Joe Rogan - What's Going on With the Carnivore Diet

Let's talk about something I think you guys can both agree on, because I am baffled by this carnivore diet. Yes. And baffled. I'm baffled by how many people are clinging to it as a panacea. I'm baffled by whether or not it's a physiological effect or whether there's a placebo effect going on. I have a theory. Please. So my theory is that it mimics some of the benefits of fasting, but allows people to persist for longer because it's providing some nutrition. If you look in the scientific literature, fasting is like the cure-all for everything. I agree with you. You can look at any condition, and fasting is the cure. We're talking water fasting, so you can do it for two, three, four weeks. Right. The problem is try that for a year. That will be the cure for life in that case. The longest example is a year of water fasting. So most people are not... That's the guy that lost 300 plus pounds. Yeah, he was extremely obese. He was living off of his fat stores. He was living off of his fat stores. The fascinating thing about that was that he actually is skin-shrank too, which is really... No, yeah, which doesn't usually happen with weight loss. So this is just a theory. I have nothing to... I don't have any evidence, but meat is absorbed very high up in the digestive tract. When you only eat meat, it's a low-residue diet, and there's nothing left over to irritate or inflame the gut. My theory is a lot of people who are benefiting from this have a really disrupted gut microbiome. Alessio Fasano has argued that leaky gut is kind of a precondition for autoimmunity, and the carnivore diet is essentially like a gut rest or a fast. So I don't doubt that people are benefiting from it. The question is, what is the long-term implication? There's a few people that have been doing it. There's some anecdotal evidence. We've been doing it for a few decades. Well, it's pretty cool. I'm actually going on my Homeboy, Sean Baker's podcast in a few weeks. You guys are homeboys? We started... Sean and I started as enemies. We love each other. Sean, I love you, brother. We're going to have an honest discussion as much as you can to say, why is Michaela Peterson feeling good? And you got to love that and honor that. If she had done water fasting transitioning to an ultra-clean diet, which she had done as well, who knows? But to look at Sean Baker's labs and say, pre-diabetic, low testosterone, high BUN, I'm concerned, although he just published his coronary calcium scan of zero, and I honor that. He's got little kids. I don't want the guy to drop dead. But it's way preliminary for the bandwagon that's growing. The problem with the testosterone thing, though, is he said that he had been deadlifting the day before, and the day before he took his test. Could that have significantly decreased testosterone? He said he repeated it a few times and it stayed low. But if your serum total test... It would have been raised quite a bit. It could have. I think it raised by 100%. No, it was like 237. I can't memorize his labs. It's low, though. There's plenty of data. If your serum total testosterone is less than 250, it's an adverse mortality predictor. And he wants to be alive. He doesn't need to do it. Michaela Peterson and Jordan might need to do it until they find a better path. Sean's adopted it. So the biggest puzzle is, quickly, quickly, one of the things that plant-based eaters and people that fill three quarters of their plate with fruit and vegetables get way more than everybody else is lots of vitamin C. And vitamin C builds healthy walls and builds healthy immune systems. You love vitamin C. I love vitamin C. I love it from foods. I don't mind it as a supplement. I don't mind it intravenous. Vitamin C is Linus Pauling. There's so many benefits to the body. Where are these people when every chart says that meat has no vitamin C? Are they eating raw meat, which might have vitamin C? Are they eating Oregon meat, which might have some vitamin C? Let me stop you there, because I'll tell you what the explanation's been to me. The explanation to me has been that there is a decrease in absorption of vitamin C when you're consuming vitamin C with all these other things, cruciferous vegetables, carbohydrates, all these different things. If there's some sort of a, there's an adverse effect. Is that a fact? Well, if you take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C, you'll absorb a lot of it. If you take 10,000 milligrams, by percentage, you won't absorb as much, but you'll still get more than 1,000 milligrams. But there's also this theory that since they're eating basically a no-added glucose diet, that there's some kind of competition in us between glucose and C. So even if they get a touch of C, they're absorbing it hyper-efficiently. Nobody knows. They haven't developed scurvy. And then they're getting their glucose from glucogenesis. Internally, right, because they're adding, you know, surely it's a low-carb diet. No doubt about it. But they get a little alpha-gal in there, maybe. That's about the only curve. I think, I mean, the point is we just don't know. We don't know. And I, I, I, I mean, as a, as a practitioner myself and as someone who's dealt with chronic illness who wasn't able to find help anywhere else, I mean, I do not begrudge people for sticking with something that, that when they've tried everything and nothing has worked and they do this and they feel good. I mean, who can blame them? It's, it's really. Well, I've gone to dinner with Jordan, Jordan Peterson, and he's eaten his big giant steaks and he looks great. Well, you know, he's lighter than he's been since he was 22. And I'm, I'm 100% empathetic with that because I've been through something like that myself. But to then take that and say that we're certain that it's safe is a big leap. And the other thing is, you know, my field atherosclerosis takes years to develop and I wish him well. He's contributing amazing things to the world. But unless he's tracking carotid and coronary and doing it year after year after year, you know, it's an experiment you might not want to run. But Sean did run those tests. And baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline. bus Jennifer towater's. Baseline. He's a human. He's a human to trucks. You do it from ship to ship. He's a human. He travel the t t. And carry their to the system. Where in sir? And close the meet it that it had before that even with all the right things maybe not and so I'm not saying that they should the people should give up hope and I'm saying that like there we have to separate between this is helping me and it's making me feel great and nothing else worked right and we know with hundred percent certainty that this is safe for the long term those are two very different questions and again I'm totally empathetic to that you know and I would probably do the same thing especially yourself that has gone through this process of being yeah and I might even say hey you know if I maybe I'll die five years earlier but I'll enjoy the ret you know those years of my life I won't be in pain and discomfort the entire time then sign me up or I might I might say to myself well wait it can't be that good for me to be inflamed all the time and like right you know it that can't be good for me so maybe even though the all-meat diet might have some downsides it actually might be reducing inflammation and therefore that will cancel out we just don't know what about all meat diet the thing that gets me is there's no vitamin supplementation I'm like what about an all-meat diet with good supplementation of multivitamin pretty smart idea fiber where's omega-3 coming fiber essential it's being questioned I mean is it as central to health in the medical literature Dr. Dennis Burkett from England went to Africa described fiber described it reduced all kinds of chronic diseases a book called the fiber man and all it's being questioned now it's so entrenched have we got it all wrong and only plants have fiber it's a good question where they getting their fiber their meat is sticking in their colon it's called putrefaction for days and days that's is it yeah well it's that is what happens and they high me die there's a hundred percent and with every single person when you chew it well and drink water does it always get stuck it's generally thought that it's fiber that is the process of moving abdominal contents whether you eat an all plant either I mean I think there's there's definitely controversy about fiber but I think the weight of the evidence still does suggest that fermentable carbohydrates fiber essentially and butyric acid beneficial because they're very important for the microbiome and we have you know people like Justin Sonnenberg at Stanford who's done a lot of good work here do we know with hundred-percent certainty no but we also know that virtually every human population that's ever been studied had significant amounts of fiber in their diet so so if we're going with sigh right no they very high note the warriors they consumed the warriors consumed milk and meat and blood at certain times of year when they were you know and other times you they did eat more plant foods so the why the wise really the plants even the even the Inuit the traditional Inuit you know they had during time certain times a year like the winter when the ground was covered with snow they had a very low intake of plant foods but they would still trade for them and then during the winter summer when when they were able to collect berries and things like that they would definitely do that so every culture that we know of that's been studied ate some combination of animal and plant foods you know what ratio what amount you know that varies from place to place depending on where they are but that's that's what the anthropological data show there's actually you know when you talk about this two super super cool piece of data I'll go quick there's a professor University of Pittsburgh Steven O'Keefe who took 20 African Americans in Pittsburgh eating an inner city not healthy diet and 20 rural Africans in South Africa eating from the bush and largely plants and they switched them for 20 days and they measured every single thing they can measure in the microbiome in their stool metabolites TMAO and all the rest your body is so amazing that 20 days on a better diet what I would call the rural African diet a better diet you know there was in incredible changes towards health making butyric acid having bacteroides and pre-vitalia I mean changes and the the rural African suffered American illness in terms of what you can measure within two weeks now there's data I just learned yesterday in Los Angeles that our microbiome changes in five days you go to a low sugar low protein plant diet this is University of Southern California I can tell you in five days Michaela Peterson's microbiome would change would she feel better I don't know I'm just pointing out just the remarkable resiliency and that's