Why Do Some People Benefit from the Carnivore Diet? | Joe Rogan & Ben Greenfield

Did you do that carnivore diet thing? Did you try that out? No. You didn't? No. No, I like me, but I didn't do the carnivore diet. I thought you were gonna do it for a certain amount of time and test it. I thought about it. I'm too much of a foodie. I'm like, I, what I did was I tried to eat ribeye steaks every night for dinner. So I did like a 33% carnivore diet. But there was a study actually that came out, it was just like two days ago on that TMAO. The sugar that is associated with gut damage when you're eating a high red meat diet. Right, when your body takes excess protein and it turns it into sugar. Right, with theoretically the idea being that that might be present because your microbiome is imbalanced from a diet that's too heavy in meat. Is it a micro? If you're working enough fiber. It's because of your biome. I thought it was just because of glucogenesis because your body has nothing but meat. Your body turns it into glucose. No, that would be something different. Oh really? That conversion to glucose is a different sugar than the TMAO. Oh. So what the TMAO is, is that's gonna be present if you aren't getting enough fiber. Or if your biome is imbalanced. But what this study, a couple of days looked at was people who were eating like a fish and egg and plant rich diet. And they had high levels of TMAO too, but they weren't deleterious. Because of the fiber. They were actually protective because they had the fiber. And I mean you could do a carnivore diet if you were, there's a few populations that do this. Like in Spain, I forget the name of the sausage, but they'll like eat the ruminant. Like they'll eat the intestine of the ruminant and get their grasses and their fibers and their plants literally by eating the stomach of the animal. Like a cat. Yeah, yeah. And it's the same issue with like, you know, methionine. Too much of the amino acid methionine from just eating red meat would be deleterious. But if you're getting glycine and some of these other amino acids, if you're reading like nose to tail, right? Bone marrow, bone broth, all the organ meats, you know, head cheese, bra and shryger, just like all these different mixes of meats. I think that would be the way to do a carnivore diet. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are proponents of that as well. And then there's a bunch of people that are, you know, it's interesting because you've got a, there's a disparity between the anecdotal accounts of health and wellbeing and then blood work. Yeah. The blood work these folks get is not impressive. You mean the people on the carnivore diet. Yeah. What I've seen, I haven't seen anything where I see all their inflammatory markers down, their testosterone up. I haven't seen anything where it's looking really good. Yeah, high blood glucose is another thing that you see. But I should say that there haven't been a lot of tests done. It's not like a lot of people are publishing stuff on it, but the anecdotal evidence is amazing. It's like, it's really weird. Like my friend Jordan Peterson, he's had a tremendous success with it. Yeah. Lost a lot of body weight. He says he's in his intellectual prime. He said he's never felt better in terms of his energy levels. And that guy is, he is so rigid and disciplined with it. All he's eating is meat with salt on it and he drinks water. And that is really, well, if you think about it, it's an elimination diet. Yes. It's like an autoimmune diet. Or you can say, well, I don't know what's giving me trouble, soy or wheat or dairy or what have you. So I'm just going to stop eating all that stuff and switch to primarily meat. Yeah. The problem is that it's, I don't want to call anybody out and call them lazy, but it's almost like kind of a very easy, lazy-esque approach. Because rather than figuring out how to do, you know, like that sourdough bread, it's slow fermented, the rye and the wheat are in there, but all the phytic acid that would normally inhibit your ability to absorb minerals is pre-digested by the lactobacillus and all the bacteria in the wheat. So you've got a bread that's lower in a glycemic index and it's more easily digested. Which is why both rye and sourdough are more healthy for it. Right. And you put the rye in it because it lowers the glycemic index. And then you've got the, what's it called, the, I forget the term, it's like a gluten-digesting enzyme that gets activated with the lactobacillus. So that's a smart bread. I mean, it takes freaking 24 hours to, it's not 24 hours, but it's like 15 minutes over 24 hours that it takes to make it. That's an intelligent approach to food preparation. Right. That's the way that our ancestors or many of the Blue Zones would have treated their foods. Fermenting, soaking, sprouting, slow food. And you can take a lot of these things that would result in, you know, you're talking about Jordan Peterson. I know his daughter does this as well, Michaela Peterson. They use that elimination diet, you know, which is the carnivore diet, to clear up a lot of those autoimmune issues. But you could also just render food more digestible or switch to an elimination diet or an autoimmune diet for 8 weeks or 12 weeks, something like the carnivore diet, heal the gut and then return back to a more all-inclusive eating pattern that allows you to eat, you know, dairy, wheat, plants, etc., all these things that would normally damage the gut if the gut is actually leaky. So what are the, like, what's the process? Like, what is happening when they go on this very strict elimination diet and they're just eating meat? Like, what is happening to their gut that allows them to have all these pretty, pretty significant health benefits? A lot of loss of weight, increase of energy, autoimmune issues. Like, Jordan had some pretty significant gum issues. Those all went away. Depression, that went away. Right. Some of the gum in the joint stuff might be just as much related to the fact that he's getting a shit ton of collagen, you know, fiber, or not fiber, but, you know, elastin and muscle fiber precursors. He's getting a lot of protein. I don't know if he's eating bone broth and bone marrow, but maybe a lot of glycine to some of these other metabolites. So part of it could just be more fuel on board to repair muscles or to repair the joints. But then the other part of it is that when you eliminate inflammatory products that you're consuming, like, let's say you're eating whatever, you know, Wonder Bread and commercial dairy or unfermented soy or any of these things that can actually damage the lining of the gut, you're creating an inflammatory scenario. And I know you're familiar with the gut brain axis and how our gut interacts with our nervous system via the vagus nerve. And when you have inflammation in the gut, that affects neural symptoms, it affects sleep, it affects intellectual performance. And then you've also got the autoimmune component. If you're actually truly allergic to or intolerant to some of those proteins that wind up in the bloodstream in the presence of a leaky gut, you know, plant proteins, lectins are another one that a lot of people complain about, then you create almost like a full-body damage scenario. So the idea is you get rid of all that stuff, you introduce the carnivore diet, and I don't know that there's a lot of components of the carnivore diet that are actually healing the gut as much as it's the absence or elimination of the foods that we're harming it. Interesting. You know, the Bell brothers, Chris and Mark, do you know those guys? Yeah. Their take on it is basically they've never felt better. And, you know, these are guys that work out very heavily. The difference between them and Jordan is probably that, especially, you know, Mark is a gorilla. Yeah. You know, he's powerlifting and, you know, has been doing that basically his whole life. These guys are what their take on it is essentially, at least the way they think, is that most people that are talking about diet, they really don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Even though you might be able to look at it on paper and you might have these ideas about what's beneficial or non-beneficial, some people are proponents of vegan diets, some people are proponents of, you know, paleo. He's like, until you are actually physically doing something, until you are actually doing something with that diet and then you report how much better you feel, the people that are actually training really hard, those are the ones you should rely on. And he's saying, for him personally, he's never felt better, never been leaner. Yeah. And a big part of it, I mean, this just returns to diet personalization and customization as a whole. You know, we live in an era where you can self-quantify pretty easily with genetics and you can find out what ancestry it came from, what blood markers that you have, what your gut microbiome looks like. And I don't think we talked about this on the last show, but there's this idea of eating according to your ancestry. Yes. And the concept of what are called cold spots, like areas around the world where people have a genetic susceptibility to have certain diseases that they don't actually develop, those diseases don't actually manifest because of their traditional diet. Like you look at like the Icelandic population that carries the genes that would render them more susceptible to something like depression or seasonal affective disorder. But their diet is very rich in omega-3 fatty acids and DHA, which we know can protect against those disorders. And you take the Icelandic population and you uproot them and put them in the context of a westernized diet and all of a sudden depression and SAD manifest. That's interesting. So the same thing for like Cameroon, Cameroon, Africa, higher than normal risk for colon cancer, but they're eating a diet that's high in fiber. Why is it higher than normal risk? I don't know. It's a genetic susceptibility. But the idea is that that population probably figured out at some point in human history that if they eat a lot of plants or they eat a lot of fiber, all of a sudden people don't have as many issues with their colon, right? And then you take that same population again, strip out the fiber, put them on a westernized diet, and you get a large portion of the African-American population developing colon cancer. That's crazy about the seasonal affective disorder. And you've got to wonder how would that affect people that live in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest, that are dealing with constant rain. I wonder if that would have some sort of an impact on them. Probably even more if you come from that population. I mean, I'm on the Spokane side, but I'm out in the middle of the forest. I get sun from maybe 10 to 2. I'm on a north-facing slope, and I work indoors a lot of the time. I'm typing on my computer, I'm blogging, and so I don't get a lot of sun exposure, but that's where all these newfangled light panels and head-borne light devices and things come in that were actually developed for seasonal affective disorder that actually worked pretty well just to keep your mood up. If you're working indoors, you don't get sunlight exposure.