J Gulinello: Exposing The Big Agenda in the Food System | MMP #219
Because I'm talking about things that don't necessarily have to do with what I went to school for, but I'm astute. I loved history. I'm just an avid reader. I look at things bigger picture. So I don't think we need more people that are hyper focused on one thing.
Speaker 1:Think we need more generalists in the world, people who can think on how to, like you said, how to bring some of these concepts together rather than just looking at everything in a disparate way and thinking, Well, how are we ever going to get there? Well, we have to figure out how to get there by looking at higher levels.
Speaker 2:Totally. And we'll get into this when we record, but I actually don't know this. Did you first pursue a career in music before nutrition or were those things going on simultaneously?
Speaker 1:I moved to New York as an actor and a musician. Wow. I have not been in this studio, but I've been in so many studios in this city doing independent films, doing comedies, doing dramas, doing horror films, playing in a band. Played at CBGB, like the famous CBGB where every famous band played back in the day before. I think it's a bank now.
Speaker 1:So sad. But yeah, so I moved here in 2010 to just be an artist. I had no It's so weird how your life works out. I had no concept of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The fact that you're now lecturing a doctor, teaching doctors about nutrition.
Speaker 1:And talking about biochemistry, something that I always make the joke that in high school, I got a D in chemistry and I cheated. And I got a D. That was so bad. And now I'm giving lectures on the electron transport chain and mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation and people. And I can't believe that I'm that guy.
Speaker 2:How far you've come?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just goes to show you, at the time, I didn't find it interesting, so I didn't focus on it. But once I find something interesting, look out. I'll spend an entire weekend just reading papers. I don't think of it as like, oh, I spent my entire weekend reading papers.
Speaker 2:I'm like,
Speaker 1:guess what I did this week? Not everybody's into that. But yeah, it's a weird winding road to this place.
Speaker 2:To where you get to where you are now. Well, for good whenever you are. Are we good? You good? I'm good.
Speaker 2:All right, cool. Well, Jay, thanks so much for joining me in New York in studio.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man. Thanks for coming home. Know.
Speaker 2:Made it work. Yeah, I told you I was in town for a couple of family related things. And there's so many great guests to have on in New York. And this podcast has been a long time coming. I don't know if you remember this, but I don't remember who it was that connected us.
Speaker 2:But I remember hearing from a few different people they were saying about a year ago, Oh, you should have Jay Goulinello on. A lot of things that he talks about in regards to like the war on food, his perspective on nutrition is really in alignment with the Meat Mafia show. We were DMing a little bit. We were going to do a virtual, it didn't happen. And then we got connected through our mutual friend, Zane.
Speaker 2:You came and spoke on our Alternative Health Summit in early June, and your panel, your twenty minute panel, it was short, but it blew everyone's minds. It blew my mind. I didn't know what C40 cities were. You were talking about so many things that were in alignment to our core ethos. So now to have you on the show, I feel like it's a very fitting thing.
Speaker 2:We made it happen when it was supposed to happen.
Speaker 1:I think right. I was just going say that sometimes the best laid plans, and it doesn't really matter. Life kind of just figures it out for you. And when you said you were going to be up here in New York, I thought, Well, that's great. It's a perfect opportunity to actually talk in person and to have a more detailed conversation about what I was able to talk about at the event in Tennessee, was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Was there talking at two events that same weekend, so it just happened to be serendipitous for me too to be there on that weekend. So it was great. The crowd was so interesting. And we were talking offline. All the speakers played off of each other.
Speaker 1:That was really cool. So yeah, I had a great time. I appreciate you having me. And it's again serendipitous that you're up here and we can do this again.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It was cool just to see how intentional people were to go to that conference. Like, I I remember there was a kid, Luke, who had just graduated from University of Arizona, broke college kid, takes his own dollars, flies across the country to go to that event. There were ranchers there, Crowd Health was there. There were all these interesting people that were very intentional about why they wanted to be there.
Speaker 2:And I think like you said, the speakers played off each other amazingly. And to that point, I was saying to you off camera, I think why Harry and I have been so drawn to your content is like, when you look at the state of the food system, it's so easy to get bogged down in like, seventy percent of Americans are overweight or obese, seven out of ten deaths are from chronic disease. I think you've said before that like 19% of our expenditure is going to like healthcare related costs or something like that, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in 2020 it was 19.7% of GDP went to health care.
Speaker 2:So, say why fight when we could just eat ourselves to right?
Speaker 1:Right, because we only spend 3.7 on national defence. It's crazy. Almost six times the amount on health care. Yeah, our enemies can just wait for us
Speaker 2:to eat ourselves to death. Absolutely. But it's so easy to just get bogged down on the circumstance and the statistics. But I think your gift is like, you're able to break down these very complex topics and very clearly define like, this is the situation. There's hope that we can pull ourselves out of it.
Speaker 2:But here are all the things that have gone on over the last century that have kind of gotten us into that point. Do think that's fair to say?
Speaker 1:I do. Correlation is not causation. So a lot of times when I point out things like the dietary guidelines, and there's a very tight correlation between the introduction of the guidelines and the upward trajectory of chronic disease. Because in the early 1900s, things like heart disease, cancer, they're relatively unknown. The first published heart attack in the medical literature was 1912, which sounds like a long time ago, but not really when you think about heart disease being the number one killer right now.
Speaker 1:So it's hard. You can't necessarily say that the guidelines are the cause. I believe through my research that they are part of the cause. But what you can certainly say is that they haven't done anything to help. We have followed the guidelines.
Speaker 1:The Nutrition Coalition points out just how well we follow the guidelines. But also, was a paper published just a few years ago, it might have even been 2022, that looked at food consumption in The US all the way back from 1800, where the records were pretty sparse, but all the way up to 2018. And we did follow the guidelines, we reduced meat intake, we reduced animal fat intake, we reduced all of the things we were told to reduce, we increased grains, we increased fats from plants, and we're still sick, and we're actually sicker than we've ever been. So while you can't necessarily say the guidelines are the only thing because I do believe there are other factors at play, But you can definitely say, well, the guidelines haven't saved us from anything. I think it's time to revisit them and decide, are we actually doing ourselves any good with the government controlling the messaging on food?
Speaker 1:My argument would be no. Other people have other arguments, but I at least say, Well, listen, they're not helping. So, we have to think about revisiting this at some point.
Speaker 2:Jay, why don't you tell the audience just for their benefit, what do you specifically do in regards to nutrition and biochemistry? And when did you start to wake up to the fact that like, okay, the things that were being told by the mainstream narrative aren't actually right?
Speaker 1:Boy, I wish I could pinpoint a specific moment. Were saying, my career actually started off in the entertainment industry. I went to Berkeley as an undergrad. I've been a touring and studio musician for years. I want the audience to understand that this is coming from a true place of self exploration and love because I was the guy that after a gig at 1AM would find the twenty four hour McDonald's and go get whatever, you know, in my 20s, because that's all I didn't know any better.
Speaker 1:And I thought it was calories in calories out. I was a long distance runner at the time. So I was running thirty, forty, 50 miles a week. And I just kind of was barely keeping pace with the poor diet that I had. They always say you can't outrun a bad diet.
Speaker 1:I am living proof that you could not outrun a bad diet.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:tried. I think I maintained. Then I moved to New York and then I just sort of started seeing things pop up on YouTube,
Speaker 2:believe it
Speaker 1:or not. Think I saw a cholesterol video way back when, and some doctor was saying, you know, cholesterol is not all bad. And I thought, what an idiot. Because that's always your first reaction whenever presented with information that's slightly discordant. You're like, well, that can't be true.
Speaker 1:So I started just doing some independent research. Long story short, I found my way to a conference in San Diego on nutrition in 2017. And I don't even know why I ended up there. Think I was going through a breakup, a personal relationship breakup at the time. And I thought, I need to do something new.
Speaker 1:Need to get away. So I flew across the country and I went to this conference.
Speaker 2:Was it Low Carb USA? It was. Awesome. Doug and Pam, they're great.
Speaker 1:Yes. And that sort of changed perspective for me because I saw all these really educated people. Now they were talking way over my head. I had no clue. So I understand when I talk sometimes about biochemistry, like at Ketocon, I was giving a lecture on the mitochondria and biochemistry.
Speaker 1:And I really try to make sure that I keep it a level where people can understand, not because people are stupid, it's just because people have never been exposed to this kind of information before. And I remember what that was like. People like Dom D'Agostino, he talked over my head to the point where I was wondering if he was even speaking
Speaker 2:He's so in doubt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right. And I have such respect for him. My goal when I left that conference was, I was like, Damn it, I'm going to come back here in a couple of years, and I'm going to understand what he's talking about. And so the story is pretty cool. I met the nutritional therapy association there.
Speaker 1:When I got home, the first credit card offer that came in the mail, I maxed out that credit card for my tuition. And I was in school two weeks later, two weeks. So I didn't even, that trip sealed the deal for me.
Speaker 2:So you were ready to go?
Speaker 1:Ready to go.
Speaker 2:You just applied.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I was late, I didn't do any of the summer reading, because I think, like I said, it might have been thirteen days between the time I got back and was in school. And that led to one year at the Nutritional Therapy Association, fell in love with all of the stuff and then really said, Okay, I'm going go to grad school. I'm going to get a master's degree in this. I'm going go crazy.
Speaker 1:So I did and got a job at a New York City hospital. And at that hospital, I was actually in charge of, we were trying to improve medical claims. So we were actually working with the doctors and nurses to help improve their health. So I wasn't working with the patient population. I was actually working with the doctors and nurses, which is really interesting.
Speaker 2:When you're working with doctors and nurses, are you trying to teach them about nutrition so they can talk to their patients about diet and lifestyle or just for their own benefit working in the hospital?
Speaker 1:Well, for me, was both. I thought, well, if I can convince a doctor to make some changes, they see the changes in themselves, then think about all the people that I'm indirectly going to impact. But I was really hired just to help them because the hospital wanted to cut down on insurance claims and latency and all that stuff. They were just like, Well, we're just going to bring in this team of three, this hospital had 4,000 employees. So we were sort of outmatched.
Speaker 1:But I saw people every day coming into my office, doctors, nurses, brain surgeons, everybody. And what shocked me was how little and this is going to seem shocking to some and insulting to some, how little doctors actually understood about nutrition, and in some ways about the human body. Because in medical school, they're taught a lot of things, but their biochemistry is usually in some of the like the first or second semester. So many doctors like Ken Berry says all the time, I forgot all that stuff. And when I finally figured it out, I had to go back and go, Oh, you know, I was taught this at some point.
Speaker 1:But it just switches over to this sort of pharmacological driven education. And that's intentional. And it's not that pharmacology doesn't have a place, but biochemistry the blueprint for the human body. So if you don't understand that or don't keep that fresh in your mind, to me, it wasn't just stuff to memorise, it was stuff to know. And for a lot of the doctors, they told me when I would talk to them about this stuff, would say, That was just stuff I thought I was memorizing for a test.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, But do you see now? So I would apply it to what they were doing in life and what they were doing with their patients and say, Do you see now why it's not just something to pass a test? And some of them did, and some of them were just like, they got paid to take part in my program, believe it or not, they got like a 400 or $500 stipend for just even talking with me. So some of them were just like, I'm here for the money. And I was like, it's cool.
Speaker 1:But I felt like I could get through to some people. And so that was my job forever and a day. I just fell in love with education. And that's how I ended up saying, I think I just want to start touring like I did as a musician, except being on stage speaking about biochemistry. And with my background in entertainment, I felt like maybe I could have this unique perspective and be able to bring complex issues to people in a digestible way.
Speaker 2:Jay, with some of the doctors and the nurses that you were working with, do you have a sense of how much nutritional training a doctor gets in medical school and a nurse would get in nursing school? I've heard the rumors like twenty four or twenty five hours, but I don't know if that's actually correct or not. So I think
Speaker 1:it varies from school to school, but from the doctors that I spoke with, most of them said they either didn't get any or maybe they got one or two lectures. So it extremely limited. And let's face it, they were getting food pyramid lectures. They were getting eat your whole grains. The advice they always say was, you tell your patient to eat a balanced diet.
Speaker 1:And I would, of course, ask the inevitable question, what is a balanced diet? And they were kind of like, I know. And so that was a little scary to me because when you think about it, you take medications and those are just milligram quantities and they can have profound effects on physiology. But every day you're putting in kilogram quantities of food. And to think that it has no effect on your physiology is a little ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:you can go back to papers in the 1980s that talk about nutrition as the cutting edge of prevention. I found a great paper in the journal Health Values that actually talked about how nutrition is a core of preventative medicine. Was 1983. What happened? So it was alarming to me that doctors didn't understand nutrition a little bit better.
Speaker 1:And a quick anecdote about that. When I was in grad school, Yale Medical School, the students had gotten together and put a petition together to actually get a nutrition curriculum in medical school because they realized that it was so inadequate. And so they came to my college, my university, to have us put together the nutrition curriculum because my school was the oldest master's program in nutrition in the country. So they said, we would like you to put together the curriculum for Yale Medical. And so the dean was excited and we started putting together this whole curriculum.
Speaker 1:And then the higher ups at Yale put the kibosh on it before it actually got to go through. So the students understood that they were lacking it somewhere. But again, we talked about top down control when the higher ups got involved, all of a sudden, that didn't happen. So that's just a little side story that I thought. I found that out the day I got at my orientation, the dean was telling us so excited about this.
Speaker 1:Then like, after my first couple of semesters, asked the dean, said, whatever happened to that program? And he just kind of said,
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's fascinating. It's so cool for me to interview different people in the alternative health space and just kind of understand what was your light bulb moment that kind of got you into this space. So I look at you, you watch that YouTube video about cholesterol, it piqued your interest. You go to this conference, you absorb all this knowledge, then you get your degree in nutrition, you're educating doctors and nurses, and now all these people like really instructing people on what are the right foods to eat to live an abundant, healthy, amazing life. For me, I think I mentioned this at the conference, I've talked about it extensively on the show, I was just battling with ulcerative colitis for five to six years.
Speaker 2:So, I was just told by my GI that I was gonna have to be on these biologic drugs that cost 400 ks a year. Luckily I had good insurance, otherwise I don't know what I would have done, but I was told I was going be on those drugs for the rest of my life. I hear Doctor. Baker go on Joe Rogan. He's talking about all these people with autoimmune diseases that are, they're essentially healing themselves and getting off these drugs.
Speaker 2:For me, I'm thinking to myself, okay, well, I want to get off these drugs. I don't want to be dependent on some pharmaceutical drug the rest of my life. I had this amazing experience. My gut gets better, my skin gets better, anxiety goes away, and I literally cured my inflammation and micro inflammation to the point where my GI was comfortable getting me off all my meds. And I would go for these six months checkups leading up to that when I was going carnivore, and every time he would be like, wow, you look great, you're doing great, your colonoscopy scans look amazing.
Speaker 2:And then I get off the medication and to my knowledge, I don't know, I don't think he's gotten another patient off of these drugs. And I'm like, Do you want to know what I'm doing? And he was kind of like, Yeah, yeah. He kind of just brushed it off. And I'm thinking to myself, You're a GI.
Speaker 2:He's an amazing guy, by the way. But I'm like, Why would you not be more curious in what this patient that's getting off the drugs is doing? Like, why are you not more curious about that? And I'm sure that's something you think a
Speaker 1:lot about too. That is one of my favorite words. And I think we have a stunning lack of curiosity in the medical field. And this is more maybe of a philosophical point of view that I have. Know probably more doctors than most people just because I was working in a hospital.
Speaker 1:So I just knew some doctors really well. And then I knew some just sort of peripherally. And even the ones that were just really good people, I think to some degree, think, well, I've gone to the best schools, I've gotten the best cutting edge education, and they just sort of assume that they have been given all the knowledge. Right. And so I think that can kill curiosity.
Speaker 1:And personally for me, I think that's why coming from the background that I came from as an artist, I've never satisfied as an artist. And I was in an original band, so I recorded multiple albums and every time the next album came up or the next show came up, I was thinking, I got to be better. How am I going to top this? I don't want to fall into the sophomore slump. I want to make a better record than the last time.
Speaker 1:So I just have this innate desire to always be better. I always say I'm a lifelong student, and I'm not saying that to be coy. I truly believe that. In fact, for me, going to school for getting a master's degree, I left with a major case of imposter syndrome. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Speaker 2:So you had that when you got the degree? Yeah. Why? Just because it happened so quickly because you went from musician to having I
Speaker 1:a think so. Yeah. And then all of a sudden people looked at me differently. Oh, you have a master's degree in nutrition, so you're the expert. And I immediately was like, repelled by that term because I'm thinking once I crack the door open to see, ignorance is bliss to some degree because you think that you know everything there is to know when you know nothing.
Speaker 1:But when you start to learn things that you never even knew existed, and you just peek through that keyhole, and then you open that door and you walk through and you go, Oh, wow, there's so much to know. I was just immediately hit by this wall of fear that I was going to be inadequate because I now know how much there is left to know. Whereas before I had no clue, had no concept. But I think that's a good quality. And I'm trying to maintain and retain that through my whole career.
Speaker 1:Always want to be learning. Never want to be, there's an old adage, never want to be the smartest person in the room. And I never feel like I am. Being at some of these events, it's so great to see people who speak from a different point of view and do things from a different point of view. I'm always learning.
Speaker 1:But I think doctors, for all their best intention, sometimes just they have a lot of loans to pay off. So just put your head down, work. I know what I need to know. I know what I need to know to get paid to do my job. And that's fine.
Speaker 1:But it's not fine for all doctors. You know probably a whole bunch of doctors who have sort of left that paradigm of practice to say there's got to be a better way. We all know doctors like that. Those are the doctors that follow me on social media. Those are the ones that I really respect because they had the courage to say, Well, I actually may be taking a hit in the paycheck by doing this, but I need to do better for my patients.
Speaker 1:So curiosity is one of my favorite words. Hubris is another one. We have this sort of human hubris of saying, Well, I've got it all figured out, whether it's climate change, whether it's the human body, we got it all figured out, we know what to do, we stop asking questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have you done any digging on like the Flexner report and how that impacted Western medicine? And the reason why I'm saying that is we started off just writing informational threads on nutrition, kind of telling some of these stories similar to what you do about like why the food system is the way that it is. And I remember stumbling upon like Rockefeller and Carnegie's impact in creating the Flexner Report. And if you're comfortable with it, if you want to talk through that, that is a fascinating story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, essentially you're talking about the homogenization of all medical schools and the complete destruction of the empirics, the homeopaths, everything that was thought to be alternative, even though when you think about it, the current model of the petrochemical, that current model of practice is actually the experiment because that's only really been around for a little over one hundred years when the rest of these modalities. And so again, what I'm trying to say is I think we should be combining everything. I think there's a place for everything like trauma care. I mean, there's no better place or time that I would rather live than right here at this time, if I was ever in a catastrophic accident and Western medicine had to put me back together.
Speaker 1:100%. No other time. They are brilliant at that. I have a friend who's an ER nurse and the things that she tells me that she's able to do because of her training and because of the advancements in medicine, I would never want to give that up. Yes.
Speaker 1:But, and it's a big but, is that there's a whole other side. We talked about prevention and a lot of that stuff because of the Flexner report, which essentially closed, I want to say two thirds, but it was a large portion of medical schools because they didn't meet this sort of standard, this Rockefeller medicine standard, which was we're going to use chemicals to manage symptoms. But back at that time, people had a choice whether they wanted to go with sort of allopathic medicine or sort of empirical medicine and work with the empirics. And most people didn't want to deal with allopathic medicine because the side effects were so terrible. And so again, I'm all about choice.
Speaker 1:People that follow me and that read the work, I only want to present information and then say, listen, make your own choice. Yes. With nutrition, with medicine, with everything, informed consent, informed consent, informed consent. As long as people have that, then I'm totally happy with whatever choice they make. Because I figure eventually people will get there.
Speaker 1:The true free market will decide. That's what the Flexner report did was essentially, and if you read the Flexner report, it's very interesting. Abraham Flexner had a serious bias going in. And when you're paid by the Rockefellas and the Carnegies, the outcome that you get is not surprising when you're paid by the entities that want a certain outcome. That's just human nature.
Speaker 1:That report was not going to come out and say everything's fine. It was never going to happen. You know, I think again, and nothing is all one way, nothing is all bad or all good. Mean, it certainly did help establish some sort of level of credential for medical institutions and universities. But it also completely abolished almost.
Speaker 1:And in fact, it was sort of responsible for the whole quack term. Right? Everybody who didn't practice Rockefeller style medicine was considered And a that's wrong. That's just wrong. And I think we're suffering.
Speaker 1:I think now it's taken a long time for us to really understand just how poor that paradigm is. And I think now we're starting to realize it. I mean, the last three years we've seen what happens when you squash descent and you just have one way of practicing and bad things happen. Bad things happen.
Speaker 2:And our health is a reflection of that. I think the backstory, right? So Rockefeller owns Standard Oil, biggest oil conglomerate the world has ever seen. They realized to your point that you could take these petrochemicals and actually turn them into synthetic pills, supplements, vitamins, things like that. And him and Carnegie essentially funded this Flexner report, which was going to be the benchmark and gold standard for all medicine moving forward.
Speaker 2:So to your point, all these allopathic practices were deemed as quacks versus everything that kind of fit this pharmacological source of medicine was deemed as like the gold standard. To what you're saying, I think part of the issue that the alternative health community makes is that they view it as a very binary thing where it's like all in on preventative alternative medicine, no space for pharmacology. And what you're saying is like, no, both of those things have a very distinct place, but it's a blend of both of those things together, which is so important. It's not one or the other.
Speaker 1:Right. It's like to me the terrain versus germ theory debate. I see a Venn diagram, a perfect intersection of the two. But there are some people that only want it to be one way, and there are other people that only want it to be the other way. And I don't know why that is.
Speaker 1:I'm always looking to find I tell people all the time, don't want to be right. I'm just looking for the truth. I don't care to be the first or I just want the truth, whatever it is. On that path, sometimes it's a very winding road. So sometimes I have to go down a whole rabbit hole to figure out I was wrong about something.
Speaker 1:But the thing about admitting that you're wrong about something is that now you know that you really don't have to consider that anymore. You've exhausted that possibility. So with terrain theory, I always think, Okay, so what we want to do is through nutrition and lifestyle, we want to support the organism, if it's a human, as best as possible, get the immune system robust, we can impact the immune system. Nutri deficiencies have a major impact on the immune system. So that is terrain theory.
Speaker 1:If you and all your friends go out to dinner and you all have the same meal and one person goes home and gets food poisoning, I've had that experience before where we all have the same food, but only one person gets food poisoning. That's terrain theory. Why there's only one or the other is beyond me. I don't think it has to be that way. But I think that in my opinion, the pharmaceutical model needs to find its place because it has completely overtaken everything else to the point where I know doctors who say nutrition doesn't matter, which is mind boggling.
Speaker 1:Because again, when I drill down on that and ask them about simple biochemistry, they don't know, they don't understand. So to say that nutrition doesn't matter while simultaneously not understanding the biochemistry of human metabolism, that's a huge knowledge gap. And so that's where I'm always trying to fill in the gap. So with doctors, I talk about more detailed biochemistry stuff and with the public, I'll give them a little bit of that. But I also try to go the history of the food pyramid and the history of the dietary guidelines.
Speaker 1:You know that it wasn't really all that evidence based and it's a very sordid past going all the way back to the Seventh day Adventist church is a weird soap opera.
Speaker 2:No one knows about this
Speaker 1:And Godre, you got to know history so you can understand how we got here. So I think that's really important. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing when I was listening to your twenty minute talk, you know, we'll call it the war on food because I know you did a longer It's talk that same so easy to hear the things you're saying about the Seventh day Adventist church and be like, Oh, this guy's just a conspiracy theorist. Yet if you actually do your homework and go back, it's actually what happened. John Harvey Kellogg's, he was a protege of what was her name? Ellen Gould White. And she had a vision from God, right, that she shouldn't eat meat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a super long story, so I won't go through the whole thing, but she was a co founder of the Seventh day Adventist when she was nine years old. She got hit in the head with a rock. She was unconscious for weeks. And when she woke up, she said that she was having visions of God. And God told her that in order for her flock to attain the rights to heaven, that they should avoid eating animal flesh.
Speaker 1:Also they should avoid things like wigs, corsets and tight dresses, just throwing that out there. And her protege was a young 12 year old John Harvey Kellogg, very impressionable. So he was writing for the church bulletin. But he was such a brilliant guy, he really was, that he ended up going to medical school. Ellen Gouldwight and her family and the Seventh day Adventist helped fund some of that.
Speaker 1:But he carried all of that with him. And he really believed that diet was the cure for what he called sinful behaviour. So again, religious beliefs, you can have whatever you want. But when you start to enforce policy on the entire population based on someone's visions, which a lot of medical experts now think essentially she was suffering from epilepsy, it becomes problematic. And we have to take a step back and just say, are we sure that this is all evidence based?
Speaker 1:And then you can go further from there. One of John Harvey Kellogg's proteges was Lena Cooper, who went on, she was a nurse at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was the place that he ran that was a sort of mecca for wealthy industrialists and politicians. So that's how he started to gain a political foothold. Lena Cooper went on to found the American Dietetics Association. So now you see a direct line from Ellen Gould White, John Harvey Kellogg, Lena Cooper in the American Dietetics Association, which is now why everything they want is plant based.
Speaker 1:And then if you move over to a more modern nutritionist, Nathan Pritikin, most people know his name, Pritikin diet. He was a big fan of Alan Gould White. And he said something really funny. I read an interview with him where he said, she must have been divinely inspired because she had so much knowledge of nutrition, yet she had no training at all. And I thought, yeah, either that or she was wrong.
Speaker 1:But again, his pre existing beliefs were vegetarian, low fat, low salt diets. And one of the people who was a big fan of his was Senator George McGovern. He attend used Pritikin's diet camps. He dropped out early because who wants to eat a low fat, low salt, no diet? I mean, it sounds terrible.
Speaker 1:So but they were such good friends that George McGovern, who was the head of the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in the 1970s, who were addressing the dietary guidelines for Americans, he had Nathan Pritikin come and speak before the committee. They were such good friends that he gave Pritikin's eulogy in 1985.
Speaker 2:He gave the eulogy
Speaker 1:in Yeah, 1980 they were friends. And despite people's belief, they took two days of testimony on nutrition in the summer of nineteen seventy six. And after that, one of McGovern's aides was charged with writing up the dietary guidelines. Now there was a ton of protests. In fact, there were some great exchanges.
Speaker 1:You can even find them on YouTube, exchanges between doctors and the senators who were running this committee. They said, Listen, we don't have the evidence to support making these dramatic. This is the first time the government is about to make these dramatic changes to the public and say, Hey, we're to change everything about nutrition. And said, We plead with you to not make these recommendations right now until all the evidence is in. And McGovern actually said, The senator doesn't have the luxury that the research scientist does of waiting for all the evidence to come in before making decisions, essentially.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They said they don't have the privilege of waiting. And you would think, Oh, maybe this would take weeks, months, even years for such an important recommendation. Forty eight hours.
Speaker 1:Forty eight hours worth debate. And then after that, Nick Modern was essentially the journalist who had to write out the guidelines. But he wasn't a scientist. So he went and found Mark Hegsted, who was a Harvard nutritionist, to actually help him with the science. And just a side note, Mark Hegsett also happened to be one of the nutritionists at Harvard that was paid off by the sugar industry to blame dietary fat for heart disease.
Speaker 1:So that's just an interesting side note that he was part of the actual construction of the guidelines. And then later on, the food pyramid came out. Louise Light was a nutritionist who was actually charged with taking those dietary guidelines and essentially putting them into a shape so that they were easy to follow. And when she and her nutritionist colleagues put it together and they handed it back to the politician, she was horrified with the results because she actually said that this is going to create an epidemic of obesity and type two diabetes if we do this, because they essentially did things like putting all the grains on the bottom of the pyramid and they just made this intensely high carbohydrate diet. And she said, that's not the pyramid that we handed the politicians, but the industry has a very powerful lobby.
Speaker 1:They got involved and everybody made concessions to the industry to try to And this is what we've got. So we've got a food pyramid that doesn't really necessarily even resemble the evidence at the time. It was just something rushed. That Senate committee was actually originally tasked with undernutrition, malnutrition in The United States. But because in the seventies, essentially that had been eradicated, they said, Well, before we go out of business, we might as well do something in nutrition.
Speaker 1:That was literally the sentiment. I can read you quotes of some of these people. They said, We're going to go down in history. Yeah, you did.
Speaker 2:You are. Not in the right way.
Speaker 1:Right. So, these historical facts, you can find them in the medical literature, you can read them for yourself. I use the term conspiracy theory proudly because people don't realize that the initials for conspiracy theory are CT, which is also the same initials for critical thinker. That's really important to me because to dismiss something as a conspiracy is to sort of eliminate thought. That's what I think it does.
Speaker 1:That term was essentially used to do that. It was actually used originally for the Kennedy assassination to eliminate thought. Well, we don't want anybody to think for themselves. We'll just tell you what answers are. And we've been struggling now with this chronic disease rate ever since.
Speaker 1:So as I said at the beginning of this, it's not that you can say the dietary guidelines are causal necessarily, but they certainly didn't help. And I believe they are partially to blame. And then we have all the foods that were added to the food supply and seed oils and things like this. But those low fat dietary guidelines created a whole cottage industry of food manufacturers now manufacturing their foods to be low fat and adding all these other things to sort of make them fit this set of guidelines that were never evidence based. But now you've got schools saying that you've Cheetos that are school approved because they fit these dietary guidelines.
Speaker 1:Just wrote a story on this the other day. Cheetos are school approved
Speaker 2:But by the you can't legally sell whole pasteurized milk No. In a But you can get Lunchables as a lunch option. It's gonna be right at 100,000 public schools or something like that, which will be out as an actual option.
Speaker 1:I believe so, yeah. And New York is really, really bad for that. I know Nina Teicholtz has done a lot of work on this, but it's everywhere. And I think that has something to do with the C40 cities, New York being one of them, there's just this top down control. Remind me at the end of this, would love to read you two quotes, one by Thomas Jefferson and one by one of the dietary guideline committee members, just illustrate what the original intent of government and health was and then what we've normalized to today.
Speaker 1:So there's this element of top down control that I'm fighting against because again, I just want people to have options, but it doesn't seem like the government is even interested in having people have options. It's just this is the way it is. But yet you can go into California, a California supermarket and you can buy raw milk.
Speaker 2:Makes no sense.
Speaker 1:So in other words, right, so it's not a Democrat Republican thing. But what's interesting is that you would think if raw milk was so dangerous, yet I can go into a supermarket in California and buy raw milk, you should be seeing people dropping dead in Aisle 4 all the time in California, but it doesn't happen like that. So what's the problem with that over here? Again, why can't we give people the choice? That's all I'm advocating for.
Speaker 1:I just want the choice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you've said many times, look, if you want to go plant based or vegetarian, it's your prerogative, it's your right to be able to If do I want to eat meat because I'm trying to live the best possible life, I should be able to have access to that animal protein. And to your point, I think it would be great to dig into C40 because now it seems like, you know, if you live in certain cities, are you even going to have that choice to be able to buy red meat and animal products in the next ten years?
Speaker 1:Right. And I mean, to your last point, you are patient and of one, right? You ate an animal based diet and cured a disease that was told to you that was incurable. Yes. I mean, how can anybody argue with that?
Speaker 1:It's unfathomable to me. And I've seen this too. At the hospital, I had people reversing their type two diabetes, and I didn't have anything but nutrition, lifestyle, and then I could recommend supplements. And I had people drop their A1C down from twelve percent into the non diabetic range to five percent just with lifestyle changes. And doctors remain completely uncurious about how that to your point before.
Speaker 1:So these out of one experience are very important. I think, I tell people all the time, just do the experiment on yourself. What do you have to lose? I mean, you can eat Twinkies for thirty days, you can certainly eat red meat for thirty days and see what happens. Right, what's the worst thing that could happen?
Speaker 2:And that's the beautiful thing about this open sourcing of information, gives me hope for the future is like, now there's such amazing access where people are coming out of the woodwork and they're sharing their testimonials and their stories. So the average person that's like, Oh, well, I've suffered from, psoriasis for ten years, but this girl is saying that she ate an all meat diet, she cured her psoriasis, if she can't do it, why can't I? Can do it myself. It almost like gives you that power belief that we've never really had before, it's why anecdote is so powerful, but I guess that's a lot of the pushback too is, Oh, it's not a peer reviewed study. It's just anecdotal evidence that you're providing.
Speaker 1:But that's where science starts, right? With the hypothesis. That's the first step of the scientific method. So that doesn't even hold water. And I think a lot of people just have this preconceived notion because there's a concept I recently came across called semantic satiation, where you take this phrase and you repeat it often enough.
Speaker 1:And again, we've all experienced this over the last three years. You take this phrase and you repeat it often enough that it actually loses meaning to the point where now the meaning can become malleable. So saturated fat and cholesterol, people automatically have this predetermined reaction to it. Oh, causes heart disease. Oh, it's terrible for you.
Speaker 1:But then when I tell people that cholesterol is so important to the brain, that the brain makes its own cholesterol, where cholesterol is 30% of your cell membrane structure, which dictates function. Are you sure that you should have your cholesterol at zero? I know cardiologists who have said that cholesterol should be zero. And I'm like, you understand that no cholesterol, no life, that's incompatible with life. But the dietary dogma around cholesterol and saturated fat is so deep that I think people when you say, Well, I ate an all meat diet and cured this, they think, Well, there has to be some other mechanism.
Speaker 1:Can't be that because meat is full of fat and cholesterol. So that's just another whole I do approach things from a psychological element, too, because I understand that people come to me with a life long programming that I have to unwind. Yes. Because it's so hard to do.
Speaker 2:It's so hard. There's people I remember when I first went carnivore looking at the rib eye that I was going to eat, and I actually thought, is this going to kill me by eating this over and over again? Yet it was literally the key that unlocked my health and, you know, transformed me. And now it's why we're doing the show and building a business. It's changed.
Speaker 2:And it's like, it's all from making that one simple change. But what you also said, Jay, it's really interesting. You've almost seen this like progression of pushback from the other side where it's like maybe like twenty, thirty years ago when the Atkins diet was starting to get popularized, which is really just another version of low carb. Was, oh, you know, nutritionally, it's going to cause heart disease, it's going to jack up your LDL cholesterol. We've been disproving all that.
Speaker 2:Then the other side shifts to the environmental arguments, regenerative agriculture disproves all that. And now it's like, no, cool, maybe the next thing is like suppression, C40 cities. It's been this like interesting progression from nutrition to environment to like, okay, now we're just going to suppress these things.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the moving of the goalpost. You're right. When they couldn't curb meat eating, although again, from the 70s in the sort of 80s in the institution of the dietary guidelines, red meat consumption has declined. But apparently not enough for some people. When they can't scare you with your own health, because why?
Speaker 1:Because when you continue to eat red meat and you don't have health problems, you're not going to believe that it's bad for you. So then they move to another argument. Well, it's bad for the environment. And we go on an old rabbit hole. In fact, I'm in the process of writing part two of long substack on meat and the environmental impact and just the general greenhouse gas concept as well.
Speaker 1:Because believe it or not, two papers were just published in 2017 and '18 in Nature, not just published five, six years ago, that actually show the earth over the last century has gotten 31% greener.
Speaker 2:Wow, 31% greener.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And this article will be all cited. You can go to my sub stack and read it. I've been excited just writing it because now it's giving me ammo when people come to me and say, because I usually use the argument that, well, according to the EPA's own data, agriculture only contributes 9.4% of greenhouse gas emissions. So if you're concerned about greenhouse gas, it's only 9.4%.
Speaker 1:And of that 9.4%, 50% is crop, only 44% is animal. So crop agriculture is actually contributing more to greenhouse gases. The remaining is fuel combustion. So that argument doesn't even hold water. Then if you take and check this out, JAMA 2019, there was a paper published that said if you took the health sectors of The US, Canada, England and Australia, they commit a combined seven forty eight million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents annually.
Speaker 1:And if you took those health sectors of just those nations, they would rank seventh in the world in greenhouse gas emissions. So in other words, greenhouse gas emissions coming from industry and the healthcare industry specifically are a much bigger problem than animal agriculture. So I would say if you actually want to curb greenhouse gas emissions, we need to be a healthier population. And how do we do that? We eat meat.
Speaker 1:So that's how I usually approach it. But now I'm actually starting to see the evidence come out about the greening at Sub Saharan Africa over the last thirty years has become 8% greener. I thought that was a good thing. Isn't that the whole environmental movement? So, when you start to look at the actual published literature, you're like, Wow, so these people aren't even telling you the truth about that.
Speaker 1:I know you want to get to see 40 cities, but I just want to throw that out there because if people are interested, that's coming and it's so fascinating. So this
Speaker 2:will be part two of the Substack article?
Speaker 1:So I haven't even released part one yet because I just finished part one and I'm working on part two right now. It was too much information to keep. I try to keep them to like around a thousand words because a lot of people are busy. But so the C40 cities, essentially, that's a collection of mayors from around the world who are trying to get their cities onto this platform where they're going to make this whole sustainable, equitable future for everybody kind of thing. Again, semantic satiation, those words start to lose meaning when you just throw them around all the time.
Speaker 1:Bullshit. Yeah,
Speaker 2:that's what I hate
Speaker 1:to call Yeah, it's good one. I like that. And they're into all kinds of sectors. They're into not just food, but aviation, construction, clothing, electronics, so your home appliances, I always make the joke, what if one day you've eaten too much meat and all of a sudden your refrigerator won't open? But these are the areas that they're involved in.
Speaker 1:And if you look on their website, I think it's c40cities.org, there's not a lot of literature out there aside from their website. So take it with a grain of salt because they're promoting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread. But that tracks with New York where we are now and Mayor Adams wanting to track meat and dairy purchases. And so that concerns me because the C40 Cities is using the Eat Lancet model. And I think that allots 10 ounces of meat per week, which breaks down to about 1.5 ounces per day.
Speaker 1:So, I I certainly eat more than 1.5 ounces per day. So what if one day I go in and my meat purchases are being tracked and I want to use my credit card to buy a rib eye. And my credit card is declined because I've gone past my carbon allotment for the week, the day, however they're going to track it. I mean, that's being tracked right now. And I just think people understand that our data is so valuable.
Speaker 1:That's why they always say if the product is free, you are the product. And so data is very important. And that's why I've started to switch to purchasing a lot of food with cash. Not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, but because I know they're tracking purchases.
Speaker 2:It's not a conspiracy theorist. Are literally
Speaker 1:tracking. Even the front page of the New York Post, Mayor Adams is touting that he wants to track these food purchases. I would love to have a sit down with him and ask him, Where are you getting your information? Are you aware of this? Are you aware of that?
Speaker 1:I mean, look, let's face it. I just told you that the dietary guidelines were not evidence based back in the 1970s. The politicians have no idea what they're doing. They're doing the best they can. Some of them have good intentions, some of them have bad intentions, but they are ill equipped.
Speaker 1:They don't have the evidence. And so, I just want the other side of the argument to be presented. I mean, who does Mayor Adams have himself surrounded with? I don't know. Maybe it's a bunch of ideologues.
Speaker 1:Maybe he's being controlled from the top down. I don't know. But all I know is that curbing meat and dairy intake, now these are some of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. If you're really worried about population health, by removing access to these nutrient dense foods, you might actually be hurting the middle to lower class population by not giving them access to the most nutritious foods possible, like eggs, like dairy, like milk and meat. And if you really want to go back, this is a little bit off topic, but still on topic, I think.
Speaker 1:Always go back to do we ever know what to eat before dietary guidelines? Well, I'll say yes. Eby McCollum was an American biochemist, and he coined the term protective foods. And so he had a list of protective foods that he said, if we just eat these, we'll be fine. And they were meat, fish, milk, eggs, leafy greens, fruit.
Speaker 1:And in his time, this is the early 1900s, he's talking about raw milk. So it's not pasteurized. So I would amend that maybe today to say raw dairy, like kefir, yogurt, things like that. But imagine if people just ate from that list, meat, fish, milk, eggs, leafy greens and fruit.
Speaker 2:How much money would we save every
Speaker 1:year? And I just told you that the health care sectors of these industrialised nations are contributing a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. So if you're worried about GHG, then you should want to bring down the health care sector emissions, not focus on the low hanging fruit, the 44% of the 9.4% coming from agriculture. That's ridiculous. But if you realize that they're not really trying to solve problems, they're just trying to create more top down control, then all this makes much more sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to your point about history, I remember, what was that? There's an amazing book on raw milk. It was written by some raw dairy farmer in Connecticut, I think. I think it's called The Untold Story of Milk. And it's incredible because it tracks why milk got pasteurized, what's wrong about it, what are all the amazing benefits of raw milk?
Speaker 2:And one of the things he was talking about is that one of the original founders of the Mayo Clinic literally would prescribe patients on like a raw milk fast if they were having issues like IBS, colitis, things like that. Wow. This is one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic that was getting people on like seven day raw milk fast because it was so nutrient dense. It's the founder of the Mayo Clinic. So, you think about how far we've gotten now, people and just don't know the history.
Speaker 2:They don't know the stories. That's why your work is so important because we need to be able to tell these stories so people understand this is why we're in this situation that we're currently in. It's like they're very trackable stories throughout history, but people think that you're a conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can't tell you how much I hate that term, because again, it just destroys thought. It just destroys conversations. And it allows people who are uneducated to dismiss people who have actually done the work. Now, I always say, I'm not always right.
Speaker 1:Who is? But we need to go through the process of thought. Thought is a process, right? Again, you need to find areas where you're correct, areas where you're incorrect. You need cross collateralize information and figure out where the truth is.
Speaker 1:So we've lost that curiosity, but we've also lost that discernment and we dismiss things as conspiracy. It's just so silly. If I had one wish, and I think people would be a lot healthier if they could remove that term because just eliminates people's desire to even go down rabbit holes. But we're also bombarded with that messaging. We get mainstream media messaging all the time telling us, Don't do your own research, you're not qualified.
Speaker 1:I think that's ridiculous. It's so disempowering. Of course, people can read and understand things. And then you look at the health professionals today who've gotten so many things wrong. Again, I'll keep saying it over the past three years.
Speaker 1:So if they can be wrong, they're just people. So my whole reason for getting in this field was to empower people because I felt so empowered when I started to learn about health. And then I quickly realised how mad I was that I was not taught proper history in order to start on my health journey earlier in my life. And so I love when people work with kids and they want to sort of raise kids in a way that introduces them to some of these concepts. And I think it's, again, profoundly empowering for people.
Speaker 1:And I don't think you can give a bigger gift than education to somebody.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's easy to initially look at Nina Teicholz's work or Gary Tops' work and be like, why are journalists so influential in helping us understand what a species appropriate diet actually is? And I think you just nailed it. It's like the ability to understand nutrition is actually the ability to understand history. And they're masters of like uncovering information and unlocking the exact stories and things that happen, whether it's like with George McGovern or raw milk or Eisenhower's heart attack of like, these are specific points that we've tracked back to, which led to this chain of events, which is why we're now in this metabolic
Speaker 1:health crisis. Eisenhower's heart attack is really funny because when he had his heart attack in 1955, his cholesterol levels were 165, which would be considered today by medical standards just perfectly fine.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:yet that heart attack was essentially part of the snowball cascade that got the public to be so afraid of cholesterol. So it's just another interesting side note.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a quote that I think is interesting. I know Naval says this, he says, If you're so smart, why are you unhappy? And I've applied it to nutrition, I've thought about, you know, if you're so smart, why are you fat? And I think back to like my own anecdotal experience of when I was going carnivore, was working at a tech company, and I would, you know, chop up a pound of rib eye or ground beef and bring it into the office, and I'm, you know, I'm losing weight, I'm feeling great, my stomach's getting better, I'm doing triathlons and Ironmans and all this stuff, and I would have coworkers that were literally fifty plus pounds overweight with an insomnia cookie and a Mountain Dew, and tell me that I'm going to die of heart disease. And I'm like, I'm going to die of heart disease.
Speaker 2:I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm curing this incurable thing, And you're literally forty, fifty pounds overweight, but you're going to tell me that animal products are bad. It's programming.
Speaker 1:Part of my other presentation in Tennessee was to go through two papers. I couldn't quote them off the top of my head now, but they were papers on the use of AI to manipulate the public through messaging to reduce red meat consumption. And what was incredibly interesting about reading both of those papers is that they started with the presupposition that red meat was bad. And they even cite any evidence other than the World Health Organization classifies red meat as a probable human carcinogen. By the way, red meat is classified in the same category as glyphosate, which is an herbicide.
Speaker 1:Something that's literally designed to destroy life is classified as a carcinogen in the same category as red meat, a nutrient dense food. Again, when I go through the biochemistry nutrition and mitochondrial energy production, I can break down red meat and show you how all of the constituents are useful in energy production. And so anything that helps the mitochondria produce more energy, I say, well, tell me how that's bad for you. And when you break down the biochemistry, all of a sudden people don't want to have the conversation anymore. Because it's so much easier from a higher level to say everyone knows red meat is bad for you.
Speaker 1:But when I really dial down and say, no, no, no, We're going to talk about the electron transport chain here, and I'm going to talk to you about vitamin B2. I'm going to talk to about creatine. I'm going to talk to you about CoQ10. I'm going talk to about all these things that are in red meat that help the electron transport chain run more efficiently. Then I want you to tell me, and I'm going talk about stearic acid, something that actually helps upregulate mitochondrial aspiration, which is a saturated fat found in dairy and meat.
Speaker 1:I want you to tell me how. And they don't want do it at No, that they don't like that. And I'm not doing it to embarrass people. I'm trying to shake people out of the apathy of just dismissal. Oh, well, it's just bad for you.
Speaker 1:No, you got why. You have to tell me why. Why do you believe what you believe?
Speaker 2:So the most nutrient dense bioavailable food you could possibly put in your system is in the same category as glyphosate?
Speaker 1:Yes, according to the World Health Organization. And so these papers that talking about AI models that are going to help public messaging and reducing meat consumption. All they use as a justification for this is the World Health Organization classifies this as a probable human carcinogen, and therefore, what the World Health Organization says is solid and we're ready to go. So again, these dramatic changes to human nutrition based on such shoddy evidence is remarkable from a scientific point of view. But the public should know that the experts really don't know why.
Speaker 1:And there's no direct evidence. So you can't find an experimental paper that shows red meat causes cancer. It's all observational epidemiological studies, which can't show causation. So that's another thing that people don't like to hear either. And the fact that people in Hong Kong are simultaneously the most long lived culture and they eat the most red meat per capita, any population on the planet.
Speaker 1:So they eat the most red meat and they're living the longest. So while you can't say, again, that's observational. So you can't say red meat is the cause of their longevity, but reverse causation or lack of association is incredibly important. And I can tell you that red meat is certainly not shortening their lifespan. Right?
Speaker 1:Again, these facts are just people, they don't know
Speaker 2:them. Selective bias over the facts they want
Speaker 1:to Confirmation bias, all those things.
Speaker 2:I think that certain people that listen to this, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all the different factors that have kind of attributed to the situation that we're currently in. But I know you're also a very hopeful and optimistic person. So I would love to leave the audience with kind of a two part question. Number one, just being what makes you optimistic about the future of the food system and society in general? And number two, what are some practical things that someone that's listening to this episode can actually do, whether it's connect with a local rancher or pay for me in cash?
Speaker 2:I think that would be kind of a cool thing to dig into.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, what gives me optimism is shows like this. The fact that we're here having this conversation and that there are so many conversations and that people contact me to talk about this quite often now. Whereas when I was starting my journey, I felt like the outlier, you probably did too. I see, yeah, I'm always going to be, I'm just an optimistic guy, but I'll, I just see an elevation in consciousness.
Speaker 1:I see people starting to just say, and again, I'll just go on record as saying, I think in the end, when we look at the final analysis, the big picture that what happened in public health with COVID over the last three years shook a lot of people out of apathy. A lot of people just started saying, Well, that's weird. Well, that doesn't make any sense. And even just that little kernel of curiosity, right? I just want to spark the fire of curiosity and then let people run with it.
Speaker 1:And some people will run the marathon with it. And some people will stop at the 100 meter mark. But I see people and I hear people asking questions. And the audience that I've built up is super intelligent and they ask great questions and they're very curious. And so that's what gives me a ton of hope.
Speaker 1:And I also think when I see things like C40 Cities, I also smell desperation on the part of people who want to control that. In the end, nobody is going to be happy with that kind of top down control. Once the tighter the grip becomes, the more people will become aware that this is not how they want to live their life. And this is why I try to say the uniting factor, whether you're a vegan or a carnivore, the uniting factor should be food. And unfortunately, I do see too many vegans commenting on things that I post will say, Well, good, I'm glad they're restricting your ability to eat meat.
Speaker 1:And I always say with kindness, I'm like, You're missing the point because it might be meat today, but at some point it will be something that you want. This should be a uniting factor that human beings, since we all need food to survive, this should be the uniting factor for all of us. We should all have the right to be able to do what we choose. And I do see a lot of that too. So I do think that that might be something that could unite some of these camps.
Speaker 1:So that gives me optimism as well. And then in terms of things I think people can do, just go as local as you can. In New York, it's more difficult, but I managed to do it. The Hudson River Valley farmers bring their stuff down to Union Square and they do a farmer's in certain times of year. So I buy locally.
Speaker 1:There's an Amish farm, believe it or not, in Pennsylvania that delivers to New York City.
Speaker 2:There are some amazing Amish farms.
Speaker 1:They're incredible. So I get a ton, if not most of my meat from them. I get my raw dairy from them because it's illegal in New York. So I have to get my raw dairy over state lines. Yeah, you can start paying cash because I think it's just a good thing to get used to in general.
Speaker 1:I'm really anti central bank digital currency. I'm just not a citizen that wants to be tracked, traced and databased all the time. I'm not advocating for us to go back to caves, but there's a fine line between how much I want the state knowing what I do and how much I don't, and I want to be able to choose that. So I pay for cash, I bring cash around as much as I can, certainly for meat purchases. But yeah, local farms, get to know your local community, local farmers if you can.
Speaker 1:If you happen to live in a more rural area, that's a lot easier. You can actually go to your farms and talk to them and ask them what they feed their chickens. Most of the times, people are giving away eggs up in New Hampshire and Vermont when I go up there because if it's a high producing time of the year, they'll just be like, come take a dozen eggs, $2, $3, take them for free, whatever. And then some of the highest quality food you can get.
Speaker 2:And you're getting it for free. And a lot of these farmers, they're like, they are encouraging you. They want you to go to their farm. They want you to ask questions about the lineage of the cattle, vaccination history, is it grain finish or grass finish? It's like, that's a really good sign that you're buying your food from the right source.
Speaker 2:Now it's like, there's more resources than ever to find a local farmer. That's actually the most common question here, and I still get asked is like, where do I find a local farm to buy meat from? And I'm like, damn, I feel like we've talked about this so much. It's interesting that people still don't know. Like eatwild.com.
Speaker 1:Obviously, eatwild, there's a few, I think beef initiative?
Speaker 2:Beef initiative, yeah. They'll source boxes from different farms across the country. And now that's what's so cool is a lot of these farmers are starting to establish their own DC operations where they'll just ship it to you cold, ready to go. You can get regenerative meat regardless of where you live.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then my other recommendation would be go to that list, rewind this, go to that list of protective foods and eat from that list. And that will minimize your intake of ultra processed foods. That's And really what we want to do ultimately, because when you're eating from that list, you're reducing seed oils, you're reducing refined carbohydrates, added sugars, all of these things. You're just eating natural foods that are in season.
Speaker 1:I eat meat and fermented foods all year pretty much and then seasonal produce. And it's just, as I get older, I start to feel better and better. And that's the opposite of what everybody tells you. And I even see people I went to high school with who are starting to, they're on medications and they're not feeling good. Say to me, they feel like their best years are behind them.
Speaker 1:And I'm just thinking, I hadn't even begun yet.
Speaker 2:Your best years are in front of
Speaker 1:you.
Speaker 2:I even see it too. I mean, I'm 29, but there's already a big discrepancy of people that have taken care of themselves since graduating from college versus people that haven't. They're in that standard American rabbit hole and still drinking alcohol and things like that, and it's almost like they don't have the belief that you can get better as you age. Like you hear people like, yourself or Doctor. Baker or Ken Berry, and Sean's like, I'm in way better shape now and my lifts are better than when I was 35 years old in the military.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I played sports a lot when I was in high school, but I've never been in better shape than I am now. I'm not special. Doctor. Sean Baker, not special.
Speaker 1:Just making the right choices and being able to make the right choices in the face of the sort of mainstream narrative telling you that you're making the wrong choices. It takes some personal conviction, but I don't know many things in life that are worth doing that aren't slightly uncomfortable at first. Even if you start exercising, you know it's good for you. But the first day you get home from the gym, if you haven't hit the gym in months or ever, you feel like you got hit by a truck, but it's your body adapting and your mind needs to do the same thing. You need to get in the habit of flexing that mental muscle of, I'm going to push back on this a little bit.
Speaker 1:I'm going to try this list of protective foods and just see what happens. Give me thirty days, see what happens. And I challenge people to do it and tell me that you don't feel 100% better, even if you didn't have any chronic disease you're managing, just your energy levels, your sleep, your sex drive, any of those things. They're all measurable the way your clothes fit. So I think those are really profound things that people can do.
Speaker 1:If you want, I'll leave you with those two quotes. Let's get into
Speaker 2:the quotes.
Speaker 1:Because I found these when I was doing some research for an article that I was writing and they're pretty amazing. One of these is Thomas Jefferson in 1787. So this is right after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There was some upheaval going on. But he even still said, was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet?
Speaker 1:Our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. So essentially, the government has no ability or education in the matter of medicine or diet. Even in the most trying times, the government should be staying out of that kind of thing. Fast forward two hundred years, almost exactly to Senator Charles Percy, who was on the Dietary Guidelines Committee, and he says, Without government's commitment to good nutrition, the American people will continue to eat themselves to poor health.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:I just think those two quotes couldn't be more opposite. And you find a founding father who would be considered, I guess, a conspiracy theorist now because he doesn't think the government should be telling you about your medicine and about your nutrition. And you've got now senators telling you without us, you'd be lost. But like I said, after 1977, our health, our obesity rates, our chronic disease rates all started to skyrocket. So I don't know, if I have to choose between Thomas Jefferson and Senator Percy, I'm going go back with a founding father and say, let's take a more conservative approach to health care, to medicine, to nutrition, to everything.
Speaker 1:Maybe the government just needs to back off a little bit because, again, they're not educated in this matter and maybe leave it to people that have some education in this field to try to intervene. And I think that would be as we approach the 2025 dietary guidelines. To me, I would love to see that completely disbanded because I don't think we need it anymore. But I think now they stick around because they're trying to undo some of the damage they did from the 70s. They've now created this whole population that now thinks the government exists solely to tell them what to do.
Speaker 1:I think we need the exact opposite. And need to decentralize and we need to return to a level of education locally. Let a local farmer tell you what to eat, a nutritionist in your area. But it's a hard prospect because again, people are just so used to the government stepping in to take care of them. So I just think those two quotes are very interesting because they couldn't be more opposite.
Speaker 1:And they're really only two hundred years apart, which sounds like a long time, but
Speaker 2:it's not.
Speaker 1:It's really not.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:when you go to the founding of the nation, the government was never intended to be telling us what to eat. 100%.
Speaker 2:Well, Jay, I mean this, in all seriousness, we could probably talk for literally five hours. I wish we had five hours and not an hour in the studio, but you're a guy that Harry and I have both learned a lot from. I appreciate you just your ability to like speak boldly, uncover the facts, say the difficult things that a lot of people are trying to suppress. And I know that you're changing so many people's lives, and I've taught Harry and I and our audience a lot about just nutrition and what it actually to be a healthy, autonomous human being. So I'm just super grateful for the work that you do.
Speaker 2:I'm grateful for you being here and grateful for you for coming for the conference. We'll have to do a part two with Harry so we can both grill you because that'll be really fun.
Speaker 1:Well, I would love that. And that is the highest form of compliment. If I can educate people and get them thinking critically and being curious and staying curious, then I've done my job. So I appreciate the time and I'll be back for part two, no
Speaker 2:doubt. Awesome. Thanks, Jay.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:Dude, that was great, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man.
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