Joe Rogan - Does a Meat Only Diet Cause Cancer?

What the heck? Sis, you're full. The point I'm making is what is it going to tell me? Here's the thing we don't know. One of the things is, you know, I'll tell you what will probably, because I've seen hundreds and hundreds of people who've already done blood work, so I know what it's going to show basically. You know, so I've gotten, we've got this study going, we've got all these people submitting blood work. But the, you know, probably my HDL will go up, my triglycerides will go down, my blood sugar will stabilize to a low level, my inflammatory markers will be normal. That's because I've seen lots and lots of other people's blood work already, so I know it's going to show my cholesterol may be up or down. And that's something that we have a lot of people worried about that. You know, I can talk about cholesterol, in my view, is a pretty worthless marker, you know, by itself. You know, you have to take it into context. And so there's a, you know, there's a couple people that are really, really intelligent about cholesterol that are really testing this sort of stuff. One guy's name is Dave Feldman. On Twitter his name is Dave Keto. There's another guy named Iver Cummins who's an Australian, he's both engineers. And so this is what happened to this guy, Dave. He goes on a ketogenic diet and his cholesterol goes sky-fringing high, it's like 400, you know, way, way up there. And his doctor's freaking out and he's freaking out. So he's like, I don't understand this. I mean, I feel great. Everything about me is just the best health I've ever felt in my life. So what he does is he starts drawing his blood every single day. He gets a blood test. And what he finds out is that his blood cholesterol is all over the place. One day it's 300 and the next day it's 200. One day it's 350 and the next day it's, so what we, when we go to the doctor every six months or a year and they get a blood cholesterol, you assume, well, that's my cholesterol and it's always that way. Well, he found out that it's so variable. They've actually known about this since the 1950s, but no one has been talking about it. So what he figured out, and he's a systems engineer, and these engineers are some smart guys. I mean, that's one thing I kind of talk about. It's just because somebody's an MD or PhD doesn't mean they know everything. There's a lot of people that are plumbers and whatever. They don't have any formal training that can figure, they're smart people and they can figure this stuff out. So he's an engineer, a real smart guy. And so what he does is he figures out that cholesterol is basically all it is, is it's traveling around in your blood based on energy flux. So how much, so if you've eaten a lot, so if you've eaten a whole bunch of food and you're full, your liver is saying, I don't need to put out a bunch of fat because we burn fat as fuel. Well, even if we're not on a kidney jig diet. So what it does is it transports fat. So when you're hungry and you haven't eaten it for a while, like you fasted for a blood test, your liver says, we need fat in the system because we're low on energy. And so it shoots out all this fat. And what happens is cholesterol is just cruising around for a ride. So it's just sitting there, you know, you know, as a passenger. So depending on how much you've eaten, when you've eaten, that'll change your cholesterol. And so it's not a very good marker. I mean, you can, you can find studies that show for all cause mortality. Like if you're like you and me on it, cause you're, you're the same age as I am. I think you do. Right. Yeah, we're both 50. So if we look at, you know, and again, associational studies are not that great, but if you look at that and you say all cause mortality, am I going to die or not? If your cholesterol is high, you're less likely to die. If your cholesterol is high, you're less likely to get Parkinson's disease. If your cholesterol is high, you're less likely to get a bunch of cancers. You know, so it's like, so you're saying that though, but most people hear this and they go, but, but, but, but, but if you're a cholesterol is high, you're going to get a heart attack. Well, here's the deal. You're going to die. Here's the deal with heart attacks. And this is interesting because, you know, vegetarians and vegans, I don't mean to pick on vegetarians and vegans because, you know, I know some great ones are great people and I think, you know, there shouldn't be a war between us, but vegetarians and vegans, the number one killer of vegetarian vegan is heart disease. I mean, that's what kills them too. It kills everybody. So it's just like, you know, you trade, am I going to have cancer? Am I going to try to have heart disease? You know, which, which won't pick your poison? Most people don't understand that the sugar industry's hijacking of science in the 1950s where they paid off those scientists to literally false advertise the idea that sugar is safe for you, but that saturated fat and cholesterol is what's causing all of these issues with people and heart attacks to this day. People just sort of repeat that. Like they think it's gospel. Yeah, I mean, it's, and it is, it's part of the framework of society now. I mean, it's like... What was the push that got you to say, I'm just going to eat nothing but meat? Was there anybody that you knew that was doing it really well that you were talking to? Did you get some... Well, like I said, it was just reading about people online, you know, you know, there's a, you know, if there's a, I'll tell you what, there's a guy named Joe Anderson on Twitter and his handle is Joe Charlene 98, 8898 or 9888. This guy, you know, it's just the guy he's been doing it for 20 years. I'm just like, this is pretty cool. Like I said, reading back on that stuff. And then just because I've been an athlete, I'm like, and I don't, you know, I've never taken drugs and stuff like that. And I was always like, what can get me to the next level as far as athletic competency? I'm just a really competitive guy. I mean, I just, I just like to, you know, push myself and see what works. I know a lot of savage people that eat mostly meat. My friend Cam Haines eats almost all meat. He occasionally eats like something else, but most of what he eats is meat. My friend Jocko Willink, when he's tired, he goes, I need more steak. That's what he does. He eats meat. I mean, it's a frigging health food. It totally is. I mean, and you know, there's a guy named Bobby Maximus, who's a fitness guy. He was, I guess he was used to being a MMA guy years ago or something like that. But I know he did this steak every day thing. And so if we look back into, into history, I mean, there's all kinds of accounts of people using meat as an athletic performance enhancer, you know, back in the original Greek Olympics, those guys knew that they ate a lot of meat. They performed better. You know, the beef feeders out of London, you know, these guys were the guards for the kings. You know, they gave them extra meat because they knew they would fight better. The, you know, the Mongols, you know, they just decimated all through Asia. They basically just ate their horses and their meat. That's what they did when they traveled with that. You know, and so you've got all these historical examples of people performing better. You know, the Inuit, they were they were they were known to have this incredible work capacity and all they, you know, all they was seal meat and reindeer and, you know, stuff like that. So what's a typical diet for you? Like, give me a normal day. You wake up in the morning. So I do. Well, I'll tell you what. So today, I mean, you know, eating wise, you know, generally either one meal or two meals, depending on what my workout training is going to be. So this morning, you know, because I knew I was coming up here, I trained real early in the morning. Well, it's fast. I said a new record, by the way, and my personal record is doing that. But I had a couple of New York strips. I had about two pounds. So you ate two pounds of meat. Oh, that's a snack. Is that your phone, man? That keeps it good. It might be. It might have your little thing on it. I think I'll probably get notifications from people saying, hey, bro, see you on YouTube, bro. Let me turn that. So it's amazing, man. You look just like you. Yeah. So you had two New York strips today. Yeah. I mean, that's two pounds of meat. You know, it took me a while to build up to this before, you know, like a pound of meat would be, you know, that'd be tough. Now I can I can put down four pounds at one time. And people looking at you would go, well, he's super lean. Like, obviously, whatever you're eating, your body's processing it really well. I mean, you don't have a you have what someone think of as a steak eater gut. Like you tell a guy someone, a guy eats two steaks a day and like, oh, I must have a gut. That's all the mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese and bread. I mean, it's the stuff you eat with it. I mean, you know, I'm just you know, I put like I said, on that Instagram page, I've got, you know, meat exercising and doing stuff. And, you know, pictures. And that was something you talked about outside the studio right before we came in, that the studies that have been done on people consuming meat. And I brought this up as well, that there's a lot of misconceptions about these studies because they're not very clear when they say that people who eat meat five times a week are more likely to get cancer. What they're not telling you is what these people ate along with the meat. Are they eating cheeseburgers or are they eating grass fed beef or it's grass finished, grass fed, you know, high in essential fatty acids, healthy for you? Or are they eating some bullshit cheeseburger with a sugary drink? Like what is the rest of their diet? Are they consuming a lot of refined carbohydrates? Are they consuming a lot of sugar? Are they drinking alcohol? Are they smoking cigarettes? All you're saying is they're eating meat five days a week. It's not specifying in any way their actual overall diet. Yeah, they don't they don't sort that very well out. So they've got all these epidemiology studies and basically a meat eater is basically someone and you know, statistically, we know they're more likely to smoke, they're more likely to drink, they're more likely not to wear their seatbelt, they're more likely to be in accidents, they're more likely not to go to their doctor, they're more likely just not to care. So you've got that's what a meat eater is. What's this? Because people because if I tell you as I say, Joe, eating meat's bad for you and you say, F you, I don't care, I don't care about my health, right? So you just don't care. So this is it. So they can't separate that out. So they've got all these studies where they they try to separate out and say, well, kind of even up the smokers, but they never can take that I don't give a you know, I don't I don't give a fuck. Right. Thing out of it. And so you've got this stuff and then all the studies are really, really low strength. So if we look at, you know, and we can talk about this about me being causing cancer, because there's some concern about that with colon cancer. But if we look at smoking, you know, when they determine that smoking cause cancer, the epidemiology showed a 2000% increase in the incidence of cancer in a lot of studies. When they compare that to meat in cancer, they found an 18% increase, which is nothing. I mean, it's like, it's like it doesn't even matter. It's so 18% isn't high. Not when you look at relative risk, right? So if your risk, if your risk of getting colon cancer is one or say your risk of getting colon cancer is five in a million, right? And now it's six in a million. I mean, it's like nothing. I mean, it's like it is so minor. But if your risk is going from five in a million to 300 in a million, then you're like, well, that's pretty powerful. Right. So this is a problem. So it depends on the incident. So if it's really low to begin with, and you only raise it by a tiny amount, it's so small. And so what we know, there was a guy named Bradford Hill who talked about statistical correlations on when this thing's actually matter and not till you get to 200% or 300%, does it even matter? You can't draw any conclusion from that. The problem is 300% difference out of like a thousand. So instead of two, it would be six, something along those lines. So instead of being 18% more likely, you're 200% more likely. Those numbers are confusing to people, though, the way you're saying 200%. That's a lot of people. Right. So you would have to double or triple your risk. So 18% is not double or triple. It's only putting it up by a fraction. So when you separate all that stuff out, then there was a World Health Organization two years ago, last year, two years ago, declared that red meat was a class two carcinogen and prasant meat was a class one carcinogen. They said it's like plutonium and smoking, and everybody runs all over the place with that. Why'd they do that? So here's why they do that. So first of all, and you can go on their website, they'll tell you what their conclusions were. So this was done by an organization called the International Association for Research on Cancer. They're based out of Lyon, France. And they are, you know, that's what the World Health Organization uses to determine their stuff. And so they're written, and this is, you know, besides the point where right now the IRSC is under investigation by US Congress for using crappy science and, you know, promoting political agenda. So I don't know if that's true or not. Part of that's generated by, probably be corporations who don't like their findings. But so they're under investigation for that. What they say is we have some weak epidemiology, which is this 18% stuff, but we think we have some strong mechanistic reasons for this. Right? So if everybody, you know, there's a doctor named George E. E. D. E., who's a psychiatrist out in Maryland, who's got this tremendous, she analyzed the whole thing. She has a website called DiagnosisDiet.com. So she did an analysis of all the 800 studies they used. And she found that what they ended up doing is most of them showed that meat didn't cause cancer. There was a small percentage that did. They looked at all these rat studies and there was about 20, 25 rat studies. And they found like three or four of them showed that meat, you know, if we gave this type of cancer, if we gave this rat a certain, you know, amount of meat and we genetically bred them and we gave them a medicine that makes them get cancer, that they get a little bit of change in their colon that might turn into cancer. What medicine that makes them get cancer? I don't remember. There's something there. There's a special way to make rats get cancer. So they have this model that makes them get cancer really, really easy. So what they did is they felt. Why did they do that if they're trying to find out if something gives something cancer? Well because they want to make it, they want to be able to, you know, they want to differentiate that as quick as possible because they got to use a million rats. I see what you're saying. This is a real fast way to show up to get cancer. But the problem with that, and she explains it very well, is that we don't know that they would get cancer. It's not shown. And the other thing, and we talked about this before, is that if you want to look at rat studies, and it's not to say that plants give you cancer, but there are pesticides in plants that have been studied in rats that we eat every day, natural foods and vegetables and fruits that also give rats cancer. And so the only difference is we've got, you know, some really weak. By pesticides you mean things that natural compounds that plants extract or that plants secrete in order to discourage predation. Exactly. So these natural substances, when they feed them to rats and they isolate them and feed them to rats, it gives the rats cancer. At 52 they tested 27 of them. And these are just normal foods that we eat on a daily basis. They're some normal stuff we eat on a daily basis. So it's not to scare people out of eating that stuff. But it's just saying that's how much BS the stuff is based upon. But it just seems to me to be so crazy that they're doing a cancer study and they give the rat something that induces cancer in order to find out what gives them cancer more. So they give them this compound, and then on top of the compound, then they check their diet. Right. And they also feed them sugar with it. So it's kind of like it's just the way they do it. You can extrapolate, does that really matter to humans or not? It's just so hard to tell. I mean, there's so many things that animals can eat that we can't. The whole thing is bizarre. Yeah. I mean, we're not rats. That's interesting. It's like the same thing when we talked about cancer rates in the historical populations. They didn't have much cancer. Not until we started feeding them in the 1940s, 30s and stuff like that. And so until we started feeding them all our crap, that they started to get those diseases.