Joe Rogan - The Problem with Refined Sugar & Carbs

What's your organ experience? Inflammation, the big difference is when I eat a lot of carbs, if I go off the rails and I'll cheat and have pasta or bread or something like that, I experience more inflammation. I experience more soreness in my joints. You get more fatigue. You get tired. You get that insulin crash. You get all those big factors that I just don't get when I eat clean. When I eat just meat and salad and vegetables and high fat diet and low carb, my body is just way more efficient. It feels better. The big thing that I keep trying to stress to people is you don't need a nap. That fucking afternoon nap, which I just thought is something you need. All that is is just your body recovering from lunch. From carbs. Yeah, your fucking carbs at lunch. If you don't have that, the day is much more efficient. I get more done. I have more energy. People say, how do you do all these podcasts, two podcasts a day? No, I eat good. Eat good. It's not hard. It's not hard. Your brain is functioning all day long. But man, if I stopped at noon and had a fucking pizza and then tried to do a podcast, I'd be here going, oh, is this done yet? I need to sleep. Yeah, you just get tired. Yeah, you get exhausted. We've been doing this diet since the mid-90s, since 1993. I think it was around the time we started. We've been doing them on and off for a long time. More recently, I used it to drop 70 pounds. But I think one of the things with keto that I noticed was it almost doesn't really matter that I'm in ketosis all the time. I think the effort to be in ketosis, I think, is important by getting rid of a lot of the carbohydrates that you have, the effort to kind of eat a little bit more fat. But what I've noticed is I don't think I need to really go out of my way to eat tons and tons of fat. I don't need to be dumping tons of MCT oil on stuff. There's enough fat usually in the steaks that I'm eating. A lot of times I get ribeye. Sometimes I eat bacon, eggs, things like that. I put up on my Instagram the other day about seven or eight foods that I thought if you just stuck to these seven or eight foods for a handful of days, you would lose a lot of weight. And the response was amazing. People were writing back and they're like, holy shit, man, I'd lost 10 pounds. Well, a lot of people do lose weight off keto. There's no doubt about that. Even Mark Sisson, who was one that got me into it, Mark goes on and off and he thinks there's some benefit to going on and off keto. I don't think you have to be in ketosis all the time. It has a sick keto cyclical ketogenic diet. But even when you go off, you're not switching your diet to spaghetti. You're not eating fucking wonder bread and shit like that. You would love it if you switched up spaghetti, right? That's your thing. Pasta? Well, I like it. I like it when I cheat, but I don't like the effect on my body for sure. I just like the taste of it. Like linguine with clams is one of my favorite things to eat. But the way I feel afterwards is not my favorite. How about bread and butter? Why is that so good? Wonderful. Why is that so good? It's amazing. So good. Well, you know, people out in California, they don't even know. We always talk about this. Hard rolls used to go get like a buttered roll in the morning and we grew up in New York. So you go get a buttered roll. There you go. There you go with butter. It was the best thing ever. Yeah. And out here, they don't have them. Thank God. I'm actually glad they don't have them. You know what I've had that I fucking love sour dough bread with grass fed butter and honey. Oh my God, man. Sourdough. Sourdough is really good. What honey on top of the butter. Oh, Jesus. Oh, with all this ketogenic sounds amazing with all this keto stuff going on. I've been wondering when somebody's going to make some bread like figure out. No, it's terrible though. It's not that bad. No foods is good. I like their bread. I make eggs sandwiches with their bread. No fruits. I haven't tried that one. I haven't tried that one yet. A lot of good stuff. I know they just came out. Yeah. I've tried the waffles. The donuts and stuff like that. But I think a lot of those things for me, they have way too many carbohydrates for me. They do. Way too many. But I think isn't there something about the type of carbs they have? Fibers and I'm usually. Yeah. Yeah. They don't raise your blood level. Some like that. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I don't want to eat regular waffles on a regular basis, but if I'm going to cheat and I eat what they have, you know, and they also have a very low sugar syrup too. It tastes very good. It's just, it's the best option if you're going to do something like that. Exactly. You should mostly eat real foods. Like I feel better when I eat meat and vegetables. That's when I'm, you know, I had Jordan Peterson on and he had some pretty serious autoimmune disorders and his body was really in trouble. And his daughter had similar problems and his daughter went to essentially a diet of just meat and greens. And now I think she's on a carnivore diet. She's got a Instagram page to documenting it, but he went to meat and greens, lost a shit ton of weight. What was losing? I think he said he was losing, what does he say? Like seven pounds a month for something like something along those lines, lost a ton of weight and looks great. He said he's thinner than he's been in 25 years. Feels great. All his autoimmune issues were done. I think a lot of what people are dealing with is inflammation that's caused by too much processed carbohydrates, too much simple, refined carbohydrates and sugars. And the inflammation leads to disease. So if you look at what they call the five scourges of health, they are obesity, cancer, cognitive decline, heart disease and diabetes. Those are all metabolic. Those are all things that we get through food and over half the people that are in the hospital today right now in the United States are in there for metabolic issues. So that's crazy. It is crazy. So more than half of the people that are in the hospital are there because of what they ate. It is crazy. And you see a direct correlation between the amount of refined sugars and carbohydrates human beings have adjusted and started eating to the rise in diabetes and heart disease and all these other issues. And you know, the one of the things we were talking about before the podcast is, sorry, I went running today for some reason I can't stop coughing. People are dealing with a lot of various health issues. And they're always trying to pin like one cause of these health issues. And one of the real problems is when people develop these ideological answers, like veganism is one of them, they do not want to think that there's anything healthy about meat and that what they do is the only way. And this is the way and like I'm watching this. There's a thread right now going on on Twitter between some cockamamie vegan doctors full of shit and all these people that are citing science and and he is getting pissed off and he's showing his degree and photos of his degree. They're like, look, motherfucker, there's real science to the fact that dietary cholesterol is necessary. It's the building blocks for cells. I mean, it literally is. It's the reason why your body is converting it to all the sex hormones, cholesterol, saturated fat, your body processes that. It's healthy for your brain. It's healthy for your heart. All these things are a fact. He's not recognizing the fact that the issue is not saturated fat. It's saturated fat in conjunction with all these other things. That's a problem with these studies. Like one of the studies they did recently where they showed that people who ate meat more than five times a week were much more likely to have heart disease. But that's not a good study because they didn't say what are they eating the meat with? What else are they doing? What are you eating the meat with? What's their life like? Are you eating it with bread? Are you eating it as a burger? Are you drinking a soda with it? This is not a good study. A good study would be have someone get a large group of people, put them on a carnivore diet, have a large group of people, put them on a keto diet, have a large group of people, put them on a standard American diet, let them eat burgers and fries and chocolate shakes and sodas. Let's find out what the fuck it is. Put people on a vegan diet. I have had tons of friends, including Sam Harris, who was on a vegan diet and his fucking blood sugar was off the charts. He was trying to figure out how to stay healthy. He tried. He tried it for a long time, but he felt like shit and then he went and switched to fish and he felt like shit just doing that too. And then he went back to meat. Now he's healthy again. I think the answer always seems to come back to being in the middle somewhere, right? Like somewhere. We veer off so far and we're like, oh man, we got Doritos and we got cookies and we got all this stuff being thrown at us every single day and it's convenient. And then somebody will say, okay, you don't know more carbs and you just go the complete opposite route and you end up with something like a carnivore diet. But I think just if you were to sit there and think about stuff logically, it would make sense to me that you can overdo it on meat. Like I think you can overdo it on just about anything. Yeah. That's why I lean towards balance and that's why I like vegetables, but I can't talk you guys into that. Yeah. I think your balance is probably, is probably ideal, but you know, the balance of the average Americans not great because I think they think they can just grab and reach for anything. That's their level of balance. Well, I think the average America is just trying to feed themselves. You know, they're just trying to, they're hungry and they're tired. And look, there's a great Henry Thoreau quote that most men live lives of quiet desperation. And I think that applies to so many different things. And one of them is work. Most people are fucking working all day and they're sad and they feel like shit. And when you get out of there, you're like fucking Wendy's drive through. Come on, baby. Get me up with one of them fucking double cheeseburgers, chocolate shake, please. They get a little reward and you know, and then they feel even more shitty and then they crash and they get up and they do it all over again with a fucking egg McMuffin and a cup of coffee with three scoops of sugar in it. And this is the, this is the roller coaster that most people are on. And it all started with them going to bed too late because they stayed around and fucked around on their phone or watch TV. They went to bed too late. They woke up later than they wanted. They're tired because they didn't get the sleep they were supposed to get. They drank the coffee. Right. And it's just, it's just one thing snowballing after another. Now, what are you guys doing in this documentary? Like what are you trying to document? We're basically just going around interviewing people that are sort of in the know, you know, that are writing these books like Mark Sisson, Rob Wolf. Those are some of the people that we interviewed and just asking them, you know, basic questions about diet and nutrition and sort of seeing what, where they stand. And then we sort of, we shot about 15 interviews right now. And then it's my job to sort of figure out like, well, how does this all correlate together? So we don't really have, I'd say it'd be disingenuous for me to come on and say, this is exactly what we're going to do. Cause I have no idea what it's going to be. And I think that's the beauty of it. When we shot bigger, stronger, faster, I had no clue how that was going to turn out. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers, they go in with like, here's the point I'm going to prove. Let me find all the people and string them along and then figure out how they fit into the puzzle. And if they don't conveniently fit into my puzzle, they're out. And I just, I don't know. I developed a different way of doing it. I just like to try to get as much information as I can and then think about it a lot and then put it in a way that makes sense to me. So you're basically doing the opposite of a lot of these propaganda films. Like this is one of the problems that I know a lot of people that have had heart disease or all these various issues. They paid attention to some of these propaganda films. So there's a couple of vegan ones that are out there right now. What the health? That's been widely dismissed by scientists and nutrition experts. And I would love to interview him or any of the doctors that are involved in that because you know, why not? Let them speak their mind and let's hear what they have to say and then let's talk about it. I think that's another interesting thing because the other thing I also feel is like the guy that made What the Health, I just feel like he has good intentions also. Yes. Right? I mean, he's not trying to like kill people. He's trying to help people just like I'm trying to help people. So he's over here going like this guy's trying to help people eating meat. He's crazy. The problem is I'm not doing that to him. I think like there is a lot of benefits to a vegan diet. There are a lot of people that could benefit from it. Can everybody benefit from it? I don't know. There's a lot of things missing also. So I definitely question it, but I don't shit all over it. I don't think that's the way to help people. The way to help people is a sort of bring them together and figure out what works. I think it's very rare that people do it right. I think if you do it right and you have, you know, some sort of B12 supplements, whether it is, you know, from like greens, like what do they use that? What's that? Algae greens. Oh yeah. Algae stuff that Dominic D'Agostino uses, right? Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff that you can get your B vitamins from. And if they're not opposed, I mean, some of the simplest organisms on the planet are mollusks, you know, and I know that people think of them as animal life, but they're more primitive than plants. I mean, there's certain clams and mollusks and things like that. They don't feel fucking shit. They're not suffering. They literally don't have the capacity for pain. And they're one of the more primitive life forms on earth. I mean, we deviated from them 600 million years ago or something like that. They're barely an animal. We can call them an animal. But see, what we say is because they move, you know, because the clam closes its mouth, we've decided that that's a living thing. Plants move too. I mean, you have the plant that eats the rats. Yeah, that thing's awesome. Or Venus fly traps. But the thing is, plants are far more complex in their ability to communicate and their ability to even express predation, pain, and protect themselves through various chemical means to protect themselves from predation. They change the way they taste to keep from getting eaten. And there's been studies also that you just play the sound of a caterpillar eating leaves next to plants. They recognize that sound and they change their taste profile, which is just fucking crazy. And those are chemicals like lectins, things like lectins and stuff that can be very damaging to people. A lot of people don't know, but if you eat cucumbers and tomatoes and stuff like that, you're getting a lot of these lectins that a lot of people are, they have adverse reactions to. So a lot of people be eating a variety of vegetables in their diet and not understand why they still don't feel good. They need to look into that. They may have a lectin issue. Yeah, it's entirely possible. So a lot of people still don't know that. When we started this film, you know, we were going to call it the war on carbs. That's what we were talking about. That's what we've been talking about for quite a long time. But as we started to go through the movie, we're like, Oh, I don't know, war on carbs. Like maybe that's going to isolate and that's going to pigeonhole the movie into one style. But as we started interviewing more and more people, we realized that the problem is carbs. It's really a war on refined carbs and vegetable oils and sugars, you know, sugar, which is a refined. And you say carbs, you're talking about pizza, basically, and ice cream and all the excess things that people are eating. They're not really refined carbohydrates, refined sugars. And these are all products of the modern world, modern industrialized world. They call it Western. They call the diseases Western diseases because they didn't used to have these, you know, diseases on another level in other countries. And then when we started exporting, you know, molasses, and we started exporting rice and everything else we were exporting to these other countries that didn't have it, they all got sick. They all started getting sick. You know, they all started their obesity rates went up, their diabetes rates went up. And that's, that's just proof right there that if you eat that stuff, you know, it will have those consequences. Well, one of the one of the great ways that I've seen someone talk about, I forget who it was, it was discussing this, they were saying, look at humans teeth. People did not suffer from the type of tooth decay they suffer from now. What is that from? What's from refined carbohydrates and sugar? That's what it is. And especially sugary drinks, like people were constantly drinking soda. I mean, you were just fucking torturing your teeth. You're just throwing acid on your teeth all day. I can't believe I used to eat all that stuff when I look back, you know, man, I used to eat all that and look forward to it too, right? And I guess I thought I felt okay, but I really didn't, you know, like thinking back on it, I'm like, I feel way better now. But back then I thought I was okay. I thought I was doing a good job.