Joe Rogan on the Carnivore Diet "There's No Science Behind It"

of the year, such as every quarter for a week where you're eating a plant-based diet or you're restricting meat, you're basically giving your body a break from being in that constant anabolic state. And I think that the carnivore diet causes a lot of people to miss out on some of those elements. And then if you look at the blood work of a doctor who does a carnivore diet, he publishes blood work online. And I don't know what else is going on with him from a health standpoint, but he had really high blood glucose and really low testosterone and some things that suggest that it might not be healthy to eat just meat. Did he have really low testosterone? That's interesting. I think it was like 200 to 300. Really? It's pretty low. That's really low. Yeah, diagnosable hypogonadism combined with almost like borderline diabetes. Is it possible to do it after a workout? He does a lot of rowing. A real high intensity. Pressure, testosterone, that's significantly. It would increase your HSCRP and your inflammatory markers, which is why you never want to go to a doctor for a heart checkup after you've done a workout because they're going to tell you you're going to have a heart attack based on the levels of HSCRP. But that blood work is just one example. I don't want to pretend like that one example is going to paint with a broad brush the entire carnivore diet phenomenon. But I think that unrestricted protein intake and unrestricted meat intake probably has an accelerated aging effect on the body. Well, here's the difference. Dr. Ron Rosedale is a doctor who has some good information on that. He's got a good video online. What's going on with this carnivore diet is there's no science behind it. There's a lot of people that are giving it a shot. A lot of people are finding good results. But I find that people, when they just change things, there's a period of time where they say they feel great. And that is absolutely 100% a placebo effect. It's the same thing as like a vegan diet. You feel fantastic. Right. Well, name me one population, one blue zone that eats meat like nothing else. And there's actually very few centenarians who are purely vegan for their entire life. Because you can, if you don't do it the right way, build up fatty acid deficits, amino acid deficits, creatine is one you don't get, vitamin B12, DHA. But at least it's been studied on vegans. There's been a lot of studies on vegans. We know that if you eat E3 live, you know. You can supplement. There's a lot of really smart vegans. I mean, there's guys like Rich Roll. They do things the right way. It's a lot easier to see a piece of meat to get some of the B12 and some of the other amino acids you're trying to free up by soaking and sprouting and fermenting, which my wife does a lot of. But I watch her. She's in the kitchen like three hours a day making vegetables bioavailable. It takes her hours to make sourdough bread, to actually make a bread where the gluten is pre-digested and it's actually healthy and the glycemic index is lower. She's not vegan. She's just a rancher girl and she likes to leave you with goats and chickens and we eat meat. But she's very into like an ancestral preparation of vegetables, deactivating a lot of these stressors that Dr. Stephen Gundry talks about. Before we talk, we were talking about Tom Brady and how he does like a no night shade, no tomato, no potato. And I'd rather eat those things but actually figure out a way to render them more digestible and friendlier to the human body. That's the other thing too when people talk about food that has protein in it. Broccoli has so much protein, true, not really bioavailable though. Tell me a shit ton of broccoli. It's just not the same. Your body doesn't absorb it the same way it does a grass-fed ribeye steak. Your body absorbs that protein instantly. He knows exactly what it is. By the way, there was a study that just came out about stem cells. They found that carnosine, which you find in copious amounts in grass-fed ribeye steak, with blueberry extract enhanced your stem cell production. It was a hugely significant number. I don't remember the exact percentage but this combination of polyphenols and flavanols with meat is a good combo. That's why when I did the carnivore diet, not the carnivore diet, that's when I was eating meat, I was doing lots of salads. I was doing lots of wild blueberry extract powder. I had these vegetable powders. I was doing a lot of big salads for lunch. Flavanols, polyphenols, any of that. Same thing with the high saturated fat diet. A high saturated fat diet like the whole coconut oil thing is highly inflammatory in the absence of plant polyphenols and flavanols, which is why if you're doing a high fat ketotic diet, it needs to be a plant rich high fat ketotic diet. Avocados, things on those lines. You can get a lot of your fats from avocados. Avocados, yes, but I'm talking about more like doing coconut oil and butter and avocado chocolate pudding and all these things, your ketogenic fat bombs and all these recipes that are out there. But you got to eat a lot. You got to eat a lot of plants. Even in the animal kingdom, you see animals when they rip up another animal like a carnivorous animal, they're eating the intestines and they're eating a lot of the organs that are chock full of what? Grass, plants, herbs, whatever that omnivorous animal that the carnivorous animal is eating. Pre-digested in a lot of cases. When you're talking about carnivorous diets, the real issue that I have with it is there's almost no research. Other than Dr. Baker doing those tests on himself, which according to you are not very promising. I have some friends that are trying it. My friend Jordan Peterson, his daughter had some serious immune system issues, autoimmune disorders. And to the point where she's had, I believe she's like 30, 31, she's had a hip replaced, she's about to get one of her ankles replaced. Serious arthritis, real problems. The only thing that's been able to clear that up is meat. Just a pure meat diet. So with some people, but she might have some outrageous allergic reaction to plant. It might be something on her. I don't think the meat wasn't the medicine, probably the elimination of whatever she was admitted. That's what I'm saying. She might have some sort of a real serious problem, some sort of allergic reaction to some plants or to gluten and maybe a bunch of different things. That's the way a lot of these diets are. It's the elimination. Yes. Not the magic of just eating meat. But John Baker keeps going on and on about how meat heals and meat this and meat that, all carnivorous diet. All these people are trying it. Man. It's got a lot of good stuff going for it, but restriction of plant matter, in my opinion, long term is not a good idea. Eating meat all the time, long term, is not necessarily a good idea. Eating only plants with the absence of some meat based protein is for a lot of populations. Not that great of an idea. Yeah. Well, that's the point is that for most people, you're going to have to experiment a little bit to figure out what works best for you. There are people that, especially if you use E3 Live and algae and get your B12 vitamins and your fat soluble vitamins, you can live off a vegan diet. It can be done, but you really have to be careful about it. But then there's other people where they can't. You really have to figure out what the fuck is going on with your own body. It's genetic too. The whole carnivore thing to me is kind of tweaking me out because I just don't ... They start talking about the poisons and phytotoxins and all these things that are in plants that are bad for you. I'm like, okay, but the issue with that is- It's a mild, hormetic exercise is bad for you. Sunlight's bad for you. Exactly. All that stuff goes away because it's a hormetic stressor. Is that your body responds to that in a positive way? It even shows some of the rodents outside of Chernobyl are living longer from the radiation. And I'm not saying go move your cabin out next to a nuclear disaster website. But the idea is that's a hormetic stressor. Mild amounts of UVA and UVB.