Dr. Paul Mason - 'Carnivore Diet & Optimal Health'

[Music] dr paul mason welcome thank you great to be here really good to have you here man we've been trying to do this for a while on the back of your colleague derancia who everyone's loved and it's been listened to many many times i want to start just a little bit of background about you where you did your study metabolic medicine in general and you know just what's happening in the field well i guess the key to finding thing for me is i'm a sports and exercise medicine physician so i spend my days with athletes and as you know for athletes body weight and performance is a key consideration and as it so turned out that's gradually evolved into dealing with more and more members of the general public and for me personally i used to have metabolic syndrome so metabolic syndrome is a condition if you're if you take three boxes out of five that includes central adiposity low hdl high triglycerides high blood sugar levels high blood pressure then you have metabolic syndrome and i was in my 30s and i had metabolic syndrome and as you know most doctors are a bit ocd a bit taipei so i followed to a t the advice that i was told i counted the milligrams of sodium that i was having on a daily basis i made sure i had a low-fat diet i did not care about the carbohydrates nor the sugar because we were told that was okay so food pyramid i had massive amounts of carbs and sugar i was exercising every day i would ride my bike to and from you know wherever if i was working or studying you know i'd be exercising for at least an hour hour and a half every day and still i developed metabolic syndrome and so i guess it was a bit of a personal journey in there and then it morphed into a professional interest yep so you did your undergrad study at sydney university yeah well i've got a i've got three degrees so i started out doing physiotherapy down in melbourne yeah then i did my medical degree at university of sydney and after i did that then i followed that up with a master's degree in occupational health interesting and then i've sort of uh morphed off into just doing i guess private study or personal study [Music] on ketogenic diets low carb diets nutrition health in general metabolic medicine it seems to be a bit of a new area of specialty what actually is that obviously it's it's dealing with people's metabolic health but for those that that don't understand that like how do you diagnose whether you've got metabolic syndrome how do you diagnose whether you've got a healthy metabolic system give us a little bit of insight to the field of medicine well i think in a nutshell metabolic syndrome comes down to insulin which is a hormone in the body and as i mentioned earlier there's five diagnostic features in what we term metabolic syndrome and each one of those five is caused by something called insulin resistance which is basically high levels of insulin and that's been proven in multitudes of papers um biochemically it's been mapped out we know how it happens we know why it happens and we've proven that it does happen so metabolic ill health is a consequence of insulin resistance and then if you want to take it one step further what's the biggest cause in the population for insulin resistance it's dietary carbohydrate and yet that's what we were taught to to eat for a long long time that's what i was taught to eat so i i studied physiotherapy in the 90s and so what did i do when i got out well we were taught the food pyramid so you know i used to advocate that and when i went to back to med school what did we get taught carbs are good carbs are good and yet if any my understanding of how much nutrition study is done in a medical degree is is deplorably low yes yes so i believe we had one hour of nutrition i couldn't actually recall what was in that one hour lecture [Music] but given that in my practice i have a quite a holistic practice and i see a lot of people for a lot of different conditions and i'd say attention to nutrition probably forms 50 60 possibly more of my practice so the formal teaching i've had is totally disproportionate with how important it is one of these amazing new age doctors that instead of writing a prescription actually write you some some dietary framework perhaps well exactly so we prescribe dietary advice and i probably just to reflect on your comment on writing a prescription in medical school we're taught how to write prescriptions we're taught you know here's what drug you use for what condition this is the starting dose if that's not effective you increase it to this we know this very well what we're not taught and what was the one of the biggest conceptual challenges for me when i first started practicing medicine like this is de-prescribing taking people off medications so if we take somebody as i said high blood pressure is one of the features of metabolic syndrome a patient might come in and they might have normal blood pressure but they might be on three different medications designed to lower the blood pressure so then what happens if we start correcting their the underlying cause of their high blood pressure and they're still on these three agents well we know what happens i'll they'll probably faint they feel dizzy they'll feel lousy because they're it's it's like you took a normal person with normal blood pressure and just put them on a bunch of medications to drop their blood pressure so then the art is then well how do you know which medication to reduce first and how much you know if you reduce it too quickly is that going to cause a problem it's exactly the same in a diabetic who needs to inject insulin if i put somebody who's on a standard australian diet the sad diet i love that and and i put them overnight on a strict low-carb diet then i actually need to reduce their insulin dose in the vicinity of 50 otherwise they'll have a what we call a hypoglycemic event where because of the injected insulin their blood sugar will go too low and that that could put them in a coma that could even kill them so this whole element of deep prescribing is actually uh it wasn't touched on at all in medical school of course it wasn't it's uh his surgery and and pharmaceuticals are at the heart of the commercial model of medicine yeah look i'm i agree with you maybe you're disproving i probably i probably will i probably will defend the medical profession to a degree that i love the medical problem i told you that my mom my dad my brother are all doctors so i have nothing but respect for medicine but the the the institution itself seems to be flawed oh the institution is flawed but i would like to make a distinction that i think a lot of the the harm that the medical profession is doing i think it's more through negligence and not through culpability doctors don't set out to harm their patients negligence or ignorance well i think if you're if you don't educate yourself about the latest sign i would argue that's negligence yeah but i don't think they do it deliberately i think there's a there's a duty of care that we have to stay up to date and informed of the science and if we don't do that for whatever reason i think we're failing our obligation to our patients yeah no it's a really good point i want to talk about the two ends of the the proverbial spectrum that is getting more more airplay becoming more divisive than than any other thing perhaps other than climate change which kind of ties into it anyway it's but that's the vegans on one end and the carnivores on the other and have a really objective look at the benefits of like let's talk about red meat because it's probably the most nutritionally dense of of all the meats on one end of what actually is in it and what is potentially dangerous about it and then on the other end the the nutrients that you get being on a on a vegan diet and the benefits of that and the potential dangers of that yeah and i know that's a that's a it's a big ass but can we just start with that like let's start with the plants like what's the benefit of being on a vegan diet look i think the benefit of going to a vegan diet is that you are no longer on the standard australian diet you're not on a sad diet being heavily processed sugar so sugars now the problem with but you can have a lot of sugars on a vegan diet there's a lot of vegans i know that have a lot of sugars and they're very unhealthy yeah but the problem is when we do the research the research doesn't include those sugars it doesn't include the tim tams and the snakes and all these kind of things on the research so you can pick any diet you want if you compare it to the very low bar that is a standard australian diet it is going to come out superior so when people point at the studies and say this diet found this and this study showed this and it's clearly good it's like well what are you comparing it to and nobody has compared a whole foods animal-based diet with a whole foods vegetarian or vegan diet plant-based so when they're one of the big problems with the research is that when they're looking at what they consider to be red meat they're actually conflating it with intake of junk food so a lot of that is done all sorts of other confounding factors yeah well absolutely but let's just address this one for the moment so a lot of the studies are done on food frequency questionnaires which so if i can do how many milligrams of salt did you have yesterday how many eggs have you had in the last 12 months you know these things are just most people can't remember what they had for breakfast exactly yeah i get it inherently unreliable yeah and then just for people's knowledge is this a typical epidemiological study that they use the framework for yes food frequency questionnaires are a standard instrument involved in nutritional research and then we might take something like intake and if somebody's eaten pizza do you know what food group pizza gets in class does red meat yeah wow because it might have a bit of meat on it yeah now if you're having a pizza could you be having a soft drink perhaps at the same time if you're having a hot dog you know are you sort of having you're not having that uh with a salad on the side are you um so there's these confounding variables where the the misclassification of foods the the poor recall of foods and the uh the associated health behaviors which you alluded to before now we have it's it's a healthy user bias is what we call it so if you believe that something is healthy um or unhealthy then that's going to influence your behavior if you're the kind of person who takes care of your health and somebody says red meat is bad for you say fine i'll eat less red meat you're also the kind of person who will probably quit smoking if you're addicted to smoking you'll exercise because you're told that that's good you'll try and get enough sleep because you're being told that's useful so because of this association that red meat it's been correlated at least in the public perception with ill health a lot of the research is now subject to this healthy user bias and this is why the epidemiological researchers some people term the epidemio illogical research you just can't trust it and until they come out with a proper experimental design that compares a whole foods animal diet that means without the soft drinks that means you know it's not red made on pizza it's red meat from well cooked healthy steak compared to a whole foods plant-based type we're not going to have a definitive answer yeah but if we have a look at uh things from a biochemical perspective or a nutrient density perspective or any other number of ways we can clearly see there's benefits in animal foods there's a paper published a few years ago and i believe it was sanctioned by the world health organization looking at stunting in different countries across the world stunting stunting not growing at all growth in children um pathological yeah and that actually showed a clear correlation with lack of animal food intake um they did interventional studies there was one study they did in ecuador where they actually uh a control group they gave them an egg a day um because it is a lot of the reason that animal protein is not consumed across most of the world is nothing to do with attitudes to meet it's due to its economics and availability i mean we're incredibly in the fortunate position where we have the option of having animal products if we don't unfortunately in much of the world that's not the case and they're actually able to find that they are able to prevent a lot of this pathological stunting in children just with an egg a day now and they've also done various analyses looking at other animal foods and basically they found that you know red meat dairy and eggs are absolute winners when it comes to child's health and growth and development now if we were to but just stay on this for a moment the developing brain uh requires an omega-3 fat called dha so i think something like uh two-thirds of the brain is fat and of that this dha fat it's an omega-3 fat is a major major part of it and this does not come from animal foods uh perhaps with the potential exception of algae which is why it's in fish but we're not eating algae um the animal foods we're eating the flax seeds that's got a form of omega-3 that's very poorly bioavailable and very little if any will actually be converted into this dha which is a building block for the brain so there's been lots of research looking at developing children and cognition and brain it's a pretty clear picture that if you have this available in the diet it actually will affect the iq how can i play devil's advocate because the study thing is is really interesting to me in the you can virtually find research to support whatever argument you want how do you like we talked before about some of these epidemiological studies and that there are confounding factors that aren't taken into account so are you comparing apples with apples and so on and so forth the studies that you refer to with brain development in children and things how do people know what studies they can rely on and that it's not just someone that believes in a in a certain science is finding the sub the studies that support their view whereas there's probably equal number of studies on the other side of the ledger so when you're reading the study yeah if it says epidemiology or correlation be very suspicious so correlation is what happens when we say look the uh you know the uh you pick some random event um let's say it's uh it gets it gets light in here when you walk into the room you might have a sense of light and you say well that seems that whenever so walking actually turns the light on well perhaps it is but it's actually more than that it's actually you know this sensor and it activates and it's the electricity running through the wires that actually will lead to the light being there so just because something happens at the same time doesn't mean it's a direct cause of it so for that matter we actually want to look for experimental designs so this study i described in ecuador was where they actually had one group of children who didn't get an egg and they had another group of children who did get the egg but they were in the same socioeconomic status they were the same age they were in the same country so all the other variables were taken care of so because as i said if you having a pizza you're probably having a soft drink with it so these are what we call confounding variables and by having two control groups that are randomly allocated those in theory if we have enough numbers in the groups those confounding variables will basically cancel each other out and then the only effective difference between the group is our actual intervention so that's called a experimental design and the best experimental design is what we call randomized control trial that's blinded so blinded means that um the researchers and some occasionally the participants won't know which intervention they actually got so you can do that with a say a vitamin supplement because you can give people a an inert tablet and somebody gets a real one and that's the absolute gold standard and then we can take the level of evidence another step further with something called a meta-analysis and a meta-analysis basically says look you might just by chance if you do enough of these randomized control trials it's just like flipping a coin you might get 10 heads in a row just by chance through probability so a meta-analysis says well why don't we take all of the randomised control trials together and and analyze them as one and see what the average result is because we know that the more numbers there is statistically the more likely it is to represent a true finding so i tend to place more weight in experimental designs and meta-analyses now one of the problems with some of the meta-analyses is because we don't have a lot of experimental studies backing it up they they might do a meta-analysis on research that's been poorly done and uh as you know garbage in garbage out so you have to be careful when you do look at the meta-analysis of the the type of studies which they were looking at got it can i come back to the plant-based vegan diet is it possible to get all the nutrients you need for optimal health for the average punter no no no what are the big things that you miss by being on a vegan diet well the the one that everybody knows about is vitamin b12 um which you can't get unless you're having animals you cannot get unless you're having animal foods now there's some people that talk about bacterial production way down in the colon and all of this and that's basically garbage even if there were um bacteria down inside your colon that could be producing b12 that's not where it's absorbed in the intestines so you're basically going to excrete it so um you cannot have by definition a nutritionally complete vegan diet without supplementation now vegetarian diet supplementation in the form of oral or intravenous supplements well it's well let's it's either got to be yeah oral b12 or injectable b12 now on a vegetarian diet because you are permitted some animal foods then you do get higher amount you can get some of these but the vegan diet is absolutely impossible to be optimally healthy without extraneous supplementation then we come to other nutrients which we know um things like zinc and iron and copper which have far higher concentration in animal foods than they are in plant foods and it's not just the concentration of these nutrients that we need to be aware of but also their form for instance the the type of iron so you've got heme and non-heme iron the type of iron that you get in plant foods is very difficult for the body to absorb and to know what to do with compared to the iron that we have in meat um and that goes for you know as i alluded to before with the omega-3s the type of omega-3 that we get from plants is very hard for the body to know what to do with whereas what we call the marine omega-3 basically to reflect that it's a good quality dha the body is very easily able to assimilate that into its tissues then we also have a factor called anti-nutrients and this sounds a little bit sci-fi nutrients but we've all heard about it so there's a reason your doctor tells you not to drink tea when you have an iron supplement if you're if you're a vegetarian lowering iron the reason is because there's substances in the tea like tannins and phytates that will actually interfere with the absorption of the nutrients so for instance we've done some studies looking at zinc absorption and if you combine if you have a zinc rich food like oysters and have some black beans at the same time you will reduce your absorption of that zinc by more than 50 percent so in effect you're getting less than half of what you otherwise would have if you didn't have that food with the beans at the same time because of these anti-nutrient factors within the beans so it becomes very very difficult so we we all get hooked up on these recommended daily intakes and things like that and really they're they've been created with very poor science um and it doesn't necessarily reflect whether or not the micronutrient you're looking at is the most bioavailable form and it certainly doesn't take into account what you're consuming it with that concurrent consumption of these anti-nutrient substances will then impair the end nutrient result that you're getting from that and that's not even including the deleterious effect that certain substances in plants such as lectins or glutens these other type of proteins that they actually are known to cause harm to us to humans so there's a lot of there's a lot of moving parts there is but it it's and i don't think there's ever been a point in time in in the history of man where more people are convinced that the best thing for their own health and the health of the planet is a plant-based diet and i can only assume it's because the the plant-based movement and the climate change movement that quite often has hidden agendas and quite often has big corporations behind it have just been very good at spreading their their message propaganda is probably a word i'd prefer to use but let's call it spreading their message how can we get the science so wrong and and and i do want to talk about the other side of the ledger in a minute um and maybe we're starting to have more influences on the omnivore carnivore side of it but in your view why do you think that that so many people are misguided in believing that they're doing the right thing for themselves and the planet by eating a plant-based diet i think it's a simple and an instinctive message i also happen to think it's wrong um there's a couple of very appealing things so we we know that this whole business about the saturated fats in the diet being bad for us is just complete bunkum but the logical extension of that if you accept that premise is that because plant foods are very low in saturated fats plant foods ergo must be good for us so the we can make these type of leaps of faith and there is there are studies out there that do appear to demonstrate that the plant-based diets are good for us understanding that they've set a very low bar of comparing themselves to junk food rich carbohydrate-rich processed food-rich diets yeah so i mean basically you could go out and you know have a bowl of mud um that's going to beat the australian diet yeah the average australian diet then it comes this uh this ethical issue as well and instinctively that is appealing for a lot especially a lot of young people and i can understand the appeal there but i think there's also a lack of understanding that a true vegan diet does not exist without dead animals this is this is this is a conversation that i've had a couple of times with some really learned people around the fact that so many more animals are killed by plant-based agriculture than by animal-based agriculture you know and we used an example recently we had joel salatan that amazing sustainable farmer on the podcast a few weeks ago around a farmer here in australia that raises animals and raises crops and has done the study on how many animals die and the length and pain of their death through plant-based agriculture versus an animal that's part of the food chain and is raised and treated and has one bad nanosecond second in its life but again it's a conversation that gets caught up in romantic views of disney characters and that a cow's more valuable than a field mice or a bird or whatever it happens to be well let's look at it like this so we know that plants come from soil and they they draw all their nutrition and their sustenance from the soil in which they've grown and yet if we don't fertilize the soil then the if you don't feed the soil you won't grow anything we know this the soil will be depleted now when after world war ii when we had this boon in agriculture this discovery of fossil fuels and how we could use the fossil fuels to make fertilizer and we were growing now think for a second fossil fuel dead animals we we basically require without death there is no life yep agree fully with it without um biological matter that comes from things that have previously been in existence our soil is barren so in essence um there is no such thing as a vegan diet and if you think there is you are kidding yourself and then it comes to the environmental effects every time you take a plow to a soil you turn it over you expose trillions of microbes to the elements to the uv radiation of the sun they get blown away every every season that you plow a field you deplete the topsoil and it's been estimated that by 2020 we'll have depleted 50 of the topsoil that we've ever had by next year uh effectively yes so sure we've still got a lot of topsoil to go but what happens when that runs out now so growing crops depletes this do you know what replenishes topsoil grazing ruminant animals because they've got this remarkable ability so grass from the cellulosing grass so is basically produced through this remarkable process using the sun rays photosynthesis and then these uh these cows they can come and they can uh basically ferment that in their guts and they'll have excrement that comes out the other end and that will actually build topsoil so whereas if you crop up land you deplete the topsoil if you graze a land with ruminants you'll replenish that soil particularly if it's rotational and then and people will also talk about the water use it's almost like if a cow drinks some water that it doesn't come out the other end it's not waste water the cow is actually uh watering the fields for you yeah via the urine so this these whole arguments there zero sum game about you know cattle do this and they do that they've actually been shown to lead to a sequestration of carbon they're actually if you actually have a look at it and how much carbon actually gets sequestered in the soil um from grazing the running cattle is actually beneficial from a carbon balance perspective so it doesn't matter which way you look at i mean they're very appealing vegan arguments but they're very easily dispatched if you have a look at from an ethical perspective then you can understand that you know it's not you don't have life without death and it's just you've got to be an adult grow up and admit that there's no other way for you to thrive it is impossible for you as a human to exist without there being death on some level yeah um if you have a look at it from an environmental perspective we've just had the wool pulled over our eyes um if you have a look at it from a nutritional perspective again we've been misled so whichever way you look at it i don't believe that a vegan diet stacks up there's a there's another and this isn't meant to be a vegan bashing exercise because i i i will always say this i i respect people's choices to do whatever they want but to your point about ethical decisions that one of the big things that that most vegetarians and vegans don't want to acknowledge is for them to live on a plant-based diet the only way we can get let's use australia as an example since we're sitting here in sydney the only way for them to eat that plants based diet year-round is for us to import from other countries typically third world countries that can't afford to give up that food where most of the malnourishment the two billion people in the world that are are currently living malnourished comes from and so if you want to talk about ethics then you need to expand your understanding of how this whole food chain works yeah and then importing avocados from brazil so that we can eat them for fifteen dollars a pop down in bondi doesn't make you an ethically right person that that's true i couldn't agree more yep i do want to talk about because for the first time in a decade i can remember that the whole and let's go to the extreme because this carnivore movement that people like sean baker and jordan peterson and and some other well-known um call them influences around the globe you know and and i i can't quite understand how anyone can just live on me but i don't want to pass judgment on that it just doesn't seem intuitively right to me but what uh what are the true what is the truth about red mean and you spoke about some of the incredible deficiencies from having a plant-based diet so i can only assume that the the the flip side of that is that you're getting that from from eating um ethically grazed and harvested predominantly plant-fed um beef and and other more animal producers what are some of the the real truths about red meat in particular that we should talk about well i think one of the myths is that red meat can be nutritionally deficient um the first one that most dietitians i speak to will say what about vitamin c um it's called vitamin c isn't it well that's a very interesting thing so in the the classical teaching is that there is no vitamin c in meat or carbohydrate for that and yet but if you actually have a look at some of the food tables and this was elegantly pointed out by ambro hearn when you who's ambrose amber hearn she's one of the prominent carnivores she arranged carnivory con in boulder in colorado earlier this year she's a very uh very astute and bright lady now she went and had a look at some of these food tables that listed uh vitamin c content have made as being zero and they just had a little little number it might have been six or seven they said beside it in soup's um subscript and she went down and had a look at that and it said assumed zero they didn't even calculate it they just they were so confident in their own opinion that there was no vitamin c in meat they'll just put it in the table and put it in the medical literature for posterity and yet we know there is vitamin c in meat so in the napoleonic wars um when they used to have scurvy they used to use the raw horse meat from their horses that were killed in battle to cure scurvy it's been long known historically and this has been known for almost 200 years that meat has been described as an anti-scorbotic it's basically an agent that will cue up scurvy so there is absolutely no truth to the uh to the statement that there's not sufficient vitamin c in meat now some people will point out and say well the quantities in in meat is so far below what the rdi is well the recommended daily intake is based on a carbohydrate intensive diet so glucose actually competes with vitamin c for uptake so if you're not putting all this sugar into your body then you actually will absorb a higher fraction and there's also vitamin c is also used to produce something called carnitine which is a molecule involved in fat metabolism now the c-a-r-n the first four letters now this is the latin root for flesh so carnitine is only found in meat and if you don't eat meat then you're not ingesting this you have a much greater need for vitamin c to help your body synthesize this but if you are eating lots of meat then that actually will have a vitamin c sparing effect you're not using your vitamin c as much for this purpose so there's several mechanisms by which on a uh on a low carbohydrate diet that includes meat your vitamin c needs will actually be much less and almost certainly the vitamin c content in your diet will be sufficient for your needs what are some of the other big ones that uh are found in and let's continue with just red meat because again it is the most nutritionally dense but what are the big things that you're getting from red meat well the big one iron is an obvious one it is an obvious one that everyone knows yeah um well yeah you can get a little bit of vitamin d interestingly i believe there's a difference between whether it's uh being raised in a feed lot or not um so i think it was in about 1970 when they discovered um vitamin d as a nutrient and that was actually what then allowed them to start doing the feedlots because they could then start injecting the cuddle with it because they weren't necessarily getting it from their environment in the same way because the feedlots were not in the sunshine look i'm not sure if it's a sunshine thing or if it's a uh from the from the grass but i do know that historically feedlot without um giving them vitamin d it's a uh cattle and feedlots do need vitamin d now one of the other interesting uh extensions on that is there's another vitamin called vitamin k2 which is essential for metabolic health it actually helps us it reduces calcification in our blood vessels that actually helps us put calcium into our bones it improves our bone mineral density and my understanding is that on grass-fed and pasture-raised cuddle there's a very nice level of vitamin k2 but it's likely to be much lower in uh in feedlot raised cattle yep get it um do you honestly think that you can live in optimal health on a pure carnivore diet look i have it is extreme i get it's extreme but there seems to be people that are doing it and yeah and it's just anecdotal evidence but that that seemed to look and what's the guy's name that um aaron mckenzie i was watching some of his things is he a carnivore uh from what i understand yes the guy is freakishly talented healthy agile um is that just because he's got good genetics or is part of that that i have to say i haven't seen any research that would tell me that would convince me it's not possible to be extremely healthy on carnival i do know several people personally who are carnivores who appear to be in very very good health were they not in good health before when they were on a sad diet yes yeah yes and i've actually got several patients who are carnivores and who have actually reversed chronic health issues by going carnivore and i mean some people will say the jury is out because we haven't got long-term studies on them we do have population evidence we look at the masai and the inuit and other historical cultures which were often uh predominantly uh animal products very very little uh foraging and uh so the historical data would certainly suggest that it's possible to be very very healthy on an animal-based diet with minimal if any plant food interesting i want to talk about some of the again the things that most people have heard over the years red meats bad for cholesterol heart disease etc cholesterol is a big one and i had uh personal experience recently with a doctor that i i respect i've been to her she's a gp she's she's a lovely human being and you know as far as gps goes she seems to be reasonably knowledgeable but we had this conversation recently about my cholesterol is too high and i said explain more to me what you're testing you know because i've got enough knowledge to be dangerous you know and i was trying not to be insulting because i really like this woman and and as i say she's a terrific doctor she said your ldl bad cholesterol is bad and i've been to see you four years ago so again i knew enough to be dangerous i said but what about the sub strands and it wasn't even it was probably not even the right terminology can you and she didn't have an answer for it so again no disrespect but i walked out of there saying you know what i need to talk to someone that's done a little bit more up-to-date research on that let's talk about cholesterol in terms of cholesterol in general but also the correlation between meat consumption and cholesterol well i mean cholesterol is a molecule that's essential for life so first of all if you actually ask the average doctor what cholesterol is they will not be able to tell you in medical school i got through a whole medical degree and i did pretty well i got honors and i honestly could not have told you what cholesterol was at the end of it i could tell you all i could use a nomenclature i could say hdl ldl ratios apple a1 app ob etc i could do i could talk the talk but i honestly didn't have a good conceptual understanding of what it was so let's talk about what is cholesterol it's a small molecule it is essential for life every cell has it it's so important that if you don't eat it the body will make it if you do not have any cholesterol you will die so that's what cholesterol is now what doctors call cholesterol are very complex particles think of them like a submarine that circles around inside your blood and they carry cholesterol inside now if you've ever poured some water inside a frying pan that's got a bit of fat in it you'll see how the fat forms globules so fat that's what fat does and fat can't move around the circulation as a globular it's got to be broken up into smaller particles so this is why we need these particles and we call them lipoproteins which will actually carry the cholesterol around the body now the one that we talk about as being dangerous um is called an ldl a low density lipoprotein now for some reason and well i'll tell you why we associate high levels of ldl with heart disease and this comes back to a guy called ansel keys and he developed what he called the lipid heart hypothesis and he postulated that higher levels of saturated fat um in the body could actually uh then lead to deposition inside the arteries and his model was developed from rabbits and herbivore an animal which has absolutely no capacity for uh you know protein and fats in their diet so what did they feed these rabbits well saturated fat and they said them saturated fat and somehow they thought that you could uh translate an herbivore's experience and physiology to a human so it's basically utter utterly bad science but if you subscribe to this theory that saturated fat is then bad we also have made the observation that saturated fat can increase the amount of circulating ldl so if you accept the premise saturated fat is bad then you must also accept the premise that ldl high levels of ldl is also bad now unfortunately the very first premise was wrong so the second premise is also wrong and the most recent meta-analysis um that looked at 19 separate studies looking at all-cause mortality so your chance of dying and your ldl levels they actually found in 16 of them that there was an inverse relationship that is the higher your ldl level the longer you lived okay so i mean if that doesn't live a long time if that doesn't immediately make you suspicious of our uh of our fear of ldl then i don't know what will but we still do know that ldl does end up lining the blood vessels and i'll tell you what happens there it's when ldl gets damaged and it can be damaged in two ways it can be damaged through a process called glycation where sugar attaches to it and it can be damaged through a process called oxidation which is to do with uh electrons in valid it's basically uh think of it like rusting of a molecule it's a bit of a bit of a loose description but it can be oxidized or it can be glycated or damaged by sugar so what does that mean so if these things lead to ldl clogging your blood vessels that means high blood sugar is bad and high oxidative stress is bad what gives you high high blood glucose well carbohydrates are made of glucose so therefore eating high carbohydrate diets is what actually will turn your ldl bad and oxidative stress number of contributing factors in our modern lifestyles but a big one is the omega-6 fats vegetable and seed oils so simply put if you want to make sure that your ldl population remains healthy and is going to make sure that you're in that population who lives longer with a high ldl don't have excessive amounts of vegetable and seed oils yeah and don't have excessive amounts of carbohydrate yeah that will keep you having a healthy cholesterol yeah interesting i think this for a lot of people is exciting liberating perhaps a little bit agitating what tests should people be doing because again this is one of my fundamental that's the reason why i just don't go to the doctor anymore i just went this year because my dad's a doctor and he said you've got to get a check up you're 50 and i said dad you're a stubborn old prick i'll just go and get up but you go in and you get cholesterol done and we just we won't go back down that rabbit hole well we can well let's talk about if you're worried about your cholesterol yep um and if you want to know do you have this damaged ldl so we actually call that small dense because when it gets glycated and oxidized it actually gets a fraction smaller yeah and we can do a fancy test to measure that um that costs 120 it has to be sent to one of the research laboratories however we can get a proxy of that looking at something called your hdl and your triglyceride ratio now triglycerides are actually produced in the liver predominantly when you have excessive carbohydrate so triglyceride is a very good marker of excess carbohydrate and we know that it's excess carbohydrate that damages your ldl and the data shows that if we have a look at the ratio between your triglyceride and your hdl that will be a far better predictor of your chance of dropping off the perch then we'll looking at your ldl level so triglyceride to hl ratio would be something very good there's another test called the hba1c and this is a test so if you visualize that inside your blood vessels you've got the pipe you've got your blood cells they're sort of like a ufo or like a donut shaped floating around and you've also got molecules of sugar going around so remember the term blood glucose level so there is sugar in the blood now these glucose molecules can passively attach to the blood blood cells now this uh this just happens based on the concentration of the sugar and how long it's been in contact so if we understand that the average lifespan of red blood cell is 120 odd days then we can actually take a red blood cell have a look at how much sugar is attached to it and that can give us a rough guide for what your average blood sugar level is so and this average blood sugar is a very good indicator of your risk of heart disease far better than almost any other blood test we can do and why is it such a good indicator why does it have such strong predictive value because the problem causing a lot of this is high levels of carbohydrates so hbo1c is certainly a good one and there's a bunch of other inflammatory markers but if i had to pick two if you're worried about heart disease simple blood tests that are very easily available triglyceride hdl and hba1c what are some of the others so poor because assume that there are a bunch of people that are listening to this that really do want to be able to to measure their improvement if i'm going to go down this path of of having better health and let's measure it what are some of the other tests they should be doing and and can they get them done at their gp or do they need to come to a specialist like you to to really understand what's going on under the hood look most gps will do these as standard the question is do they truly understand what the results mean that's a no i think that's a given for no disrespect for the vast majority of gps they don't understand it i think one of the problems is that when the blood tests come out down the right hand side of the page we have a what's called a reference range and basically that is a 95 confidence interval in most cases where 95 of the population will be expected to fall within that result and the result is only flagged as being abnormal if it falls outside that level now here's the problem do you think 95 of the population is healthy of course not these these values do not reflect optimal health they don't even reflect you know mediocre health a lot of the time they just reflect a statistical marker so and a lot of doctors are interpreting the blood results based on these reference ranges so that's where the first problem is let's take for example a marker of liver damage so imagine that you've got a liver cell it's like a ball and you've got certain chemicals inside that enzymes that are not really found in high concentration in other tissues now if that liver cell gets sick and bursts open that will release its content into the plasma we can do a blood test and we can detect it so one of these markers is called alt that's the abbreviation we often use and it's well known as a liver enzyme and if that level is particularly high that suggests liver damage and this whole pathology of metabolic disease is central to the liver so this is another very good marker of metabolic health so what happened over the last 30 years as the population got healthier well this reference range it used to have an upper limit of about 20 and it used to when everybody was skinny and healthy and if you were over 20 you would say how long ago was that like i did 50 years probably 30 40 years ago and over time that has just gradually increased so now for females most females the upper limit is set at 30 and for some labs the upper limit for males is set at 40. so you can be simply because the population has gotten less healthy rather than say well diagnose every second person with fatty liver we just move the goal posts so i guess to go back to your original point about what blood tests to do so these liver enzymes are very good to assess metabolic health but you have to understand the context in which they're interpreted do not interpret them in the context of the population interpret them in the context of what is optimal health yeah it's a good one anything else they should be testing inflammatory markers i mean homocysteine look i do a uh a large number of blood tests depending on what i find uh when i examine the patient and take a history so um i guess i've probably talked about the main ones but there is a whole lot of secondary ones and homocysteine is certainly one homocysteine reflects malabsorption states so if you're not absorbing nutrients effectively this could be b2 b6 b12 folate your homocysteine level will rise now for most reference ranges it's considered normal if it's under 12 or some reference ranges even under 15. but the data very clearly shows your risk of dying goes up when it's over nine so i actually use elevated homocysteine as a marker of malabsorption which is often secondary to intestinal inflammation so if i go back a step when you ingest a nutrient it goes into your mouth and ends up going through your stomach and into your intestines there it's broken down into small parts and then it will cross the wall of the intestine where it can be absorbed into the body now if you have inflammation or dysfunction in the intestinal wall then perhaps you're not going to be able to absorb all of these these nutrients and this is very interesting i mentioned before very early on in our chat about lectins and gluten this is where some of these proteins which are found in plant-based foods they can actually cause intestinal inflammation so if i see somebody with an elevated homocysteine that's outside of optimal i'll then often go and do some testing for something called antibodies which is an autoimmune disease now an autoimmune disease i know we're going into the weeds a little bit here the weeds are good man um an autoimmune disease is when your body starts attacking itself so if you get an infection um let's say uh you know you go outside and little kid sneezes in your face which is usually what happens when i go home um your body will see this virus and it will say you're not part of me you're foreign and it will mount what's called an immune response against it and as a part of that immune response you can have things called antibodies they're like little guided missiles and their person their little personal assassins for that virus that will go and it will attack that virus and knock it out now occasionally you can have this immune response go rogue and rather than create antibodies that will target parasites bacteria viruses they might actually target your own healthy cells and there's very good evidence that these proteins that are predominantly found in plant foods called lectins can trigger autoimmune responses through something called molecular mimicry which we can talk about in a moment and then once you have this autoimmune response going on it might attack your thyroid so i can actually do a blood test and look for antibodies against your thyroid it might lead to celiac disease so there's some antibodies we look that provide us evidence of celiac disease it might be affecting your pancreas and autoimmune diabetes like type 1 diabetes it could be affecting your joints of rheumatoid arthritis so there's a myriad of different antibodies that we can test for and i'll usually base my selection of those antibodies based on somebody's symptoms do they have joint pain do they have abdominal symptoms do they have troubles with insulin resistance etc etc but i'll just backtrack now and talk about this molecular mimicry concept because it does sound quite foreign so if when the immune system targets a bacteria it doesn't actually look at the whole bacteria it just looks at i guess a molecular signature a short sequence of of amino acids or proteins or carbohydrates or a short sequence of molecules on the coat and if it identifies it let's say that it might be a series of random letters you know aece now if you ingest a carbohydrate binding protein that has on part of it the similar the same sequence of letters a c e and that's able to trigger an immune response because your body says well this is foreign then these antibodies that are developed to target this this ingested what we call a lectin a carbohydrate binding protein they can also recognize the same molecular molecular moiety on your cells that's what we call molecular mimicry your immune system is just confused and i've had a lot of success in clinic where we have people with these just low-grade nutrient malabsorption they've got circulating antibodies against their thyroid so a condition called hashimoto's thyroiditis is very very common and probably if we test people um up into their 60s and 70s more than 50 of people at that age would probably have evidence of some antibodies being developed against their thyroid and that leads to lethargy fatigue malabsorption nutrients because it's also associated with gut inflammation and when we eliminate some of these foods that have the highest concentration of these problematic lectins their symptoms usually improve dramatically it's a really interesting point my father-in-law who's yeah 60 61 sin active guy but chronic knee problems vegetarian you know not vegan but largely vegetarian and i've been for a long time you know he's listened to duran and different things do you think that there is potential that and energy-wise too i think you know just just just struggles in general um for a guy that is ostensibly quite healthy and has a really all the other thing sleeps well good family good weight levels all those kinds of things do you think that the potential that lectins or other things implants and the absence of of some of the critical proteins and things in in animals could could really help him so yeah there's probably three main mechanisms which uh which come up with regards to connective tissue health with diet so i just want to talk quickly about uh bone health and protein for a moment so i don't know if you know much about osteoporosis but conventional teaching is that when you have weak bones reduced density there's nothing we can do about it we can slow the decline but we can't actually um reverse it so bone is made up predominantly of two things calcium and one thing that people don't realize is protein so basically bone is mineralized tendon or you know it's mineralized protein so if the body needs calcium the calcium is stored in the bone so the body will actually break down some of this protein matrix to get it the calcium and release it so if you give somebody lots of calcium and lots of vitamin d you actually reduce their need to break down more bone and this is what the studies very clearly show they show that when we supplement with calcium and vitamin d we can slow down the decline in osteoporosis now there was one very clever randomized control trial where at the end of it they said oh we collected all this dietary data as well why don't we analyze the results based on protein intake and this study was done in postmenopausal females and males over the age of 65. so the population that is considered that it's the most difficult population to deal with osteoporosis you can't really even help it with medication and they found that over three years using dexa scanning which is the gold standard for diagnosing bone mineral density they were able to reverse the loss of bone mineral density in the group that was having the highest amount of animal protein so protein and connective tissue health is an absolute no-brainer now and this is well in excess of the recommended daily intake so the recommended daily intake of protein was calculated in college college-aged males only thinking about the structural need for protein basically they were thinking well protein is used to build build struct build stuff so we'll calculate how much stuff you're building and that will be how much protein you need but protein also does other things it's also involved in enzymatic processes and enzymes and things like that so already you can see that you've you've missed out on one of the big dietary needs for protein so probably um for optimal health you need to double that recommended daily intake for protein now just to go back to your question about more specifically about knee pain andy says the dietary components of that so going back to lectins so we know that some people and certainly people with rheumatoid arthritis studies when they cut wheat out of their diet they get better so one of these lectins that is problematic is called wheat germ agglutinin and that can actually bind to something called glucosamine so glucose a sugar thing so these lectins are carbohydrate binding proteins so they bind to carbohydrates and remember sugar is a carbohydrate so glucosamine can actually bind to the wheat germ agglutinin now if you take glucosamine at the same time that you're eating wheat it can bind in your intestine the the hollow of your intestine what we call the intestinal lumen before it gets absorbed into your system and this explains why there's so many people around the world that swear that glucosamine helps the joint pain and yet when we study it we don't see any benefit and the reason we don't see any benefit is that the people who are getting benefit from glucosamine have an inflammatory joint pain and the people who we study by definition we say oh it must help osteoarthritis we require you to have osteoarthritis that's proven on a knee x-ray so basically we exclude the people with inflammatory pain for our study and we only have the people with arthritis and then we wonder why there's no clear evidence that it works and yet every orthopedic doctor every surgeon every sports doctor you ever speak to will tell you that they've got dozens and dozens of patients who swear that the glucosamine helps their system symptoms and that's the mechanism that the glucose mean helps it actually binds to this lectin the wheat germ agglutinin and stops it from having an inflammatory effect so if you're uh you know have a relative on a vegetarian or a vegan style diet with lots of wheat who's having inflammatory knee pain you could do worse than giving a trial of glucosamine as a supplement or through as a supplement yeah yeah just get it from a health food store um that uh obviously uh what about bioavailability and things like that because it just it it seems like you don't need to absorb it the whole point is that it binds to okay it binds it doesn't matter what happens inside your body it's not being incorporated into the cartilage or anything like that that we used to think all it does is it binds to this other deleterious molecule before that can be absorbed get it now um the other thing is that you can fatty liver will actually lead to weaker connective tissue so all our connective tissue in the body it's uh imagine you've got a cell and each cell is responsible for what we call an extracellular matrix it's basically a sphere of scaffolding around it bone is like this tendons ligaments every tissue we have it's basically a nucleus in a cell and then you have this zone of connective tissue now this connective tissue or extracellular matrix is constantly remodeling breaking down a little bit reforming a little bit now there's some circulating enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases and they are the only enzyme in the body that can actually break this extracellular matrix down so if you have higher levels of these circulating matrix metalloproteinases you're basically leading to a softening or a weakening of the connective tissue and they're produced from the liver and when you get a fatty liver they're produced in much much higher concentrations and this is why especially when we see pain from arthritis where the cartilage is already thinned out so if you've lost a lot of your cartilage you want the cartilage that's left to be as strong and resilient as possible so you really want to have a low amount of these matrix metalloproteinases and fortunately when you lose just a small amount of body weight it usually comes from the liver first it usually corrects fatty liver quite early on in the piece and then your liver stops secreting the same volume of these matrix metalloproteinases and then that means that this you don't have this softening effect on your your connective tissues anymore and that's why a very moderate reduction in body weight so somebody might lose on average ten percent of their body weight and the data shows that their pain will reduce by thirty to fifty percent and this is ten percent's a lot though well a ten percent depending how heavy you are like if you lost 10 percent of your weight you'd be well i'm i'm about 80 kilos yep so 10 is yeah it takes you down to the low 70s yeah i mean but that's the reason why and we're talking about people who are obese but if you have somebody who's 150 kilograms yep losing 15 and they go down to 135 kilograms makes them there's some difference they're still very very overweight yeah so clearly it's the benefit on their knee pain is not mechanical predominantly it's these inflammatory effects and these systemic effects of these matrix metalloproteinases and it's just for me it's fascinating how you could you know get such a dramatic reduction and we didn't understand it for a long time and it was only when we were able to when we figured out the pieces that the liver makes this enzyme and the liver is the first thing that actually loses fat when you lose weight so this is why if you lose 10 percent of your body weight you still might be technically obese but you can be metabolic health metabolically healthy in the same way that we also have the uh the other flip of the coin what we call tofi which is thin on the outside and fat on the inside yeah so you see you go down to a park run on the weekend and how many of these guys are exercising a lot and they've all got that pot belly yeah these middle-aged guys with that little pot belly they're exercising they're trying to do everything they can i promise you they've got they've got fat in the wrong place yeah around their liver yeah how important is fasting from an optimal health perspective or is it a little bit uh of a fad that that seems to be getting as much airplay as the plant-based movement i think fasting is very helpful if you're metabolically unhealthy so if you have this if if you're having an unhealthy diet if you're eating crap food you'll get health benefits by eating that in a time restricted fashion by giving your basically giving your body a little bit of a fast and giving your body a break from sustained elevation of insulin levels and these circulating fatty acids that are produced after a carbohydrate-rich meal and there's very good evidence that you know that time restricted eating which is you know maybe eating in a six hour window or intermittent fasting that they're very similar conceptually but there are some differences between them either and or will lead to metabolic improvements for the exact same macronutrient intake um but so you change nothing you just eat it in a shorter window exactly exactly for both metabolically healthy and unhealthy or but particularly for metabolically unhealthy i think it's i don't fast at all oh well i i well i probably i eat usually one to two meals a day i don't consciously fast so what times do you eat then whenever i'm hungry yeah um so you're not necessarily having this 14 to 16 hour window no no i i don't believe i'm a bit of a hedonist yeah if i'm hungry i'd like to eat sure um so what about your mate durant sure that loves this stuff well he's uh just recently done a three-day yeah we all part two okay you know some of my guys almost jumped off the bridge one guy said i almost lost my wife and my job i became so cranky and if you try and do something like that and you're not fat adapted so what happened it definitely wasn't fat when you start a ketogenic diet you it takes a while for the cellular machinery for your body to start breaking this fat down you basically will starve your brain of any fuel source you can't that's a really interesting thing i hadn't thought of so he literally because he probably wasn't efficient to use his ketones his brain was starving so he was both not able to think and was yeah super angry so angry he was angry man he was hysterical so i mean for me i think if people aren't prepared to go on a a very low-carb diet or an optimally healthy diet then intermittent fasting is a way to make their diet healthier without changing much health if you're on a particularly healthy diet and i think i'm on a healthy diet then i uh for me personally i i'm i'm yet to be convinced of all these benefits of mitochondrial biogenesis and autophagy and all of this i'm not saying it's wrong but uh i haven't been swayed by it myself yet yeah there's definitely some psychological benefits i think too just learning to be a little bit uncomfortable it's my own personal view that we've got a society that they get a cold and they take a pill they get a sore knee they take an anti-inflammatory they don't like their job for a day they change their job that learning to be uncomfortable is a psychologically healthy thing as a society well i think there's probably a lot there that we could introduce into the schools yeah yeah tell me you do spend a lot of time with some professional athletes some olympic athletes and things they have you got a protocol or do you really adopt this n equals one approach to optimal nutrition look it depends on the sport they're doing i mean it's all very logical so let's take the rowers the australian rowing team that you've been working with probably can't talk specifically about the rights i'm afraid confidential we want them to win at the olympics let's talk more broadly then um but yeah i'm i'm i'm i'm more on the rowing team for my medical um oh rather than nutrition okay yeah but um um but look if you pick a um is it an explosive event athlete or is it an endurance athlete actually i can probably talk about one guy because i believe he's gone on public record on twitter and a few other things as uh mentioning himself as a patient and that's uh pete jacob um so he won the hawaiian iron man back in 2012. yeah wow um so he's no slouch um the most grueling event on the planet absolutely yeah so he's currently on a a very uh low plant food diet at the moment and he's actually just uh he's winding up to compete next year and hawaii again at hawaii yeah so he's uh basically thought he'll have another crack at it so he had his own personal reasons for going to a heavy animal-based diet and it's certainly working for him and where he's at with his training um he he's certainly done a lot of experimentation with you know do you have fatty meat do you not have fatty meat etc etc he had a very interesting experience recently actually this is a little bit tangential um where he had a lot of aged foods and aged meats and that this is a bit of a cultural thing we like to especially in australia we might have to sponsor his um hawaiian iron man campaign i would think he would absolutely reach out to him i will i'll put you in contact with him with the aged meat specialist man like well unfortunately the aged meat caused him a bit of a problem oh really what happened well when you age mate when you wake up reassess yourself when you age meat um there's bacteria naturally in the environment that can metabolize an amino acid called histidine and produce what's called a biogenic amine called histamine now this is just a fancy way of saying biogenic just means it acts on the body and amine is just referring to its chemical molecular structure and that can actually cause symptoms in some people who are very sensitive um usually perhaps a little bit of diarrhoea or a bit of nausea so histamines are released when the body has an allergic response so some of the symptoms that people who are intolerant of meat and there are a couple of people out there that don't go so well with meat it's uh quite possibly because they're having meat that's been too aged and if they have meat that hasn't been aged and it's sort of frozen soon after harvest as you would then the freezing can stop the histamine formation and mo i've not met anybody who's had an intolerance to the so-called fresher meat um but that's certainly very interesting i um i get my meats um from a family farm actually yeah and they actually um they don't hang my meat at all um which is i know all plant-based sorry all plant-fed grass-fed oh yeah so it's actually bundera farms yeah um so they they total pasture they don't grain feed they refuse to use uh weed killers they go out there picking all their weeds by hand amazing um when they we've got some farmers like that that we use they're incredible when it comes to uh slaughter um they actually i mean they really care about their animals they go they take the animal to the abattoir they they make sure it's not standing in the yard for long it's basically straight straight in for slaughter um they do everything they can i mean i'll tell you a funny story they um this how crazy they are um they got some horse coats and they wondered what would happen i mean they got a herd of you know hundred angus or something like this and they bought horse blankets because they thought i wonder if they'll work for the cattle as well and we'll try and do that so they spent one season putting and every everybody all the other farmers thought that absolutely bonkers and they were putting these horse blankets all over their cattle well maybe it was maybe it helps them fatten up well they actually did find that so i mean um so the lady's name is uh linda o'neal and uh so they've recently uh re-branded i don't know they used to be cursey cattle or something and now they're bandera meats but um yeah they actually found that they actually put on more weight when they had the blankets on that's incredible you should introduce her to i don't know had them off the top of my head but we have this amazing association with a an on-farm processing site that again trying to eliminate the stress that the animal undergoes from transport from farm to to the slaughterhouse and and they're having some incredible results and so far is um how much cortisol and things are in the body when they're slaughtered so that that service is now available in in parts of australia and and for some particularly these these boutique ethical farmers it's a really good option for them so you should you should connect those two and i think this is a probably a really important conversation to be having too when we're talking about the ethics of certain diets is that just because you eat meat doesn't mean that you don't care about the welfare of the animal it doesn't mean so i i honestly believe that sustainably raised remnant meat is can be ethical and is more ethical than any other diet and i guess this is my personal reason why i source my meat and i eat a lot of meat um and i'm very comfortable with the decision to do that because i know how my meat is raised yeah i know where it's from i know the quality of it and you're prepared to pay for it and yeah i mean look i'll be i've got a 350 liter deep freeze so i actually uh i get half a car at a time yep that's pretty cool so not everybody's is that dedicated yeah but you are eating a lot the influences in this industry like i i think there are a lot of people that are craving more information about this stuff and and no doubt will be incredibly appreciative of what you've shared today how do they find you how do they follow you like low carb diet low carb doctors is your website yes like doctors dot com dot eu which is a great resource i've looked at that what about on instagram i've i'm on instagram i just haven't posted anything not one post i don't know not one post yet i did create an account what the going on man this is 2020. yeah so i've been told that twitter is outdated and that puts me in the uh older generation twitter's the water cooler of the the digital age man it's just it's just people sitting around chewing the fat i want yours is a very visual education process i was gonna cross post and then i got told that just wasn't cool yeah so okay well we'll keep that um dr paul mason on twitter yep okay cool the guys can find you there um sean baker is another guy that i know you respect a lot yeah so he's uh he does a podcast called the hate human performance outliers podcast hpo needs a little bit of audio help we're going to help him with that i think he's up there louie on to it i think they just figured that out but i mean yeah it was quite abominable for a while there yeah but great content now two other people who are in this space who are absolutely brilliant is dr georgia eid um ede now she's a i think it was harvard trained um psychiatrist and she actually treats a lot of her patients with dietary management um she sort of no longer just looks at the human brain as a mix of uh chemicals subject to manipulation with drugs and she's a psychiatrist psychiatrist yeah and she's got some brilliant insights and if you're looking at developmental psychology or the nutrient needs of the brain and a lot of this provides a really compelling argument about why a plant-based diet does not lead to optimal brain health well it was something i was going to ask you is there the risk that it is goes the other way that depression anxiety etc may be aggravated by by not having enough protein in your diet well it's not the protein it's the iron so there's a chemical in our brain called dopamine yeah the feel good one the brain needs iron to make dopamine let that sink in for a moment and you can't take it as a supplement because that's what people will say i get well you can't take dopamine no you know no no you can't take iron as a supplement and have it bioavailable well you can take it as a supplement but it it's got a lot of side effects most of my patients will complain of constipation when we give iron tablets and it doesn't get absorbed particularly well and even if you are supplementing with lots of it unfortunately this intestinal inflammation which is often triggered by gluten and these other things will prevent you from absorbing iron or it will lead to something we call functional sequestration now this is a good word let me just uh i'll i had the dictionary out just before i came on of course so let me just sort of elaborate on what this is so as we've evolved um over the eons we haven't been exposed to autoimmune disease the only thing that we've been worried about is infection and so the predominant cause of inflammation in our bodies has only been infection so when we've been inflamed the response to the body is to say hang on there might be a bacteria around the bacteria needs iron to proliferate i'm going to lock my iron away so the bacteria can't use it that will help me kill it and that is a very intelligent thing to do now the problem is is that while you're locking it away from the bacteria you're locking it away from yourself so you might have lots of iron in the body but it's what was sequestered it's it it's stored in a molecule called ferritin and you're and when you're inflamed your body just can't touch it now if you have autoimmune inflammation your body says oh we've got inflammation we better lock our iron stores away and this is then not a counterproductive thing to do because it means that this inflammation goes on for months and months and months so you end up your ferritin's doors will be very very high the doctor will look at it and say oh you've got enough iron but the trouble is you can't use it it's called functional iron deficiency or latent iron deficiency interesting so in that state um even if you're even if you are supplementing and trying to absorb it if you're if some of these plant-based foods are triggering an inflammatory response that leads you still can't use the iron you're going to be deficient in dopamine and no amount of tablets is going to help you out yeah well dr georgia eid who was the other one you're going to mention amber o'hearn ambro hearn she's a doctor no she's actually uh i don't know if we can use the term citizen scientist but she is i believe she's uh trying to linguist maybe a degree in russian and mathematics and she's just got a very analytical mind and she can she can look at a paper and call bs from 20 paces and she's i really appreciate some of her analysis on some of the topics such as vitamin c and foods and things like that so certainly worth a look at both their work yep and gary tubbs yeah so gary taub says um he probably broke the whole low carb movement you know over 10 years ago with his book good calories bad calories if anybody is interested in just broaching the subject for the first time you could do worse than read his book he's certainly a he's probably one of the doyens of the low-carb movement he's probably not necessarily so prolific with regards to the the plant versus uh animal debate but certainly his um he understands metabolic disease and the role of carbohydrates and insulin as well as anybody in the world yeah amazing and you've got a conference coming up i believe yeah so we've got one in uh at sydney university i think it's it's coming up on thursday the let me just get this date thursday the 10th of october gary taubes is actually going to be coming down flying out from america to help us out there tickets can be at the website uh low-carb down under dot com dot a u and uh that's uh if you're interested in the uh the whole science of low carbohydrate that would be well worth coming out and seeing an internationally respected lecturer amazing paul thanks for coming on the show man it's it's it's endlessly interesting and and we're going to do this a bunch more times i think so look forward to it awesome thanks for having me

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 1,041,144

Keywords: LCDU, Low Carb Down Under, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Carnivore Diet, MEAT: The Ultimate Podcast, Vic's Meat, Paul Mason, Low Carb Doctors, Protein, LCHF, Carbohydrate Restriction

Id: Xgokvp5bfNg

Length: 84min 28sec (5068 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/eterneraki]

This was posted on his channel yesterday but the interview is more than a year old. He gives a lot of really excellent info and covers many different common arguments surrounding carnivore. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend!

[u/[deleted]]

Did Kevin "chip on the shoulder" Bass ever get to debate Paul Mason?

[u/[deleted]]

Love this vid