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News Topic:
Mathew Liao Director for NY Center for bioethics
Great Moments In Unintended Consequences
Show Notes:
Questions:
Red Meat and aging
Alicea writes:
I have been carnivore for almost 3 years and eat mostly red meat. I feel absolutely amazing and have ultimate health. I recently heard a podcast with a guest saying that Red meat is dangerous. I usually roll my eyes and ignore these statements but for some reason I listened and wanted to get your take on what he said. He said red meat ages people and causes inflammation. His reasons were because saturated fat along with carnatine, lethathin, and choline (I may have mispronounced those – sorry) change our gene function of bacteria and this causes inflammation. Thoughts? I do not plan on changing my red meat diet by the way.
Too much cardio?
Lil writes:
Hello! I have written in a few times. Thank you so much for your knowledge and your willingness to help.
2 unrelated questions:
1) could a trend in increasing resting heart rate be related to overdoing cardio?
I am a chronic over-exerciser. I feel emotionally better when I hit cardio in addition to weights. I know the sciences says too much cardio is a stressor AND my personal experience is that I feel anxious without serious cardio.
If you think cardio is contributing to a higher heart rate, how do you suggest weening off overtraining with minimal negative side effects?
2) In addition to correcting daily posture while using devices and such do you have any specific exercises that can cure or lessen “tech neck” or the start or a dowager’s hump?
Thank you!!
Fruit and non alcoholic fatty liver disease
Andy writes:
Robb and Nicki,
Thank you! Thank you for persisting in fighting the good fight! What you say and how you say it both are vital now more than ever. The coconut farm can wait. The world needs you. Haha. I read Paleo Solution back in 2010 ish and caught the podcast probably on episode 2 or 3 and haven’t missed one since. Being a chiro and a strength coach, I’ve shared your rational and sound advice (and book) with hundreds of people over the years. Thank you for helping me help the people around me. Could not have done it without you.
Question: in the past I’ve avoided fruit due to the fructose and its potential for liver problems, namely non-alcoholic fatty liver disease due to the fructose content. Recently though, I just can’t seem to convince myself it’s a problem given that, humans have eaten fruit for… well, probably ever. We must be tripping over our own mechanistic shortsightedness, no? For the past 16 months, my diet has consisted of mainly meat, fruit, egg yolks, butter, and liver and I’ve never felt better. Can fruit really cause NAFLD and, thus, should it be avoided?
Thanks for all you do and like a previous listener said, an abundance of health, laughs, and sunshine to you and your family.
-Andy, listener number 6.
P.S.- Any thoughts on the enzymes in fruit and whether or not you think they might aid in digestion of meat in particular?
P.S.S.- LMNT is amazing! Cheers!
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Transcript:
Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning. When Robb gets passionate he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well there’s always Disney+.
Robb: Welcome back.
Nicki: Hello everybody. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you might be on the planet. This is episode 158 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. How are you doing, hubs?
Robb: Pretty good.
Nicki: Doing awesome, actually, but a little-
Robb: Thank you.
Nicki: Well, I think we’re all doing very awesome. Just we’re all very tired. My cousin has been visiting with her family. She has four kids between the ages of five and 14?
Robb: 14. Yep.
Nicki: Which has been super fun. The girls have been fishing and swimming and hot tubbing and playing and doing all the things. And the sun doesn’t set here until…
Robb: It’s really not dark till 11:00.
Nicki: … 10:30 or 11:00. We’ve been doing little campfires most nights and roasting of the marshmallows and all of that good stuff. So it’s been a wonderful, wonderful week. But I think everybody’s a little on the underslept side.
Robb: Our eldest daughter tapped out of sleeping with her…
Nicki: Sister and cousin Hallie.
Robb: … sister and cousin Hallie because she was so exhausted. She’s like, “I need real sleep tonight.”
Nicki: Well, because by the time everybody’s like, “Okay, time for bed. Brush teeth,” it’s like 11:00. And then Sagan and Hallie, apparently they’ve been wanting to read with not just the lamp on, but the big overhead light on for 20 minutes beyond that, and Zoe’s like, “Done.”
Robb: They partied hard.
Nicki: They’ve been partying hard, but it’s been fun. Good summer fun, so, all good. I’m trying to think of anything else. What do you have for us for our news topic?
Robb: It’s actually a link to my Instagram account where I Regrammed a post from… communismsurvivor is the handle. It’s a woman who grew up in the former Soviet Union and escaped to the West apparently before the fall of the Soviet Union. And so then has a rather interesting perspective, and I think her handle pays homage to her worldview about collectivism and things like that. But she had a piece from a guy, a Dr. Matthew Liao, the Director for the New York Center for Bioethics. And Dr. Liao had a talk where he was discussing options for modifying the human genome to battle climate change. One of the options that he put forward was basically taking some of the immunogenic kind of ramifications of…
There’s a tick-borne illness that can make people intolerant to red meat, and there are some folks out there who think that this is a vegan-based bioweapon. I would personally probably file that one deeply under the conspiracy theory thing, but who the heck knows these days? But anyway, he was putting forward that, since we know that meat is so damaging to the environment and such a major cause of climate change, and because people are so incredibly incapable of stopping the eating of meat, why don’t we just genetically modify them so that they are incapable of eating meat without getting terribly sick? And then he went on to make the case that, with just a few little tweaks in the human genome, we could dramatically decrease the stature of humans on average, the height, and smaller humans generally consume fewer resources.
So these are the two things that this bioethicist was putting forward that we could collectively do to do our part to fight climate change. And I Regrammed it, and I’ve been trying to be better about when I post the stuff on Instagram about just trying to stay professional and not call names and stuff, even though I desperately want to, and I would say it’s generally gone better. But the point that I made is that all of this seems totally ridiculous only up until you see the last couple of years.
There are people who swore up and down that healthcare should be a fundamental human right who pivoted on a dime, who subsequently said, “If you haven’t gotten the COVID vaccine you should not be allowed to work, you should not be allowed to travel, you should not be allowed to shop, and you shouldn’t be allowed any medical access or care whatsoever.” So it’s really not a big stretch in my mind that people like that would suggest that for the greater good we all subject ourselves to this type of activity. And the thing that’s really, really crazy is that this guy, Dr. Liao, I’m sure he’s a very smart guy and I’m sure he is a very sincere guy. And what’s amazing is that he actually believes that meat is a primary driver of climate change. And this has been unwound, debunked. Even more mainstream outlets have put forward disinformation.
Nicki: The narrative, though. I think if you did a man on the street style kind of query of random people in a handful of large metropolitan areas, they would-
Robb: Agree with that.
Nicki: … agree with that. If you said, “What’s the biggest cause of climate change?” Meat, transportation… I don’t know. Pick a third one. They’re going to go, “Meat.” That’s been drilled into the collective psyche.
Robb: And so I just think there’s all kinds of concerning features around that. In the case that I’ve made on a lot of different topics is just that, if you really care about a particular issue, it’s critical that you really understand the issue. So if you really care about climate change, if it’s legitimately a thing of concern to you, then you cannot let bullshit like this slide. You just can’t, because if there’s a massive amount of energy… This is kind of the ocean pollution and then really getting fired up about banning straws. That’s not the thing. This is the stuff that is done to make you feel like something is being done, and it’s really not doing anything.
That’s probably even a weak analogy for this because, arguably, the proper use of grazing animals can actually be a climate change mitigating tool, given what we know about soil carbon sequestration and stuff like that. So it’s not only not the problem, it may be the solution or a really viable solution. And it’s got all these implications for just like food sovereignty and traditional cultures. Very, very, very difficult to adequately feed humans without animal products and not have them nutrient deficient and sick, and tending to overeat, which is a bunch of the rebuttals around the EAT-Lancet pieces, which is that if your protein is inadequate, you will just-
Nicki: You actually eat more.
Robb: … continue to overeat.
Nicki: Right, which was making me think, his whole point or one of his aims is to reduce stature so that people consume fewer resources. But there’s nothing to say that a shorter person actually does. I mean, plenty of short people consume a lot of-
Robb: Well, and there is-
Nicki: … resources, as many or more than people who are a few inches taller. And then, if they’re not eating adequate protein and they are eating a lot of processed foods and sugar and potentially one in… What’s the statistic now? One in four Americans type 2 diabetes, what kind of resources are being consumed from a medical perspective and hospitalization and-
Robb: Dialysis.
Nicki: … dialysis-
Robb: And plastic tubing and on and on.
Nicki: … and amputations and wound care, all of the things. This whole thing makes me think of the reason… Is it Reason TV or Reason Magazine has that series? Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions.
Robb: What could possibly go wrong?
Nicki: What could possibly go wrong? I mean…
Robb: Great moments in…
Nicki: Great moments in unintended consequences or something like that?
Robb: Yeah, yeah. Something like that. So, yeah, apologies. This is linked to Instagram. I think this guy’s video has gone out other places, so if you look for his name, Matthew Liao. Again, the reason why I’m particularly concerned about this, relative to what I would’ve been maybe five years ago is, five years ago I would’ve still made the same argument that if we don’t operate with good information, then we can’t make good decisions and we won’t effectively address problems. That’s still true. What I’m more concerned about now is that there’s a whole cadre of people out there that, for the good of the planet, they would feel compelled to compel others to enact something like this. And they would-
Nicki: And again, it’s the certitude of his position. He is so certain that meat is this huge driver of climate change, and he’s wrong. And then you get these people who are in really influential positions who could maybe influence a program or something like this, and they’re operating from completely faulty premises.
Robb: And folks would say, “Well, how could they force this thing?” Well, maybe, your central bank digital currency status is contingent upon getting the mRNA transfection that is the gene therapy that alters-
Nicki: Your meat consumption.
Robb: … your meat consumption. Makes you intolerant to meat. And maybe that also is able to pass into the germline and then decrease the average height of your offspring should you… Mother or father, any additional children. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but-
Nicki: That sounds super crazy.
Robb: … fuck, man, we’re kind of there. We’re kind of there, and it’s just this thing that… Just so we can drive the sane completely off a cliff. Take two really hot button topics, abortion and Second Amendment gun ownership. And the only thing I’m going to say on that, both of those camps, the folks are super, hyper aware of any type of a slippery slope encroaching into the rights or accesses that the particular camps want to defend, and probably rightfully so, because some minor encroachment can become a major encroachment.
And I think that that is… Take that and then just broadly apply it to human liberty, and not in any type of living memory do we have examples like this other than under just horrible totalitarian regimes in which you have a forced process foist upon a whole population. Anyway, the thing’s spinning out-
Nicki: We can leave it there.
Robb: Give it a look and we’ll leave it there.
Nicki: I’m also going to link in the show notes to the Reason TV video series that I mentioned. It’s phenomenal, and it’s fun for the kids. It’s different topics throughout history where different bills were passed or laws were made to get a particular outcome and it completely backfires, and…
Robb: Like The Cobra story in India, and even in The Great Moments piece, it’s like, “We’re not sure if this is a real story, but it’s a really good story.”
Nicki: They’re well done. Very, very fascinating. I’ll link to that, too. Okay. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our SALTY AF electrolyte company, LMNT. The truth is, everyone needs electrolytes, but if you are an active person and/or on a low-carb diet, you really need electrolytes to feel and perform your best. And if you live in a hot or humid climate, electrolytes are an absolute must. Our co-founder, Luis, shared a post from Ketogains from Kimberly, and I wanted to read this to you all.
She says, “May I give a shout-out to LMNT? Texas heat is brutal right now and everyone seems to be suffering from heat fatigue, except me. I was out of LMNT and I have not been able to stay on top of electrolytes with anything else, even the home brew. But within two days of getting my order in, energy levels were good again, better than pre-brutal heat, even. So remember to always stay on top of electrolytes. LMNT sure makes it easier to do.” Thank you, Kimberly. That was perfect. It is hot out there, folks, especially if you live in-
Robb: Maybe it’s hot outside.
Nicki: That… Yes. There could be a song, but it probably would get canceled, too, because isn’t there some…
Robb: Oh, there’s all kinds of bad stuff.
Nicki: Not good things in that song. All right. Anyway, folks, it’s grapefruit season, which I know you know. If you haven’t tried it yet, please do. It’s an awesome flavor, one of the favorites, one of the most popular, easy to add into your rotation to help keep you hydrated, energized, and always ready to perform at your best. You can get your LMNT at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T.com/R-O-B-B. All right, we have three questions for today. The first one is from Alicia.
She says, “I have been carnivore for almost three years, and I eat mostly red meat. I feel absolutely amazing and have ultimate health. I recently heard a podcast with a guest saying that red meat is dangerous. I usually roll my eyes and ignore these statements, but for some reason I listened and I wanted to get your take on what he said. He said that red meat ages people and causes inflammation. His reasons were because saturated fat along with carnitine, lecithin and choline,” I may have mispronounced those, sorry, “change our gene function of bacteria and this causes inflammation. What are your thoughts? I don’t plan on changing my red meat diet, by the way.”
Robb: Yeah. One of the big things that pops up in this with the choline and lecithin and whatnot is that a byproduct called TMAO is produced from gut bacteria primarily, although you can get TMAO from food directly, which I’ll mention that in a minute. And TMAO is correlative to systemic inflammation under some circumstances. And this is really one of the big things that the vegan doctors will trot out again and again about the problems of red meat. Here’s where some issues arise. You get far more TMAO as a consequence of eating fish than you do from red meat, but you really start sounding like an idiot when you suggest that fish is bad for you. So when they talk about TMAO, it’s just ignored that fish is a larger contributor to TMAO in a given meal and within a dietary context. Then the meat, they just somehow drop that fact.
Nicki: It’s an inconvenient truth.
Robb: It’s an inconvenient truth, in fact. So that’s a piece of this story. So often these correlational studies, we’ll see a relationship between red meat consumption and cancer and gut issues and altered gut microbiota and all that type of stuff. But broadly speaking, red meat consumption has historically been associated with people who are broadly less dietarily concerned, broadly less health concerned, and so it’s really hard to decouple that stuff. And Diana and I talked about this a lot, and so Alicia, if you haven’t read Sacred Cow, I would really recommend doing that. Grab a used copy-
Nicki: What, watching the film.
Robb: … somewhere if you want to or catch the film. The film won’t go into this type of detail though, but we talked about this stuff in which these correlational studies just don’t really do justice because there were a few others that were done that tried to account for the healthy user bias. So they looked at a whole foods market type scenario, people shopping at a whole foods market co-op type thing, meat eaters, non-meat eaters, and then tracked their health forward with the idea being that, if these people are spending the extra money to shop in these places, they’re probably more health conscious. They probably exercise more. They’re probably higher socioeconomic status. They’re probably not as much smoking and all that type of stuff.
And what they found in that circumstance is that the meat eaters lived longer than the non-meat eaters and had lower all-cause mortality and all this type of stuff. Still correlational. So we have the same kind of bad science being used to produce the answer that I want versus the answer that the vegans want. But there’s stuff like that. The one thing that I would give a credible hat tip to on the possible accelerated aging would be red meat consumption, men or postmenopausal women, and iron overload. That can absolutely be a problem, without a doubt, and I have to give a hat tip there to Mike and Mary Eades of Protein Power Lifeplan fame.
They mentioned this back in 2001, that men and postmenopausal women should probably donate blood on a consistent schedule because that iron overload can be a significant oxidative stress and can cause all kinds of problems. It’s something that’s been on my radar to get back doing again because I used to do it, and so if there is a thing that would be concerning about red meat consumption, it’s that. It’s iron overload in certain populations that could absolutely be in oxidative stress and that wouldn’t be great for health and longevity and aging. But that’s about it.
Nicki: I’m totally blanking on the vegan doctor’s name that-
Robb: Dougall…
Nicki: McDougall. Okay. So I was just also just completely… I mean, there’s no scientific basis to what I’m about to say at all, but if you look at some popular vegan doctors or influencers who are now in their 60s going on 70, and then you look at somebody like Mark Sisson in the same age range who has been eating meat, visibly, the aging that you can witness with your eyes is, I think, pretty-
Robb: Stunningly different.
Nicki: … pretty stark. Dr. McDougall looks far older than Mark Sisson.
Robb: And he ended up getting a spiral fracture of his femur when he slipped going pee in his house. He got up in the middle of the night-
Nicki: Okay, sorry. I was picturing-
Robb: … and slipped somehow. No, he didn’t pee on himself or anything.
Nicki: I was picturing him slipping in his pee.
Robb: No, no, I don’t think that was the case. But a spiral fracture of the femur is something that usually happens when you’re shooting down a hill on a set of skis going 60 miles an hour and you hit something solid. It’s usually this really gnarly impact problem, and he did it just by twisting his leg wrong. And that phenotype thing, it’s gauche on the one hand where people will do pictures of this vegan doctor versus this carnivore doc, and you go side-by-side. What’s interesting is, I think people in their 20s, 30s, maybe even 40s that are vegan, can still look pretty good. They can still pull some stuff together. I also question whether a ton of these people really are vegan.
I think a lot of them hang that shingle and then probably eat differently. And in truth, and there have been a lot of them that get caught here and there, get outed by the vegan community. They’re out eating dinner in Italy or something and they’re eating fish or whatever, and then they get ostracized by that community. But once you start hitting 50, 60, 70, the vector of poor dietary changes really gets laid in pretty deep. Again, it’s observational, it’s gauche, it’s probably not that nice, but it’s telling. I remember my 10-year high school reunion that everybody still looked pretty much like they did.
Some of the people, I had a couple of friends that smoked a lot of pot and drank a lot of booze and they were looking rough. And by 20 years I couldn’t… It was so crystal clear the folks that were consistently exercising and just had some thought about good dietary practice, they still looked pretty much like what they did in high school. And then there were other folks I just couldn’t recognize them. And again, maybe I’m a dick. Maybe that’s a jerk thing to say, whatever, but it’s just so obvious and it’s that time accumulation that makes that stuff so clear.
Nicki: Okay. Thanks Alicia for your question. Moving on to a question from Lil about too much cardio. “Hello. Thank you so much for your knowledge and your willingness to help. Two unrelated questions. One, could a trend in increasing resting heart rate be related to overdoing cardio? I’m a chronic over exerciser. I feel emotionally better when I hit cardio in addition to weights. I know the science says too much cardio is a stressor, and my personal experience is that I feel anxious without serious cardio. If you think the cardio is contributing to a higher heart rate, how do you suggest weaning off overtraining with minimal negative side effects?” So that’s question one. Question two. “In addition to correcting daily posture while using devices and such, do you have any specific exercises that can cure or lessen tech neck or the start of a dowager’s hump?”
Robb: On that first one, I have a link to Train with Morpheus, which is the Morpheus training system developed by Joel Jamieson. The cool thing about this, I know we’ve mentioned it before, we have no affiliate link. We’re not involved with this thing in any way other than I really believe in Joel’s work and I’ve really benefited from this Morpheus training system. When you get up in the morning, you have a heart rate monitor typically in a watch form that you throw on and it gives you a readiness score. It gets your heart rate variability and it talks to you about your sleep and some other things. And then based off that readiness score, it will prescribe some zones to play around with in your training. And you’ve got kind of a zone two recovery area, which is blue, a green conditioning zone, and then a red overload zone.
And it has a weekly prescription about how much to do in those different zones. And what’s cool about this thing is, it starts off kind of general. It gives you some general guidelines and then based off of your recovery, if you’re lightening it up and you’re crushing things and you’re consistently recovering well, then you’re good. It’ll inch your volume in an intensity up over time so that you can improve your conditioning. If you end up having some retrograde recovery and you’re finding that you’re not recovering well, then it will dial things back and constrain things a little bit. So I think that that’s a great way to get an objective outside read on where one is and then rely on that. And then on the tech neck stuff, I mean the first thing really is, what are you doing day-to-day that’s initiating these problems? What type of work posture or-
Nicki: Do you have a monitor that is such that you can see it from eye level and you can keep your back and neck in a proper-
Robb: Upright.
Nicki: … upright position? Or are you slumped on the couch looking down at a phone with your head curved downward?
Robb: Our oldest loves reading. She reads books, but she’ll read books for hours and then she will end up with a goofy neck. And oftentimes she’ll sit on the couch and hold the book and her neck is kind of cantered down and her neck will hurt. I’ll work on it and the muscles are all fired up because they’re in this stretched loaded position for hours. And so I’ve encouraged her to change positions, to lay down on her back, get a pillow on her chest, balance the book on the pillow with her hands, and just do the rotation. So the first thing is to just really figure out what are the offensive postures and positions that you’re putting yourself in and really minimize and modify those. And then beyond that, like the daily CARs routine from FRC, body rows, working all the scapular retraction movements, the lower-
Nicki: Maybe laying on a foam roller with your arms out to your side like a snow angel sort of position, palms up. You can really feel that stretch through your pecs and just opening of the chest, because if everything that you’re doing has you flexed forward and shoulders-
Robb: Rounded.
Nicki: … rounded and protracted forward, you want to try to do things that are going to pull those muscles in the opposite direction. So things that are going to retract the scapula and open up the chest.
Robb: But I would definitely poke around for a daily CARs, controlled articular-
Nicki: Rotations.
Robb: … rotations. Lots of examples of that on YouTube. We have our good friends, Sarah and Grayson Strange of Basis New York, if you want to do training with them, it’s outstanding. I can just unreservedly recommend their coaching. There are other programs that are in the FRC ecosystem if you want to look at other stuff, too. But, again, just to recap that, fix the things that are causing the problem first because that’s [inaudible 00:29:11]-
Nicki: So don’t spend the time in the positions that are causing this issue. Figure out how you can use-
Robb: Modify that.
Nicki: … pillows or blocks or modify your posture such that you’re not in that offending posture in the first place.
Robb: And then, everything that’s working, extension, joint articulation, chest opening, back bends, those sorts of things are going to be really helpful here.
Nicki: Okay, final question this week is from Andy on fruit and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. “Robb and Nicki, thank you. Thank you for persisting in fighting the good fight and what you say and how you say it, both are vital now more than ever. The coconut farm can wait. The world needs you, ha ha. I read The Paleo Solution back in 2010-ish and caught the podcast probably on episode two or three and haven’t missed one since. Being a chiro and a strength coach, I’ve shared your rational and sound advice and book with hundreds of people over the years, so thank you for helping me help the people around me. I could not have done it without you. Question. In the past, I’ve avoided fruit due to the fructose and its potential for liver problems, namely non-alcoholic fatty liver disease due to the fructose content.
“Recently, though, I just can’t seem to convince myself it’s a problem given that humans have eaten fruit for, well, probably ever. We must be tripping over our own mechanistic shortsightedness, no? For the past 16 months my diet has consisted of mainly meat, fruit, egg yolks, butter and liver, and I’ve never felt better. Can fruit really cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and thus should it be avoided? Thanks for all you do. And like a previous listener said, an abundance of health, laughs and sunshine to you and your family. From Andy, listener number six. PS. Any thoughts on the enzymes in fruit and whether or not you think they might aid in digestion of meat in particular?”
Robb: Yeah, so I’ll tackle that one first. Not all fruit has enzymes amenable to protein digestion. Pineapple does. Interestingly, it needs to be raw. Pineapple, if it’s cooked, then the enzymes are denatured and won’t really help there. Or, I’m getting this backwards. It’s papaya that is the raw fruit that has this. Pineapple has papain, but that is mainly in the pineapple leaves, and so it gets extracted out of the leaves, although I think the pineapple, either due to the acidity or perhaps it has some bromelain in it, may also help. So those things can help a little bit, but I honestly think it’s pretty minor. You really need to get a supplement of those, either bromelain or papain, to really get some effective protein digestion out of that.
But they do work. There’s good kinetic studies showing it helps break down protein and that would be a handy thing for somebody with impacted digestion or an older person who has maybe lower stomach acid or something like that. And then back on this, can fruit cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease? My understanding of this story at present is that a big part of the problem with fructose is not just the volume of it, but the kinetics, the rate of fructose entering the liver. And for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, this is best facilitated by liquids being ingested, being drank. And so-
Nicki: Juice.
Robb: … juice, sodas, and this is one of the things that I think has been really confounding and buggering in this story where it really looks like something is going on. That’s a problem. This non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, there are children that need liver transplants now, and this was unheard of 20 years ago, 50 years ago. It didn’t happen broadly and it certainly didn’t happen in kids. And now this is a painfully common occurrence. And then you can say, “Well, is all fructose bad? Is fruit bad?” Probably not. Just based off of… Like if you juiced fruit and drank the juice, I think that you could easily get into the rate of consuming enough, quick enough that it changes the enzyme kinetics in the liver so that we start heading into that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease process.
But that said, say like the Paul Saladino take on carnivore currently is fruit and dairy and meat, and that’s fine. But there is a reality that if we’re really wanting to emulate or think about ancestral eating, there are a couple of things going on there that are different. And while game meat is so lean, comparatively, and for a lot of human history we did hunt megafauna and the larger the animal, the more fat it contained relative to its body size. And so there was a thermodynamic efficiency for hunting large game, but there’s also a reality that fruit, other than at equatorial regions and even in equatorial regions, it isn’t always available. And so Richard Rangam makes the case that humans probably evolved to eat cooked starch, and cooked starch probably provides a different stimulus into the liver relative to even fructose from fruit.
And so, could one get into problems from overconsuming fruit and say like total fat load or saturated fat load? Because overabundance of fructose via the Randle cycle ends up producing palmitate in the liver, which is part of the problem of the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. I think you could. In a modern eating scenario where you’ve got a highly marbled meat and you’ve got modern Luther Burbank fruit that is much sweeter, much larger than what we’ve had in the past, much less fiber, I think you could eat yourself into a problematic situation there. Maybe some dyslipidemia, maybe non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
But I do think it’s one of these things that, because we’ve modified our food environment so much, we probably need to be a little bit careful on that count. I think that paying attention to some blood work annually will give one a pretty good insight into that, but I doubt you can produce non-alcoholic fatty liver disease with just whole foods. But I think that maybe you could under the right circumstances, eating fruit and meat and dairy and an overabundance of it because our lives are relatively easy. And at a minimum, I think that you could just overeat those foods pretty easily.
Nicki: I’m reflecting back on your news topic and the fellow that is wanting to engineer people for shorter stature because that would mean less resources for not eating meat. Presumably people are doing a lot of pea protein and vegetation and fruit and juice and all of these processed foods that we normally eat, and then the resources required to treat a population with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease are-
Robb: Stunning.
Nicki: … not insignificant.
Robb: Absolutely stunning. Yeah. It’s another one of these things, and again, there’s been a little pushback here and there. People like Diana and I wrote riposte pieces about, say, EAT-Lancet that was recommending basically a thumb-sized piece of red meat a week or something like that. And there were some folks that, I believe, correctly, pointed out that if people head down that path, there’s going to be a tendency to overeat. There’s going to be a tendency towards nutrient deficiencies, and then folks will say, “Well, they just need to take supplements.” And it’s like, “Okay, how are we going to get supplements to the developing world? How are we going to get supplements to the doorsteps of every poor family?” And it goes on and on because [inaudible 00:37:49]-
Nicki: By Amazon drone.
Robb: That might be. And then people rightfully will say, “Well, can poor people afford meat?” And it’s like, “Well, I don’t know.” It just gets really complex. But what we miss so much of is that good health and healthy humans are a remarkable boon to the planet and to each other. And we’re trying to affect that in these ways that are just completely antithetical to our three million years of human evolution and to the evolution of every other organism on the planet. It’s interesting how much engineering and thought and whatnot is put into trying to find solutions here, but this ancestral health model just gets pooh-poohed and stuffed in a corner and made fun of. I’m struggling for a good analogy here, but it really is the answer.
Not everybody needs to eat Paleo. Not everybody needs to do a complete caveman reenactment, but, when and where we see problems, particularly with human health, almost all of it presently is reflective of a discordance process. Our genes and our environment don’t match up favorably, and you’ve got to overlay this ancestral health template. And even if you just want ancestral health to be what our grandparents did, like a clean agrarian mixed diet, is going to be light years better than what we’ve got currently.
I’ve been meaning to do more writing, just haven’t taken the time to do it. But there was a MedPage piece that was basically saying that it’s racist and unethical to call junk food, junk food, because it’s going to make some people feel bad because the only thing that they have access to is junk food. I’m not even sure what to say about that. Yeah, I get that maybe folks could be made to feel bad about this stuff, but it’s…
Nicki: Without a base level of awareness of what makes for building a strong, healthy body, there’s going to be no choice when the opportunity arises for a choice to be made, right? If you don’t know that some foods result in-
Robb: There’s consequences.
Nicki: … clear minds and feeling better, and then maybe right now I’m unable to afford anything but junk food, but if I have awareness of what good food is, then I can at some point make that choice.
Robb: Absolutely.
Nicki: When I’m in a position to afford it or otherwise.
Robb: It makes me think of the Mike Rowe episode, and maybe it was with the guy that did the history podcast, but they talked a lot about consequences and shame, and that these things actually frame and form our lives a lot. If you decide to enter into a committed relationship with another person, part of the reason that you stick to that is the shame of dealing with the consequences of not living up to monogamy or committed relationship or whatever, or just being a good parent or human being or partner or whatever.
So much of this kind of social engineering is trying to absolve people of all sense of shame, all sense of responsibility, and clearly that can go over the top. Another piece that I’ve been meaning to work on at some point is this experience I had as a kid when my family was on food stamps. This was at a time when you got a dollar bill looking thing, but it was orange and it was money, effectively, but it was-
Nicki: It was clear to everybody behind you in line that you were paying with-
Robb: With food stamps.
Nicki: … with food stamps.
Robb: And there were some grumbles about that, and it sucked and it was embarrassing, and it lit a fire under me personally such that I was like, “I’m never, ever, ever going to utilize those.” And I’m grateful that it exists and I’m, although kind of libertarian leaning, I think that we do need social safety nets. But I think these social safety nets can turn into multi-generational traps, and I’m not totally sure how we got onto that with where we are with this, but this awareness of what good food is and whether we have access to it or don’t have access to it, that doesn’t change the reality that there is an ordering of food quality.
Like whole, fresh, minimally processed food is generally preferable to virtually any type of highly processed food that we’re willing to consider. And, yes, some people can weigh and measure their Twinkies and donuts and pretzels and jerky and stay within certain boundaries and make that work, but most people don’t. I don’t know. This is why we’re 23 years into this. It’s so funny. After I wrote The Paleo Solution, I sent that thing off to the publisher and I was like, “Okay, well, I guess I’m going to need a different career because this is just going to solve everything.” I was pretty damn naive.
Nicki: So naive, yep.
Robb: But also I think that naivete was something that has kept me in the fight as long as I’ve been, because I really felt, if people just groked what was in those pages, it would fix things and you wouldn’t need me. You wouldn’t need another diet book.
Nicki: Well, clearly, new people come into the scene all the time and so the same questions come forward and people who are new to these concepts, there’s an ever-increasing amount of people for you to help.
Robb: For sure, for sure.
Nicki: Okay, I think that was our last question for the week. Any closing thoughts, hubs?
Robb: I don’t think so.
Nicki: You don’t think so? Okay. We are going to head back out and see how many fish have been caught in the 40 minutes or so that we’ve been in here. I think my five-year-old nephew is on fish number 24, and, gosh darn it, that kid is cute.
Robb: He is pretty cute.
Nicki: That kid is something else. And Zoe’s caught, I don’t know. She’s really come on in her fishing here with her older cousin. She’s learned how to take everything off the hook and she was even cleaning it, cleaning her own fish.
Robb: They ate a few. Almost all of them had been catch and release, but they did keep a few of the better ones to eat.
Nicki: She fried it up in some butter and said it was great. All right, folks, wishing you a wonderful weekend. Get out, enjoy the sunshine if you have some, and we’ll catch y’all next week.
Robb: Bye everybody.
Nicki: Bye.
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