December 4, 2023
Today, Dr. Doug takes a deep dive into the Health Optimization Pyramid and the why behind the 6 Pillars of Health with a special focus on Nutrition and the benefits of eating animal proteins.
The Health Optimization Pyramid designed to show you where you should start your health optimization journey! The 6 Pillars of Health should be built upon with additional interventions to achieve your version of optimal health. If you don't have a solid foundation, it will be much more challenging to get the full benefits of the additional layers of the pyramid.
Dr. Doug explains his philosophy behind each of the 6 Pillars of Health!
The nutrition literature around what types of protein is "good" for you is often misleading.
Dr. Doug discusses some of the misconceptions between animal protein intake and:
Okay, So welcome to our health span nation number two. So I'm not surprised to only see a few people here. Everybody's trying to probably still figure out how do i join this thing at 9 a.m. on a weekday? And we're open to changing the time. I have some flexibility in my schedule, but trying to meet everybody's needs throughout multiple time zones and actually throughout the world is a challenge.
So if this has to be done mostly asynchronously, that's fine too. But those that can join us, Absolutely. We want you to join us, so please do so. My thoughts today, I had a couple of I have actually several questions that people have sent in and they kind of align into a couple of different topics that we can work on.
So I want to go through those. And then there was one comment through Slack. And if you guys aren't on Slack, I know it might be new to you. And if you guys aren't on Slack, I recommend that you get on Slack because you can ask each other questions through there in between while you're waiting for me. So I think that would be a really helpful thing to do as well.
All right. So then the things that came in, we had one question or comment through Slack to talk about hormones for men. And I was thinking that actually that would be a smart thing to do. But I have a couple of questions that came in through the the question and answer message box and box. There's a word there I can't think of it for.
There you go. Form. And actually, it was pretty relevant. So one of the things I'd like to do, I'm going to start with and I think this came from not that one, it came from James. And James asked if I would go through the hh0bh as it were, a pyramid of health optimization, kind of the framework that we use to create programs and talk about each of the foundational pillars.
And that will actually lead me into this really beautifully written question that was probably five pages long. She asked to remain anonymous, but she's asking about animal products versus vegetable sources of protein and some of the controversies around animals. So I thought in this conversation around the pillars of health, since nutrition is one of those, so we could dig into that.
Does that sound like a good thing to talk about it? Does anybody have anything else that that is urgent that they want me to address? I think that sounds great, Rebecca. Just so you know, I don't usually drink sparkling water at nine in the morning, but I was in a rush to get down here. All right, so let me do this.
Let me pull up. We just updated this pyramid to see if I can share this. Yeah, great. Okay. Can everybody see that pyramid? Yeah. Okay, So if you've heard me talk about any of these things, then you know that we look at health from a very different perspective. We want to work on the foundational things, the pillars of health.
First and foremost, and then move up the ladder as far as targeted supplementation, hormones, if it's appropriate peptides, pharmaceuticals, etc.. I want to talk about the bottom part of this, because as this question basically asked, why are each of these things included and why are they so important? So I'll start with and then I'll come back to nutrition.
Nutrition as probably most of us know, is it's really the foundation of of everything we have the capacity to do if we're not getting adequate nutrients, if we're not absorbing those nutrients, then none of the rest of the stuff matters. You have to have nutrients to fuel your exercise. You have to have nutrients to build bone. You have to have nutrients to make hormones.
You have to have nutrients to survive. So this is a very, very foundational thing. But it is also one of the more controversial things. What do we eat? When do we eat? Do we fast? Do we not fast? What about processed foods? How processed is processed? You know, all of the questions that come along with nutrition and it is one of the most unregulated spaces out there, which is I mean, it's probably good that it's unregulated, but also so confusing because there are so many opinions.
And if you want to get into trouble, like I like to get into trouble, sometimes you can talk about nutrition and you can start poking holes in people's beliefs and then they get really upset. I try not to do it that way, but it really is a belief system and this is why we get into such challenges around nutrition, is because what you eat and why you eat it for a lot of people is as much a belief system as is religion and politics.
It is as controversial as those other two things. So I'll come back to the meat side of this, but just know that this is a huge part of what we do, and that's why our program involves using coaches, dietitians, meeting with them regularly, tracking food, you know, with my wife's program and weight loss. Same thing, tracking food, understanding what you're eating, why you're eating it, the emotions behind it.
It's a massively important thing. Exercise is without a doubt the most underutilized tool in the space of longevity, health span and probably bone health as well. We forget about exercise, most of us, because it seems like an add on make something that is not required of us to to do well, to improve our health span, to improve our health, to reverse chronic diseases.
And yet exercise has such an incredible ability for wow, there's a stink bug on my microphone. I took away if you guys have those elsewhere in the country, but they're totally harmless, but they like to crawl over everything. Like in ladybugs too. Anyway, so exercise has the capacity to improve our muscle mass. So if you're doing resistance training, increasing muscle mass and muscle is without a doubt the organ of longevity.
It can help us to reverse metabolic disease. It can help us to improve our glucose metabolism, It can help us to probably reduce inflammation and a lot of other things that we don't even know. Exercise is anything that has that capacity. Exercise can also help normalize many other organ systems just by the act of going through exercise. Our bodies were meant to or designed to be pretty active all day long in in our society where we've, you know, we've kind of gotten around that we don't have to be active, we don't have to run after prayer.
We don't have to, you know, harvest it. We don't have to to move and be transient societies because of that. We really have to focus on what we can do every day throughout the day, whether it's getting out and walking, you know, exercise, snacking with resistance or whatever it is. You have to have a very intentional mindset around exercise because we're just not getting enough of it as a society and then sleep.
So sleep. If you don't sleep well, then all the nutrition and exercise in the world is still not going to have the impact that you want it to. This is something that I think has taken a front seat over the last probably decade, which is great. Definitely the last few years I've seen a significant increase in the conversation around the importance of sleep.
You know, that 7 to 9 hours for everybody is critical. And I don't know anybody that functions well under 7 hours. So the potential impact of poor sleep has gotten good attention. Some media coverage, there's some great books on this. But my favorite book on this is by Matthew Walker. And if you're not familiar with Matt Walker, he wrote a book called Why We Sleep.
There was a second edition of that book out. Now, and it literally changed my life, how I view sleep and how I view sleep for my patients, because he does a great job of going through the literature and demonstrating just how impactful it is. So just a few examples. If you poor sleep, meaning less than 7 hours or some studies less than 6 hours, so and I'll use the term short sleep.
If you short sleep either intentionally or not, you will have higher levels of cortisol. If you short sleep, you will have higher levels of inflammation. If you short sleep, you will make worse food choices around nutrition. You will eat more calories overall, likely due to the cortisol. You will have more cravings, you will have more hunger, other mental things that go along with that.
If I'm remembering correctly, in some of these studies, they show, you know, of course, decision making, decreased performance in decision making. So this is really important. This is why pilots have to have that 8 hours where they have to go to sleep. It's critical. And if you don't if you haven't experienced this yourself, intentionally short sleep, you know, sleep for 4 hours and see how you feel and really pay attention to that increased feeling of what an elevated cortisol feels like.
You just feel wired. You feel terrible, really, but you feel wired. Phew. For me, I'm definitely hungrier. I'm craving carbohydrates over different types of foods, and then I just don't perform as well. You know, I'm scatterbrained. I can't focus on all the things that I need to focus on. It really has an impact. And yet most of us don't think about sleep as being that important.
And I was when I was practicing as a surgeon, I was a five hour a night guy for years, if not decades. And it blows my mind that I was able to function as well as I did. But knowing that I was still not functioning as well as I could have. So sleep is really, really critical. Now, The the last three here are used to be one.
So we started out with four pillars, and the fourth pillar was stress mitigation. And we use stress mitigation because we know that stress has such a big impact on people, particularly in our modern societies. And if we're not handling our stress and it really can undermine and everything else that we're doing, what we realized as we move forward in treating patients is that there wasn't really a direct way to treat stress if we didn't kind of break it apart into different things.
And so what we did was instead of just saying stress, we kind of broke it apart and said, okay, well, what are people really struggling with? And social connection is one. And because this company started with the pandemic. So social connection is something that we found was missing for a lot of people and it's something that's really important for stress mitigation, but also just for life in general.
We are social creatures and it's unnatural for us to communicate as I'm communicating to you right now, this is a necessity because of the way that our world works. But having social connection, whether it be family, friends, your inner circle, whatever it is, I think is pretty critical for us to be able to kind of stay true to our mission, understand what our goals are, understand who our people are and how we can serve them.
And so I'm a very big believer in and being mission oriented and whether that mission is your profession, your family, whatever it is, being mission oriented is driven by your social connection. And so this is true for me. I have to get out. I have to go to medical meetings. I need to get out and talk to groups like I was in New York this past week and meeting with this was osteo strong, specific, but meeting with osteo strong franchise owners, talking about their their clients, meeting with the administration of the company and understanding all of the significance of what goes on and the the impact that we can potentially have.
You know, so so that helps me to drive them my mission, which helps me to stay on track and then focus and not get distracted by shiny things. So social connection is now a pillar all by itself. Mindset is something that I did not focus on at all until really the last three years and mindset. You know, there are lots of people that talk about mindset, but mindset for me is really all about understanding what your goals are and we could just we could kind of step to that and say goals, but you know, smart goals, But it's not really just a goal setting because mindset has so much more to do with that.
Because if you were to try to set a goal around all the small things in your life, you know, I'm going to get up at this time and I'm going to eat this breakfast and I'm going to do this. It would just be exhausting because goal setting and achieving goals is very different than understanding who you are and having the mindset that then supports all the actions that you want to do successfully throughout the day.
So the reason why I get up pretty much before my alarm and I go through my morning routine every day without questioning it, including uncomfortable things like the cold plunge at 645 and, you know, walking the dogs and do all of that. Actually, I enjoy that. But doing all the things that I do, the journaling for me right now, I'm also reading the Bible for the first time in my life.
You know, these things that I make time for, I do them. Those aren't goals for me now. They are part of my mindset. My mindset is very much in personal growth. It's very much an education for both myself, but for my patients and followers. And having that mindset allows me then to just do these things automatically because it's just who I am.
It's a it's an identity, not a task. Then when you do that, it's easy, you know, and this is true for whatever your goals are. If it's if it's a weight loss, if it's improving your bone health, whatever it is, if you have the mindset around making those things your identity, then it's a totally different question and different way to work through your day and then ultimately stringing days together, stacking small wins and doing great in your life.
So for people that have mindset issues are coaches are trained to that in that to some extent we're actually working on some different ways that we can help with this because I know some fantastic mindset coaches that I'm trying to bring into our programs and I'm actually going to have I probably shouldn't say this. I will likely have my my favorite coach, Sally Maxwell, on HSN in the future.
And then we're working out the details of that. But she is one of the best mindset people I know. She's amazing. So hopefully we'll bring more of that here. And then spiritual health and this is one that it was relatively new to me as well. And and I feel the reason why I did this is that I was hesitant to talk about it early on because then you run into this conversation of, you know, secular versus religious and, you know, is it do we have to go to church and all these very kind of controversial things?
I mentioned that earlier. But what I found is that doesn't matter if you're secular or religious or what religion it is, but having an understanding of the the bigger picture, you know, the fact that we are all we're all on this rock that's hurtling in space around something that is about ready to explode or is slowly exploding over time, understanding that there is a bigger order of things and we are just a small piece of this thing, but yet our role is very unique.
And I find that people that have that sense again, whether it be through religion or through another understanding, do better overall because they're more willing to put things in order. So I think that spiritual health is important. There's just a lot of ways to spend that. And right now in our program, we don't really have a way to handle that because there is such a variety.
So I don't want to hook into one particular religion or one particular idea. So this is somewhere where we just encourage people to do it on their own and understand that this is something that needs to be addressed. But I don't have a clear way to help people there, and I'm certainly not an expert in that space for sure.
So those are the six pillars. And then I want to dig back into nutrition, but I'll pause there and just ask if there are any questions about that specifically in those pillars. No. Yeah, I have no question. Dr.. The sleep issue. So what is the recommendation if all of a sudden you just don't sleep like you used to?
I used to, you know, lay my head on the pillow and never move until I wake up and get a good 7 hours of sleep. As you get older, I understand a lot of things that are going to play there, but I just don't sleep like I used to. I don't like taking medication or anything, actually. So I you know, and I try the things I'm getting off your devices and, you know, making sure the TV's not on.
And but I don't know how you stop your mind from bracing. And I just don't know how you. Well, I don't know there's any good suggestions for I got I got a lot of suggestions. Well let's just do a little sleep coaching then. So you mentioned turning off your mind and let me just walk through the sleep hygiene component of that for me.
So do you have you ever followed Craig Valentine? He's a he's a mindset guy, actually. So. So Craig Valentine has written a couple of books. He wrote The Perfect Today Formula on the Perfect Week formula. Super interesting guy. I've worked with him a little bit personally, but he has this ten 3 to 1 rule, and I like this because it helps just to lay out the framework for then some more specific things.
But ten 3 to 1 is no caffeine. 10 hours before bed, no food, 3 hours before bed, no work, 2 hours before bed, no screens, one hour before bed. So you start to kind of peel away things, getting getting your mind ready for sleep. So the caffeine thing, depending on your ability to process caffeine, some people need to actually push it back earlier than that.
So for myself, I'm a slow metabolize rate of caffeine. If I have caffeine after like 7 a.m., it'll impact my sleep quality. So being being careful with that. And then as you approach your evening kind of bedtime routine, making sure that you do have a clear bedtime routine, making sure that you are trying to get to bed at the same time every night, being super consistent both weekday and weekend, same thing in the morning.
You're waking up in the morning, same time, weekday weekend. It doesn't matter. We don't need that social jetlag or going back and forth for people that struggle with that. The racing mind either not being able to get to sleep or waking up at 2 a.m. and having a racing mind. I find that having both a meditation practice can be really helpful with that.
But then also journaling and journaling I think is a very underutilized tool. But what I find is and I'm I'm a I'm a believer because is right here, what I find is, is that if I can put it down on paper, then my mind doesn't need to keep thinking about it. So for people that struggle with this at night, I have them keep a journal beside their bed and you can wake up, turn on, preferably like a red light, something very low light.
Don't look at any devices. Don't look at your phone, Don't look, don't watch the news, you know, But write in your journal and write down what you're thinking about. And I find that once you write it down, then you're able to go back to sleep. Never stay in bed more than probably 20 or 30 minutes while not being able to sleep, because then you're training your body to lay in bed awake.
So get up again, read a book, nothing exciting, journal. You know something that's that's going to not stimulate you and then go back to bed when you can. I find that's a pretty reliable way to continue to get sleep, or at least to get a little bit more sleep. As far as supplements for sleep, I actually I'm not a big fan of any of them.
Melatonin has the impact of being able to improve as osteoblasts function. So if both bone health is a concern and melatonin has that benefit as well only works probably I'd say for 50% of the population, maybe a little bit more as far as actual sleep goes, some people find it really helpful as far as a lot of the other stuff, like, you know, Camomile and five HTP and like all the there's so many sort of like GABA or slightly depressive supplements or I'm right what I'm looking for Adaptogens there you go better out there for sleep and they're all okay Some of them will make you feel hungover.
None of them have really a sufficient risk profile. You mentioned drugs. The drugs for sleep for the most part, are terrible. So I don't I don't like using drugs for sleep because they don't they they basically will knock you out. They don't let you sleep naturally. And we need that natural sleep cycle, too. The thing to remember, too, is that if you are not on hormone replacement and not taking oral progesterone, that's a really common one for the postmenopausal timeframe because natural progesterone will naturally act as a GABA agonist.
So all of those supplements that I mentioned that are kind of GABA agonists, progesterone is the way to do that naturally, although if you're taking it exogenous and it's not exactly natural, but it's at least the same hormone that I mentioned that great jumps and the HRT is somewhere that I really want to end up. So I'm looking forward to talking to you.
But unfortunately, I'm in Michigan. It's coming. It's coming. I know it's coming. And we have a timeframe on all this. So I should be able we should be able to tell you when we think it's coming out. But yeah, we can talk about HRT in depth another us into and talk about some of the pluses and minuses. I spent that whole conversation I had and the topic I talked about with Osteo Strong was all about HRT and testosterone, specifically in women.
And I listened to your I think it was a YouTube or something you put on in my email and I listened to a couple of things that you had to say about it. So yeah, I thought it was great. And so pedestrian will help a lot with sleep. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Shelly and Kathy, did you have a question?
Well, I was just wondering about these folks you mentioned. And Matthew Walker, you said he has two books. I suppose if I just Google him, I can. I'll see. Yeah, it was. I know we moved everything over to HSN from our website. We're updating our website, so it's probably in the resources section on our website too.
I've not seen what we did with the books. We used to have a whole list of books and that was one of them. But it's called Why We Sleep by Matt Walker. So if you look it up on Amazon, you'll find it. It's I think it's been a bestseller for years. Really great book. All right. So then the other thing I wanted to dig into there and let me actually stop sharing, because you don't need to stare at this pyramid.
So there was a question that came in. So let me complete this one from James. Okay. So there's a question that came in again. She asked to remain anonymous, kind of. She just said, don't read the whole thing out loud, which is fair as long, but it's really well written. And so this is something that I think is really important because there's a lot of can can risks to consider when it comes to animal products.
And so let me just hit she has a list for you to do. Okay. So the list here of concerns about animal products hits all these things. So she lists out cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, especially call on inflammation, autoimmune disease, and then some other things like parasites, acid reflux, liver and kidney issues. So I want to dig into all those things.
But let me start a little bit of context. So if you've heard me talk about diet, especially for osteoporosis, but honestly, it's true for health optimization as well. And I just recorded a new video on this. So we have a 2020 for Osteoporosis Diet update that'll be released probably in January. The protein component is pretty simple, but it's the most important part.
And the reason why I say that is when we look at osteoporosis and really aging for both men and women, one of the biggest drivers is this being in this kind of slow catabolic state, which just means that we're losing, we're losing muscle mass, we're losing bone mass, we're just kind of slowly breaking down. That's how the human body ages.
So one of the things we need to do to slow that down or potentially prevent it, at least temporarily, is to maintain as much muscle mass as possible. And this is where I deviate from a lot of the longevity folks who will say that we need to drive down this thing called IGF. I'll explain that in a minute.
Drive down IGF, because we know that IGF elevation is associated with bad things and that low IGF is associated with longevity. And they pretty much point all of those things to to meat and say stop eating meat, because if you eat meat, it'll raise your IGF. It's true. So dairy. But here's that here's the thing about the IGF conversation.
So if you look at animals studies, so there are studies in mice and they were they measured IGF and these are these are fasting studies. The IGF one drops and the mice will live for a third longer. So imagine like a third of our human lifespan would take us to 100 and 2030 years. That's amazing. Right? But the thing to remember is that we're not mice and that we don't live in cages and that we mice, mice.
If mice fall over, they don't get hurt. If we fall over, we do. So I don't think this can be extrapolated to humans directly because we we have to maintain muscle mass and IGF one, which stands for insulin like growth. Factor one is your anabolic catabolic switch. So when it's low, you're in a catabolic state, you're you're breaking things down.
People that are on a weight loss journey have a really low IGF that they have to by definition if you want to build muscle if you look at bodybuilders if you look at the peptides for bodybuilding, if you want to maintain or build muscle, you need IGF one to be high. Now you could argue, but isn't a high IGF one in humans going to be bad for longevity?
And the answer is if it's chronically high, Yes. So I mentioned that meat increases IGF, so does dairy, so does exercise, so does optimized hormones, but also so does a highly calorically dense diet, meaning that if you eat a calorically dense diet from any from any source, if you eat even a, you know, a vegan diet, that is too many calories, which is hard to do.
Let me just say, let's say a highly processed vegan diet with a whole bunch of processed food, that's too many calories. You're going to elevate your IGF one because your body flips into this anabolic mode. So what we see is, I think the research that looks at humans and elevated IGF, that shows a downside. There's no way to separate out those that are eating a healthy diet.
That includes meat, potentially dairy, if you can tolerate it, versus those that are eating a highly processed garbage diet. So we know that meat and dairy, when you consume them, IGF one will come up, but then it goes right back down. You get the benefit of the hormone, but it doesn't stay elevated. Whereas if you eat all day long at a high caloric content, then your IGF one stays up chronically.
That is probably going to be bad for you. And so just like all hormones, we need to see them turn on and turn off. This is the natural way hormones work. They're on, they're off. There's a signal. It's off. Whenever you have a constant signal from a hormone, it's usually a bad thing. Like constant insulin leads to diabetes.
Insulin on off leads to a healthy metabolism. So IGF one is no different. So what I tell our patients from a longevity perspective is let's go through phases of building. And if you have osteoporosis, it needs to be a longer phase. Wait, we need to protect your muscle mass at all cost. But for those that have adequate muscle, then we need to also then go through catabolic phases and drop IGF one for a while.
So we go through the cyclic up, down, up, down. How long for each one? It depends on your unique scenario. So for me I'm more in the building phase, less catabolic phase, but I do go through catabolic phases intentionally because then you get into things like, you know, the clearing, cellular senescence and autophagy and all these longevity things.
So I think that is important. So that was a site, Sorry. So getting back to me then, I don't think that meat is going to be a negative from a longevity perspective. I think in fact it is required for longevity in in any species that's going to live for decades or potentially over 100 years. We have to maintain muscle mass.
It is critical. You can do that with other sources of protein. It's just harder. So I've got a guy that I'm going to interview coming up here. His name is Fraser Bailey. He's an Australian guy and he is the most muscular vegan I've ever met. And so the reason why I want to talk to him is because I want to I want to get an understanding of how he puts together the amino acid profile of plants in order to maintain that much muscle.
It's remarkable, assuming that he's being honest about it, but I do think it's possible. But for most people it's very difficult. And for most people, using meat is going to be better absorbed. It has the essential amino acids that we need all in one place, all in the levels that we need. So when we talk about one gram per pound of meat I'm sorry, one gram per pound of protein, that's through animal products.
If you switch to plant products, you're going to have to increase that to about 1.6 grams per pound, which gets difficult, especially if you're using plant products. And so so that's why we where we really lean on animals. So then we have to talk about what are the potential risks of using animals. So let's talk about the cardiovascular risk.
So for a lot of people, when you increase your intake of animal products, you will see an increase in LDL cholesterol and you think, my gosh, well, that's going to increase my risk of cardiovascular disease. The answer is me, Maybe so. Cholesterol was a topic we should talk about just for an entire hour. But the short of that conversation is that cholesterol is not a great measure of cardiovascular risk.
It is a risk factor. I'm not going to be one of those doctors that says that the cholesterol doesn't matter. I think that it does matter. But it is one of the least most important of the risk factors, but it is one of them that we can measure in that we have drugs for. So we talk about it a lot as doctors because I can write a script and I can bring down your cholesterol and it's going to improve your cardiovascular risk.
A little bit. More importantly, though, is metabolic health. More importantly, is muscle mass. More importantly, is inflammatory markers. And so LDL cholesterol is actually, as it goes up, is positively associated with those other things. So for me and this is true for me personally, but for me and my patients, I would rather eat a diet that supports my metabolic function and keeps my agency in check, keeps my CRP marker of inflammation in check, helps me to build and maintain muscle mass at the cost of having higher LDL.
And then let's check and see if you are developing plaque. So there are ways that we can test for this. So what is your coronary artery calcium score look like? What is your coronary c.T. Angiogram look like? If you want to go that far, are you developing any plaque at all? So again, I'll just give you my personal experience, which is i'm 45.
I have a strong family history of heart disease. I have a strong family history of high cholesterol. When I add animal fats, my cholesterol goes up. It's not terribly high, but it's high. My but my HDL is 80 and my feels like 100 and whatever. Ten. So it's high, but it's not terribly high. But my coronary artery calcium score is zero.
My ccta is about as clean as they can get, meaning that I don't have any plaque whatsoever. So for me, eating the diet that I eat helps me to keep my all my other markers in check. Poor metabolic function is a much bigger risk factor for cardiovascular disease than is cholesterol. So my predisposition to be glucose intolerant, carbohydrate intolerant and have pre-diabetes or diabetes is a much bigger risk factor than is my elevated cholesterol.
So if I had disease, I would actually still eat the same diet, but then I would use pharmaceuticals to control my cholesterol rather than eating a plant based diet and making my diabetes worse would be my choice. That's debatable. So I think the cardiovascular risk can be mitigated. I don't think the risk is real as long as all the other things are are in line.
So I think where people run into trouble is if they eat a high fat diet, but also eat a high carbohydrate diet or highly processed food diet, They have high cholesterol in the face of inflammation and in the face of metabolic dysfunction. That's a disaster. So we can't do both. And this is what the Western diet is, right?
The standard American diet is a high fat, high saturated fat, high carbohydrate, highly processed food diet, which will lead to inflammation, metabolic dysfunction and high cholesterol. And that's a recipe for a heart attack. So that makes sense. They're the diabetes one. So I'm actually recording probably, gosh, I will be able to record it for a couple of weeks, but there was a study that came out.
It was either a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago now by Dr. Walter Willett out of Harvard. And it basically said in the headline that eating meat causes diabetes. You know, remember this study. So that's made big headlines because obviously people care about diabetes and it's really popular to just bash on meat. So putting those two together made for a lot of good clickbait.
The thing that we have to remember is this study was first of all published by an author who continuously publishes essentially vegan propaganda. It's really the only way to say it. So he's a guy that publishes about the downsides of meat. And unfortunately, Harvard allows him to use their name and credibility to continue to push into the vegan propaganda and saying that every association with meat is the reason why you shouldn't eat meat.
So what he did in that study was to go back and look at a database of people that reported eating meat and the number of people that got diabetes. So they followed this cohort over time and they filled out free food frequency questionnaires, which are notoriously inaccurate anyway, but then followed them over time and followed who got diabetes, who develop diabetes.
So if look though, at the details and this is the devil's always in the details of these studies, is that what they considered to be meat was any meal that contained meat. So if you think about that for a second, if I had a hamburger and French fries and a milkshake, that's a meat containing meal. If I ate a salad, I'll say I ate a vegan diet.
I eat a salad with some soy or whatever, and you have a non meat meal and you're choosing to live that lifestyle. Which of those two people is more likely to develop diabetes? Of course. The burger, fries and a milkshake person. Right. But yet that's considered a meat meal. So is lasagna, so is chicken nuggets. So all these things that are, you know, highly processed and mixed with a whole bunch of other things.
So there's no way to separate out somebody who's eating a good diet with meat versus somebody who's eating a garbage diet with meat in these studies and in most studies. So whenever somebody comes up with an association like this, you always have to look and say, well, what what is the actual potential there? And is there any reason why this association would make sense from a from a mechanistic perspective?
And if you think about it, diabetes is an inability to tolerate carbohydrates that are being consumed. You can argue what broke the metabolism in the first place, but the metabolism in somebody who's diabetic is broken. They cannot tolerate the carbohydrates they're consuming. And we know that if you reduce that carbohydrate load, you can reverse their diabetes. So put it into remission.
Now, the metabolism is never quite the same, so they always have to be carbohydrate restricted. But we know that we can put diabetes in remission if we do that. So you might then say, well, people that eat carbohydrates are more likely to get diabetes. And that's true. If you overeat it, something is going to break your metabolism. But if you think about this from a mechanistic perspective, if you eat a meat only diet, in other words, you go on a carnivore diet, go to that extreme.
There's never been a person on a carnivore diet who was developed diabetes ever that I'm aware of. And I know a lot of people in this in the carnivore space, you think about that meat has no carbohydrate in it whatsoever. If you want to go on a zero carbohydrate diet, go on a carnivore diet, and you will eat essentially zero carbohydrates and you will reverse diabetes very quickly because there's no carbohydrates.
Right. You're not you're essentially not making much insulin. You might need a little bit because you're eating a large amount of protein, but you reverse diabetes very quickly in a carnivore diet. So it makes absolutely no sense that adding meat to your diet will increase your risk of diabetes. That makes sense. All right. So the next one is cancer.
Now, this goes back to that IGF one question. So I started with that. To say that humans that have chronically elevated IGF one are at increased risk of cancer, but humans that have elevated IGF one chronically are also the humans that are eating high levels of processed food, too many calories. They're obese, they're metabolically dysfunctional. Those people are also at increased risk of cancer.
So if you look at the studies, again, there are a ton of association studies that would say meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of cancer, goes back to the same thing as the diabetes study. Meat consumption is always going to be intertwined with other unhealthy habits. There's no way in a cohort or an epidemiological study to parse those things out.
So we're always going to see people that eat meat that are also going to have a higher likelihood of smoking, higher likelihood of other unhealthy behaviors, higher likelihood of going out to the bars at night, not sleeping well, always going to be connected because people that are are healthier by design in our current society and culture are going to eat less meat because that's what they've been told us, healthy.
So we are stuck in this paradigm of meat eaters being people that don't follow health advice or, people like myself and people that follow me and the people who don't follow health advice are naturally going to be more unhealthy and they're going to be more likely to develop cancer. So we have to throw all of that research out and then look at any research that that has helped to differentiate those things.
Look at any of the intervention studies that have gone on long enough to look for an increased risk of cancer. And when you do that, because those studies do exist, they just don't make headlines because it doesn't fit with the the narrative that people are trying to pass along around meat. But those studies do exist and they do show that there's no connection between consumption of meat and cancer.
And I should I'll do some have I have them on my list of things to report on because that there is no association between me and cancer. When you do those when you look at those studies. And the question here is that especially colon cancer and yes, it's true for colon cancer as well, inflammation, as I just said, if you separate meat from the things that typically go along with me, you know that hamburger on a bun that's highly processed with gluten in the French fries, fried in highly processed seed oils and the milkshake with a ton of sugar in it.
Of all of those four things, five things that I just mentioned, the only thing in there that isn't inflammatory is the meat. So meat does not increase inflammation, but everything that I just mentioned does. And then autoimmune disease and here's a funny fact about the carnivore community is if you have autoimmune disease, whether it be thyroid inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's ulcerative colitis, people with rheumatoid people with eczema, a lot of autoimmune disease, people will get attracted eventually because because of the way social media works, they will get pulled into the carnivore community and reliably they will see improvement in their symptoms and sometimes complete remission of their disease.
So again, if that were the case, how could we say that that eating meat causes autoimmune disease? It doesn't make any sense as far as parasites cooking meat, simple, but actually beef in particular beef muscle does not have a I've looked into this a little bit because I had a neighbor who was eating raw raw meat, which I don't recommend, but she was eating raw meat and I thought, Wow, that's both.
So I actually looked into this a little bit for her and I could not find any parasite that would likely be found in raw beef. Now, pork is a different scenario. Don't eat raw pork, but for pork, you just have to make sure that it's well cooked. You mean it's medium? Medium well, You know, don't don't mess around with that.
Those parasites are nasty or don't eat pork. But beef doesn't seem to in the muscle that you're going to have any issues. Raw liver is actually pretty common. That doesn't seem to be any downside that I can find from a parasite perspective. But if you have any questions, just cook it, kill the parasite. Acid reflux is going to get better with meat.
As long as you have enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach and you have good gut function, meaning that you're actually processing, you're processing your food appropriately, you don't have delayed emptying, etc. and then liver and kidney issues, there just aren't any. So I hope that helps explain that for this patient. I'm sure she'll be watching this. And then I think that's all of hers really well written.
The other thing that people ask about often is what about the environmental impact? And so I think it's worth mentioning here because we're digging into this a little bit. So there's well, there's two things. There's the environmental impact and there's the ethical impact. And let me just start with the environmental one. And so people are concerned, particularly cows, which is always in this equation, but cows and the methane production or essentially overall greenhouse gas production.
So there's pretty good evidence on this when you look at the impact of agriculture overall. So that's plants and animals. So agriculture is mostly plants and animal husbandry animals. When you combine all of them together, they make about 10% or they're responsible for about 10% of the greenhouse gas emission for the United States especially, but pretty much across the world.
But it's about 10%. So then if you wanted to make a big impact on the environment from greenhouse gas perspective, really this shouldn't even be your biggest target because we need to make food if we want to divide out, you know, single percentage points. Again, we're not making a big impact. So if you want to make the biggest impact, control less or consume rather less petroleum, consume foods that are locally raised that don't have to be moved around, whether it's animal product or plant product, and potentially travel less, you know, potentially, you know, use less petroleum.
That's basically the if you want to improve greenhouse gas emission, use, less petroleum. That's not the only thing you can do there. If you want to dig in to the agricultural side, this is the way I look at it. About 50% of the agricultural greenhouse emissions, greenhouse gas emissions are from plants and about 50% are from animals. You could eliminate all of the animals from the food production system and you would only save about 5% of greenhouse gas emissions if you did that, a couple of things would happen.
First of all, you would need to massively increase the number of plants that we're producing because if you're eliminating half of the animal products, let's assume that that's it's not accurate, but let's assume that it's around half of the calories then that we're consuming. But it's actually more than that because it's the most nutrient dense food that we have.
So it's probably more than half. But let's just say that it's half and you have to then double the number of plants that are being produced. My question is, where are you going to grow them? Because there's less land that is suitable for plant production than there is for animal production. And then the amount of fertilizer storage, transportation, what do you get?
How are you going to do that? It just doesn't make any sense to eliminate animals from agriculture. I'm not saying that the way that they're being raised now is great. There are definitely ways to improve that and I'll talk about some of those. But overall, you cannot eliminate animals from the food system. I think the burden to do anything positive for the environment because we're not when it comes to the whole processing of them, though.
Yeah, concentrated animal feeding operations, capos are pretty terrible, terrible for the animals, terrible for the environment. But there is another option. And if you look up or read about regenerative agriculture, I think that really this is the answer on a big scale. Regenerative agriculture can work and it makes sense. The reason why this is really, really important is that cows in particular are one of the only animals that can take carbon dioxide out of the environment and put it back into the soil.
So whether you choose to eat them or not, we need them in our agricultural system because if we want to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases, we need to pull carbon dioxide the most poisonous of them and put it back in the soil and cows do it naturally, it's remarkable. And the thing to remember about regenerative agriculture is that if you raise any modern crop or any animal in massive quantities as a single thing, right, You look at the big, you know, big cow, I mean, what they call them, I guess they're close.
But, you know, big cow CFOs in the West and Midwest, anything in isolation will destroy the environment. The environment cannot tolerate that much of one thing. You need them together, whether it be plant or animal. You need them together in order to support each other. That's how ecosystems work. And so going back to those ecosystems, creating regenerative agricultural farms, there's some really great ones out there and there are some people that are really speaking out about this because we do not have the capacity to continue to model crop.
We're stripping our soil. We if you read Mark Hyman, who I don't agree with everything he says, but he wrote a book, came out with the book was one of his books. He talks about the food system and some of the statistics in there are absolutely frightening. Like we're going to be out of topsoil in the next 20 years because we're just stripping topsoil, because we're not putting the nutrients back in the soil.
So if we think that we're going to continue to grow plants without animals, man, we are marching down a very, very scary path because we're not going able to grow anything. And that's a problem. And then there's the ethical side. So this is such a heated debate because let's face it, cows are cute. You ever seen a cow in person?
They're super cute. We've thought about raising cows ourselves, but I don't that might impact the way that I consume the meat, you know? But wild animals are cute deer, cute elk are cute. I mean, well, they're scary, but they're cute. So when you have cute animals, it makes it really challenging, right? Because you're thinking about this. This big, brown eyed, beautiful beast is going to be in my dinner.
So people will then say like, I can't support killing this animal for me to eat. But what they're ignoring is the fact that you're eating plants and plants are being being harvested. There are animals dying in that too, whether it be from the pesticides, whether it be from clearing varmints, it be from the harvesting process animal, you know, rabbit holes being consumed, The insects do their lives not count.
And so there is the loss of life no matter what you're consuming. The way that I've heard it stated, which I think is a really great way to say it, is that there's no bloodless diet. You just get to choose. And so I choose to eat more animals because I'm killing less animals. They are big and fuzzy and cute.
I get that, but I'm actually killing less animals and there's less loss of life to support my own. But that's challenging for a lot of people to stomach and people that are eating a vegan diet from an ethical perspective just refuse to admit that. Or people that have been proposed that will say that, well, insects don't count and there aren't that many rabbits that are killed.
Okay. So I think from an ethical perspective, you just have to remember that there's no bloodless diet. You will leave. We all will leave an impact of our existence. And then question is, how do we make up for that in the back end? So my question there. So I hope that answers all of that. Any questions? I see there's a couple of charts.
Let me see what's in the chat here. So Cheryl sent me this article, so I'll take a look at this. Cheryl I've not read it. I've heard about it, but I've not read it. So I will take a look at it and we can chat about it next week. You put the findings in here, so I but I'm, I'm not going to, I'm not going to trust this until I read it, because all of all of the essential vegan leaning research will have a finding that really supports their purpose.
So off to see what I agree on there, but I'm happy to present this next week. So come back next week. Let me just go ahead and drop this. Actually in a question for next week, Cheryl. So we don't forget, but I'm happy to review articles like this. If anybody one, it's controversial that they want to talk about it because this is the perfect platform to do that.
All right. It's in there, Cheryl. We'll talk about it next week. And actually, speaking of next week, you see when I'm flying back, I'm flying back from California on Monday. So I will have to see when I get back. It's not on my calendar. Look up, look, watch out for. well, you know what? It might work out because it'll be it'll be 6 a.m. in California.
Might be okay. All right. Okay. So that actually brings us kind of down to the end. So here, what other questions do we have on any of these things we've talked about? Well, the LDL, I've been researching because I did a little test on myself because after I started listening to you, I had been pretty much vegetarian, rather low protein.
So I changed and I did the Carlsberg study. So I started taking two ounces of iceberg a day, plus the high fat yogurt and eating more meat, protein, chicken, mostly. And my LDL went up from two let's see, one 129 to 164 LDL went to 164. Yeah, but my my triglycerides went down from 50 to 45, My HDL went from 87 to 1 to one.
My LDL went from 9 to 6, but my total went up to 71 from 225. Yeah. And I also stopped taking cholesterol, which I had been taking, which is the phytosterols that might have an impact to that, that only have an impact though, on about half the population that has the genetics that over absorbed or hyper absorbed his rather.
So that would probably elevated up. It had brought it down in the first place. But that's okay because I see that reliably in people anyway. So they do remember those that this is not a clear guideline, but the the protection of cholesterol reduction is a U curve protection, meaning that in the middle of our lifespan, if you reduce cholesterol, the the protection is more relevant.
So if you're, you know, 30, 40, 56, but around 70 that starts to go the other direction, meaning that lower cholesterol is actually associated with an increased risk of having events and death, probably because people as they get sick their cholesterol goes down. So we don't really know if you artificially reduce cholesterol through diet or through statin, are you actually increasing the risk that way, or is it just because of the association, because of low cholesterol and people that have cancer and other chronic diseases?
So don't really know that. But I get less aggressive about treating cholesterol in my patients that are over the age of 70 because I'm not saying you're over 70, Kathy, but because there you go. So I never want to assume that based off of the picture, but because the risk, you know, the risk of, again, losing metabolic flexibility, losing muscle mass, you know, developing other issues that are going to lead to other causes, the most common causes of death goes up as we age.
And I'm less worried about cholesterol because really higher cholesterol is a sign of vitality. Now, that being said, you could potentially look at your sources of dietary fat and eat less saturated fat sources. So this is something that's relevant to genetically. I don't know what the percentage is, but those that have APOE, E and a couple of other genetic polymorphisms will have an increased or cholesterol response or a more dramatic cholesterol response to saturated fat than to other fat.
So now that you've done this trial, you could actually spin around and do another trial and say, okay, well, I'm going to reduce my saturated fat content, not completely, but reduce it and eat, you know, lower fatty cuts of meat. And you're eating more mostly chicken then you're not eating fatty cuts of beef. But look and see where else you're getting saturated fat in the yogurt, probably you're getting a fair amount.
And then replace that then with mono and saturated fats like olive oil and avocado oil, and then do that test and then repeat their lives after two or three months and see what happens to your cholesterol because you might just be a saturated fat responder. So that's an easy tweak to it. And then you can continue to eat the diet that's going to support you in other ways and then keep your cholesterol a little bit lower and you kind of get the best of both worlds.
So do you recommend the cheese? Dairy is a mixed bag. So I like I like cheese for people that can tolerate it because it's going to bump up IGF one. It is intrinsically fattening. That's why that's why we we consume dairy as we're babies and we grow fast. But if it causes gut inflammation, then probably not. And if it raises your cholesterol a lot, then maybe there's better resources to get what's in the cheese.
Yeah. Any other questions? Okay. Well, we're right at time. Yeah. Alan? Yeah. You can get plenty of protein without getting a lot of fat saturated said Yeah. What's, what's your favorite source, Alan Eggs are protein shake one in the morning avocado for you know get the fat from that tuna salmon Yep chicken you know all things that don't have a lot of saturated fat and fat mean cuts of meat.
Yeah. You know, I get 160 grams of protein a day with only 15 grams of saturated fat. Yeah, I'm working with a trainer now outside of my program, and she's got me on kind of fat restricted. It's not real fat restricted, but compared to what I was eating. So I'm having to be careful of that now. And so just to give you an example, Cathy, so I have my goal right now is 220 grams of protein and 95 grams of fat.
So I'm having to eat new lower fat items in order to hit my protein dietary fat and calorie goals. Because if I ate what I used to eat, then I would be way over on calories. But I'm in a pretty significant mode. So my goal is to grow a lot of muscle, which is not necessarily your goal. Cheese and the butter or the worst.
Yeah, but butter is so good. Yeah, I had to give it up. I love it. I get yeah, fast food, a little bit of butter, yogurt. I like to stave for fat if we can. But again, it's kind of hard to it just depends on the product. But the nice thing about the some of the more dense are dairies though.
That was as you start getting fermented. So key for full fat Greek style yogurt you can get them in lower fat versions, but the more the more fermented they are, then the less they're going to impact your gut in a negative way. So did you see the euro's work study where it has vitamin K in it and everything else?
I've seen it. I have not looked into it deeply. Okay. Yeah, but it's I mean, if there's people ask me this all the time, you know, where do we get vitamin K and diet? And you're right, it's, it's in, it's in cheeses and fermented things. It's hard to get enough vitamin K or at least as much as I want.
You know, if you're going to try to get 200 or 300 micrograms, that's that's tough. Can you take a supplement of that? That's what I recommend, Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. MG So I'm we recommend right now we're using either one or two things. One has 300 micrograms of K2 is in K seven all trans in case Ivan and then the other one is has 180 milligrams.
But most people are taking two cups. So there are 360 milligrams of K2 is in K seven, which is quite a bit. But there's no as far as we know, there's no upper limit of safety, particularly when you look at the studies that have looked at K2 as in K four, they're using massive doses with no side effects or potential risks to everybody would be get on chronometer.
And when you really start seeing it like that, the food you're eating, it will amaze you. I did it. I did. Yeah yeah it's it's I go back and forth on it, but my coach is making me do it. She said this is my day. Yeah. Because anything that touches space. Yeah, that touches your lips. I want to see it.
And I was like, really? Cheryl just commented in here as well that she's eating under four grams of saturated fat, which is really hard to do and no dietary cholesterol. And I want to I want to take a minute and speak to that, even though remember, but total cholesterol and LDL for her are still above reference range.
And so, Cheryl, this is an example that you're just not a saturated fat responder. So you probably could eat more saturated fat and not have a negative impact on your cholesterol. I just want to mention that the dietary cholesterol thing real quick. So dietary cholesterol does not impact blood cholesterol in the vast majority of people. So we've seen this time and time again where people have said, you know, anything that has cholesterol in it will raise your cholesterol.
And it's just not true. It's never been true. It's just been dogma. So don't avoid dietary cholesterol thinking that you're going to have an impact on your blood cholesterol because you're not all right. With that said, I think I'm late for something, so I got to go. This has been great. I appreciate everybody's input. I love the back and forth use the the form to submit questions.
And we'll I'm happy to go through those and base everything that we talk off of those things. And then I'll always ask people for questions. I think in the beginning too, we can hit hot topic items. There's a new study or whatever that's come out. Feel free to send it to me ahead of time too, so that we can I can look at it like this study I think will be great from JAMA.
I'll take a look at this one for next time. You're welcome, Cheryl. And thanks, everybody. Thank you. See?
