going on a carnivorous style diet primarily I mean I think a lot of people benefit but primarily autoimmune disease and mental health and then you mentioned body composition what did you notice from a mental health standpoint and mood initially and maybe how long into eating this way did some of those feelings kind of diminish yeah well I have a long history of mental health problems actually and I never connected them with diet it just it didn't even really occur to me to because it's either either think of it as psychiatric or well physiological but the brain has this kind of special status that we don't think of being affected in the same way that we do for say heart disease you might think about diet but mental health people don't really so I had had depression which I was first diagnosed with when I was 20 it was eventually considered treatment-resistant major depressive disorder meaning that I would go on any depressants and it might help a little bit for a little while but it wasn't really resolving and no one knew why and I just hung out on antidepressants for a really long time without anything getting better but then in my 30s I started experiencing different kinds of mood disturbances and I was eventually read iagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder type 2 bipolar and the difference is just that in in traditional bipolar you will have periods of actual psychotic breaks of mania and bipolar type 2 you have the depressive States but you don't have the psychotic breaks so when I got read iagnosed or aleix itíd about it it was intimidating because of course it sounds really serious and it is but I thought well maybe this is why all this time I've never come across a solution because I had the wrong diagnosis and maybe now I'll get the help that I need to get the right drugs that I need and everything will be better but in fact things just got worse oh wow each drug had side effects and didn't really help very much so things are just getting worse and worse so it was at that stage of my life at the end of 2008 where my my mood disorder had gotten worse and my weight had gotten worse way worse I was almost 200 pounds and I didn't link them then and even until years after I didn't really fully make the connection but now I think they're quite intimately linked but what happened was I tried this all meat diet and I immediately started dropping weight rapidly so first of all like a pound every couple of days and but at the same time I felt really good now one could say well finally this goal is happening so of course you're gonna feel happy and excited and and I knew that there might be a component of that but after a couple of weeks I just felt so I just felt more like myself in a way that's kind of hard to describe and when I brought it up with my husband at the time he said I didn't even know how to bring this up but you just seemed more stable than I've ever seen you in my life now of course with when you have bipolar you're not gonna say oh in two weeks now I know it's cured right because this is a long-term progressive disease and you might have two weeks where you feel great and so you know I kind of kept back for making any major conclusions but after staying on that diet for a very long time it became increasingly clear that my mood problem had basically vanished that's amazing now mechanistically what do you think is going on there and there's no probably a lot right like blood Sugar's stability and less information and this and that but you know you this has now been like what you know 11 years 12 years if you could tease apart if you don't speculate what do you think I think it was well it's a great question and I've tried a whole bunch of different hypotheses and never so far really found one that either that completely explains it or that I completely understand in the beginning I thought because I came from that very carb centric model I thought maybe it's just really down to the amount of carbohydrates maybe there's even fiber maybe could be so even a small amount maybe I have some kind of microbe that's driving my my health problems and even a tiny bit of feeding them will send me off kilter and I decided that that wasn't probably it in part because I have tried addressing microbes and I also don't have any lab results that would indicate that that was something that was the real contributor to my problem and also not only that but a plant free diet is not necessarily a low carb diet so I could eat things that were higher in carbs like dairy products or eggs or liver for example and I don't have that reaction so I don't think it's really about the carbs mm-hmm then I started following dr. Georgie aids work and she said something that is not necessarily novel news but to me it was a complete brain flip turn I have an idea that that plants aren't really there for your benefit like actually there are organisms with their own motivations in a functional sense and they don't want to be eaten any kind of any plant that makes itself available to be eaten unless you've got some very complex kind of symbiosis going on is going to be detrimental to the plant and that's particularly true if you're eating parts of their body that they need to survive or reproductive parts for example so I came to learn that plants because most of them can't move very fast defenses so they have some more physical barrier ones like shells or thorns but they're also full of chemicals that are actually a defense mechanism that they're they're basically pesticides and so we're when we eat plants even the ones that we have bred to be lower in toxicity they always have some level of toxicity and I thought well maybe maybe that's the problem maybe the plants are somehow poisoning me now it does still create a conundrum because obviously lots of people eat plants and don't have the problems that I have so what I've come to decide is that I have developed some kind of vulnerability that makes the toxins that are in plants makes me open to them or is it uniquely susceptible for some reason yes such that when I take them out I feel better yeah yeah I mean it is interesting right because some of these so called anti nutrients or defense mechanisms have been studied there have purported health benefits so for f---ing is one so how do you kind of grapple with this mentally you know to differentiate these purported health benefits of these defense mechanisms so forth in being one you know the Federal Elections and resveratrol Japanese knotweed things like that you know because there's two schools of cants camps you know your camp and and that the phytonutrient camp how did how do we make sense of this well that's a really good great question I love that question because I think that so there are there is a response that you can have to certain chemicals in plants where a body will actually make self stronger in a way when it's presented with a bit of a toxin and so some people will say well actually you need to eat these plants to keep your body strong enough to fight off whatever it means it's almost like a kind of immunization model and of course they'll use the word hormesis for it the reason that I find that not quite so compelling there are a couple reasons one is that usually the amounts that are involved are so high that you can't necessarily get it by eating a sort of natural amount of the compound so if you take for example sulphur fame you really need to eat like I don't remember the exact amount but like maybe a pound of broccoli sprouts a day and then the sprouts are not all of the same concentration if you compare different ones off the shelf I wrote a paper that was actually all about how to get enough sulforaphane and the authors concluded that it just wasn't realistic to try to get a therapeutic dose out of a natural food and that's why they're trying to figure out the best methods for isolating and concentrating and the same thing might be said about the curcumin and resveratrol and I think those are the top three for the efficacy that's been studied all right so that's one problem is it seems a little bit contrived and not necessarily something that you could argue that humans were evolved to depend on hmm but then a second problem that I have with it is that the mechanism of action goes through a molecular pathway which is usually called nrf2 and that pathway is actually stimulated by being on a ketogenic diet and so there's this question of if you're already getting that stimulation through a ketogenic diet do is there any extra added benefit from getting it from a plant source and I can't tell there is in part because we don't have very good measurements of what the of how much the dose is and if you're talking about hormesis you're talking about something where the dose gets better and better and better and then it gets toxic and if you don't even know what dose you need to get better you could actually be veering into the other side and how how would you for an individual figure out how much you should be getting that's an that's an excellent point I didn't realize that the state of nutritional ketosis increases north to you it does yeah yeah more about that that's fascinating yeah so what it does is it there's a really an interesting interaction with keto adaptation so when you first start acute at genic diet you will increase the oxidative stress and what happens is that over the process of kyudo adaptation the cell will start creating its own antioxidants in the same way that it does in response to a to a phytochemical but after the process of keto adaptation it appears at least in some studies in rodents that the the the balance now is tipped in the favor of the antioxidant on a ketogenic diet and so it's it all works through a NPK as far as I understand right right very fascinating I mean there's a lot of how do you say survival circuits David Sinclair's kind of talked about that induced through this more kind of fat adapted phenotype which I think it's really really fascinating and a lot of people don't really realize that and along those lines I didn't want to interrupt you when you were talking about like before you realize Georgia eats you know her notion of these anti nutrients found in plants you found a lot of benefit just with your own body composition with regards to you know restricting the carbohydrates per se there's a lot of people that will say oh yeah well if you go low-carb Aikido you're naturally reducing your calories so it's it's really not the the calories coming from carbohydrates it's really the deficit created from you know the restricting that particular food group well let's talk about that art because what happens if you say you're you're you spontaneously reduced calories to me that means that your fat stores have are providing enough energy that you feel satiated so if you if you if it's all about a deficit of calories you could try manipulating calories directly and forget about the carbs what happens if you say you give yourself what you believe is a caloric deficit of 300 calories or something like that if you don't feel satiated that indicates to me that your body fat stores are just not providing what they're supposed to be providing and you're actually not getting what you're supposed to be getting under the caloric deficit whereas if you spontaneously reduced by 300 calories that says to me that's how much flow of fat you were naturally getting so it's possible that you could reduce the I don't I don't actually think that it works all the time it might work in some cases it's possible that you could reduce the calories and get the same effect if your fat stores are cooperating but if they are cooperating you should get that satiety and it should feel like you spontaneously did it so I kind of feel like if you don't get a spontaneous calorie drop you're fighting against your body not with your body and you're not actually getting the the fat from your stores in a way that you might expect you are that's a really good point I never considered it in that regard and it makes a lot of sense because you know a lot of people that go on a diet they they're hungry all the time they're craving foods and things like that and and people that are naturally eating like carnivorous or ketogenic style diet report that they're satiated they're full they don't need to have these snacks and things and and yeah and I was just talking with dr. berry this weekend and another mechanism that I think is kind of interesting is the reduction in baseline inflammation that that lends itself to more volitional activity so people's you know if you want to look at the energy in energy out hypothesis people are just doing more volitional activity you know to go mow the lawn they feel better they don't have the aches and pains and their joints that was causing them to just sit around and maybe over consume foods which i think is fascinating now along those lines that's one of the things that I think is really interesting about going on the carnivorous diet is people that had previously high levels of inflammation c-reactive protein ferritin everything those things seem to drop and that I think is really confusing for a lot of people that will say well you know this Whole Foods plant-based diet is very anti inflammatory and all this so do you think that's a big mechanism kind of a player's the inflammation I do so inflammation is your body's way of healing right so whenever there's inflammation going on that means that something asked for inflammation there's damage your body's saying we need to respond to this damage by creating inflammation and so if if your food is anti-inflammatory in the sense of you're giving medicine that reduces your body's inflammation response that doesn't necessarily reduce the damage response so there's two ways to reduce inflammation right you can you can hide it or knock out your response to damage or you can reduce the damage itself which then causes less need for inflammation and so I think when you see a claim that such and such a food is an inflammatory or anti-inflammatory you've got to ask what is what does that mean does that mean it's reducing the need for inflammation or does it mean it's fighting your body and and preventing your response so in a lot of ways they think that plant-based claims are often saying this component and it comes back to those isolated concentrated components that we don't even know have that effect at a food level has been shown to reduce inflammation is that because your body it's helping your body to fix something and then you don't need as much information or is it just interfering mm-hmm it's a great way to look at it something else before we kind of dive deeper that I wanted to talk to you about I didn't think I'd bring it up but given that you've would you say that you're fully recovered from mental health stuff like I think all and I speak for myself a lot of us are susceptible when the days are dark with their stress and in the winter months as we film this in early January we can feel a little down do you think depression exists in the sense that is it something it's feedback from your body right but do you think that it's like a lot of people struggle through their entire life and like you you experience you know going on this medicine or this medicine and it's not really restoring the root cause of the problem so um is it a response in the body or is it how do you view depression from a theological perspective now thank you well it's a little complicated I think that in in a lot of people's minds and in my mind previously my model of what depression was either came down to a disorder of thinking or some kind of chemical imbalance of course you can't have one without the other I don't want to be a dualist about it right but a lot of the things that I did to try to address depression when I was younger was to pay close attention to my thoughts and try to like be very aware of when I'm thinking all-or-nothing things or when I'm when I'm going for all these cognitive biases that you know if I think about life this way of course I'll feel depressed and you can you can try to manage the way you think the funny thing about that is that even though I could see how useful that was it never really helped to me when I was feeling depressed but when I stopped feeling depressed these skills became super awesome I mean now now I'm in a much better position to actually make use of all that cognitive therapy that I did when I was depressed that didn't help me then the balance theory I think is also not quite right because if you if you're conceiving of your depression is something like oh you've got too much too little dopamine or something like that it begs the question in the same way that a calories in calories out model might right so why do you have too little dopamine or why do you have too little serotonin and if you do something that intercepts at the receptor level and says okay we're gonna prevent you from taking this back up does that does that really solve the problem I don't think it really does because I think your body is striving for some kind of homeostatic setpoint in terms of neurotransmitters that just manipulating it at the receptor level isn't really addressing so I do feel like my ability to cope with stress and things that would normally cause a person to be unhappy and I have happy times and unhappy times like everybody else but I used to be just thrown in a hole in a way that I'm just much more resilient and it it made me become much more of a believer in the physiology of the brain even though I want to in a kind of romantic way think that I can think my way through anything the role that physiology has played has been very humbling I love that because it we do hear about kind of if I could kind of add some nomenclature I think just to make me help remember it better you were talking about kind of this kind of a top-down approach like I'm feeling depressed I can't have these feelings I gotta think happy thoughts and you know be optimistic but if you have but you could have worked on both you started top-down and bottom-up diet getting the foundation maybe calm me down inflammatory processes in the body that we're aggregating your brain and causing these neurotransmitter imbalances so I think you know having approaching it from two angles it's really unique and I feel like not a lot of neurologists or psychiatrists but I feel like the conversation is being more and more talked about which is really nice for people but there's I went through a bout of depression as well overtraining in college wanting to be a pro bike racer but you know then I thought it was all my thoughts and things like that too but at that time I was consuming a lot of soy protein I worked at this vitamin store and the cheapest protein powder I could get was this soy protein and and and I can't say that was the I think it was a trigger a big trigger because I had these dark days it was it was January 2006 like I couldn't get off the couch I was like thinking about suicide I'm like what and he'll like I've never had these feelings before and then I started that's how I found paleo but it was really interesting that you know that some compounds and weather and I was only that protein where that was an exacerbation totally affect the brain in a negative way and I think this is an important conversation because mental health especially amongst people in their teens and 20s right now the rates of suicide and depression are sky-high and people are blaming it on tech and technology and screens and social media but we know in those individuals there's a big push for plant-based and you know do what's right for the environment and so I think this conversation can be very helpful for people to realize that your diet can be a major factor for your mental state you know and don't under that so yeah it's surprising the amount I mean just mind-blowing really to think I mean if you just take my experience which is the one that's closest to me I was I was suffering psychiatric horror really I felt a lot of suicidal tendencies I thought I thought my life wasn't worth living a lot of the time which is a terrible terrible way to live and then to have simply a change in diet have that profound in effect to go from that to feeling optimistic almost every day of my life is just you you can't even it's it's hard to even imagine if you haven't experienced it mm-hmm now at that time were you seeing conventional treatment from a psychiatrist or neurologist yeah did you tell them like I'm gonna go out these meds because I changed my diet I had a really lucky turn of events I had started the carnivore diet or the CCA diet as we called it at the time and I was on a low dose of a medication I was also on thyroid medication and shortly after I started the carnivore diet I got pregnant and so I had to go off all my meds because it wasn't clear that they're safe yeah so I did that and as I've mentioned to other people I didn't stay completely carnivore during my pregnancy I didn't even stay completely low carb and that's partly to do with a hereditary condition I have called hyperemesis where you're you're very prone to vomiting when you're pregnant not just like the morning sickness at the beginning but all through a lot of people get hospitalized and so there were a lot of times when I ate food just to kind of soothe my stomach but in any case I did end up going back on the carnivore diet as soon as my baby was born and I was still nursing so I didn't have any more meds and I just never needed them again and so I never went back to psychiatrists should write her a letter if she's still practicing like I believe it yeah yeah my my ex saw her on the bus one time and he told her the story she was kind of speechless she know what to say no I mean what would you say it sounds ridiculous right okay Wow gosh I mean now how did you discover Georgia aids was that back in that era or is this as of late no it was back in that first year I came across a video of hers from the ancestral health symposium it was called her talk was called Little Shop of Horrors it was all about plants and how they might not be as benign as you might assume or certainly as how I assumed so I watched that and then I looked up her website and read what she was doing and I've just been a huge advance yeah I didn't realize so she's been doing this a long time as well a very long time well she's she's been studying diet and the effective plants for a long time and I think she was on a very carefully crafted elimination diet for many years and I think she started carnivore about two years ago okay time flies yeah that's impressive that's really really cool she seems like a great person I've only talked to her a handful of times okay so maybe if we can kind of drill down on some things you know because again you have the carnivore symposium that's going on this May of 2020 here in Boulder Colorado which is awesome I'll put links below friends you definitely gotta check that out but I'm sure you've received just ton I think Twitter's your primary your most active on Twitter she receives Crowley's a litany of messages I had this condition and I tried carnivore and this happened what are some main conditions that you hear people getting like a result resolution well it's it's funny that you talk about the social media because I do get more private messages than I can handle so I just want it since I've got this opportunity make a public apology if you've sent me a message and I haven't replied it's just that I'm a little bit flooded and many of those questions are very art I wouldn't have the credentials to answer because there you would require you know a history and there might be some something medical going on but when I do hear from people who just write to me to say hey I want to thank you for turning me on to this idea because I've resolved such-and-such it's very often mood related and I think that's partly because that's something that I've openly talked about so people want to connect with me about that but I've also seen people who do have the autoimmune connection resolutions and things like arthritis asthma skin conditions like eczema or psoriasis and also GI issues and I think there's kind of a double thing going on there first of all if you've got GI issues then putting a lot of fiber through the system can often just exacerbate it and that can just be maybe a physical thing but I also think that there are GI conditions that are autoimmune related like Crohn's for example and colitis have an autoimmune component and so it's kind of hitting it from both sides it's funny that we're making this just in because I only started considering this recently but I think that maybe the mood problems like bipolar also could be an autoimmune like disease I don't really like the word autoimmune because it has implications about the mechanism that were not really that sure of but one thing that I think happens in autoimmune and I'm speculating but there are theories that it has to do with an inappropriate openness of the intestinal barrier right and so if you remember when I was saying I didn't really get the paleo aspect thought it was all down to it being lower carb by virtue of having lower grains I did learn that there were specific components in grains and legumes that are connected to autoimmune but I discounted it again because I felt I don't have an autoimmune disorder but I've more recently thought well maybe actually I do and maybe the blood-brain barrier has susceptibilities that are similar to the intestinal barrier mmm have you done any testing in that regard I know cyrex does a few different antibody no tests that'll be fascinating to see I'd love to get a list from you recognize yeah I have no financial affiliation with the company but a friend of mine teased cries Ian and Aristo va's Johnny started this company a few years ago to help people to better ascertain if their body's making antibodies to the different barriers and things that Skye wants to join us yeah that's awesome people people well my current boyfriend yeah right that's really amazing so have you done any genetic testing at all either oh yes yeah while but I did a 23 me skin like several years ago I didn't I didn't find anything that was too persuasive or enlightening but it's nice to have that there in case something comes up yeah like the HLA DQ some of these different antigen receptors and things might be kind of interesting and polymorphisms but yeah so permanent is that's kind of a theme that you talk about in the book about the permeability if they got and how potentially going on a carnivorous diet could help with with that a little bit I think that that's it's a good candidate for a mechanism I know that the people I don't know if you know about the clinic ICM and I in Hungary they used to be called paleo medicinal okay so they change her name yes and that is their number one theory for why this diet is helping and so they're the ones who really turned me on to that I went to visit them a couple of years ago it was wonderful wonderful experience and that's that's when I really began to take that theory seriously and realized that it might actually apply to me right along those lines there's some theories out there speculating and I used to really be kind of dogmatic about this I've interviewed a few different people Jeff leach have he's you know quantifying the diversity of an industrialized humans and their microbiomes and in finding there's a disparity between Bachelor diversity and people in Tanzania for example and its parts of Siberia that are unand us realized and Westerners and Europeans we have really low bachelor diversity and and he's looked at their diets and and sees that their dietary diversity is high and made these correlations so I was really big on dietary diversity get all these phytonutrients flavonoids fibers and all that and so it was it was a it was mentally a hard thing to grapple with you know accepting a more diverse diet that is you know consumed when you eat a carnivorous diet but yet all these people with conditions that are historically characterized by low fat or diversity are benefiting so that was a hard thing that grapple with but um what do you thoughts on natural diversity well I think when we first started realizing that that the gut microbiome is a huge diverse population that's right within our bodies and then it was a lot of potentially having a lot of effects throughout the body the first thing that happened was correlations started being drawn in studies where you would take people and measure different strains or populations and make associations between their state of health and and what you're seeing inside them and that's I think that's a really good start but it also comes back to a principle that maybe has been forgotten along the way which is we're going to assume that the biome of a healthy person is is what characterizes a healthy biome so if you do something and it makes you a lot healthier it's almost a conflict of logic to say well your your much healthier now but you're but you're you can't be healthy because your biome isn't like it's long as it feels to me a little bit backwards and one way that so there's kind of two ways you might look at it one is well you're healthy now but from things we know about the biome maybe there are consequences down the road that are not going to be good for you and that we can't really know about that and it's it's a legitimate question to ask but on the other hand it could be that all of the data that we have so far have been on people that are eating a high carb sort of plant diverse diet and maybe you need that kind of biome to deal with that kind of diet and be healthy and so one idea that I have about why why those results might not be generalizable is that if you're removing the plants from the diet and your gut biome changes maybe it's changing in a way that would look very unhealthy if you were eating plants but since they're not there it doesn't matter so much that's beautiful it that that does make a lot of sense I've never heard I know you've had I haven't heard you articulate it in that way but I've know you've been diving into this for a while and it seems that yeah the the microbiome bugs kind of adapt you the diet and like you said maybe because you're getting all these different cellulose molecules things like that so then you need to support the proliferation of those bugs to deal wow that's a really interesting thought alright so if you're eating a lot of cabbage saying and you don't have a microbiome that deals with that you might see a result of illness because it's not coping with that food and then you might see benefit from suggestions like why don't you eat these fermented foods that are carrying along the kind of bacteria that would be useful for for fermenting breaking down the cabbage so but then if you're just not eating cabbage at all maybe you don't actually meet it mm-hmm what are your thoughts on fermented foods in general um I think they're delicious they don't agree with me there was one point where I thought well actually this looks just like the beginning of gaps so maybe I should start adding from I've been on this for a long time maybe I should start adding fermented foods and I'm pretty much immediately started feeling not good oh it's like tired and almost what I would describe as a histamine overreaction and I don't know if that's because there are literally histamines and fermented foods or if I'm just making that connection like I didn't measure the histamines fasting yeah yeah I mean it seems like if people and that's how I consume most of my vegetables now if I know in the summer we'll have more greens and things like that but more in moderation I used to be why would a weed over consume food because of their purported health benefits and then had you know GI issues but kind of overlooked that and thought it was from something else but anyhow so yeah from fermentation I think that's the way that if people are curious to weave in some of that that's why I generally recommend to tribes it seems like it's parsley digestion you're getting the bugs makes sense going back to like I guess dairy and then meal frequency you know I guess maybe a big picture like how does your diet today look different from when you first started you know it's changed a lot over the years through different phases when I first started it I eat a lot of ribeye which is kind of the stereotypical how to do a carnivore diet right and it worked really well for me obviously it's a little bit it can I hate to say this it's not even true I was gonna say it's boring is not boring but now it never gets boring but I do sometimes want to branch out and so eat more chicken or pork different cuts of meat I started you know growing up vegetarian a lot of the cooking skills that I had or the meals that were familiar to me were not different types of meats so I came to love things that might be just normal for other people like beef ribs oh my goodness I discovered beef ribs and and pork belly and skirt steak which what I didn't know about and just all of these different types of meat that I would get into a phase and just cook one thing for a while right when there was a time so I'm not at my lowest weight and I had some health issues over the last couple years that I don't even fully understand the etiology of don't think it came from a difference in my diet it's not like I started changing things but what I was about to say was that when I was at my very lowest weight my desire for fat actually increased quite a bit which for some people you might think is counterintuitive but I think it was just because there was less available body fat and so I had to get more of it from my food and I also after I went to hungry when I was there I tried a lot more organ meats I've always liked like liver for example and I've had I've tried some different things like thymus and I liked them but what I tried there that I really really liked was brain and I got kind of on a brain kick for a while after that but I don't know I don't think that my diet is strongly different from how it was I'll include dairy now and then it's not a big staple I feel like it messes with my satiety a little bit so if I sometimes I can gauge if I want to eat based on hunger or not by if a sort of plain meal of meat sounds good to me or say a boiled egg if a boiled egg sounds good to you you're probably hungry but for me sometimes I would want cheese and I'd say to myself what's anything else dunno only cheese and then I know there's some kind of addictive if they're right cheese is very yeah yeah it's it's craveable I guess is the best way to party yeah yeah so when you do have Daria's at Iraqis raw milk I do kind of friendship between most of my dairy consumption is in the form of cream I do drink coffee that's my plant vice and I mostly drink it black but my first dairy go to will be adding a little cream to my coffee it feels a little indulgent yeah yogurt I try to bring back now and then and it's partly because of this idea that fermented foods might be good for me but I I almost always regret it because I can't put it down I just yeah I mean yeah that's fasting I used to buy milk from raw dairy farmer just south day here on 63rd so I know there's a lot of like raw what is it that a to a to cows yeah yeah have a local source of that and that's where I get yogurt if I get it yeah and it's it's really good I've had fermented colostrum from them as well they don't always have it but when it's available where you try and get in yeah yeah my wife wasn't producing a lot of breast milk early on when my daughter was born so we supplemented with raw goat dairy and that really really helped my daughter and I think it had to do I think it helped her immune system in such a way she's an only child and and doesn't seem to get sick very often and so that kind of kind of hygiene hypothesis getting the raw you know whatever my curves are they're from the farm so to speak so I think it's kind of interesting if people are gonna do it frequently recommend find the farmer and if you can you know if you live in Manhattan it's challenging but I guess my cousin have you heard about this this kind of this black market raw dairy thing going on oh yeah so there was this like white truck it would pull up and you had to know someone who would give you the number and it would at least in Manhattan presumably happens in other cities where you can just you can buy there's like a market for raw dairy that's kind of under the table cash only kind of thing it's interesting I have really mixed feelings about it because of course there are microbes that you want to kill right yeah there could be very serious illness from that and in fact I had some illness lap not last year about the year before I had a really terrible experience with salmonella poisoning which probably was traced back to some I had sort of hoped it was an egg problem because I'm really attached to beef but the CDC always contacts people who have confirmed diagnosis to try to you know narrow it down to what the source was and they think that it was from eating raw beef which I love and I probably am NOT going to stop doing but it is a serious risk totally with that is when you eat raw how often do you eat raw beef um there was a while where I was eating it about once a week no it's just from time to time for in that situation is it you know the farmer is it grass-fed this and that like how important do you think it is in that context I don't know I don't know if a farmer that I know is more susceptible or less the beef that was probably my source was from a small store but it wasn't a single farmer but I knew that they freshly grounded every morning and I felt really good about it so I don't know interesting I also feel like honestly though there's something about my own susceptibility that maybe made it worse because that was a point in time where my health was not as solid as it had been and so it might have just been partly due to my own vulnerability and now just the right circumstances and yeah or stressed out or not sleeping or whatever right I mean yeah it's a very interesting okay so in closing what would you say to someone who's struggling with their health but for philosophical reasons we're ethical reasons they're just done in vegan or vegetarian diet and they're they're just not willing at this point to even think about the idea of going anymore animal products would you say give it a shot for your health for two weeks like what would you say to them if you were in an elevator or a grocery store and that a question for you it's a really tough question because we always want to do things that make us feel like we're living with integrity one thing that I might say is you've got to put your own mask on first so you can't be a help to the world and to the animals of the world into the environment unless you're functioning at the best level that you can and so if it turns out that your health would actually be drastically improved by eating meat first of all you might want to do that just so that you can be the best person you can be and then second you might want to like that's the food for thought right like if it's the case that that your physiology requires meat and is averse to plants in a way that you didn't understand you may need to think about the ethics of taking care of you because you are an animal you are valuable to the world no one is like you and if you can't take care of you no one can mm-hmm brilliant I love that what a great piece of it yeah that's that's really important and yeah if anyone's ever traveled on a commercial airline that's one of the first things they say it should you know we be unstable and the airbags deploy even though if you have three kids you can help your kids if you can't breathe yourself right so they put tight bigger air mass kind of first I love that that's awesome so amber everyone probably already follows you on twitter that's watching but if not they definitely gotta fire you on Twitter and you know this event coming going on in Boulder Colorado for the second annual event is it still at the boulders feeder it is yes it'll be at the Boulder Theatre May 23rd and for two full days and we're gonna have dinner both nights I'm sure it'll be amazing absolutely and is it carnivore conference calm or what's the lips carnivorous con carne every con that's amazing that's really cool so since it's at the boulder theater it will sell out whether you can't have I assume so because well it did last year we sold out twice actually had to move to try to accommodate more people but because we are having dinner in house we can only sell so many seats no I hate to say buy it now but I had a lot of people who were sad at the end and I couldn't help them even though I wanted to right and it's a great weekend May the weather's historically pretty good in Colorado during that time so that's awesome and you're working on a book gonna talk about that yes I have a book online it's called eat meat not too little mostly fat which is also the name of a guide to eating carnivore that I did a couple years ago and if I've written a couple of chapters I'm releasing it chapter by chapter as I write it and I'm really I'm really excited about it because it turns out I have a lot of ideas that's so cool I like that kind of Michael Pollan spin you know what help me forgives me I know right yeah along those lines amber we've asked now like 300 people you know this this question I personally think that how we're gonna change health in this country in the world is gonna be kind of a bottom-up approach but obviously policymakers can influence things it seems that that the the vegan diet and plant-based diet is getting a lot of influencing and fusing into government recommendations dietary guidelines if you could meet or bump shoulders with a politician what would you want them to know in 3040 seconds about you know how you feel people should eat and diets and legislation and things like that oh that's such a tough question I think I would ask them if they really know where their evidence is coming from and if they have thought about the long history and previous that humans have with meat and how it affect their our revolution and whether whether they think they really know the consequences of changing our diet and such a drastic way brilliant love that final question I promise it okay so if there's just if someone said Amer that the power grids gonna go out but I can supply you the lifetime supply of this one cut or this one animal product what would it be like without worrying about like forever yeah yeah that's all that's covered oh boy this is gonna be silly but I think it's gonna be really it's got to be a ruminant and it's got to be something fatty because if that's super important and if it were just liver for example I think you would get over doses of vitamins so yeah you bring a really good point I think this is where people that don't watch podcasts or follow people like yourself on the internet they try carnivore those used to lean meat top sirloin London broil things like that is it's just not say shooting enough you know I feel like and and you you definitely need that fat and again this is gonna take a long time for people to grapple with because they've been told especially red fatty meat is linked with heart disease and all that but it's really key for satiety and all that I found out to be very just me personally yeah proteins are not a great source of calories you don't want to be using it for that you want to be using it for maintenance of all of your body structures if you have to use it for for energy that's really hard on your body and if you're not gonna eat carbohydrates then fat is where it's at yeah and if you're trying to compress your feeding window doing intermittent fasting or Oh mad if you don't get that fat it's damn near impossible I found because like you said the protein you know I mean yeah maybe it can be back converted through gluconeogenesis to glucose and this and that but it's getting it from the fatty just much easier so yeah amber I am so grateful for this opportunity to meet with you in your home in Boulder thank you so much for lending us in and thanks for all your work and inspiration and ideas that you share on Twitter and for just getting out there and putting on this conference which is gonna be amazing and your book um I know it's a progress your new book that you're working on you're aiming for summer of 2020 it range yes should be good so I'll put links below and if you all enjoyed this video which I'm sure you did please hit that like button and definitely subscribe and please check out the links below and have an awesome day thanks for coming on thanks Mike it was a great pleasure

Channel: High Intensity Health

Views: 74,194

Keywords: Carnivore, Carnivore Diet, Keto carnivore, mental health, depression, anxiety, depression diet, anxiety diet, depression foods, best foods for depression, best diet for depression, best diet for anxiety and depression, all meat diet results, carnivore diet for women

Id: __0WqiD04vs

Length: 61min 38sec (3698 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020