Plants do THIS to Blood Cells - Interview with Dr. Paul Mason

there is only one species of animal on planet Earth or on any planet that I know of that is confused about what foods they should eat and what foods they should avoid it seems that every other creature on planet Earth knows exactly what they should eat they know how much they should eat they know when they should eat and they know when they should stop eating only human beings seem to have a problem understanding what a proper human diet is I've got a great guest with me today and we're going to be talking about a proper human diet and no telling where this conversation's going to go uh my guest is is a bit of a reel like me so there's no telling what we'll wind up talking about before this interview is over welcome Dr Paul Mason from the other side of the earth good day Ken it's absolutely wonderful to be here we've had a couple of false starts here getting this done and I'm really grateful to be on your program absolutely now uh it's actually tomorrow morning where Dr Mason is compared to where I am uh I'm about to wind my day down and he's just getting his day started so Dr Mason welcome uh before we get started give us just a brief 30 60 second bio of about you and why why did you become interested in a proper human diet well basically well for my own health so I used to have metabolic syndrome in my 20s and 30s I'm now in my 40s and I no longer have metabolic syndrome so that's a bit of a win I'm a sports medicine physician so uh we've got a natural interest in human performance so we deal with Elite athletes Olympians and the like so it's kind of useful if we can put them in a their body and running the way it's meant to run and uh there's also a rich Heritage of uh proper human nutrition in sports medicine we've got Dr Timothy knes Professor Timothy noes and Professor Peter Brookner who are uh both uh leaders in the field as well absolutely and now this is being recorded live in our private community and so one of the benefits of being in our tribe is that you get to ask questions of uh some of the world's leading thinkers on Health Medicine nutrition sports medicine and so uh we might entertain some questions as I see them go by in the comments uh doc first of all I've seen you talk lately recently I was doing my research about you to make sure legit uh you were talking about hemoglobin A1c measurements and plant stero and the effect that that eating some plants at least some of the time can have on the health and viability of uh arites red blood cells and how that can affect hemoglobin A1c measurements uh and I've actually about in about 5% of the carnivores in our community we see that they get this falsely elevated A1C of uh and so I'll be using different numbers than you in in in the United States A 5.6 or lower is considered completely normal uh but we'll see carnivores get a 5.7 5.8 and they've been strict carnivore for six months or 12 months and so we know that that's not coming from glycation events coming from their diet there must be some other cause uh tell me what you've learned about A1C plant sterols and how they can affect reticular sites and arth sites well first of all let's have a think about what hb1c is yeah so you've got a red blood cell and it's swimming along in a soup and when we talk about blood glucose when you do the finger prick and you say oh there's glucose in my blood you're physically talking about glucose molecules that are swimming along in this soup so these red blood cells also in your blood they're in contact with the glucose now now these glucose molecules can actually non-enzymatically which means it's just a passive process can attach together and when the glucose attaches to the to the red blood cell we call that glycated we call that hb1c glycated hemoglobin now the more sugar that attaches the bigger the number so there's two factors that can actually increase the hba1c so Factor number one is how much sugar is there so that's why people with diabetes have greater hp1c is because this soup it's it's a thick viscous soup of sugar it might as well be honey for blood but number two the duration of exposure so if that those red blood cells are in that soup for longer then there's going to be naturally more time for things to attach and that's what happens in carnivals you see we talk about red blood cells like they got a life of 120 days but not in everybody some people's red blood cells cells just aren't that healthy they don't live as long they they suffer more oxidation stress they're not as resilient they're not as deformable Myriad of reasons why but they if their red blood cells are not lasting for very long then what will actually happen is you'll get an artificially low hba1c reading so people who are sick I'll often see people with an hba1c of 4.5 or something like that and I'm just saying uh-uh that's not real there's we're got to look at a reason why you're red blood cells turning over excessively but on carnivores they put their body into a physiological state where the red blood cells can actually live for longer their survivability is improved and in that situation what actually happens is that because they're in contact with the sugar for longer they're able to actually have an elevated hb1c and fortunately there is a way we can actually assess for this in the blood so we've got a when we do a full blood count we get hemoglobin you know red cell counts on and so forth and we can also get although we don't always ask for it something called reticular sites now a reticular site is a new red blood cell now I'd call it a baby red blood cell but they're actually bigger yep so we'll go with a new red blood cell and the idea is that if you're in a steady state if your if your red cell count is stable between two blood tests then the rate of red sub blood cell production should be a pretty good surrogate marker a proxy marker for the rate of red blood cell destruction or turnover so what we can actually see is that in carnivores their blood cell now amount is staying stable their reticular sight their new red blood cells are going down and at the same time the hba1c is going up so that gives us an Insight that the increased hb1c is actually a consequence of improved red blood cell survivability so how on God's green earth does this come about so we heard of cholesterol this molecule which is absolutely essential for life but have you heard of fake plant fraudulent cholesterol imposter cholesterol phytosterol so this is what's in seed oils and plant foods and this is molecularly very very similar to actual real cholesterol it's just got a bit of a tweaking on molecular side chains and it can actually be absorbed in small quantities by the body but because it is different it doesn't have the same biolog iCal function and it gets incorporated into red blood cells which by the way the highest concentration of cholesterol in any cell membrane in the body is in red blood cells is in red blood cells so red blood cells take it up and if red blood cells take up this fake plant cholesterol because you're consuming too many plant you know seed oil so on and so forth it actually damages them there's clear evidence and this has been studied that when you increase the phytosterol content of red blood cells they become fragile less deformable they turn over quicker so that's why if you had a diet high in seed oils you could actually see a paradoxical lowering of your hb1c now I know not part of your question here but just why we're talking about so if you have a hb1c what do we do well I I would recommend cross referencing it with what I consider to be the gold standard for glucose measurement glycemic assessment which is a 24 hour or a continuous glucose monitor and they are absolutely beautiful so that's real time measurement you know wirelessly going straight to your phone you'll see in real time it's like what we call the election night worm you know which political party is winning in that seat you actually see your sugar Trace in response to whatever Foods you're eating and if youve got great glycemic control you will see this just a couple of points though that is often overlooked on continuous glucose monitors they do not measure the concentration of glucose in the blood so and this is often people will say oh you know my sugar goes High I have a shower when I exercise my Sugar's going way up and it's like uhuh your sugar's not going way up let me explain what's going on so you've got the little probe from the 24hour Monitor and that sits in what we call interstitial fluid not exactly in the blood so what happens is the blood is Flowing around it's delivering glucose molecules and some of those glucose mole ules are escaping and going into the interstitial fluid so the interstitial fluid rting of glucose is dependent also on two factors one of them is the concentration of glucose the other one is the speed of blood flow the greater the blood flow the great of a delivery of glucose to that sensor which is why if you have a hot shower you Vaso dilate you open up your blood vessels you increase the blood flow it looks like you're getting a spike in Sugar you're getting a spike in blood flow same when you exercise you're increasing your circulation you're increasing the delivery of glucose to the sensor and that's why there's not always a direct one-o-one uh relationship between the fingerprint blood glucose which is more accurate and the continuous glucose monitor but the continuous glucose monitor will tell you if you've got stable sugars and if you've got stable sugars you're sitting fairly pretty y I totally agree and there's a a long list of things that can falsely lead to an elevated A1C there's a there's a long list of things that can lead to a falsely depressed or lowered A1C uh chronic alcohol intake can actually give you a falsely low A1C there's a long list that anybody can look up and so when I see a carnivore and I don't I don't see this in in people eating a ketogenic diet it's really only in carnivores or or kores who are just almost carnivore 95% but I'll check either a fructosamine or a glycated abuin and invariably even though the A1C is a little bit elevated in these carnivores the fructosamine or the glycated abuin is Stone Cold normal which I think is another good way and I love your reticul sit that's an excellent way of looking at this to see how many new young blood cells are out there in the circulation why are you having to create so many of those well it's because the degraded red blood cells that that have the plant steroid they're being uh PR preferentially broken down and destroyed by the spleen and other other parts of the body because they're improperly made I think that's an excellent Insight um well just just one thing there Ken though just on fructosamine so fructosamine is analgous to hba1c and that there's a protein called albumin or albumin as we might say down under from the an yes Al now um now alamin is what we call negative acute phase reactant so now what does that even mean so basically in a normal existence healthy existence our liver produces lots of proteins which is good because we need proteins to live but when we're sick we have other proteins that the liver produces like C-reactive protein that's an inflammatory protein but there's a finite synthetic capacity in the liver it can't just say oh I'm going to produce more CRP now and not subtract away from something else so your albumin production will actually reduce when you're actually inflamed and chronically inflamed and the the change in alamin synthesis uh rate can actually impact on your fructosamine as well so fructosamine is not not removed from having extraneous factors that can impact it in the same way that hb1c can so so absolutely I I do use fructosamine from time to time but I still always come back to the continuous glucose monitor I love that yeah 24-hour continuous glucose monitor it's hard to beat now I always love to point this out because there's a few people in the carnivore Community now calling it animal-based diet who eat hundreds of grams of of carbohydrates a day in the form of fruit and honey and I actually had a discussion with one of these folks we won't name any names but he and I are good friends but he said uh that that the hemoglobin aeny and fructosamine test they they absolutely test test for fructose glycation as well as glucose glycation and I was like I don't think so my friend you maybe need to look into that and so let's be very clear even though frook is in the name it only checks for glucose glycation it does not monitor or and here's the other problem with fructose is that the glycation potential of fructose is s to 10 times greater than that of glucose exactly right and so these people who are eating lots of and honey are getting a gigantic amount of fructation or fructose glycation that no test that the doctor's office can detect and so I always like to make that Co because it's confusing for for the Layman say well it's got it says fructose of mean it's got to measure fruct no it doesn't and even and don't feel bad if you're a Layman and you thought that because some doctors don't know that that it only checks for glucose glycation as does the glycated album they do not check for fructose glycation and so that's very important for people to understand now are you a big fruit and honey eater as well or do you believe that's probably not the best choice look for me I don't think it's the best choice but I'm also I don't want to be dogmatic about this so this whole thing about carnivore it's turned into a bit of a dogma and ideology if you will yes my personal belief is that people who are metabolically healthy probably can tolerate certain amounts of sugar and I have a sneaking suspicion which I think will be borne out in future that a lot of these plant food intolerances that we're actually seeing that we didn't see in Generations gone by is actually a direct consequence of alterations to the way food is produced namely the to a lesser extent nutrient deficient and more significantly pesticide adulteration so in Australia say here's a pop quiz here for you so I'm a farmer I'm growing wheat in Australia I'm uh I want to turn it into bread in the future how many days before I harvest that wheat am I allowed to spray it with Roundup I don't know what the regulation is in Australia six days and okay so and if I spray a crop with Roundup um we we often do it while it's growing so the the whole thing about GMO modified organisms is not worried about the genetics of it it's designed to make it resistant to weed killers so we can spray the crap out of them with weed killers so that only one thing grows that's the whole point of a monocrop and the reason that they would spray it six days before Harvest a lot of people don't know this Dr Mason is that desiccates that dries the crop out so that it's easier to harvest exactly it may it allows for a much more rapid Harvest but often they they're Al they're not just spraying it on on at the end they're also spraying on it when it's rapidly growing now what do grains do when they're rapidly growing they take everything up from their environment so when you're got a crop that's been sprayed by pesticide it is actually internalized you cannot break it down by cooking you cannot wash it off the rate of pesticide exposure is increasing exponentially so a World Health Organization report calculating the worldwide per capita for every single person in the world use of pesticides is estimated that in the last 30 years there's been 11 kilog of Roundup applied to our food for every person on Earth and 70% of that has been applied in the last 10 years I mean this is and that's just one single pesticide you know there's there's numerous versions so this whole thing about and the pesticides has incredibly wide ranging I know we probably didn't want to get too much into the Weeds on this kind of but I mean we have to understand that what this does is it destroys the soil so the the all the the fungal elements and all the these uh protest elements the things that are necessary for soil structure are destroyed now sure that doesn't sound like a big deal but where does the nutrition how do we release the nutrients from the sand and the stone and the clay from the soil it's with these complex ecological biological forms and the pesticides just demolish that which is why when we perform nutrient analysis on fruits and vegetables today compared to earlier many nutrients are down by at least half you know often up to 34 yep and a lot of the data that I've been able to get is still 20 30 years old which doesn't incorporate the recent massive increases in fertiliz years so when I come back and say look this is not an ideology about Carnivore Plant Foods versus you know so on and so forth we have to understand that our very food systems are not the same so sure if you want to eat plant foods and they agree with you and you're not Celiac and you're not reacting to gluten so on and so forth then there's no ideological reason why you ought not do that but I would strongly encourage you to make sure that it is organic and even if you're eating organic foods that doesn't completely eliminate your exposure to pesticides but it has been proven by research to reduce it significantly yep I totally agree and in many cases I've actually I've read all the studies you've read about the decrease in the nutrition in in uh plants in grains and in actual vegetables as well and in many cases when the when the researchers look at the soil itself and do chemical analysis the the vitamins and minerals are in the soil yes but all the bacteria and all the fungus that's that that beautiful currently Indescribable ununderstandable food that soil Web of Life that's how the the the minerals get into the vegetables or the wheat and when you destroy that with fungicide pesticide herbicide it might be in the dirt but it's not going to get into the into the plants and that's a huge problem that's a huge deal and I love it that you know that about uh about raising crops that's that's good information most people don't aware not aware of that um you talk a lot about statins I talk a lot about statins we talk about cholesterol um I understand that you've got some newish information on statins because one of the main problems I have with Statin is that the drug companies will not release the raw data from their studies we just have to finally trust them that that what that the study was properly designed that it was properly conducted and that they got the numbers they actually said they got and I understand that you've got a little bit of insight on that situation I mean this is complete debacle I mean the fact is that you and I as independent doctors independent researchers do not have access to the raw participant level data on statens is is just astonishing that we have to accept at face value what these pharmaceutical companies who have this uh obviously desire to increase their profit so if we go back to we all know about the uh the Oxford University and Sir Rory Collins and you know all of that but in 2013 there was a the Cochran collaboration did what's called a systematic review on stattin and they said oh we found in some benefit but they acknowledged the possibility that perhaps if they had access to the full data that unpublished data that perhaps their results might change so in 2012 there was an agreement with drug companies around the world for them to provide access to unpublished data so two authors from the Cochran collaboration they actually approached drug companies and they made 10 submissions using these convoluted um approaches to drug companies to say look can you please give us your unpublished data so obviously you know statens are a wonderful drug you know you know that we know that um if you give us the unpublished data we'll be able to tell the world the convincing truth so of these 10 submissions two companies didn't respond Flatout didn't respond so much for an agreement then we had astrazenica they declined on the basis of their internal company policies which makes me wonder how the company was able to make this agreement fiza we may have heard of fiser too um they said I would love to but we actually didn't collect any data on the side effects of our drugs um of the Staten sorry I not talking across their whole product range that would be speaking out of turn um other companies they said uh that the the Staten data was collected before they formed the agreement therefore it doesn't form part of the agreement uh in another situation the company said oh the period where we're required to retain the data for the stattin has lapsed so presumably they just burnt the data rather than having it be released transparently um a Japanese company now this is very interesting the one that was researching the very first Staten Sanko they actually specifically excluded Staten data from the the drug sharing agreement almost like they had something to hide now the really interesting thing is that this company was actually in a race with MC to develop the first Staten back in the 1970s and it's on record there is some documentary evidence that they stopped researching the first Staten because it was causing too many cases of cancer in their test animals and gee it would be wonderful if they hadn't excluded that data from this uh this data sharing agreement wouldn't it yes that would be very nice I mean wouldn't you love to have your hands on this data but the simple fact is you know we we say we've got all of this data and this information was something that unfortunately I didn't have room for in my lecture but I probably should talk about I'm glad that you've given me the opportunity to talk about it publicly today but the fact is that the drug companies do not give us access to all the data on side effects and even when they do give us data the data that they curate that they want us to see the benefits on Saturns are marginal at best now that they're technically they are there in the matter of you know it might increase your life expectancy by three or four days um but you know would those benefits vanish if we had access to the full data and that that's a question we don't have the answer to but in my head I think I know what the outcome would be yeah me me as well and so the 10 companies that were responsible for the majority of Statin on the market either just didn't reply at all or said no you can't have that or we all we've destroyed that data uh even though much of this data much of these many of these studies were actually paid for with government dollars AKA on public yes exactly right but yet somehow they own the data even though it was paid for by the people and and not only that understand that we're wanting data on personal individual side effects we want to know what happened to Mr you know Joe and Mary when they took the stand did they get muscle aches did they start weeing blood you know did their liver start you know cooking itself you know so these are this is individual D yeah it's it's crazy and speaking of drugs statins are very often part of a of a pharmaceutical soup that patients especially over the age of 50 they're going to be on a stattin two blood pressure medications two diabetic medications a medication for restless leg a medication to help them get to sleep a medication to help them stay awake poly Pharmacy I know you have some rather strong opinions about this and and most of them align very closely with my beliefs uh I'm I I and I listen I used to be guilty of this Dr Mason let me be the first to to fess up early in my career when somebody would come to me on 5 10 15 20 different prescriptions and they' be like yeah I'm just here to get labs and get my refills I would refill every single medication I never went down line by line do you still need this do you still need this I never did that it never occurred to me to do that I thought my job was just to refill everything I'm not joking I'm serious and now I would never in a million do that if somebody came in on 20 medicines they would walk out with at least nine if not 15 of those medicines cancelled right and so if we were to sit down together and say well let let's let's take a root cause approach to medicine now what does root cause mean it's saying find out the cause of disease and address the root cause we've either got a root cause approach or we've got a Band-Aid approach which we call appe pill for every ill oh you got a headache oh you don't sleep well you know what have you now if we if you and I were to sit down and put our heads together and come up with a list of medicines that would genuinely be rootcause medicines it would be less than 20 medications I would imagine would have anti-infective agents you might have hormonal therapies for people who have had a damaged gland like thyroid gland might have cooked itself and they need thyroid hormone or they might need testosterone or something like that um they might even need insulin but the list would be far far shorter than what we're actually able to prescribe most drugs actually just treat symptoms so so what I presented on recently in a lecture called fixing medicine was a case of AG greges poly Pharmacy so there was a 71y old lady and she was found to have slightly high blood pressure um which by the way have you ever gone looking for the all cause mortality benefit of blood pressure medication like for evidence that they actually make people live longer well for for minimally elevated blood pressure it's infinitesimally small it's it's an unsatisfying search so anyway so this this lady was started on a she had blood pressure that was elevated so she'll started on a blood pressure drug now this particular drug is called a calcium channel blocker amodine and it is known to have a side effect of ankle swelling and as you know ankle swelling can also be a sign of heart disease but or or a drug side effect surprise surprise so she ended up seeing another doctor who said oh you've got swelling of your ankles well you must have too much fluid in your body let's give you some fluid tablets these are called diuretics they they force the kidneys to expel extra water from the body basically leading to a state of dehydration now if you put an old lady on two diuretics you can reliably predict she's going to start peeing and guess what she did so she was diagnosed with urinary incontinence so she was put on another drug for the urinary incontinence now this drug has what we call an anticholinergic side effect which leads to the sense of a dry mouth and that was bothering her quite a lot so she was given a drug to treat this which is lovely um but eventually she ended up being on 17 separate drugs including all these ones that were commencing in Rapid succession including two antidepressants and an antis psychotic drug most of them which have FS risk as a side effect can you guess what happened she fell over in her bathroom struck her head on the Basin as she went down and fractured her spine now the interesting thing was that two days ago I was seeing a gentleman who was in quite a pickle uh last year he came to see me and he was in quite significant heart failure his lungs were full of fluid his legs he had you know fluid pitting edema up to his woo he really wasn't in a good State and he embarked on what you and I might call a proper human diet he's lost 20 or 30 kilograms in the last few months and he's in a much healthy State and I just saw him a couple of days ago I said how you going he goes I had a fall I said you tripped over he's like no I fell I I just fainted I had a look at his drugs and he was on two diuretics and two different blood pressure medications and I just oh no and it's like once you get healthier you know we need to take you off of these drugs these drugs are causing side effects and he he went to an emergency department they gave him a full cardiovascular workup they said sorry buddy we don't know why you fail see you later um did nothing and it's very clear that he's on multiple drugs that are causing increased risk of Falls and I suspect that if we appropriately change his drugs as in deprescribed which as you know we're never taught how to do always makes us feel uncomfortable because we're never told to deprescribe we're never taught how to do it but if he goes through an appropriate process of deprescribing his chance of having another four will be way down absolutely and my heart goes out the the poor woman on 17 different medications people think well that's probably a special case probably very rare that is so common in people over the age of 50 or 60 or older that is so common that now doctors are actually writing books about pharmacology and pre pre de deprescribing finally but it's hotter than you think it is it's not easy then especially for some drugs it it's a very touchy thing to do it too quickly and so I'm glad there are books about it but you're right as a young doctor I never thought about stopping a medication I didn't think that was my job well what let's take proton pump inhibitors so an acid reflux medication right so incredibly commonly prescribed so when I was in medical school we basically got told safe as houses as long as you want rest the natural acid secretion in the stomach that you can risk becoming deficient in uh a lot of electrolytes calcium magnesium so on and so forth which is why you have an increased risk of osteoporosis increased risk of community acquired pneumonia because of aspiration risk increased risk of dementia because you you reduced absorption of B12 in the United States this would be Nexium pricd Parc those are the probably the biggest three and there's a couple more go ahead doctor so they're just awful drugs long term yes and we and if you have a look at the prescribing information and the thing about prescribing information is that by law that has to be accurate otherwise those exacts could go off to jail so the prescrib that little leaflet inside the drug box that's the Holy Grail yeah for accurate Drug Company prescribed information which is I love sometimes which is why when you look up on Crestor you'll see it causes diabetes and so on and so forth but that's a that's another side tale but these side effects of these proton pumping neers are huge and the problem is that if you suddenly stop them you will get a side effect so they took a bunch of volunteers and they said here take this drug and then they suddenly and these volunteers were healthy they had no reflux before they started then they stopped 40% of them developed symptoms of reflux so this is called rebound acid hypers secretion so what happens is by taking this drug you you suppress the natural acid secretion of the body and the body says I need the acid so it dials up the acid production to counteract the drug so if you suddenly take the drug away you take off that break you're going to have a lot more acid being produced and this is why when people inappropriately well they may appropriate but usually inappropriately get prescribed one of these proton pump inhibitors when they try to stop it they get the reflex oh I still need to take it they end it indefinitely so you actually have to win off these drugs quite slowly you you know start Harve it Harve it Harve it again do it second daily however you want and I usually you know have a protocol over you know two to six weeks depending on how long they've been on it where we actually get to Wi them off but you think we're taught how to do this in medical school no not in your life nope and for many people when they begin a proper human day whether that's low carb real whole food or ketogenic real whole food or ketovore or carnivore wherever wherever you fall on the proper human diet Spectrum most people with chronic heartburn their heartburn gets substantially less severe and so we've had so many people in the private community be able to come off of these but if they come off them too quickly they're like oh I I just stopped it to cold turkey I had the worst heartburn I've ever had in my life I got back on it then I have to have this conversation with them you got to do it slowly so you don't have the rebound uh acid reflux well do you know Dr W Eric Westman sure so I believe he did a study it's a bit of an older study and I don't think enough is made of it where they actually did aagal probes I think it was Eric I hope it is uh aop probes and they were measuring the acidity in the food pipe there's not meant to be acidity in the food pipe and they actually found that when people went on low carb diets they had a significant reduction in the the acid levels of the food pipe the esophagus within six days Y and interestingly I've actually delved into the the mechanisms of this and a lot of it is not so much the low carbohydrate element but the low grain element because with the grains you can get what we call lectin cross linking of IG which leads to histamine release which leads to acid secretion so it's actually there is a mechanism by which grains because they contain these uh carbohydrate binding proteins called lectins that will actually specifically induce acid secretion so it's nice we've got the we've got the biological mechanism and we've got the experimental proof that when you go on a lowb diet or you cut some of that crap out of your diet very very rapidly you get improvements yeah and we see that all the time one of our uh community members has a question what are your thoughts about the uh pcsk9 Inhibitors in the United States this would be praluent and repatha are the two most common Brands right well they're very effective at lowering cholesterol yeah damned effective here's the thing is cholesterol essential for life I don't know okay well that's one conversation here's another question have they ever been proven to statistically significantly extend lifespan so I ask patients when patients come in on a drug I like to ask them why and they usually have no idea what I'm getting at and I say well they say well I'm taking it because my doctor told me to but why why are you taking it and we get there what I want them to say is I'm taking it because I think it will make me healthier I think it will help live longer I can enjoy a longer retirement and see the grandkids grow up you know I want a mortality benefit so mortality is one of those fabulous markers that is very difficult to fudge even a disingenuous dishonest researcher has a hard time saying that somebody's alive when they're under six foot of dirt yes so it it's it's a brilliant Endo because it's accurate it's objective so if we actually use we don't worry about surrogate markers like cholesterol but we say well you know when we give you this drug do you actually live longer that's proof that that will be offering you some benefit and to my knowledge there's not been a single study that's proved any mortality benefit for the pcsk9 Inhibitors now this probably Segways if I may hijack this a little bit into a conversation on cholesterol and I often see this there's two schools of thoughts in the carnivore Community yes La that says cholesterol it can be as high as you like it's never going to be a problem and there this other school says oh I want to have a bet in each Camp look I don't think cholesterol is bad but everybody else says it is so I'm still want to take a set and I want to lower it and I think the truth is somewhere in the middle now what do I mean by that so if you've got high cholesterol we can determine whether you're likely to derive a mortality benefit or a survival benefit from taking a Statin by looking at something called your triglyceride to HDL ratio and if you got a good triglyceride to HDL ratio that means low triglycerides higher HDL then the data very clearly indicates and this is drug company own data which in an article with Ben bman and um David Diamond we we did a couple of years ago we we very clearly made this demonstrated this using drug company owned data that you don't get a mortality benefit from taking Statin so we can assess high cholesterol level first thing to do is to assess the triglyceride to HDL ratio you know and if you've got a good ratio then there's really no reason on God's green earth why you would need to take a stun but that doesn't mean that the cholesterol is fine because there are if we actually have a look at the all cause mortality curves we see this little u-shape and we know that when people's cholesterol goes too low their chance of dying significantly increases but also and to a lesser degree lower gradient but still exists when the cholesterol is very high there does appear to be a statistically significant increased risk of death then I believe the reason for this is because cholesterol production does associate with other health related parameters such as nutrient deficiencies and chronic inflammation for example if any of your listeners out there want to do a quick uh internet search just type in B12 deficiency and cholesterol and you'll see that there's very clear evidence that B12 deficiency increases the biosynthesis of cholesterol there's other factors that can increase cholesterol as well a folate deficiency what about an underactive thyroid what about a condition we call it hemocromatosis a genetic tendency to over absorb IR it doesn't have to be full-blown hemocromatosis where you've got two affected genes you could be heterozygous and just have one affected Gene that also will affect your cholesterol levels so there's multiple aspects to health that we're starting to have more visibility of that can consequently lead to an elevated cholesterol level so in my patients if they're coming in with a very high cholesterol I do two things so first of all we have a look at the triglyceride H ratio we want to determine is this atherogenic you know artery clogging or non atherogenic and number two I still want to find out why it's high is there some underlying pathology that we're missing that we we don't have visibility of for example I've seen high cholesterol in people with mold exposure you know not what You' expect but when we actually have a look for antibodies against mold in the blood we see that their Sky High and when we address the mold issues and we say oh okay well I've been exposed you know had a water leak in my car I just ignored that moldy smell get a new car and over a period of months the cholesterol without doing anything else would just come back to normal so there's multiple possibilities multiple potential causes for these things and I think rather than being in one camp where saying oh all cholesterol is fine or you know you know all cholesterol is bad you everybody needs a stattin I think the truth is somewhere closer to the middle yeah I totally agree and can you see I hope the the viewers can see this this concept when a doctor's got a pill for every ill it actually actively discourages them from looking for root causes because when somebody comes in with really high cholesterol the doc do they does the doctor say I wonder if they have undiagnosed hypothyroidism I wonder if they have folate or B12 deficiency I wonder if they have moldic no they say oh you need a Statin they put them on the Statin that's the end of the matter none of the root causes that actually might make the patient dies sooner it never occurred to the doctor to look for any of that he he can fix that problem just put them on a Statin or or a pcsk9 inhibitor same goes for heartburn reflux if somebody is if if a relatively healthy person is having reflux it's either from their diet or they've got some underlying condition that needs to be diagnosed but when the when the the the physician has his prescription pad oh I'll just put you on pricet or Nexium boom heartburn's gone okay there we go problem solved not not thinking maybe I need an EGD to look for a a gastric ulcer maybe I need to look for an esophageal problem or a lower esophageal sphincter problem or any other number of problems it just it encourages doctors to be lazy I think you're right it does lead to unthinking doctors yes and and and and the trouble is with that so doctors are often being put up on their pedestal you know one thing that really annoys me is when you hear stories of these doctors they're the kind of doctor they got their Cup on their shelf that says don't confuse my medical degree for your Google search just yeah anyway but let's talk about a more positive example so I had a uh a patient who I just saw last week and he told me a story he had consulted previously with a BL called Bob Atkins you may have heard of him Dr Atkins and he was way ahead of his time and he was an incredible thinker now we tend to think of him as being you know all about nutrition protein F blah I can tell you he wasn't he was a real thinking doctor because this patient I was chatting to he saidoh yes he' done a test on me because one of my questionnaire that I give to patients we asked them you know do you have amalgam feelings and he said yeah I used to have amalgam feelings but uh you know Bob told me about them and uh he underwent EDTA culation therapy to get rid of the the Mercury toxicity that he found in his blood and I'm sort of thinking there you go there's there's a real thinking doctor his his root cause he was so far ahead of his time and you know and I think you can predict that you know would like to hope that most doctors with visibility of nutrition and who understand the impacts of nutrition they're just not limited to nutrition that they're able to think about all environmental exposion and think about things across the board and as you said they're not just prescribing a pill they're not just you've got a headache I take a a pet peeve of mine well there's two pet peeves is menopause and I don't know if I should say this but menopause is the the scapegoat used by the diagnostically incompetent you you have a female what's wrong with you oh I I I have trouble sleeping it's menopause what's wrong with you I have sweats oh it's menopause and and too often we use these symptoms as diagnosis when they're not their symptoms so if we take sleep disturbance a standard doctor says okay what you have sleep disturbance I have a sleeping pill no sleep disturbance is a symptom it's not a disease by itself it's not a diagnosis by itself did you know that 75% of people with inflammatory baale disease have pathological sleep disturbance how much sleep disturbance you think people are taking these Zed class drugs for when they've actually got undiagnosed autoimmune inflammation and it's really obvious when you think about it so if you drink two liters of water before you go to bed what's going to happen you're going to get up you're going to pee in the middle of the night you're going to have a broken sleep and when we actually funny story from the Australian Institute of sport they were focused on oh you have to have light straw colored urine otherwise you're dehydrated so they were having athletes drink so much that when they woke up in the morning their their urine would be light straw colored now as you know a working kidney the job of a kidney is to concentrate the urine one of the first signs of a failing kidney I do a urine osmolality test first thing in the morning and when that starts to get dilute that's a first sign of a failing kidney so anyway these athletes having terrible terrible sleep disturbance and then that in short order they said okay that's a failed experiment okay you know go back to not drinking before bed because you know you best want your sleep but why do you wake up because you get this visceral stretch on your bladder you get visceral irritation so if you're getting any and viscera is basically anything contained within this part of your body so if you're getting any irritation or that say with inflammatory B disease or reflux or something like that it is going to disturb your sleep so when people are sort of treating sleep disturbance as a symptom and they're not thinking deeper about what the underlying cause is those people with inflammatory bow disease they can do as much sleep hygiene as they want they can wear all the bloody blue light filters and ear plugs and eye mass and all that and it's not going to help unless you deal with the root of the problem and like yourself I try and get to the root of the problem yep how would you recommend that a patient I saw a question here from one of our tribe members uh how would you recommend a patient go about talking to their doctor if they think that they're taking prescription medications that may not be giving them any benefit uh let's talk about that and then also let's let's segue into patient rights and and the right the rights that patients should have in the doctor's office okay so in terms of talking to your doctor so doctors AR evil so I and I've been criticized in the past so I I don't think doctors are deliberately making people think I think doctors are ignorant for the most part I think it's more negligence than anything else they so look up the list of the side effects on the medications you're taking and present them to your doctor your doctor may have no visibility of these side effects they may just be blindess you know mindlessly prescribing them also number two ask your doctor why am I taking this drug all too often I ask my patients why are you on this drug and they can't tell me their doctors haven't explained to them or it was started by an old Doctor Who they're no longer seeing and their current doctor just continues on status quo so I think those two bring to your doctor's attention what the side effects of the drug are and bring to your doctor's attention why you might need that drug or more importantly why when you're on a healthy diet while you may no longer need the drug so if you used to have high blood pressure of 160 and you went on a healthy diet and your blood pressure would naturally fall to 120 if you still keep taking the drug it'll go down to 100 so you know you when you improve your physiology with diet you're no longer the same person and the drugs that no long that may not have had terrible side effects their side effects can increase in the same way that if you have a diabetic who's injecting insulin and they go on a ketogenic or a carnivore diet if they keep injecting that same dose of insulin there's every chance they could enter a hypoglycemic coma which could kill them so so uh yeah just make sure your doctor's got visibility of those two things then you talking about what rights patients have and I think you and I are absolutely on the same page here so in my consultations I open my consultations by saying just to let you know you can record this consultation usually there's first time I see a patient there's a bit of a stunned silence it's like why would I oh okay yes thank you please because they've never been told that in their given permission for that never but I think it's really important so I don't I like my patients educated these kind of you know if you're the patient up there who's doing your Google searching that that doctor's mug is talking about you're my kind of patient I want my patients empowered and that also empowers me as a doctor and so here's the thing if you come in on 12 different drugs I don't want to put my medical registration at risk by saying oh your doctor's a bit silly I think you shouldn't be taking this drug no well I rely on something called informed consent so if I educate you as a patient to what the science is you are then in a position to make the decision that is right for you that's called informed consent you've been given all the information and you're the only person who truly understands your particular circumstances you make the decision right for you so I think the number one unyielding patient or right is to be provided with factual unbiased information absolutely and to not be then pressured into doing something so as doctors we we Gaslight our patients all the bloody time you hear about cardiologists well if you're not going to take this St and you're no patient of mine you might as well die you know you could die at any time we scare patients without any evidence for it y so I would like to take this opportunity to encourage everybody listening to this video from this day forward anytime go to a doctor's appointment your family doctor or a specialist I want you to pull out your your cell phone and say you won't mind if I record this doctor because I want to listen to it later because I might miss something I encourage all you guys to do that and if the doctor has a problem with that because first thing's going to happen is the doctor's going to be on much better behavior when they're being recorded I promise you it's just human nature they're going to be much nicer they're going to be much more thorough much more complete and they'll actually answer your questions if you're recording the conversation but also what's not going to happen is the gaslighting that he was just saying because he knows he's being recorded he's not gonna say well you'll die within a week or two if you don't take this Staten because he'll know that you could play that for who knows who You'll Play that for right but you're going to preface it with I I I want to listen to this because I don't want to miss anything my health is very important so I'm going to record this if that's okay with you and if they have a problem with that that's a huge red flag that you might need to find another doctor absolutely I I I've found my I've not had a single bad reaction from a patient in doing this and some patients so what I also do is at the conclusion of each consultation I email the patients a complete copy of my notes and when I order testing I copy the patients in on those test results so we try and have as much openness and transparency and I say to my patients if you have any questions about anything that I've said you're entitled to question why I've made that recommendation looks like I've just lost my camera I can still hear you will okay well we'll keep going so I that that was a bit distracting there so yeah so I tell the patients that they're entitled to question any bit of advice that I offer and and if I can't point to peer-reviewed science then they should question what I'm saying I also explain to patients that they can the person they should trust the most is themselves nobody cares about them more than them and even though I try and be an unbiased transparent doctor the simple fact is there's still conflicts of interest there's still if I tell if I see somebody on a certain drug that I think is inappropriate but that was prescribed by uh a high ranking professor at a you know top Sydney hospital um I know that if I go if I give explicit advice and say well that's dis silly then that's not very professional number one and it's not necessarily good for my career so I don't I do not directly contradict other doctors what I do is I say here's more information you can make your own decision but what I recommend you do is you approach your other doctor and in the same way that I've provided you with evidence of a certain effect I'd like you to approach this other doctor and request that they provide you with evidence to support their basis BR strategy nobody no other doctor has ever taken the patients up on that that's a brilliant strategy here in the United States we're very good at getting informed consent for any surgical procedure even a minor surgical procedure uh an ex of a mole or implantation of a of a birth control device but when it comes to prescribing Pharmaceuticals and then also vaccines we are terrible at giving and getting informed consent so doctors will say something about a Statin drug zokor lipor Crestor well you just need to take this you you just need to listen to me uh that's not informed consent that's not even close to informed consent and so I I don't know what the solution to this is I Love Your solution have the patient record the conversation and ask as many questions as they can but many doctors are just not going to allow that and they don't want to they don't want to be required to give informed consent when it comes to pharmaceutical and I I can hear the argument oh it would take this person's on 15 medications it would take me an hour and a half to get informed consent on each one then maybe you should re revisit that medication list doctor and get them off some of those medications right uh but that's a huge problem in the United States I'm not sure how it is in Australia do you have to get informed consent before prescribing a pharmaceutical or can you just say here you need this take this I don't do a hell of a lot of prescribing but but we I don't think we have enough of a focus on informed consent all too often I see patients and they have side effects from a drug and I say did you know this drug causes this side effect no what about this side effect what about this drug what about this drug and it's complete ignorance so one can only assume whether or not there's a requirement for informed consent I think it's fair to say that it that that standard is not met in day-to-day practice not routinely anyway I totally agree one final question that I want I want to ask you I I'm a primary care physician one of the things I'm looking for when I see patients is signal I'm looking for signal so when I used to tell people who are overweight and had type 2 diabetes hey join the gym and join Weight Watchers that's what you need need to do when they would come back in 3 months or six months I would see Zero signal that that had helped them at all and so I became completely disillusioned with recommending diet and exercise because it didn't ever help right so one thing I one signal I keep hearing from the carnivore community and I've actually experienced this myself so full disclosure is that back when I was eating the diet filled with vegetable seed oils and Grains and junk I was almost allergic to to the sun if I were if I was out in the sun I'm very fair Northern latitude DNA I would burn within 10 minutes especially at the beach in just full sunlight in the summer 10 minutes I was going to have a sunburn and now since I've been a carnivore I can stay in the sun three or four times longer without getting a sunburn and also I can actually get a tan now as you can tell I'm quite Ruddy I've I've been Ruddy all my life that's my my Heritage my DNA so don't make fun of my skin color it's insensitive but I can actually get a tan now and my arms are darker than nisha's arms and she's she's half Puerto Rican but I can actually get a good tan now whereas before I could not get a tan at all do you have a explanation a physiological explanation really interesting phytoplankton 500 million years old they're very vulnerable to the UVB radiation which which is just the right wavelength to damage DNA so they actually synthesize vitamin d and vitamin D molecule is just the right size molecule to absorb the wavelength of UVB radiation and protect phytoplankton from the damage so basically vitamin D uh throughout history has had a role as a sunscreen and it appears to be that in humans today we still have that role so why do people with dark skin not secrete much vitamin D on exposure to the sun because the melanin serves the same purpose as the vitamin D absorbing the UVB wavelengths and protecting their skin they don't need to secrete much vitamin D why do pale skinn people secrete vitamin D well because we need to otherwise we will burn but it's only from the UVB radiation which is more found when the sun is closer to being overhead because of the wavelength of UV it's uh it gets attenuated when the sun's coming in on an angle it gets attenuated through the thicker massive atmosphere that it has to pass through so UVB is actually ass absolutely associated with skin Cancers and I don't believe offers any major benefits now the interesting thing is that what's vitamin D made from what's the substrate for it it's cholesterol yeah so if you're having a whole lot of seed oils and stuff like that that will affect your normal biological functioning of cholesterol then you won't be able to produce as much vitamin D you will burn much easier anel keys he actually did a study and they actually people in England looking at uh how much time they were exposed to the Sun and they found that when you were exposed to more sun your cholesterol level actually fell why because the cholesterol was then needed to synthesize vitamin D so it's actually the ability to synthesize vitamin D from cholesterol which can actually improve your natural protection from the Sun then the question is do you actually need to be exposed to the Sun for vitamin D levels and historically not well the Inuit they never had low vitamin D levels did they because vitamin D being a fat soluble vitamin is in food so if you're eating you know whale blabbers and all these other Foods Seafoods that are very rich in saturated fat you're also getting all the vitamin D you need there so in a natural diet we can actually get all the vitamin D we need and our modern diet is so far removed the the standard American and Australian diets are so far removed from what is an appropriate diet that we now consider you can't get vitamin D from diet well you can't get it from a modern diet but you can get it from a proper human diet absolutely now the other interesting thing is that the vitamin D level in your blood the reason it Associates with health is because remember we said it's fat soluble so if you're big and fat you've got this massive Reservoir or sink for vitamin D and it will actually absorb the vitamin D from your blood leading to lower levels of vitamin D in the blood and this has been shown by research that when we give people Vitamin D supplements or expose them to UV radiation that if they're overweight their level the vitamin D levels in their blood don't increase by as much because a lot of the vitamin D is taken up in fat stores and that's the connection between metabolic health and lower vitamin D levels so one you can get all the vitamin D you need from healthy diet number two if you're overweight your vitamin D level will read lower but that's a correlation and not a causation now one other thing is this is not me saying I don't think sunlight is healthy sunlight is incredibly healthy because there's another UV that we get called UVA and that stimulates the release of something called nitric oxide which has been shown to lower blood pressure it also lowers hb1c UVA exposure lowers the level of glycated hemoglobin um so UVA does a lot of good things and you get exposed predominantly to UVA when the sun is passing through a thick massive atmosphere it's coming in on an angle and that's because UVA is a longer wavelength doesn't get attenuated the same as the shorter wavelength UVB does so if you have a look at your Shadow uh that will give you an idea of how the angle the sun's coming in if your shadows at least as tall as you are you're getting predominant UVA exposure with less UVB exposure you're generating the nitric oxide which is why people even people with skin cancer they've actually been shown for Squam cell carcinoma and Basel cell carcinoma to live longer almost 10 years longer the magnitude of effect of exposure to Sun in terms of Life mortality benefit is equivalent in Reverse to the magnitude of detriment that you have when you're a smoker it is absolutely huge populationbased data shows that people with cell carcinomas and Basel Cell carcinomas live longer and I believe the benefit the reason for that is because sure they're getting skin cancer from UVB damage but they're getting the UVA the nitric oxide exposure which is hugely important to health it's got immune regulation properties blood vasoactive properties so on and so forth so in my world the the to get the best of both worlds is to expose yourself to the sun when you're getting predominantly UVA you reduce your risk of uh getting sunburn and skin damage from UVB radiation and if you've got high cholesterol levels and you're on a healthy diet and you're producing a good amount of vitamin D that will provide another layer of protection from the UVB radiation so yeah that would be my take on it I love it I love it Dr Paul Mason thank you so much for doing this it's always a pleasure chatting with you tell tell people watching where they can find you if they really resonated with your message well I I do a few lectures from from time to time and they go on to the low cab down under YouTube channel which and you've got videos on there too I believe so I'm in illustrious company um I've got a Twitter handle and from time to time when I have the chance I'll uh I'll do a bit of tweeting uh but for the most part uh it's a low carb down under YouTube channel and uh I'm hoping that I uh in future I can be a guest on your show again hey I think we need to do round three in the near future thank you so much Dr Mason have a good day pleases all thank you so much so

Channel: KenDBerryMD

Views: 188,655

Keywords: carnivore diet, dr paul mason, dr paul mason carnivore, dr paul mason ldl cholesterol, dr berry dr mason, a1c, a1c levels, a1c lowering diet, a1c vs blood sugar, plant sterols, paul mason, paul mason md, paul mason carnivore, paul mason plant sterols

Id: LSjB272ZFR4

Length: 64min 58sec (3898 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2024