No 1 Nutritionist Says Don't Eat THIS! | Nutrition With Judy Cho

[Music] hello everyone this is uh dr anthony chafee and i'm here with a very special guest judy cho who from nutrition with judy and author of the carnivore cure judy thank you so much for coming on thank you thanks for having me yeah uh for people who aren't familiar with your work can you tell us a little bit about yourself yes um so i have been a meat-only carnivore for the last four-ish five years and um basically i was plant-based for 12 years i got really sick and i started looking into my nutrition i started keto but still plant-based got a lot better but wasn't fully healed i think it's a lot because i wasn't eating meat and i think the little allotment of carbs would still make me fall and get triggered so some days it would be plants that i would eat that would um that i would thrive on but then on the days that i was not as clean i would end up eating like chocolate and that would end up becoming a binge and so people told me about a carnivore diet i tried it i thought it would be like a short stint of an experiment and then it ended up changing my life i went back to nutritional therapy school i never went back to management consulting and here i am now and a big advocate of this because i believe that the right food can be medicine and it can heal a lot or even get us closer to who cause healing without a lot of the medication and a lot of the things that people say we are forever stuck with like an autoimmune mental illness i think a lot of that can be supported with food and that is now what i do in my private practice as well as the advocacy online that was great yeah and um so did you study nutrition before you got into carnivore or did or that that comes subsequently yeah it came after so i um i was actually pre-med at uc berkeley i was going to do the whole medical route and then i did organic chemistry and i was like this is not my thing so i ended up going the psychology route and i did that and um and then i ended up doing consulting and i did management consulting for a very long time i was in strategy management you know corporate all of that for a good 12 years of my life um and i was plant-based the whole time because at berkeley i was taught that plant-based is the way to go and i totally blow leave that bought into it and i my health was declining i never once thought my diet was any part of the issue um i just thought it was my own thing and then i tried the keto diet and when i found carnivore i decided i had a real passion for nutrition lots of getting red pills and realizing wait a minute a lot of these things that i've been taught my whole life aren't true and just started going into rabbit holes of a lot of things and i decided well i don't really have a clear background of nutrition you know like i studied biology chemistry biochem and all of that but never was there really nutrition in any of it other than like my food pla paint or the the the food trying uh pyramid and so i went back and wanted to learn a lot more of nutritional therapy and so that was after i already started carnivore yeah okay yeah that that's um that's funny like organic chemistry was like hands down my favorite class and like my grandmother said it's like well if you actually like organic chemistry then you definitely should be a doctor though that was um that's funny um so you i've seen in some of your videos you talk about how you actually you know suffer with depression and having uh you know those sorts of issues and and then realizing that this was related to your diet can you talk a bit about that as well yes uh so you know i was plant-based for like 12-ish years and uh i think in that i actually lost a little bit of weight maybe like 10 pounds and then people started reaffirming to me of oh my gosh your plant-based diet has made you thin and you look great and so therefore you're healthy but behind close to doors i started struggling with this like incredible urge to binge at night where i wasn't hungry i mean where i was very hungry and i wasn't satiated and i never again thought the diet was any of the issue and so a lot of times i would end up binging i would go to the market or i would go to the store and go to fast food restaurants and buy all this food and again it was all plant-based and um and then i would binge and i didn't want to gain a lot of the weight back and so i started using mechanisms whether it was over exercising literally purging using laxatives and and then just right around that time i started struggling with a lot of depression and anxiety again never correlated any of the two um as i got sicker with my eating disorder and then depression i had my child and i ended up in the mental hospital and they told me that i had an eating disorder and i needed to get help for that and so that's what i thought it was so i went to an eating disorder outpatient care very intensive and they told me well it sounds like your history was that you just had minor depression your whole life and so now that as you are older it's just getting worse and you just need to take medication and there's nothing wrong with that and you just take it for the rest of your life and i said okay so three months in though i'm taking the highest dose of the antidepressants ssris and now my psychiatrist is recommending taking these add-ons that hey there it's really used for bipolar it's really used for schizophrenia but we've also seen its efficacy with off-label use of depression and so i started adding other things but those add-on medications oftentimes they make you gain weight so i started freaking out a little bit about this isn't really working i'm on the highest medication maybe i don't have the worst of the depressive moments but generally my emotions were really muted and everyone wants the dietitians or any of the people in there say hey maybe it's that you need me they were actually supportive that i was plant-based and when um when i started researching into keto because it was somewhat popular that's when i started realizing that actually meat is really ideal for you and so that's when i started eating more keto-based foods of higher fat that helped a little bit but it wasn't until i went carnivore that i did i stopped struggling with mental health issues and i never realized that until i was in it and it's been over five years that i take no medications i don't think i've had a depressive day in all of that time sure i have days that i have lower mood but it was nothing like what i struggled with before um and and now i know because i went through that that absolutely it was the diet and the poor nutrition i was having the eating disorder behavior which i think was exacerbated by my poor nutrition and all of that combined was what was causing my mental illness and but if i had listened to just what standard care recommended to me it was that i was just kind of born broken in a way and that i just needed to alleviate it with some medication which wasn't even working yeah yeah that's so good that um you've been off all that that's that is something i see as well you know people having very serious uh depression issues and and really recovering very well and not only just because they're getting more fat and cholesterol which is linked to depression anxiety but but also just for some damn reason you know just getting rid of the plants and the greens you know like you know jordan peterson famously said that when he dropped salads all of a sudden his anxiety went away in a matter of weeks he said you know salad was doing this to me and i don't i don't know exactly what what the mechanism is but i certainly have seen it in in in people you know in the community um as as far as eating disorders that's something that i've i've thought about a lot you know that we have this you know massive uptick in eating disorders basically since the 1980s when everyone started vilifying meat and fat um this is something you you experienced as well personally is it is that something did you see a link in that where people are sort of going more plant-based and they sort of develop a natural eating disorder sort of that as a result of that of the results of not sort of eating the right thing in their body sort of rebelling yeah i i think the mental health the eating disorder it all kind of goes together i i believe that a big part of that is one when you start to count calories and you try to eat very few calories the easiest thing to cut is fat right fat makes you fat and so which is not true but i'm just saying that a statement but that's what most people believe so therefore the easiest thing to cut is fat and then you probably will eat a lot more processed foods a lot more sugar because all of those hundred calorie snacks are really high in sugar and they're very limited in fat and so you're not fueling your body the hormones and all of the steroid hormones and the fats in a way that is supportive of satiety and so your body may be craving other foods because it's not getting the proper nutrition and so while you're trying to stay thin uh one thing is that you're getting malnourished and so your body is going to say you need this other nutrition or crave things that will force you to kind of go and get these foods and so you feel out of control but i think it's really your body is telling you you're undernourished and maybe the cake will go force you to go get some food and so i'm gonna force you to get the cake so that i get some level of fat in your system and then you you just think it's an um uncontrollable eating disorder but i really think it's your body is telling you to go get the foods and i really think that eating disorders um have two parts to it one is the physical satiety where you're maybe craving things because your body is undernourished but then the second part is your brain so if you turn to food for comfort and there's that addictive part of the brain with an addictive part of the food relationship with food and so if you can nourish your body and your body is full so that you're not really craving the sugar and you're not really craving the processed foods i i've been there so where my body was now nourished but my mental side is well i'm used to turning to food for comfort at this time but the the decision-making becomes easier because your body is nourished so it's not this but i can't control myself i have to go get it your body is full so now it's more of the logical side of your brain of trying to talk through your brain of well why am i craving that cake when i'm full and i feel nourished so what is it and then you kind of go through that um healing process of figuring out okay i do turn to food for stress for celebration for every single reason you could think of emotionally and then figuring out how to unpack that and undo that and then finding a new habit or a new way to deal with your real life emotions and sit with that uncomfortableness and then heal from that and i think that in terms of the low-fat or plant-based i really think that it's a lot of these plant-based foods that are wrecking our gut and a lot of our neurotransmitters are produced in our gut so like the serotonin is produced and then you need serotonin to then produce dopamine and melatonin and even your um a lot of that is produced the neurotransmitters are produced in your gut and while they might not pass the blood-brain barrier they all connected and if you are eating a lot of plant-based foods one you're not maybe eating a lot of meat that has the tryptophan that produces the serotonin but two you're also causing kind of more leaky gut capabilities with these plant-based foods that then won't produce more of the neurotransmitters and the fats that will then support your mental health and well-being and i think it's all connected yeah no that totally makes sense and like um i sort of think about things just more sort of basically you know when someone is is purging they're like you say your their brain's pregnant like you need these nutrients you need this fat and they eat something that has fat and it generally contains sugar as well like cake and and then they go oh my god i can't have this in my body i can't have all that fat in my body and so they you know they decide to purge and then this is a pure theory on my part but you know anorexia nervosa where people they just avoid it all together where they're they're eating maybe they've tried eating plants and avoiding fat and it just makes them feel rotten and so you know they're not going to eat this you know meat and fat because that's going to make them fat and they're not going to eat plants because it makes them you know feel horrible and so they just don't eat and maybe that's that's part of it maybe i'm sure there's a lot more to that but i just wonder if that's that's you know playing a role in that as well yes and once most anorexic bulimics when we tend to eat foods it's a hyperpalatable and i think it's that kick of sugar right and then you have the blood glucose go up and then insulin and then you feel that level of anxiety because you're eating the foods that even exacerbate that and then when you feel that anxiety you feel almost like the blame because it's because i'm eating i shouldn't have eaten and now i'm going to be fat and now i need to do something to remove this anxiety and even when you purge and you use these other i guess actions to remove that sense of anxiety there is a dopamine trigger that actually happens when you purge so there is a level of hormonal release when you do do it and it actually will then hit that reward behavior where you feel good in that split second of all i released everything from me but but then you start feeling rotten and then you feel the lack of nutrition and then your body goes into this spiral again and then it's just this constant cycle which is really really dangerous to be in and in those moments where you binge and purge and all that you start feeling really depressed and you start feeling despair and you really start hating yourself and if i had known that if i could just eat meat and that would have resolved all of that fight or flight with within myself and the hatred towards myself and the lack of oh something's wrong with me um if i just knew that simple fact that could have saved me a decade of hurt and harm and despair that that's that's the biggest reason i share this is because i hope that no one goes through what i went through because it was pretty bad yeah yeah i i you know i've have family members that have suffered with depression and it's absolutely horrible to see i've had bouts of it myself and i've even noticed that when [Music] you know i'm really just mostly eating meat well even when i was just just eating meat and some things would slip back in to my diet you know i tell a story about how when my parents were starting a carnivore diet my mom was like making a roast lamb she just packing every single herb and seasoning onto it and i was it literally crusted green it's like this green log and i was like um you know mom like you know that those are those plants are supposed to avoid there's no no no it's just the meat this is just seasoning that doesn't count like right well you can you tip cocaine in your coffee and tell yourself you're only drinking coffee but you know obviously there's something more going on there and so i just you know i just sort of ate it because i was like well all right well let's just see what it does but i was it made me very depressed you know clinically depressing i was able to recognize that because you know i was i was at the point where i was literally contemplating suicide i was so just beside myself and all of a sudden that made me click over and just go i shouldn't be feeling like this you know nothing happened today that should make me feel like this but i do feel like this so this is pathological something something is going wrong and so i was able to just you know you know calm myself down a bit and just say okay i'll just go to sleep and see how it goes and obviously i didn't feel the same way the next day and i was like wow that was that was really weird did i just completely overreact or you know was that something to do with these herbs on the meat and so i just tried some more you know another piece with all these new herb crusted on and i was depressed again for the rest of the day but at least i knew what was going on then so i'm like i just reaffirmed why i just will not touch plants if i can all avoid it um is this something that you see with with your clients is that do you guys address you know depression and eating disorders and and these sorts of things in your in your practice yes uh i think it's part of the reason why i'm a bigger fan of the higher fat versions of carnivore and what i mean by that is at least 70 percent fat in terms of total calories so maybe that's like a ribeye plus a little bit of butter and i i feel that because most women have especially women have under eight their whole lives and they've been super afraid of fat because fat makes you fat again and and that level then has caused a lot of people to under eat that affects their hormones affects their thyroid and so for the older women that may not have as many eating disorders but have constantly or chronically under eight when they start eating more higher fat carnivore they have a lot of healing with their hormones so they're not having to take all those exogenous hormones of the estrogen the progesterone and that type of supports and then for other women that have a lot of the eating disorders and the anxiety and depression again the higher fat supports that as well because i mean you know we just talked about how the gut will heal as it's not getting these assaults from different plant-based foods and then when they're eating higher fat you're supporting i mean your brain is 60 fat and it's 60 cholesterol so if you're not eating sufficient fat like that is one thing that can get affected and then um all the steroid hormones all of the sex hormones they are they and they need the support of fat too and yes we can produce some cholesterol within our bodies but if you have a plethora of it you will support that area and then as a lot of my clients eat higher fat and trust me they don't want to a lot of times but as they do then they're sleeping better through the night their mood is better their hormones are better they're not waking up as much in the middle of the night when there's i know there's this big advocacy for super lean protein nowadays or the proteins very modified fast of you know certain days you eat like no fat and then the rest of the days you can eat fat but generally i don't see that for optimal healing and i don't know how you feel about that but i'm not the biggest fan of ps the lean protein days maybe if you want to lose weight but generally i'm not a big fan of that yeah no i hadn't actually i've you know certainly run into people saying that they you know sort of will eat leaner but i actually haven't haven't seen the the argument as to why your very lean days are going to be better than other days and certainly you have less calories you know i you know the calories in calories out model is is i don't i don't think is very uh helpful but obviously calories do matter you're bringing energy into your body and and so this this changes things but you know biochemically obviously these chemicals do very different things in your body and metabolically they do different things when you're eating certain things and other things um but yeah i don't really know the advantage of just eating a lot of protein in fact you know like you say you know when you get less fat as a as a proportion of your calories you actually do run into problems you know there's there's like you know like rabbit sickness or protein poison you get more than 40 percent of your calories just from from protein it actually causes it can cause harm actually cause overeating if people eat start eating voraciously their body their brain's telling you you have to eat more trying to get these nutrients probably and so they actually end up eating more paradoxically uh but then they they end up dying because they they can't they're not getting the proper nutrition um yeah what is what is that about why are they saying that uh you need to eat like these very lean days what is the argument there i think the biggest reason is weight loss um i don't follow the content enough so i'm just gonna totally make a guess and i don't know if some people are huge advocates of it but i i know that one reason is that the people that recommend doing lean protein days they are bigger fans of doing lean protein than actually doing a full fast so they're saying it's actually worse on your muscle growth if you were to do an actual full fast like of 36 hours let's say um and so instead instead of doing the full fast why don't you just do a full day of eating like chicken breast and as much as you can which is probably for the average person they can probably consume maybe 150 grams of protein so maybe 600 calories and that is still muscle sparing but and because the net average is a lot lower in calories but still supportive of your thyroid which i don't fully agree with but um that then you can still lose weight because your calories in the net week is lower but you're not catabolizing your muscles by fasting and i um the everyone that i've met thus far whether it's my clients whether it's someone from social media even my own personal trying it for half a day it is really hard to feel satiated on those lean protein days and most people they will then scavenge their pantry looking for more food because they're not satiated because they didn't have enough fat and and then it's goes back to that um i'm not satiated and then especially if someone's ever had an eating disorder it reminds them of that oh i'm still not hungry i need a scavenge for more food and then ultimately can lead them into this binge purge cycle and that's my big concern about those um those really lean protein days yeah i know i think you're you're banging on there because you you're you're still trying to micromanage your nutrition and you're and you're doing something that that goes against your nature and your body's telling you don't do this and you're directly going against that yeah whereas you know i just try to tell people just you know just try to keep it as simple as possible just just eat what tastes good you know as far as meat is concerned not candy and you know and just eat until you're satiated and just let your body do the rest like your body knows what it's doing you know do you want to you know absolutely you know spring vault your your weight loss sure you know just don't eat anything at all fine i'm yeah that'll do that but is it the most healthy maybe maybe not but it's it's not what your body's asking you to do and if you like when i was you know i had excess uh weight on when i when i got back on this um five years ago or so you know i was i didn't i didn't have a lot of excess weight but i certainly had some i'd just been in bangladesh and just you have to eat whatever the hell you could eat while you're you're in a refugee camp and you know coming back i was trying to get back in shape and you know and so i was i was eating you know just just meat and some days my body just told me like steak i was like oh i'm gonna cook a steak and everything my body's just like oh that sounds awful don't eat it and and so i started eating steak i'm like i'm just really not enjoying this so i would stop but other days you know i would eat uh whatever i ate when i got down to uh you know stable body fat percentage you know roughly you know sort of six to eight percent my body all of a sudden just went right you know we're not you know we're we don't we want to keep this you know we want to keep this in reserve and so my hunger increased i was literally eating double the amount of meat like almost overnight and that then i just sort of maintained my body fat percentage so your body knows what it's doing and i think you get into a real trouble when you try to micromanage your biochemistry because i'm sorry it's just like your body is going to know how to do this a lot better than than you are you know i i think the issue is with a lot of the older women that come to this way of eating a lot of them may have hormonal issues or thyroid issues and so then when i track okay well let's figure out what you're eating in a day a lot of them are eating very subpar calories and then even when i get them to eat 1600 which is i still think pretty low they some of them gain weight because their body has been chronically dieting and under eating and that's when they are like okay i'll eat the 16. but now i'm gaining so what can i do and that's when a lot of the online coaches will say well why don't you try some of the lean protein days or do extended fasting to balance but what they really need is to heal right so it's maybe there's a period that you're going to gain weight maybe you do a little bit of reverse dieting where you're actually eating 2500 calories and you're gonna gain a lot more than you wanted but then you can go back down to a metabolically healthy caloric range but a lot of people don't want to do that hard work but my overarching message is always if you found a way that is making your weight sustainable but it's requiring you to do alternate day fasting all the time or to do these lean protein days if you think you can tolerate that until the age of 90. it's all you but if you can't then you have to suck it up at a certain point and just accept that you may have to eat higher calories gain a little bit of weight because if your goal is optimal healing you have to let your body heal from all the years of chronic dieting and some of these women will say to me but i'm really not hungry and they're literally eating a thousand calories and i will say well you're not eating enough for your hormones and thyroids to be supportive especially when they're taking a lot of medication and and again they'll say but people say eat to society and then but if you're eating only a thousand calories that's not sufficient and i would love to hear your thoughts on that but it's um it's tricky like the internet is tricky because you know there's these catchphrases that people use but you know i i yes our bodies will totally tell us what we need but if we have tricked our body for 30 40 years then maybe our bodies are not going to tell us ideally what we need so yeah yeah well and you definitely do see that uh you know some people will gain weight and a lot of people come to this because they they want to lose weight obviously and because that's a that's a big issue now as people are generally overweight as an average and they come in and it's it's generally a smaller proportion of people that that do gain weight but it certainly happens and it's very frustrating it's very daunting i had a friend of mine who's um here you know works in the in the hospital system here in australia and and he wanted to try the carnivore diet to lose weight and he really wasn't losing weight you know he was on a short for a week and like he was daily like checking why am i not losing weight he got a bit you know worried about that and so he actually ended up stopping after about a week because he only wasn't losing weight um you know so that can be obviously very you know daunting for people especially if they're gaining weight and but you know i've never seen a case where someone was stayed on it and and you know maybe would have gained weight for a while and then but just kept getting away and didn't get to a point where their bodies said okay we're happy now and then they started just losing weight you know kelly hogan talks about her experience with that as well where she was actually gaining weight for about six months but she felt good she focused on her health and just okay i actually feel better i trust what's going on here i'm just going to let this happen and then eventually after six months her body just clicked over and said okay we're fine now and then her weight just started falling off and i've seen that in other other cases as well but it can it can take a while and that can be frightening for people which is why it's sort of you know i think the focus is better put on just your health and how you feel rather than you know your weight and um you know and so you just let this process happen and whatever whatever it is you know your body's telling you to eat more or less or whatever i think that eventually your body is going to whether it's like like you say you you've been sort of screwing with your system for 40 years or 50 years or more and then so your body's sort of acting in a bit of a deranged fashion eventually it's going to click over eventually it's going to settle down hopefully you know obviously there's always going to be exceptions but i i haven't seen one yet that doesn't eventually even after like a year or more eventually just click over and at least you're still being healthy yeah and i think there's tips that we can bring up i mean that for example if people are snacking a lot on like pork rinds and beef jerkys i mean that is really easy to forget the satiety cues right so if we're just eating specifically fresh whole meats and we eat just stick to the meats that we're supposed to eat in meals and not do much snacking other than that so that our insulin can go down and we're not snacking on high um you know high palatable foods like pork rinds are still something that you can over eat even though it's um in the carnivore space or uh dairy is something that people can really overeat especially if their first transitioning to carnivore they want something super umami-ish and it's like the perfect food to do that so there are ways that people can get the ideal macros in without eating some of those processed foods like even a lot of people will eat a lot of heavy cream for example and say this is how i'm getting my high fat and oftentimes it's ultra high um high pasteurized it's uh homogenized and it's not ideal for the fat that you're trying to get so um there are ways um that we can always alter that but you're right i think long term if people are sticking to just meat and meat only and not eating a lot of the processed versions of carnivore they will end up having a stable weight and maybe it's not the ideal weight they want to be but it's generally not that they will be super obese yeah absolutely and and yeah and i think the most important thing is is just being healthy and letting your body work and i you know when when we develop eating sort of the wrong things our bodies just going to sort of end up at a sort of an end stage that's not necessarily going to be what our genetics would have have been designed for in the first place and if you're doing this for half a century or more it can be a case of damage damage done and you can reverse a lot of things but there's just going to be some lingering effects that you know you may not be able to completely reverse you're not going to be you know if you're if you're in your 70s and you're just coming to this you know it may be that eventually your your steady state you know wouldn't be the same as if you had started this from birth and now we're in your 70s or something like that but at the same time it you know it's still very important that you're healthy and either way it's better than the alternative it's a lot better than the alternative and so it's certainly not going to get any worse eating eating a natural healthy diet so your your book uh the carnivore cure um cover a lot of different subjects um one of them is very close to my arm close and dear to my heart which is sugar which i think is is just i i think it's just that just the bane of of modern society honestly and because it's just in everything and people just have no idea how bad it is and and we think that it's just an empty calorie and and that's it and the empty calories are bad uh but it's so much more than that as you know can you can you tell us a bit more about your feelings on sugar yeah um you know i i honestly think that everybody can be addicted to food because of sugar sugar is a stimulant i mean there's studies with rats and i know people complain that it's a rodent study but there's more than just rodent studies um but there are studies where sugar is very addictive the one that i always think of is there's this rodent study where these rodents were fed cocaine and they were very very addicted and so they would pull this trigger that would um i think it would wait maybe no that was the sugar part but so they were really addicted to cocaine and then they were given drips of sugar and all they had to do was pull this like lever and then the sugar would come and eventually they stopped the sugar from coming and they would pull it down like maniacally and eventually they were the doors would open where they were able to socialize they were able to get other foods and all they cared about was they were incessantly pulling that cord and i think about that all the time when people are addicted to sugar because it shows how addictive sugar is and these people and these rodents even though they had cocaine or sugar they ended up picking the sugar i interviewed this other lady and she said she was a heroin addict and some other addict some other type of drug and then she was also addicted to sugar and she said for her own journey even though she's a phd in all of this addiction sugar was the hardest habit for her to kick more so than any other drug because when it comes to drugs or alcohol we believe in abstinence and if someone's like oh i at the cocktail party of oh i i'm sober i you know have my chip and i'm not drinking they're like sure we'll give you a sparkling soda but if you say oh i'm like trying to stay away from sugar the first thing people say is they don't go oh good for you most times they're like oh come on live a little it's it's someone's birthday or someone's celebration but it's someone's birthday and celebration every single week and month and and um and you almost are guilty towards you should have some because the if you are healthy you can eat things in moderation and that's not how really sugar works and then we have exposure to billboards and we're inundated with this in celebrations right in sadness we celebrate with ice cream and and when we're sad we celebrate with ice cream when we celebrate with cake on birthdays and it's this never ending like color and hyperpalatability of sugar and if you're not able to moderate then something's broken in you and that's sort of the general narrative in the eating disorder facilities you weren't considered healed unless you were able to eat like a cupcake or a chocolate or some type of sugary food afterward that was super processed and unless you could sit with it after and have no feelings no emotional response to eating those foods and you could do that for a couple years that is the only way that you were considered healed and now looking back and understanding the way sugar works your natural inclination after eating those foods is to have higher anxiety because your blood sugar goes up and you start feeling it in your system it's a stimulant as you said in on my podcast and but they expected me to sit there and be completely normal of oh yeah i ate the cupcake i feel totally normal and unless i felt that way and i didn't have any trigger of oh i need to work it off or i need to go purge then i was broken and until then which i think is pretty impossible um then you were never healed of your eating disorder and when i think about that it really makes me upset because the other alternative was if you couldn't eat the cupcake or you couldn't tolerate it they would eventually have you drink those insured drinks which is soybean oil and like maltodextrin and a bunch of other sugar that would also make you feel really stimulated but the thing is in the last hundred years our sugar consumption has like increased by a crazy amount and and then we wonder why we're so sick as a country and um as a as the world not only are we eating more sugar we're then eating less nutrient dense foods because of these sugars and then when our blood sugar goes up and insulin comes into and balances our blood sugar we start feeling hungry we don't tap into our fat stores and then we need to eat more and then that whole roller coaster that we're experiencing all day long not only makes us moody it starts giving us brain fog and and you lose all that all the neurotransmitters we were talking about earlier about getting the dopamine of having the reward behavior to do something other than looking for sugar but when we're focused on just getting hyper palatable foods all we think of all day long is okay i had breakfast when am i gonna get my snack am i gonna get like a frappuccino and then at lunch what am i gonna eat and then you think of your dessert after your meals and and it's it's the food that we're eating that makes us think that way i think most carnivores are not thinking all day long okay what am i gonna eat for lunch what am i gonna eat for dinner it's just sustenance that when we eat it it's really good and then we move on and we do make the most of our lives and we are not obsessed about food and we're not in this mental fog all day long and i totally attribute all of that to sugar because i myself more than the research i was plant-based and my diet was primarily with sugary foods or carbs that became sugar in my system i was probably pre-diabetic sure i was on the thin side but i i was always focused my brain was always thinking of my next meal what can i eat that will still help me be thin and then just obsessive over every single food if i go to a corporate event what am i going to eat how am i going to dodge the food and just constantly it was about food and i really think it's because we're constantly triggering dopamine with that sugar and eventually it doesn't work as much and so you need more and as you get older and you're constantly hitting glucose and insulin your body becomes broken and there are so many studies that show the addictive nature of sugar and yet we classify it as something different than alcohol and drugs and if we were to treat it the same way then we can see a lot more healing in our communities in our world and we don't do that because the sugar industry is a huge industry a lobbyist for a lot of things in the recent i think it was the 2000 to 2000 um 2020 to 2025 dietary guidelines they initially tried to lower sugar to i think 10 of added sugar and something happened where basically they ended up with 12 so even within that they try to lower it just by a few percentage points and they weren't able to get that at the end and they increased it so it was okay to add a little bit more sugar and if you think about the ramifications of that whether it's in jails public schools hospitals these people even in the eating disorder facilities they are guided by those guidelines and you have to wonder when sugar is such a stimulant and people have all these mental health issues when they're eating more sugar that's allocated to their overall calories and less fat how much of our illnesses are really stemming from sugar yeah and um yeah it's like it's like it's okay to who yeah it's like it's okay to eat more sugar like yeah um all right and and that's such a crazy thing to me because obviously sugar is not a nutrient and so you know saying that like you know these are the nutrition guidelines i mean these are supposed to be you know what like this is this is an optimal diet this is this is what will make you healthy not like oh it's okay if you do i mean that that that's not what that's supposed to be you know i mean like you know we don't we don't talk about like you know different guidelines and you know uh you know head trauma and you know and uh you know atls guidelines those guidelines aren't like ah yeah you know it's okay if you check the airway you know yeah maybe maybe look at breathing in circulation but you know if you want to maybe not no it's just like do you do this like this this is the best way to proceed don't do divert from this and so these these nutrition guidelines saying that uh oh yeah you know some sugar every now and then it's fine i think it's that's criminal frankly because i mean they damn well know that it's not it's not an important part and it's not an optimal part and yet you know and obviously it's a lot you know much worse than that but you know them just saying like that's okay i mean that's not the purpose of the of a guideline that's that's not how that's supposed to work you know but it bleeds into all of our guidelines and then even the economics of all of that so if you think about if nutrition is guided through this dietary guidelines and then think about all the children that are on like the governmental assisted eating then all of those food industries get a certain amount of money based on and then they'll allocate the sugar based on these guidelines again but if you think about a lot of the illnesses that are occurring i mean type 2 diabetes wasn't considered type 2 before right it was adult onset diabetes and then now there's these childhood diabetes as well which now they're just calling type 2 but that wasn't as much of an issue before and now we're having all this insulin resistance and childhood obesity which is completely affected because of the level of sugar we're consuming and then even polycystic ovarian syndrome it's like type 3 diabetes of the ovaries and then even alzheimer's is considered type 3 diabetes of the brain and all of these is if we reduce the sugar and even a lot of our cancers are fed through glucose and it's just if you get to a point of looking at a lot of the illnesses and what we are consuming more of than ever and it's not the meat we're not consuming a lot more meat than before but if you look at all of the sugar that we're consuming and all the illnesses at a certain point we have to wonder maybe the dietary guidelines aren't benefiting us and if we were to just even eat the sugar from back in the day and if i'm remembering correctly i think it was a hundred grams of carbs a day maybe it was less than that i can't remember off the top of my head but it's so little compared to what we eat today and i think it's part of a lot of our health issues yeah 100 and you know you look at you you talk about like the sugar consumption yeah i forget the exact statistics but like it was like the amount of sugar that people ate per year like in the late 1800s like minuscule like it was like it was like two to four pounds or something like that now it's like over a hundred pounds 100 pounds of sugar a year and so you know and we're eating less fat we're eating less meat and yet these diseases are skyrocketing so it's it's almost comical to me that people blame this on meat and fat when it's clearly not that you know we're eating less fat and meat and these diseases are going up obesity is going up so clearly that's not the cause and yet you have this this uh you know this factor in sugar where we've if there's a direct relationship as a country eats more processed and refined sugars and has more more access to sugar that the obesity rate and the heart disease rate goes up you know accordingly and so i think you know and there was the studies coming out and talking about that in like the 50s and and that was when all these opposition research from the sugar company started getting getting poured out because this was you know people noticed this you know nearly a century ago that this was this was exactly what was happening like hey you know we're eating more sugar more refined sugar is directly related to to more heart disease and and it just got so papered over by all the opposition research and then you know buying off people in the usda and and elsewhere to to just put this stuff out there and i i think it's seriously harmed you know the health of the world and i i think this is going to be such a scandal later on down the track when this all comes out people are more popularly aware of this that people are just going to be absolutely pissed and i hope i'm pissed and like i hope they are anyway yeah and i think i i think it's really coupling the high sugar plus the low fat that's also causing a lot of the mental illness i mean i i have younger clients that they tell me specifically one in los angeles told me that every single one of their friends and their friends of friends are on some type of ant anxiety or antidepressant and they're 17 years old so i think about the ramifications of that long term and how that affects them and i'm sure all of them are especially in los angeles probably super pro vegan but eating low fat which doesn't support their steroid hormones so imagine them wanting to have kids in the future they are probably going to miss their period often or become amenorrhea and then on top of that they're struggling with the mental health because they're not supporting their um their mental health with like the proper fats that you need to support that and instead eating high sugar which causes more anxiety yeah it's it's 100 yeah and um yeah it was a comment you made like you know if you're healthy you can eat sugar in moderation like but sugar makes you unhealthy so why would you do that you know if you're not an alcoholic you can drink in moderation and you can you can drink as much as you want if you're if you're not an alcoholic like well isn't that kind of what makes you an alcoholic if you just keep drinking and you know especially because these these things are addictive and so you know a little can can become a lot um i probably already know the answer to this but as far as sugar is concerned um do you feel it the same way as in natural sort of sources like fruits and honey and things like that um i think i think are you asking me like where i stand with those yeah okay uh yeah so i one don't think our fruit today is the same as our fruits because i know people use that all the time of well our ancestors used fruit but it's not the same um and i've done enough research on in that area so i know that it's our fruits are getting bigger and sweeter and they're bred to be that way it's not that it's just genetically modified but still they are bred to be sweeter and so i think it really depends then on the person um i know that a lot of people in the community say they feel much better on fruits and i i think it kind of goes back to what you said on my podcast of sure a stimulant makes you feel better and and i believe that i've met a lot of people where they're not really in a ketogenic state but they're not eating enough sugar so they're in that really really crappy place of low energy from not enough sugar and then low energy from not enough fat so you almost have to pick a side with that um i do not think honey is ideal for so many reasons um one is that it's higher more fructose than glucose and i mean you could look into dr lustig dr richard johnson's um all the research on why fructoses causes higher uric acid which then can cause metabolic syndrome and it has this whole slew of stuff that's not ideal and then even in my book i brought up how honey is actually not really regulated um some people will slap on the organic thing and sticker and it's not necessarily local i mean how can you really decide where the bees fly and consider it local for one and and a lot of people will use pesticides that may go into the organic and i know a lot of um a lot of people will say that they regulated and all that but there's also people there are ways that these bee keepers can actually put coloring in the honey and there's a lot of things that again you can't really alter meat much but you can do that with these fruits and like a lot of our organic fruits are flown in from other countries and when i would did the research on the fruits and the organic labels uh more than 50 percent of them within five years they had their organic label or their permission revoked because they weren't following and so the concern is how do you know that your organic fruit from a different country is really organic and how do you and is it even you know sustainably sourced as they complain about um animals um and for a lot of these reasons so i don't think it's necessarily healthy in that sense but i also wonder if people need the fruit the question is why right so i'm okay if people want to add it because they want flexibility they want they feel they're healthy enough fine but if they feel that they need it because they feel better my question is why because i i believe truly that a meat-only diet can give you all the energy you need and if you're adding the fruit or the honey because you feel better then i think it's a band-aid and my my general concern would be figure out why you need that band-aid and what the root cause of why you're not feeling well and then if you want to add it because you have optimal health and you're just like i just want it for whatever reason fine but if people are using it as a crutch then i don't think that's really getting people to optimal healing so in that sense i um it's really nuanced when it comes to fruit and honey but i don't think it's ideal but if people want to eat it they should be honest with themselves with why they're bringing it in and if it's because again that they feel better um i'd look into why yeah and uh and yeah just like you say obviously there's there's more fructose in honey than even high fructose corn syrup and then people go for like agave syrup that's that's even more that's even more a fruit test than that and you know i i think that um it's important for people to realize that that you know sugar is sugar and and maybe it comes with other nutrients that are nutrients and are good for you and you got vitamin c and orange juice and different sorts of things and that's great and those things are good for you but they come with things that are quite bad for you and right you know it's the same it's the same argument as you know eating spinach and like oh but spinach has these things that are good for you like yes but that's cherry picking because it has a lot of things that are that are quite bad for you and you have to look at these things uh in in totality as opposed to just looking at the parts that you want yeah yeah i i interviewed dr lustig it's actually not out and maybe it'll be out by the time this comes out but he said to me just because vitamin c is in an orange or an orange juice it doesn't negate the amount of sugar that's in the fruit so they're not the same so i i totally agree with you yeah absolutely yeah i think yeah that's just something we have to sort of look at in everything that we do and you know and and that's the thing we can we can pick out specific things you know in in juice or fruit or vegetables or whatever that are harmful like we know them to be harmful and we know why they're harmful and what harm they cause and then people just in sort of an esoteric sort of have this this sort of you know this sort of thought that meat is bad and fat is bad obviously you know people think cholesterol causes heart disease it doesn't but uh other than that it's just like oh no no but meat's bad and it's bad for you somehow but they can't actually pick out something like cholesterol they say this is bad for you the cholesterol was the one thing that they had but then they obviously that's garbage but then they kept saying there's just all these other mysterious things that are bad for you but they can't actually name them and you can name them in plants you can name in sugar sugar is something that can be named and so you know i think that that's very telling when you have all these things that you can you can just make a list of all the different toxins in a plant and all the different things that these things do and you can't do that really with me i found yeah and i i always just try to break it down really simply where if you think about all elimination diets uh whether it's like whole30 fodmap scd diet aip autoimmune paleo paleo diet if you think about all of these diets they all leave the meat at the very beginning on the onset of their their diet and at the most stringest astringent period of their elimination diet but all of them at one part or another they remove some type of plant so even some of them like the fodmaps remove remove a lot of the fruits and so if you think about it they're all trying to let you have your cake and eat it too in a sense of okay we'll leave some plants in or some fruits in but every single one if you were to lay them them out all together they're all removing they all cancel each other one out um of the plants except for the meat and so that's where my whole carnivore cure elimination diet is well why don't we just take it a step further forget like that you can't eat the night shades or you can't eat the oxalates or you can't eat the lectins let's remove all of them and then get to optimal health and then you decide if you want to stay there or if you want to add back something but it just goes to show even with these various elimination diets that some of these are clinically used for other certain type of gut health issues that they all remove some type of plant and some of them remove certain fruits and to me that's telling of well i think we all acknowledge that plants have some level of toxins yet we are always okay to leave the meats and all of them leave meats from day one yeah um so so going into that you know can you talk us through like the carnival cure and approach to starting carnival for someone who uh hasn't really done this maybe they're eating a standard american diet or even coming from like a vegan or vegetarian background yeah i i think it depends on the person so i think the most ideal way to get into the carnivore diet would be a step down approach meaning that if you're eating like 500 grams of carbs a day and i do think there's people that eat that much it would be ideal to cut it down by 50 to 100 every week but again it's your personality right i would never have been able to do that i'm an abstainer so if you were to say to cut down 50 grams of carbs every single week that would be torturous for me so i'd rather just peel off the band-aid quick and go from 500 to zero and suffer for a few weeks balance my electrolytes go through weird bowel movements but then i don't have to do that whole okay this week i have to measure and only e450 et cetera but some people do better doing the step down approach so that's one i think know yourself and figure out what makes sense for you for me it's that whole extreme abstainer approach so going full on carnivore was better for me and then it depends on your illness so if you are somebody that is reacting to everything you have high histamine you maybe are suffering from mcas you're just um you just react to even like chemicals uh and certain foods then maybe going all the way down to meats only meaning like beef lamb elk those types of meats and only doing that with salt and water may probably is your best bet and what i like to do is eventually really get people to a baseline of health of normal stools in a sense where they're brown they sink and um they're you're not having like loose stools you're not constipated so that's one um i want to see that your bowels are pretty good um your mood is pretty consistent so maybe you have days where you're not as energetic or maybe you have a little bit low mood but it's consistent pretty much you're not having these depressive days and then manic days of happiness um so general mood and then the stools and then good sleep so maybe you're waking up only one time a night now maybe two at most but generally you're sleeping pretty well and then your energy is good and your satiety is pretty good so i would say that would be my baseline of health for a person once they're eating ruminants and then if they want to um introduce other foods so maybe like chicken or poultry and pork and maybe dairy and eggs then they can slowly introduce each one once at a time but again always comparing to their baseline impulse so as long as they have that baseline that's consistent and then let's say they introduce pork and they're still the same in all those different levers then to me that's a win and that's now you can introduce pork and then you do and it's like a really slow process but that's the best way you're going to know if you start adding pork chicken and fish together how do you know which one you reacted to so as much as it's painful and it's a little long-winded to do it that way it will be the most beneficial way to do it so that you just track for three days of a certain food and then see how you feel compare all those levers and then ideally over time no carnivore food is off the table you can eat everything and you're still feeling optimal yeah um yeah i think that's um a very good way of approaching it i i certainly found benefit just just cutting everything off and i'm the same way i just uh you know once i recognize this stuff is harmful i get that away from my life and so i i found that that worked very well for me um adele davis is one of the one of the original nutritionist she did a lot of really really interesting work in sort of the early 1900s and that was that was actually one one of the approaches she did she did sort of eliminating out certain things trying to identify why these people just weren't feeling great and she would eliminate it outside so basically see like you're eating a lot of this okay well let's take that out for a month and see how you do and they say okay yeah no i you know i don't feel any maybe i feel a little bit different or whatever but sometimes they say like yeah i just feel the same and then they add that back in and they'd have this huge histamine reaction some of these people would actually get so affected by they'd like pass out and so you know it's it's really uh incredible i think sometimes when we we've sort of been eating something for so long and we've just been dealing with the background effects of them on our on our system to then actually remove them out and actually see the difference that it makes and then even adding them back in when our body's not used to it anymore and also when you bang you have this big reaction is uh is very interesting and i think that like you say it could be difficult for some people to sort of wean things off and you know maybe they can do that and they can just do that fine but some people are gonna have problems with it you know it's like the people that are you know quitting smoking for 20 years straight you know and uh oh yeah yeah you know it's like it's it's hard to do it's very hard to do and at some point you just have to get down to a point that you just say okay today's the day it's over um yeah so it's a matter of yeah recognizing that in yourself and you know can i wean this down but eventually you have to you have to have an end goal like okay i'm on this day i'm going to stop entirely as opposed to you know just sort of limping along until you feel ready um yeah for me that that uh it's much better just to for my own life i just i just like just yeah i'm sort of an all or nothing sort of person as well yeah and i really like that um the reason i did i i wrote carnivore cure in the way that it's an elimination and then possibly a reintroduction is i think people when they hear they have to do meat only forever and the rest of their life it seems daunting and it seems very unmotivating right it's fine then if i have to do meat only i'm gonna start in a year or i'm gonna start in years but if you say let's just try to get to meet only let's do it for a period of time and my hope is that people get to optimal health and they feel amazing and then they can reintroduce as much as they want but they will never truly feel as optimal as when they had that zero carb zen and then it's like so then once you taste how good you can feel you'll always remember that so that is why i kind of stun it the way i did because some people may not have to do it long term this whole meet-only approach i think it's ideal but some people really don't want to do it forever fine at least get the taste of it and see how good you can feel and then if you want to reintroduce but if you start getting back pain or joint pain you know where you can always go back and start at a baseline and that is why i kind of coined it that way so that people don't feel as daunting of i have to eat meat only forever i have to give up everything for you know that mindset is terrifying but if we could just have it where well it's just an elimination diet just try it for 30 days 60 days see how good you feel and then you can go back to however you want but i think most people once they feel as good as they do they will be very very limiting in what they bring back yeah i know yeah absolutely and you know for me when even something little slips in and i i can see the difference and yeah i mean maybe that that difference isn't enough to to really you know scare off other people but for me i was like yeah i don't like that you know i like feeling just absolutely amazing all the time um and i do yeah and i think that you know once you get that that taste of that it's you know it's really powerful because people just don't realize actually how crappy they feel and you know talk to people they say well you know i actually feel pretty good i don't feel that bad so you know maybe maybe later i'll try it if i'm if i'm feeling unwell it's just like you actually don't know how bad you feel right now because you haven't actually ever felt really good to the point to where you could and when they do get that they they really start to get it my um you know my girlfriend now she was sort of like that you know just by osmosis she's just started eating more meat by being around me um and obviously you know what i would cook and i would cook what i what i like to eat and so she would she would eat that as well so she was eating a lot more meat and you know enjoying that um but we were still eating other things every night you know uh occasionally and then we sort of you know made a deal where she said okay well i'll just i'll just go uh you know strict with you for a while and and see how it goes and it was just sort of you know like a fun sort of little bet between us and and then after a few months she you know she sort of dabbled in this and that every now and then but then she started coming around saying like i actually just feel so much better like i haven't i just didn't even realize how much of a difference it made and you know i sort of eat this other thing and like i don't even know why it wasn't even that good and then i just felt like crap the rest of the day and so now she's doing because she wants to do it she's doing it because she feels so much better and it's provided such a you know benefit to her her or her life and and well-being and so it's uh it's something that it started out as just a oh let's try it but now she's like i get it you know and uh and she really likes that so i think that's that's a that's a good thing for people to try yes and i would love for everybody to just feel that for a while and that's where when people try carnivore and they say oh it didn't work for me and so i had to add back food or i had to add back honey or i had to add or something it's just i wish they worked with someone and just altered carnivore in the way that most people feel better and then if they just taste that a little bit then if they want to add food then they want to do whatever they want fine but at least they tasted this bliss that people know of carnivore and then and then they could do whatever they want but i i it makes me so sad that people don't hit that zen when they're so close because maybe they needed to alter macros or timing of meals or the level of fat in their way of eating or the certain types of meat even that they're eating um but instead they just kind of say it didn't work for me i'm moving on and it's just it's the saddest thing to me yeah absolutely and and quite often you know when people say like it doesn't work well people that i've spoken to some of the times it's it doesn't work for them it's you know they're looking at a certain parameter like they want rapid weight loss or they want something and then so and some people say like you know i felt so much better on a carnivore diet and it you know stopped my autoimmune issues and all these sorts of things but you know i i lost weight for a little bit but then it sort of stalled so i really wish it would have worked for me i'm like sounds like it was hey it sounds like it was working and b you know what uh you know what were you eating what exactly were you eating i always asked them that and almost always they're still eating some sort of sweetener like monk fruit sweetener or stevia and having other sort of you know plant things but almost always there's a sweetener almost always and you know it's it's that's going to hold you back in a lot of ways and some of these things are going to be you know so it's not carnivore that didn't work for you it's that you didn't actually quite make it and you didn't didn't try it full on and some people think of carnivore as as just eating more meat and you know and as opposed to like exclusively eating meat because yeah you do have to frame it as like this is eliminating out all these other things and because it's those other things that cause harm meat's great meat gives you the nutrition you need but it's the other things that cause harm so you really need to get those the hell away that's true actually i i bet you if i were to dig deeper with some of these people because i'm a lot of these people are from social media because the other people i'm actually working with them but you're right it's uh it's a lot of these things helped but maybe there was like one thing and a lot of times it's the weight or it's that they're inc um included sweeteners or or i'm telling you a lot of them are the heavy creams it's uh they're they're fasting throughout the day with coffee and like a quart of or a pint of heavy cream and then they're like i don't know why i'm not losing weight or um i don't feel well and it's because you know you should just eat a breakfast than if you really need to eat something but they just sustain off that cortisol output of coffee which is not ideal too no i don't think so and and like that's the thing you're trying to trick a system that is much smarter than you you know it's so complex and so intricate and all you have to do is just give it what it wants you just give this input and it will it will provide the output and if you try to screw with that it's not going to work in in the in the way that you want it to yeah you just eat food you know you just eat food and that's that's that's it you don't have to worry about it like your body just takes care of the rest um you did mention in um previously i've seen you talking about people who try carnivore and and actually don't have like all the energy that they want and they feel pretty low energy maybe even weeks or months after uh going carnivore you know why is this and and what can people do about it it's tricky because um i think it depends on the person but for some people the first thing i always alter is the the the macro so a lot of people i will have them if they're first starting to work with me i'll have them track either a cgm their blood glucose in the morning even a little bit of their ketones just to get a sense of are you in a fatty acid state or are you eating just super lean protein which then you don't have the fatty acids as a form of energy and so i will alter the macros and a lot of times that helps a lot maybe they're not absorbing a lot of their nutrients because their gut still needs a little bit of support they're not breaking down the meats into zinc and then the zinc produces a hydrochloric acid for more stomach acid there's a lot of that and i know that only because we will do blood work once in a while and people even though they're carnivore for six months they're still deficient in b12 or b6 and that to me is or some of the minerals will be low for the same reasons and it's because they're not absorbing their nutrients um so a few things is let's say some of my kind of quick tips would be if someone's doing omad i'm not the biggest fan of omad only because i think for women especially maybe men can get away with it a little bit more you get one chance to absorb all of your nutrients and if you have had gut issues in your past then a lot of people that come to me or have gut issues because i focus on gut health and so then you have like one chance to get all the nutrients absorbed and if you're not eating enough in that one meal that so those two things one if you're not eating enough and then two if you're not breaking down all your nutrients in that meal you get one chance to absorb all of that so if you eat maybe two meals a day and then have that same meal but broke it into two you get two chances of absorbing the nutrients so that sometimes helps with energy and then timing of the meals i normally like to have breakfast and lunch together or lunch and dinner rather than breakfast and dinner so you have a smaller window of eating and then a longer window of kind of fasting especially if you're insulin resistant it helps to drop down that insulin to then tap into your fatty your fats and your fat stores and then and then i also try to get people at least 270 75 80 and then also looking at the fat sources so if they're doing this 80 fat but most of that from heavy cream i make them switch it to more of like the fats from the meat so sticking to a ribeye versus eating like chicken thighs and then um so that those are some of the supports and then sometimes it's more deeper than that and that's when if i work with them long term some people really do have mitochondrial dysfunction where you can do tests on fatty acids and it'll show that maybe their mitochondrials needs a little bit of support sometimes they use something like acetylcarnitine it helps to just support the energy a little bit some people have like mold toxicity where their body is just really down regulated because of a biotoxin in their system and that is more of a smaller population of people so but long term if somebody's meat only and they're not healing after a year so maybe they went from an f of health to a c but they're not getting to an a i will look into these other areas that legitimately a meat only diet will likely not fix it will support a lot and maybe five years out they'll be fully better but why not provide a little bit more support in the interim um and i would think that that's the those are the biggest things it's the macros making sure the gut health is getting all the nutrition they need and then making sure they're eating enough a lot of people especially again the women they are under eating and they may be snacking a little bit and getting away with eating a certain amount of calories but really um they're more they're not eating like these hearty two meals a day or one meal a day and instead they're kind of grazing throughout the day maybe they had like a beef patty with cheese and then they just snacked on some pork rinds and heavy cream and it's like that's not ideal nutrition in my opinion so uh altering the way that they're eating the kinds of food they're eating the time of their eating and then the macros usually helps a lot and then if they need a little bit of gut supports i would also recommend that but beyond that um then maybe a little bit more digging is required but uh usually for most people what i just mentioned will help a lot yeah i think that that's a very good point you know a lot of people coming from from a place of sickness and their bodies you know isn't working properly and they might need a bit bit of support and you know maybe the body's not able to absorb nutrients for you know one reason or another and even though they're they're getting proper nutrition their body can't utilize it properly and that's just going to take uh that's going to take certainly going to take time to resolve but also it may need further supports as well yeah and i think stress is a big thing so like that's like i would love to touch on that you know ever since covet happened i think all of us have like increased our stress load by a few percentage points and we think because it's common it's normal but our bodies have not been used to being at a stress state that is so high and we have to really focus on that i have clients that will tell me all the time but everyone's stressed judy so like i can't really do much about it or my marriage is falling apart but i can't do anything about it i'm living with my husband even though we don't get along and all of these things are i'm in a job that i hate um but i i have to pay the bills all of these things add on to our bucket of unwellness and over time i think it's a lot of these things that then will make us unwell and really our healing comes when we are in a rest and digest state where we can then our immune system is a lot more calm and we can heal we can also digest and absorb our nutrients better but if we're eating on the go and we're in a stress state or we have a lot of stress and illness none of those things are conducive for healing nor are they um in a place that we can actually digest and absorb our nutrients so i think stress is a huge factor in healing and even in the belief of can this meat only diet heal me right a lot of people are skeptical and they're like well i heard these magical stories but i bet it won't work for me and i think a lot of that placebo effect is also real if you don't think this diet can heal you it probably won't and so i think a lot of these things come into play i think the stress aspect is huge if people are so stressed in their lives and all they're going to do is fix their diet it will heal a lot but it will not get you to optimal health and i am a firm believer in that now i think really managing everything else in your life is so key into um having true wellness yeah absolutely um the uh and the conditioning thing is i i see that all the time or where people will really just tell themselves uh something that's just not well even even just telling themselves that they enjoy vegetables i'm like that's crazy you know like i've never enjoyed a vegetable and you know you look at kids you're giving these things for the first time most of them are appalled and they they get cry and scream and vomit and you know and then we condition ourselves to you know hate the taste of fat i think that's bad for me you know even though i i i've never met anyone who has tried bacon and said that doesn't taste good right and yet you know we think but then we associate that taste with that good taste with something bad for us and you know and then we we make ourselves feel sort of sick because of that so you know the mind is so strong and conditioning ourselves yeah is so powerful and we can we can really do a number on ourselves just by convincing ourselves of you know that something is that you know when it isn't you know yeah yeah exactly and it's pervasive i mean you watch a television show and somebody's eating a burger with bacon they're like oh i'll go for a walk later you know they they totally attributed to heart disease and it's and and then kids see that i mean we were at a toy store this weekend and it made me so upset but they had a new menu for kids it's like a little you know uh cooking play play thing and the the new american breakfast right so normally it's like bacon eggs and bread and at least there's bacon and eggs it was a vegan breakfast so the new american diner food was a like a bean burger and then everything was plant-based and it's just that's the new thing and it's we're instilling this into our children at a very young age and i showed this to my children i'm like this is propaganda and it's crazy but it's in it's in all of like when these kids are three years old like this is what's on their menu that they're playing play you know play time with and it's it's just sad that that literally sent a shiver through my body when you were describing that i was like and uh you know they're doing it here too in in australia they've really done a big push for for a plant-based even vegan uh diet it's um you know you know it makes a certain sense i've noticed that that that people are just societally you know they'll they'll really go with the recommendations so so the recommendation was you know if that's bad cholesterol is bad you shouldn't eat it they really internalize that i mean like okay well let's just get this stuff the hell away from us and so there's a big you know sort of thing of really really lean meat uh if you're going to eat meat at all to the extent that i've spoken to ranchers and the actual cattle here are different from around the world they're actually more lean they've bred them to be more lean because that's just the market and you know and i get that you know i when i recognize you know plants and sugar is harmful i would like get these things the hell away from me so i totally get that and you know and i i think it's actually probably the right way to approach things if you notice something if you recognize well this is really bad for me but i'll just do it anyway you know probably not not a great idea but you know so i get that that what they're doing that but you know they unfortunately they're going in the wrong direction obviously you know you and i um would agree but in schools now there are schools that are there are vegan schools you are not allowed to send in meat with your child like they will get punished for that and that and it will be taken away from them and they will you know go through school lunches and other ones that are not vegan it's like you have to have at least this much fruit and vegetables in there and you cannot have more meat than this and then in other schools that that don't have those strict rules there's this there's a there's a nationwide campaign going on right now in australia talking about how oh don't put don't put lunch meat in your in you know when your kids lunches because you know there's all this the nitrates in there and oh my goodness you know keep those things away from these kids and um and don't put any meat in your school lunch uh outside of that because oh you know we don't have refrigeration and so this is in just rot you know in the three hours that it's been sitting in a bag i'm like really so like school lunches over the past however many centuries that people have been sending you know lunches with their kids containing meat these are just you know just today it just changed where like meat just rots in three hours and so you know it's this is propaganda they're saying out there and and you know unfortunately people are buying it um but uh yeah it's it's absolutely crazy they're making this push you know and going out and attacking the kids to brainwash them early absolutely i mean fear cells right so if you if you think about heart disease it's really hard for us to determine if we're susceptible to heart disease other than familial people in our families that have had it but otherwise to the average person heart disease seems like it just attacks out of nowhere and if you're eating higher fat foods the risk is higher but other than that any day you can just experience heart disease and the best chance you have is if you go plant-based like that's the narrative out there and so the average person won't want to eat bacon or burgers because the meat is what's causing us to have heart disease but if we were to just take a second and peel back that ideology it makes absolutely no sense because it's naturally what our bodies want right it's tasty to us but we've eaten that way for eons and never once was there heart disease even a heart 150 years ago and now we have it but i think we're in such a brain fog with eating all this crappy foods that we don't even think wants to think maybe what i'm being told is wrong and instead actually the foods that can actually heal us are the things that are better for us but instead we listen to the narrative because one we're raised to at a very young age to listen to authority raise your hand never question things and that's why i refuse to have my kids in public school i i refuse to have them learn that the my food plate is the way to eat and then not only that i don't want them to raise their hands to have to use the restroom i mean maybe in a certain way they have to but generally i want my kids to think for themselves and question things and so we're teaching them in a socratic method of why why is that the best way why why are the rules that way and i want them to wonder why certain friends of theirs are vegan and there's a lot of friends that are vegan now and one of their childs recently asked me oh you're a nutritionist and they had no idea i was meat only but uh and they're plant-based and they told me their daughter is 13 and she's a dancer and she's having all these joint pains and this is before i figured out they were plant-based and i said well do you eat meat because that may be able to support you and they're like nowhere plant-based and i mean that's the solution right as simple as that is but they believe that they're being ethically right to the animals and saving the planet and it's just we're we're really fed this this narrative that is just so against humanity and it makes me so sad that my son's child my son's school as progressive as this school is or unschooling where they question everything i would say 30 of his class is vegan and that is so sad to me yes and they're they're seven-year-olds they're seven-year-olds eating plant-based and and i just have my child bring in mostly meat on most days it's meat only sometimes there will be some kind of snack but and i haven't do it and if they ever ask i tell them you need to tell them that it's the most nutrient-dense foods that i hope it will bleed into some of them but it's really unfortunate because i know these parents believe they're doing the best for their children and they're so misdirected in what they're they're advocating for yeah it's so sad because like i said i mean these parents are trying to do the right things for themselves and especially for their kids and they've been just so misled and that that's a perfect uh illustration of just how pervasive this narrative is is that now you know these seven-year-olds 30 of them are vegan and that is absolutely just going to unfortunately ruin their development um you know their intelligence their their stature and their their physical health for the rest of their life is going to be stunted uh because of this because you only get one chance to develop and then and then that's it you know once you your your your bones your growth plates seal off and and your your skull stops growing like that's it your brain is going to be the size that it is your body's going to be the size that it is and you're going to have these detrimental health effects you know ongoing and it's it's absolutely tragic because these people are really really trying to do the right thing for their kids i know it's so sick and it's um i mean if you think about it so in the u.s they just pass this new law where at all the schools they cannot they cannot serve whole milk it is not allowed so instead they yes it is banned but they can have um they can have fruit juice i think they have sodas i'm not entirely sure about the soda part but i'm pretty sure they can have soda they can have fruit juice and then they can have all the low-fat milks non-fat milks with flavoring so the chocolate and the strawberry but they are not allowed to have whole milk because whole milk causes them to be fat which is crazy because when you remove the fat in milk if you think about vitamin d and um i think it's calcium or vitamin k that's also in milk but they have to fortify that back because they're removing the fat and so they're eating this like frankin food type of milk and and then they add sugar back that's why they have all those flavored milks because that's the only way it's palatable because they're removing the fat in the milk and if you and the average parent that sees that where a government is going to ban whole milk in your schools you're going to think that that's what's making people sick and so you follow suits when it's so misguided yeah well obviously the government knows what's going on and obviously they they only want to help and protect us i mean that's that's what they're for right yeah and um yeah well i mean obviously that's uh you know different different things have their own their own motivations but just simply put you know they could be wrong and and are we gonna trust our health and the health of our children with with someone who can be wrong without even looking into it you know it's um you know government bodies uh maybe some of them have good intentions probably they all started with really good intentions but the road to hell is paved with good intentions and so you know if you just blindly trust these uh these these guidelines you may be in trouble because these guidelines change all the time that should tell you something you know every five years they're different you know so it's just like you know just every view they're changing they're changing they're changing so at the at the best this is a work in progress and you have to recognize that even if they're trying to work towards you know the a proper end and get the best out of this they're wrong at least part of the time by their own admission because they change their own guidelines because these guidelines have have not been static for 70 years no no we got it right and this is it you know they're changing it constantly so why do you believe them now if they said that their last ones weren't accurate you know maybe look into this for yourself and start start thinking about this and saying like well you know we've been eating fat forever and heart disease is new so why is it that an ancient diet is causing a new disease and we're eating a lot more sugar we almost never ate sugar not certainly not to the the abundance that we do now and and we have these new new issues tracking up with that so i think it's the information is there and it's actually quite compelling and when i when i talk to people i'm sure you've experienced the same thing we sort of explain these very simple uh you know these simple relationships they just go like that makes sense like that just it just makes sense you know and i think it does and i think things should make sense you i don't think you need a you know a degree in nutrition or degree in medicine to understand these things sometimes it helps if you don't because you know you don't have you don't have this pre-packaged uh i you know these pre-packaged ideas and education saying like this is how it is and and i've actually noticed that in a lot of people that because they're educated in something they're just like no this is what i learned and this is what it is and it's like it's that that that classic you know thinking outside of the box well this is the box this is everything you've been taught this is the way life is this is the way the world is okay think outside the box ask a question what if it's not you know what if that was wrong what if it's all wrong and uh i think that's a like that's helped me anyway you know just just sort of just looking at things and challenging them you know yeah no one thing i want to add to that your whole list is um the statin use right we yeah we said that 60 of our brain is fat mostly cholesterol our cholesterol is needed for all our sex hormones and yet we're giving a statin which is uh reduces our cholesterol in our body there's no guarantee where it's going to reduce it yet we see studies um i believe dr david diamond talked about this in one of his studies on statins and he said that in their trials um for efficacy out of all hundred people that had high cholesterol that took the statin only one person benefited so out of a hundred people that use the statin only one benefited yet it's the most selling drug um it's a billion dollar industry and as if it's not already lucrative enough now they're going after children and they're working on a child reducing statin drug and if you think about how again our brain is 60 fat and children's brains grow i mean yes a lot of the bulk of it grows until age five but it's still developing until late 20s and you're going to get these kids on a statin that reduces cholesterol and that is so upsetting and if you just again logically think about that just the statements of our body has all these needs for cholesterol and then you're going in and reducing the cholesterol if you see the side effects of a lot of the men that take cholesterol it's mental health issues it's um aggression rage depression and again our brain is mostly cholesterol so do you think there's a correlation with that i mean it's it's really concerning and again why are they giving kids these or why are they trying to give kids these statin-reducing i mean statins that reduce cholesterol which it's just it's it's it's so unfortunate yeah that i i didn't know that and that has like instantly just infuriated me like i am like actually like like okay who who do i find that's responsible for this and and yell at them because that that that really pisses me off that they're doing this to kids uh yeah statins are the highest grossing uh drugs of all time you know they've made more profit than anything else and they've and they've absolutely you know destroyed health and in many many different uh areas um you know with kids i mean yes brain development neural development i mean that's huge you know our whole body's made out of cholesterol so i took eighth grade biology and in in the book it was just like the the cell membrane was cholesterol and i remember looking at that going like and that's bad for us like we're made out of cholesterol how can how can that be bad for us and i was like maybe there's something else going on that that i don't know you know getting in excess or whatever and blah blah blah and and so i mean i i you know was fully aware that i was you know 12 and i didn't know everything and so i was just like all right well you know watch this space and i'll keep an eye on it but i still remember that and um you know i mean just just obviously brain development is so important but also your hormonal development your hormones you know like you you testosterone estrogen progestogens cortisol all your mineralocorticoids glucocorticoids all of these things are made from cholesterol and you don't have enough of that you are going to screw yourself especially when you're going through puberty when you when this is really important and so they're doing this to kids now and they're they're going to be you know chemical you know castrating these people uh uh by putting them on these statins and having them not develop uh normally through puberty that is that is disgusting to me that really pisses me off but i think that also kind of happens with the low fat right i mean yeah true i know this is somewhat controversial but i mean if you think about a lot of kids eat low fat and even without the statins i mean i'm not surprised that there's a lot of hormonal issues right now and kids having mental health imbalances and a lot of other things because again we are not fueling kids in the way that they are supposed to be fueled to be thriving and a lot of mental illness and even lots of other questions about things um i i really really think it comes down to the diet and i i know that's somewhat controversial and people think people are just genetically made certain ways and i think there's truth to that but i also think that our diet with the excess food dyes the excess sugar the lack of fat all these processed foods and then all the chemicals that are in these processed foods you don't think it messes with our hormones and then affects like identities and other things like that it it it's pervasive and um it's concerning because i i have two young boys and i hope that they thrive and it's not just that they thrive i want their whole communities to thrive and the concern is well if everyone is not eating optimally we're only i mean my kids generation is expect they're the first generation expected to die earlier than our generation in terms of age they're the first ones that will never not surpass the ages of our generation and then the generation above and it's saddening because it's the diet it's a lot of that what they're experiencing their life stressors right even this whole pandemic i mean imagine the stress on young kids that don't understand things but their parents grab them and say stay away from them i mean they could get you sick like all of that is just causing so much stress on these kids plus the lack of nutrition i mean this illness this pandemic it's one of the comorbidities was obesity but then statistics show that most kids have become obese in the pandemic and you just have to wonder what are we doing to our entire population no absolutely yeah and um yeah well certainly certainly not the right thing you know when obesity rates are going up and disease rates are going up in childhood obesity childhood diabetes childhood autoimmune issues and suicide too and suicide absolutely and that that was so absolutely so tragic you know that that uh you know the suicide rate increased at such an extent recently um that was absolutely tragic um yeah that's i think that's we're going to be multifactorial obviously you have all these stresses from from the lock towns and the pandemic and then also we're giving them the wrong things and you know they're promoting oh well you're stuck inside so let's just we'll give you treats we'll give you junk we'll give you this or you know get vaccinated here's a box of donuts i'm like well that's a little you know you're you're trying to promote health and yet you're you're giving something that you you we know is not not healthy so i think it's a bit counterintuitive that you would you know any whether you like you know you you you liked the you know that sort of uh program or not you know if you're if you're trying to promote health you should promote health you know you shouldn't you shouldn't you know encourage people to do something that you feel is healthy by giving them an unhealthy treat that doesn't that doesn't really send the right signals and it doesn't really perpetuate the right sort of approach to things and then being more plant-based eating less fat and having all the eating more processed food and sugar and crap and being locked in i think it's just this perfect storm of of uh you know mental anguish that has caused a lot of harm and it's very very sad um um [Music] thank you so much i think uh i yeah i don't want to monopolize your whole night but i really appreciate this i i really enjoyed coming on on your show that was one of my favorite interviews uh that i've that i've done and uh and i've really enjoyed speaking with you here well as well i hope you enjoyed it too um can you tell us how to how to find you how to see your work and uh yeah just a little bit um about yeah where to track you down yeah and i'll definitely have to have you come on because people loved your podcast with me so definitely we'll have to do this again so people can find me on nutrition with judy on instagram facebook youtube um i have a podcast nutrition with judy as well as cutting against the grain the cutting against the grain podcast is with my co-host laura spath and we talk a lot about these nuances real life approach to carnivore and we talk a lot about the kind of water cooler conversations of carnivore you know is honey good for you and then we talk about the nuances of well let's break it down what type of person are you and so on and so forth nutrition with judy's a lot more experts interviews of the science and how that affects our meat-based community and what levers to pull to get to optimal healing and my book carnivore cure you can find it on amazon or carnivercure.com great awesome well thank you so much for coming on and absolutely would love to to do this again and just just keep keep going yeah be great well thank you thank you for having me yeah thank you [Music] you