Joe Rogan - Jordan Peterson's Carnivore Diet Cured His Depression?

right it's like you know i want to get into this because this is a i think this is a fascinating thing with you personally that your diet um you're on this carnivore diet now okay so i want to preface that with something i am not a dietary expert so i'm now speaking as an uninformed citizen yes well this is anecdotal evidence from a human being that has dealt with autoimmune issues yes your whole life yes you have done this for how long now i've been on a pure carnivore diet for about two months and a pretty a very very low carb greens only modified carnivore diet for about a year so in the year and and a low carb diet for two years so from the time that i've known you i've known you for what two and a half years now something like that yeah yeah when i first met you you had much more weight on your body yeah you looked different yeah and you were back then you were eating like the standard diet right like normal people yes pasta bread chicken whatever yes right you shift it over to only meat and greens i saw you and i'm like you look fantastic i'm like what are you doing you're like i changed my diet i only eat meat and greens i was like wow that's fascinating well i felt like okay what you're doing is cutting out refined sugars and all these different things that are problematic preservatives all the [ __ ] processed foods and you're having this extreme health benefit i was like wow that's really excellent you're showing great discipline then you decided to take it to another place and cut out the greens yeah what was the motivation for cutting out the greens well all of the motivation for this has been my experience with my daughter because she has an unbelievably serious autoimmune disease i just talked to her what is it called well it's arthritis but it there's there's way more to it than that but the arthritis was the major set of symptoms she had 40 affected joints and she had to have her hip replaced and her ankle replaced when she was 15 and 16 and so she basically hobbled around on two broken legs for two years in extreme agony and that was just a tiny fraction of the of the whole set of problems i just talked to her this morning she's in chicago looks like she has to have her ankle replacement replaced so that's next on the horizon but but apart from that she is doing so well now it is absolutely beyond comprehension so she's she's she's very trim she had a baby but she's very trim she's down to about 118 pounds she's about five foot six she's just glowing with health all of her autoimmune system symptoms are gone all of them and she was also seriously depressed like severely depressed way worse than you think she couldn't stay awake for more than about six hours without taking ritalin um and she was dying and i had a cousin my cousin's daughter she died when she was 30 from an associated autoimmune condition so there's a fair bit of this in our family it was bloody bleak i'll tell you and my wife always had a suspicion that this was dietary related you know and well we did notice that when michaela was young if she ate oranges or strawberries that she'd get a rash like there were there were and then when she developed arthritis if she ate oranges in particular that would definitely cause a flare it was the only thing we could see the problem is is that in order to identify a dietary component the response has to be pretty quick after you eat the thing like if it's two days later how the hell are you gonna figure that out a lot of these responses appear to be delayed for four days and last a month so good luck figuring that out anyways michaela noticed about three years ago no more than that now five years ago she was at concordia university and struggling with her with her illness and and all the association associated problems she noticed that around exam time she was starting to develop real skin problems and my cousin's daughter who i mentioned had really bad skin problems and wounds that wouldn't heal and that was partly part of the process that eventually killed her and she thought oh it must be stress and then she thought wait a second i really changed my diet when i'm studying all i do is eat bagels all i do is eat bread sandwiches she thought maybe it's the bread so she cut out gluten first and it had a remarkable effect like a really remarkable effect and then she she went on a radical elimination diet all the way down to nothing but chicken and broccoli and then her symptoms started to drop off one by one like and and like one of the things that happened is she started to wake up in the morning she started to be able to stay awake all day and when you're only staying awake for six hours with riddle and staying awake all day that's like having a life and so a whole bunch of things improved then her depression went away and i've had depression since i was 13 probably and very severe and i've treated it a variety of ways some of them quite successfully but it's been a constant battle and my father had it and his father had it and it's all just rife in my family and my wife has autoimmune problems in her when you say depression define it oh oh how would you define it because that's a war that's a blanket term yeah well imagine imagine that you wake up and that you remember that all your family was killed in a horrible accident yesterday you would feel that even yes yes just just actually worse than that because well one of the things michaela told me was she thought well what's it like to be depressed imagine you have a dog and you really love the dog and then the dog dies and then about two three years ago our dog died and that was michaela's dog and she really liked that dog and she said that was bad but it's nowhere near as bad as being depressed and i asked her too at one point when she was about 15 or 16. i said look you've got a choice kid here's the choice you can either have depression or arthritis which one i'll take the arthritis well that was after she'd lost two joints so it was no joke it's no joke man it there isn't any no i wouldn't say that i wouldn't say there's nothing worse because worse is a very deep hole right but it's bad yeah people prove you wrong right oh yes definitely worse worse is a deep hole anyways her depression went away all these symptoms went away and like radically so what changed her from chicken and broccoli to carnivore well she she she kept experimenting and she she got very sensitive to all sorts of foods in the aftermath of that too so this is why i wouldn't recommend that anybody does this casually because we don't understand much about it but the upshot was that well she kept she kept she kept experimenting and she started to add things back and take them away and sometimes when she added things the results were devastating she was like done for a month she eat the wrong thing done for a month all the symptoms came back the depression came back she thought that her whole dietary theory was wrong because it lasted so long it was so extreme and it's like it took her two years to figure out that really what she could eat was beef and greens and then she figured out that she could only eat beef so the greens themselves well look so what happened okay so two years ago she said dad you have tried this diet because you have a lot of the same symptoms as me now i didn't have arthritis but i had a lot of the other symptoms and i thought oh christ okay michaela i can try anything for a month she said try it for a month i thought okay whatever i can hang by my fingernails from the windowsill for a month it's like it's just not that big a deal and so i i eliminated i went on a really low carb diet okay so this is what happened i had gastric reflux disorder and i was snoring quite a lot i stopped snoring the first week i thought what the hell that's supposed to be associated with weight loss because i had gained some weight i weighed about 212 pounds and i'm about six one and a half so that was my maximum weight i stopped snoring which was a great relief to tammy that just quit and that's a big deal right because if you snore you have sleep apnea and then you don't sleep right it's like not a good thing okay next i started waking up in the mornings i'd never been able to wake up in the mornings my whole life i always had to stumble to the shower and then maybe i could wake up it took me an hour and i felt terrible and so all of a sudden i woke up and i was like oh look at that i'm awake in the morning and i'm clear-headed and and things aren't gloomy and horrible it's like well isn't that weird then i lost seven pounds the first month i thought seven pounds that's a lot in a month and i'd already gone for a whole year on a sugar-free diet and i didn't lose any weight and i'd be exercising sugar-free but did you cut out bread no no it was just no desserts no sugar no and i thought that might do it didn't make any difference at all seven pounds well then then i lost seven pounds the next month then i lost seven pounds the next month i lost seven pounds every month for seven months like i'd throw away all my clothes i went back to the same weight that i was when i was 26 and my psoriasis disappeared and i had floaters in my right eye and they cleared up and then the last thing that went away for me i was still having a [ __ ] of a time with mood regulation and that sucked because when i changed my diet i didn't respond to antidepressants properly anymore they weren't working and so although i was getting better physically in a variety of ways like radical ways i was really having a [ __ ] of a time regulating my mood and i was having sporadic really negative reactions to food when i ate something i shouldn't so that took about a year and a half to clear up and i was still really anxious in the morning up to three months ago like horribly and then it would get better all day people said well you're under a lot of stress and i thought yeah yeah i've been under a lot of stress for like 10 years it's like it's a lot but it it wasn't any more stressful than helping my daughter deal with her illness that's for sure that no this is something different and she said to me quit eating greens and i thought oh really jesus michaela i'm eating cucumbers lettuce broccoli and chicken and beef it's like i have to cut out the goddamn greens it's like try it for a month okay within a week i was 25 less anxious in the morning within two weeks 75 and i've been better every single day i'm better now probably than i've ever been in my life and i haven't been taking antidepressants for a whole year so i don't know what and i weigh 162 pounds like i have no i'm i'm and i've actually gained musculature i've been doing some working out but not a lot and so i can sleep six hours a night no problem i wake up in the morning i'm awake if i take a 15 minute nap that used to take me an hour to recover from that's gone here's the coolest thing i've had gum disease since i was 25. that's been serious enough to have i've had to have minor surgical interventions scraping and that sort of thing to keep it at bay it's gone i checked with my dentist before this last tour no inflammation and that's associated with heart disease by the way gum inflammation and gingivitis it's a good risk factor heart disease it means the systemic inflammation is gone and it's not supposed to happen you're not supposed to recover from gingivitis and my gums are in perfect shape it's like what the hell so here's what happened i lost 50 pounds it's like that's a lot right i'm nowhere near as hungry as i used to be my appetite's probably falling by 70 i don't get blood sugar dysregulation problems um i need way less sleep i get up in the morning and i'm fine i'm not anxious i'm not depressed i don't have psoriasis my legs were numb on the sides that's gone i'm certainly intellectually at my best at the moment which is a great relief especially during this tour depression is gone i'm stronger i can swim better um and my gum disease is gone it's like what the hell and you've done you've done no blood work so you don't know what your lip lipid profile is or no i'll get that done again when i go back take any vitamins nope no i eat beef and salt and water that's it and i never cheat ever not even a little bit no not soda no wine i drink club soda well that's not it's still water well you know when you're down to that level no it's not joe there's there's club soda which is really bubbly there's perrier which is sort of bubbly there's flat water and there's hot those water start to become important that is crazy well we ate last night and i ate what you ate i just uh we both had that giant tomahawk i had wine though yeah um i'm curious about this very curious i think i might try it but i eat a lot of vegetables yeah but i don't have any problems like health problems hey man like i'm not disclaimer number two i am not recommending this to anyone however i have had however i have had many many people come up to me on the tour and say look i've been following your daughter's blog and i've lost like a hundred pounds i think what you lost a hundred pounds see i lost 100 pounds in six months i talked to a woman yesterday she lost 15 pounds in one month she was 70. it's like this is here's a question why is everyone fat and stupid that's a question man because it's new is it something's wrong yes it is it's new and it's not sedentary lifestyle that that hypothesis doesn't seem to hold water there's something wrong with the way we're eating and the what's wrong is that we're eating way too many carbohydrates i think but remember no big shift the elimination of most carbohydrates has made a big shift in my life and i do cheat occasionally with bread occasionally with pasta i will i will go off with ice cream and things along those lines but most of the time i'm just eating meat and vegetables most of the time and then i'll have a cheat day like you know once a week or something like that especially if i go to dinner i'll have a little pasta and it doesn't seem to mess me up too bad but i do feel shitty after i do it it's like for simple mouth pleasure i'm allowing myself to feel tired afterwards tired yeah that's a big one man yeah but like i uh yeah like well really i can't go about six hours of sleep now and it's so interesting to i i can't believe i can wake up in the morning like i've that's never happened to me in my whole life and when i was a kid 13 12 i had a [ __ ] of a time waking up in the morning it was just brutal i just thought that's how it was this is what i mean again i'm not a nutritionist either but what's fascinating to me is i haven't heard any negative stories about people doing this well i have a negative story okay okay one of the things that both michaela and i noticed was that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren't supposed to the reaction to eating what we weren't supposed to was absolutely catastrophic what did you show what did you switch to or what did you eat rather um well the worst response i think we're allergic to or allergic whatever the hell this is having an uh inflammatory response to something called sulfites and we had some apple cider that had sulfites in it and that was really not good like i was done for a month that was the first time i talked to sam harris you were done for a month oh yeah it took me out for a month it was awful really yeah yeah so i would say so and so this is right before this whole truth conversation with sam harris that got stuck in the mud during during i think the day i talked to sam was like the worst day of my life not because of talking to sam but it was just physical oh jesus i was so dead but i didn't want to not do it cider like what was it what was it doing to you oh it it produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom and i seriously been overwhelming like there's no way i could have lived like that if that would have lasted for see michaela knew by that point that it would probably only last a month and i was like a month [ __ ] cider oh i didn't sleep that that month i didn't sleep for 25 days i didn't sleep at all i didn't sleep at all for 25 days how is that possible i'll tell you how it's possible you lay in bed uh frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours and then you get up oh my god oh yeah and this is from [ __ ] cider from science that's what we thought yeah i mean look again i don't know what the hell i'm talking about okay this is all a mystery to me the fact that my daughter was so sick see the one thing that i didn't know because i scoured the literature on arthritis when she was a kid the scientific literature and because we were interested in the dietary connection and the only thing i could find that was reliable was that if people with arthritis fasted their symptoms reliably went away that's actually a well-documented finding but then if they started to eat again then the symptoms came back and i thought well what the hell does it not matter what they eat they can't be reactive to everything it's like no but they can be reactive to almost everything and the difference between everything and almost everything that's a big difference and so michaela seems to be maybe me too and tammy's on the same diet because she has autoimmune problems on her side of the family so michaela seemed to inherit all of them your skin looks better oh jesus joe i'm way better weird yeah yeah you you look like more vibrant it's very strange thank you thank you dear you're welcome yeah but the see my point is that you're saying that there's a there there is problems with this diet but that doesn't seem to be a problem with the diet seems the problem with deviating from the diet that your body becomes accustomed with well one of the hypothesis that we've been pursuing and there's some justification for this in the scientific literature is that the reason that you lay on layers of fat is because the fat acts as a buffer between you and the toxic things that you're eating because fat is actually an organ it has functions other than merely the storage of of calories and maybe when you strip out that protective layer then you're more sensitive to what you shouldn't be eating this is all speculative hypothesis right or maybe you sensitize yourself by removing it from your constant diet i don't bloody well know well i would think it would be much more likely that because you think about people who are alcoholics they develop a tolerance to alcohol you get off of that and then you have a drink and your tolerances are shot and then you immediately have adverse reaction to the alcohol same thing with marijuana yeah when people do it all the time your body becomes tolerant well i think i think that the layering of fat on might be part of the tolerance mechanism so it's not merely a matter of caloric intake it's a matter of of toxic caloric intake buffered by whatever it is that fat is doing as a neuroendocrine organ but again like i said i said i'm out of my depth here but you know the whole everyone's out of their depth the goddamn food pyramid was made by the department of agriculture not the department of health it wasn't predicated on any scientific studies whatsoever we should have we shouldn't be eating massive quantities of corn syrup we ate we eat way too many carbohydrates michaela posted a paper the other day a doctor has successfully treated type 1 diabetes with a carnivore diet type 1 not type 2. so that's bloody impressive yeah it's it's very curious to me because you're talking about one adverse reaction which is when you deviated from the diet yeah what i'm talking about is when i read people's accounts of trying this diet i'm it's almost universally positive yeah i know but again that's what means well it's a problem with an anecdote right i mean i'm not just sure and it's the same with all these stories that i'm collecting as i'm touring and you know people lots of people have come up to me and said look i lost 45 pounds in the last three months i think yeah i think well it's shocking to me i think well what do you make of that say well i can't believe it well who can well i couldn't believe it 50 pounds it's like first of all i didn't know i had 50 pounds to lose you know i thought i was maybe 20 pounds heavier than i should have been it should have been 185 something like that i guess that's 25 to 30 pounds that was the maximum i thought no no i lost i meant 162 and i was at 212 so what's that 50 50 pounds that's a lot of weight jesus i thought i'd throw all my clothes away it's i can't believe it when i saw you last night i was like you're so slim yeah like you're your stomach is completely flat and then and this is not a lean mean fighting man and you're not a uh an exercise fanatic it's not like you're starving yourself it's not like you're going i'm not running [ __ ] that's another thing i should say to people if you want to try a diet like this you eat enough meat and fat so you are not hungry okay you can't get hungry you're not eating enough if you're hungry and if you're hungry you're gonna cheat and it's gonna drive you stark raving mad the other thing that was really cool is like i really liked sweets like i kind of lived on peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate milk not not really but that was my go-to food you know both of which were terrible for me um but um after i stopped eating carbohydrates for a month the carbohydrate cravings went away you know last night when we were out for dinner somebody ordered bread pudding and i bloody loved bread pudding with caramel and and ice cream so it was sitting there and i could smell it like you know i thought i could go all fantastic mr fox on that bread pudding and just tear it down in about 15 seconds but it wasn't it wasn't as intense as a craving for a cigarette if you're an ex-smoker it was like it'd be really nice to eat that but like my appetite declined by about 75 and that's been permanent that's been so there's a perverse thing for you i eat way less now i'm not as hungry okay well how does that make sense well you're not eating way less you're eating way less things yeah because you had a 30 ounce steak last night yes yes i'm i'm i'm doing my best not to be hungry although it didn't look like it was 30. no no no it was a small 30 ounce steak well i think it starts out 30 ounces before they cook it right it loses a considerable right right it's very fatty right but that's the other thing too you must have to get a lot of fat yeah well i eat fatty cuts of steak and yeah michaela is buying fat directly from the butcher store and we cook that up cut it into small pieces and fry it up till it's crispy wow it's actually quite delicious it's not bread pudding with ice cream but it's not funny you mean i know it's so ridiculous well i wanna i want your blood profile i want to find out what's going on with you because one of the big misconceptions when it comes to cholesterol and saturated fat and food is that if you eat dietary cholesterol that it affects your blood cholesterol levels it's not it's a super common misconception well those so the thing about clinical studies with diet are virtually impossible to conduct because you just can't you can't conduct a proper randomly distributed controlled experiment it's too hard so a lot of what we're trying to do is pull out information from correlations right you can't do it which is one of the real problems with correlating meat with cancer and diabetes and all these different diseases is because people are eating a bunch of [ __ ] with that oh yeah and they have different lifestyle profiles sure like there's just endless numbers of confounding variables and you only need one confounding variable that's that's relevant to screw up the study right you can't get that information with correlational studies we try because it's impossible to do the studies but how many people are incredulous i mean when there how many people when they're hearing about this oh everybody everybody well you're not but you know you're interested in this sort of thing but they should be incredulous like when people make absurd claims it's like oh well i had 50 health problems and i stopped eating everything but meat and they went away it's like oh sure it's like yeah well it wasn't you dying so yeah and i see the results and i know it's an anecdote i bloody well understand that and i'm highly skeptical about all of this but i'm telling you so that's why i'm telling you what happened to me and what happened to my daughter and also what happened to my wife because she's tammy was always in good shape and she's exercised a lot and she reduced to the to the pure carnivore diet about a month ago she lost like 12 pounds and she was already slim she's back to the same weight she was when she was 21. she's she's like 58. you know and she doesn't look 58 i can tell you that so it's really fascinating it's really fascinating because i just as a person who studied diet for many years i would assume that you need phytonutrients i would assume you need vitamin supplements like vitamin c for example it turns out if you don't eat carbohydrates you don't need vitamin c who would have guessed that how does that work i don't i don't remember michaela outlined the paper for me vitamin c is necessary for carbohydrate metabolism but if you don't if again remember everyone listening i am not an expert in this field right so um but but i want you to get your blood tested because i think if it'd be pretty funny if it was in good shape yeah it would be i mean i'd like to find out what your nutrient levels are and where they're coming from i mean what what how much i'm getting a little bit i'm getting a little cramping in my toes from time to time so i'm not sure about potassium or magnesium that's not a possibility well that's how easy to supplement it's very easy which is why i'm concerned about like and also minerals you know i mean certain minerals you're getting from vegetables that you're probably not getting yeah well this is all like look it seems hard to supplement that stuff though colloidal minerals you know there's some mineral pills you could take plenty of well there are people there are people who basically lived on meat you know the inuit did the masai basically did there's some supplementation but not a lot yeah and apparently if you do a carnivore diet you're supposed to eat more organ meat and i do some of that but not a lot but i can tell you like i'm i'm in well look i wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't producing positive results it's not like it's fun i mean for a while well it makes you a social pariah it's like let's invite the petersons over oh yeah they don't eat anything oh we have other friends it's like well that's how it works it's not malevolence right it's just if you're a pain no one invites you out so so i'm a social pain and an ideological pain and now i'm a nutritional pain so it's like no friends how difficult is it when you're trying to get breakfast like what do you do when you oh well lots of times when we're traveling we cook so we usually stay in places where you can cook oh okay but most places you can get a steak and so that's mostly what we do we've been traveling in a motor home and so we've been cooking in the motorhome wow and so and i carry beef jerky with me which we make so yep it's crazy you make your own beef jerky well it's easy we have a dehydrator and you just basically put salt on and throw in the dehydrator so that works pretty well do you anticipate continuing this well forever cod forever is a long time i'd like to be able to eat more things but i'm going to experiment with that very very very very very cautiously i'm going to add mushrooms next because maybe i could eat them well this is why i'm asking there's positive benefits that a lot of people achieve and and experience when they switch to a vegan diet yeah and one of the things it is is you get off of the standard american diet with lots of refined sugars and a lot of preservatives and [ __ ] and then you find positive benefits chris crusher has gone into depth about this but then over time the nutritional ben deficiencies in that start to wear on your health yeah and i'm wondering well and who you're going to experience well it's certainly possible well certainly eventually this diet will kill me no life will well you're right biology will yes unless so science intervenes it might be that for some people a vegan diet is a vegan diet is it preferable well to a standard american diet for sure to a standard american diet but also there's so much biological variability yeah you know the things that bother some people don't bother other people at all and that's that's something that we got to take into consideration yeah well that's why i don't want to universalize from my experience you know but but this is what's happened to me and this is what's happened to my wife and my daughter so and all of it's been well with michaela it's it's miraculous i cannot believe it the last time i saw her it made me cry i've never seen her look like that she looks so good she's so healthy and all of her other joints are not experiencing any problems and she's taking no immuno modulators at all no medication none and she was on them first oh jesus yes more medication than you shake a stick at methotrexate which is basically uh they use it to treat cancer it's uh it's uh what's what's the cancer-treating drugs called whatever i don't remember at the moment she was on um enbrel which really really helped but but later opened to bacterial infections so she always had pneumonia in the fall um but envelope really helped um and then heavy doses of antidepressants and ritalin and jesus and how long has she been on this carnivore diet oh god she's only been eating meat it's got to be at least six to eight months now wow and does she get blood work done uh yep and her blood work i won't comment on that i don't know the details of her blood work um so i don't know answered that hmm it's fascinating i'm curious i'm i'm considering trying it for a while the problem is i eat so much game meat i don't there's not a lot of fat i'll get some fat yeah that's the trick there try it for a month see what happens you what the hell a month you know just a month yeah no month's not hard yeah interesting

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 4,379,682

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: HLF29w6YqXs

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Cipher_the_noble]

He is being far better recieved than Shawn Baker. Perhaps we are breaking the conditioning some more.

[u/anongirluser]

His daughter Mikhaila is who got me started on Zero Carb. I saw her on an interview talking about it. Six weeks into this and I'm not ever wanting to go off of it.

[u/jorsian]

I truly feel like we and people like the Petersons are the pioneers of a major food revolution that will occur within the next century. This WOE is catching on like wild fire, and with all the anecdotal evidence it’s hard to ignore at this point.