[buzzsprout episode=’4014680′ player=’true’]
Joané & Jonathan: (00:03)
Hi, I’m Joané Hart and I’m Jonathan Hart. This is The Hart of Health. A show where we focus mainly on health and self optimization. Here, we like to talk about our experiences and knowledge when it comes to health and biohacking. Hope you enjoy the show.
Jonathan: (00:23)
Hey everyone. So on today’s podcast, we are going to do a carnivore Q&A.
Joané: (00:41)
Yay. Well, we’ve been wanting to do this podcast for a while and thought why not today?
Jonathan: (00:48)
So we’re just going to take a look at the most common questions received regarding a carnivore diet. And hopefully, if you’re curious about this diet, we might enlighten you.
Joané: (01:02)
And answer some questions you’ve been wondering about.
Jonathan: (01:05)
Yeah. And even if you didn’t have any questions, hopefully you will find it interesting. A lot of people make a lot of assumptions about this diet and I think we’re going to clarify things a lot.
Joané: (01:17)
Yeah. Or even if you have been trying the carnivore diet, but your friends and family members don’t understand it, or a bit skeptical, you might be able to share the podcast episode with them and they might be able to learn more about your diet and why it’s a good idea.
Jonathan: (01:34)
Yeah. Maybe if they’re asking some tricky questions, we might answer them.
Joané: (01:39)
Okay. So we’re going to start with the first question. I like asking questions, cause I always wanted to be kind of a journalist, so I will be asking the questions. So now the first question, “Is the carnivore diet healthy?”.
Jonathan: (01:55)
That is a tricky question because it’s very difficult to define what is healthy because you get so much individual variability. And what I would say is that it’s very difficult. If you adhere to the strict carnivore diet where you include zero plants, that it is difficult to make it unhealthy. I suppose if you really charred your meat or like had preservatives in your meat, it might be a bit unhealthy. I feel like a lot of the problems in today’s diets actually are originating from plant products. Like flour and sugar and all those things seem to be at the root of most health problems. It’s basically grains in general. Those things seem to be the ones that are the culprits for causing a lot of health problems. So I think it’s very difficult to have an unhealthy diet on a carnivore diet.
Joané: (03:02)
Yes. Because if you’re doing a carnivore diet properly, and if you are buying burger patties or mince, and you’re checking that they don’t have added soy and gluten and all these things in them, that could be unhealthy. And hopefully if you had grassfed meat or if you got your meat from the farmer directly and you knew that it wasn’t tainted.
Jonathan: (03:29)
Have fillers in it basically.
Joané: (03:31)
You don’t want meat with fillers in it and you don’t want to do like a dirty carnivore where people will just buy burgers from fast food places and just take the bun off. You don’t know what is in those patties. You don’t know what is in that process cheese. If you got mature cheese, if you got cheese that wasn’t the plastic-y processed cheese that you get at a lot of fast food places, but it was proper cheese you got at a dairy farm or somewhere. Well, nose to tail, would make a carnivore diet that much healthier, I guess.
Jonathan: (04:14)
I suppose there’s a difference here between optimal and healthy. So I think you have a lot of people who are on carnivore, not doing the nose to tail thing who are still healthy, relatively healthy, but there your going into the more optimal. So I would say it’s not optimal to only eat muscle meat and fat.
Joané: (04:36)
Just steak and eggs.
Jonathan: (04:38)
The eggs are really at a huge bonus. You are going to be missing things. And I mean, you might be short on things like magnesium, if you’re not getting that in your drinking water or from seafood. And if you’re not making bone meal or something, you could be a bit short on calcium, but those are pretty much the only two things. I mean, what we did, it was super simple. We just made eggshell capsules. You can get your daily required amount of calcium super easily and really cheaply. And then if you can add magnesium to your drinking water that you drink every day, then you’re basically covered. If you’re obviously including organ meats like liver and stuff, you’re going to have a pretty optimal diet on a carnivore diet.
Joané: (05:30)
Yes. I think what you need to look at here is, why would people argue that a carnivore diet is unhealthy? So things we’ve heard are like,
(05:38)
but if you don’t have fiber in your diet, how are you going to go to the bathroom?
Jonathan: (05:44)
That’s the most common question.
Joané: (05:46)
Yes. The thing is, a lot of people don’t realize, especially people with IBS or Crohn’s disease, a lot of people will function a lot better on a low fiber diet. So someone with Crohn’s disease, for example, could try the carnivore diet and they will feel much better. Well, if I have too much fiber, I get stomach pain. It really messes up my digestive system. So switching to a low fiber diet where maybe two days a week, I joke it’s my carnivore five-two diet. Five days a week I’m carnivor-ish where I’ll eat mostly animal-based, but I’ll have maybe some dark chocolate with that. Sometimes some nuts if I’m feeling naughty, but then two days a week, I will have vegetables with quite a bit of fiber in them. And on those days, my digestion feels a little bit compromised, but overall, I feel so much better on a low fiber diet. I used to have stomach pain every day. People always say, no, but you need a high fiber diet. A high fiber diet made me feel really bad.
Jonathan: (07:01)
Some people can tolerate a high fiber diet. I mean it’s very individual. But if you look at the people who have constipation problems, there was that study done at…I saw it on… What I’ve learned?
Joané: (07:16)
Yes, What I’ve Learned on the Egypt channel.
Jonathan: (07:20)
And he cites a study where they take people who really have constipation issues and then they divide them into high fiber, moderate, and low and no fiber diets. All the people with previous constipation issues completely resolved all of their issues around constipation by going on a zero fiber diet. It wasn’t just some of them, it was all of the participants that went on the no fiber diet had a regular bowel movement with no straining or any other problems.
Joané: (07:58)
Yes. And that could actually be really great news for people who have maybe been struggling with IBS. Who’ve been struggling with constipation all their lives. So now you’re asking is a carnivore diet healthy, but you need all this fiber. But I know a lot of people who eat a lot of fiber, but they have to rely on laxatives just to be able to go to the bathroom because they’re blocked up. Exactly. So now, yes, you’re eating a lot of fiber, which you’re saying is very healthy, but you’re relying on laxatives, which is messing with your colon and your body is losing this ability to go naturally. You’re eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, but you have to rely on chemicals and medication just to get your stomach to go and that’s just not natural.
Jonathan: (08:50)
No and I would not say that it’s healthy. And the funny thing is the reality is most people who go carnivore, actually experience the opposite of constipation in the initial phases in the first few weeks. Your stomach tends to run a bit instead of get blocked up. So it’s actually more, in the initial phases, it’s the opposite of what most people think. They think, how am I going to go to the bathroom? Then you do carnivore for a week and you’re like, okay, how do I slow down going to the bathroom?
Joané: (09:26)
Well, maybe if you’ve been blocked up for awhile, it’s not a bad idea just to get it all out. What other objections would people have? The high fat content? Because a lot of people believe you need to be on a high fiber, low fat diet. Not necessarily going to say high carb because yes, you get people who say high carb, low fat. But I think what a lot of people think is high fiber, low fat. where carnivore diet is basically no fiber.
Jonathan: (09:56)
So then you have to rely on fats.
Joané: (09:59)
Yeah. So fat helps you feel satiated. So a lot of people when they quit sugar and carbs, the withdrawal period can be rough. What a lot of people don’t know is if you really increase your fat intake, it can help a lot with satiety, reducing cravings, and just helping you feel better overall.
Jonathan: (10:22)
Yeah and you can’t actually just have protein on a carnivore diet. Protein is important and your body does use it to make a whole bunch of molecules. And it’s obviously super critical to have amino acids because they’re the building blocks for so many important functions in your body, but proteins are almost calorically neutral. They don’t actually add calories to the equation because it takes so much energy to break them down that you get this thing called rapid starvation. Where if you only eat protein, you still basically start starving to death. Like you actually need something with a caloric value, like fat to actually provide energy for your body to function. So if you’re trying to do a carnivore diet where you just eating lean mince, you’re going to slowly start starving to death. So fat is super important on a carnivore diet because there are no, except for honey I guess, there are no real sources of carbs.
Joané: (11:33)
And dairy. You can get carbs in yogurt. I think he could get about 15 grams of carbs in a cup of yogurt.
Jonathan: (11:39)
But dairy is not good for everyone. It’s not really an option for everyone.
Joané: (11:42)
Yeah. So for those who can tolerate dairy and who want that on a carnivore diet, they can have that. But a lot of people can’t, or they can only have certain types of dairy.
Joané: (11:52)
Okay, next question. Does the carnivore diet reduce inflammation?
Jonathan: (12:01)
For a lot of people, yes. I’ve seen this debated so many times where people ask why would you say that vegetables are causing inflammation? There’s no evidence to show that vegetables cause inflammation. I mean the first time I ever really heard of the carnivore diet was through Jordan Peterson. And then you listened to McKayla Pearson talking about how her arthritis went away, just by cutting out vegetables and arthritis is an inflammatory condition. So her inflammation reduced by cutting out the veggies.
Joané: (12:38)
Well, let’s take a look at some foods that can cause inflammation, which basically they can be very difficult to avoid and the carnivore diet makes it very easy to avoid a lot of inflammatory foods. Sugar is inflammatory. Grains are inflammatory. That includes corn, rice…
Jonathan: (13:00)
Rice is probably the least inflammatory, but it’s still probably got a mild affect.
Joané: (13:04)
Yes. So you have trans fats like hydrogenated, vegetable oils, and seed oils like sunflower oil and canola oil. Well, lectins, a lot of people get inflammation from eating things like beans and legumes and peanuts. Nuts can cause inflammation for a lot of people. They can be very difficult to digest for a lot of people and cause inflammation in your gut, especially if they are roasted nuts that are often roasted in vegetable and seed oils.
Jonathan: (13:38)
So some nuts can kill people.
Joané: (13:42)
Yeah, some nuts can kill some people. What other inflammatory foods do you get? Soy can be inflammatory.
Jonathan: (13:50)
Yeah, so a carnivore diet is basically a very low inflammatory diet.
Joané: (13:56)
If you eat too much fiber, that can cause inflammation in your gut. If you have irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease.
Jonathan: (14:05)
Yeah. It’s very funny that people ask, what are you going to do with all the meat? And you’re going to get so inflamed. And it’s actually the opposite. What happens is you reduce inflammation like the actual marker, you should be looking at is C reactive protein. And there are plenty of case studies out there of people before carnivore diet, they test their C reactive protein on carnival diet. They test their C reactive protein and it’s way lower and way better. C reactive protein is the general marker to find out how inflamed you are. So inflammation goes down on a carnivore diet in general. Yes.
Joané: (14:52)
The next question: Does the carnivore diet put you in ketosis?
Jonathan: (15:00)
Well, it can.
Joané: (15:02)
It depends on your macronutrient ratios. So the carnivore diet, if you don’t have dairy and honey, is essentially a zero carb diet and in order for your body to go into ketosis, which basically just means that it is breaking down your fat stores and turning that into energy into ketones, then you need to moderate your protein intake on a carnivore diet.
Jonathan: (15:33)
Yeah, because if you have too much protein, then your body will just use the excess protein to do gluconeogenesis.
Joané: (15:40)
Yeah. So your body can turn extra protein into glucose. So the carnivore diet can put you in ketosis if your carb intake is low enough. So you’re not having the dairy and the honey, if your protein intake is moderate and your fat intake is high enough.
Jonathan: (15:57)
But no, the carnivore diet is not exactly a keto diet.
Joané: (16:03)
Although a lot of people do put the carnivore diet in the category of ketogenic diet. So they say the carnivore diet is a type of ketogenic diet, which I don’t necessarily agree. You can make your carnivore diet a ketogenic diet, but people who say the carnival diet is one of the types of ketogenic diets. I don’t agree with that.
Jonathan: (16:28)
Yeah. Because you don’t realize that if you drink a glass of milk, good luck on being in ketosis after doing that.
Joané: (16:39)
Three steaks? Good luck staying in ketosis after that.
Jonathan: (16:42)
And that’s what the keto diet is. People think it’s just about high fat. No, a keto diet is actually different for everyone because some people can tolerate more carbs and still stay in ketosis. And that’s actually what it’s all about. So it’s not about low carb, high fat it’s about, is your body producing ketones? And is that the fuel source that your body is now preferring.
Joané: (17:07)
And what macronutrient ratios, meaning what ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrates, do you need as an individual for your body to go into ketosis?
Jonathan: (17:18)
Yeah, because some people can still have like more than a hundred grams of carbs in a day and still have high levels of ketones in their blood. So for them that’s keto, but then you put another person who’s a little bit more carb sensitive or whatever, you give them a hundred grams of carbs and they get completely kicked out of ketosis.
Joané: (17:37)
Give them 50 grams of carbs and they can get kicked out of ketosis.
Jonathan: (17:40)
Yeah. It’s very variant on on the individual. So people seem to just think that keto is all about being high fat and no, I’d say that’s a high fat diet, low carb diet. The only time you actually really know if you’re in ketosis is if you find out if you’re in ketosis by testing it. That’s when you’re doing a keto diet.
Joané: (18:01)
You can get breath monitors, you get blood ketone monitors, and you can get urine tests. So you can test if you are producing ketones and see that way. So if you do want to go on a carnivore diet and be in a ketogenic diet, then we recommend sticking to very fatty cuts of meat. Don’t overdo the protein. Bone marrow is a great source of fat. So you just want to be conscious of that. If you do want to be in ketosis or on a carnivore diet, you can even do keto cycling where a few weeks you will do a more ketogenic structured carnivore diet. But then for a few weeks you will add a bit more carbs and you’ll have some honey. You will have some dairy if you want.
Jonathan: (18:55)
I like the carb cycling approach because I feel like it’s good to have the metabolic flexibility to use carbs and fat. You should just try and not do high carb high fat.
Joané: (19:07)
Yes. And if you do high protein, high fat, then you obviously probably wouldn’t be in ketosis as well. Yes. So that’s just something to keep in mind. So what can you eat on the carnivore diet? Basically animal based foods.
Jonathan: (19:26)
Yeah. So I’d say the thing that’s on the fringe is honey, because as an insect counts as animal, and it’s a bit of an animal product. So you have to basically look at it like, if a cheese has herb’s in it, the herb’s didn’t come from an animal. It came from a plant. So that’d be carnivor-ish and not carnivore. And not to say that carnivor-ish is bad, but it’s just to say that it’s not carnivore. It’s not strict carnivore. So if it comes from a plant and it’s in your food, it’s not carnivore. But a lot of people are more carnivor-ish, where they will have spices and stuff on their meat. But because it’s in such small amounts and it’s more benign types of plants, it’s not an issue for them. That’s where you can get the individual variability. For some people they put spice on their steak and then they get an arthritis flare up or eczema flare up, where other people can put spice on their steak and they’re perfectly fine. They don’t get any sort of autoimmune reactions to it or any problems. So yes, it’s not strict carnivore, but on a carnivore diet you actually have a bit of flexibility if you decide, okay, I’m not going to do carnivore, I’m going to do carnivor-ish. I probably recommend doing that initially because it gives you more of a stepping stone if you aiming to go strict carnivore for health reasons.
Joané: (21:06)
Yes. So yeah, you can have muscle meats like steaks. You can have ground beef and you can have chicken. A lot of people don’t want to eat a lot of chicken. We do recommend that on a carnivore diet, you should try to get meat in a way that the animals didn’t get given antibiotics and a bunch of hormones and things that get put into the meat that can affect you. Grassfed is obviously better than grain fed because that can affect the quality of the meat and the way your body reacts to the meat. Then, one thing that’s great on a carnivore diet is having things like bone broth. We did mention going nose to tail and trying to use the whole animal because that also helps you get a lot more nutrients in your diet, especially from organ meats. Liver is basically nature’s multivitamin. If you eat a lot of liver, I do not think that you really need to get any supplements. Maybe magnesium.
Jonathan: (22:15)
You can overdo the liver, but I don’t think anyone’s really experienced any kind of vitamin A toxicity from eating too much liver. But yeah, I definitely noticed that I didn’t feel that great if I had a large amount of liver every day.
Joané: (22:33)
Yeah. You can get vitamin A poisoning, vitamin A toxicity. You get that acne medication Accutane, which is isotretinoin, I think, and that is basically vitamin A poisoning in a pill. So you don’t have to spend all this money on these expensive supplements. And a lot of people are taking vitamin A for aging reasons and you can get a lot of vitamin A from liver. But the thing with, organ meats is you can only eat so much before your body says, now I have had enough. It is very satiating. It’s quite rich. It’s quite rich. We do recommend getting more organ meats into your diet.
Jonathan: (23:16)
So yeah, some people don’t like liver and if that is the case, then what you can do is try mixing it with mince. So first try with, one quarter liver and three quarters mince, mixing it up. And then that way you can get used to the taste and texture and all those things, but it’s not really essential to have to eat it in your diet. I mean, you do get organ supplements where they capsulate the dried liver or brain or kidney or whatever organ you want to supplement with. So it’s not essential to have it in your diet. I do think it’s more natural and it’s better to have it in your diet, but if you really struggle to eat those things, there is the option of just buying the capsule with the liver already contained in it.
Joané: (24:21)
A lot of people also make sausages out of a combination of organ meats with maybe some ground beef. And that can be more appetizing for a lot of people as well. The next question is, what can I drink on the carnivore diet?
Jonathan: (24:40)
Bone broth and water.
Speaker 1: (24:43)
Okay bone broth and water. Some people do still have black coffee or coffee with some cream, which comes from an animal or they make like a fatty coffee with some maybe collagen powder, which you also get from animals. Then with some butter and some people even put egg yolks in their coffee. So you can make a really fatty coffee, that’s more carnivor-ish where it’s mostly animal based, but there’s some coffee in there as well. Or you can have some bone broth. Your Dad has been having bone broth with some cream. And that is a drink, yes. It is a savory drink, but it’s still something that you’re drinking.
Jonathan: (25:29)
It’s a good, it’s a good substitute because you know, half of why people like coffee is it’s that ritual of the warm drink. So by substituting bone broth in for the coffee, it makes it easier. And that’s the thing, if you want to go strict carnivore. If you say I’m going to go carnivor-ish, then have the cup of coffee. But yeah, if you have a serious health condition, it might be worth trying the strict version where you go zero plants and that’s up to each individual to decide. And there’s very little dogma when it comes to the carnivore diet, because people are just like, Oh yeah, if you want to have some spice or some coffee or some this or that, it’s cool. It’s not like with vegans. If you have anything from an animal, it’s the end of the world. You’re fired!
Joané: (26:25)
Yeah, your shunned. Even If someone is having milk, they could drink a glass of milk if they are having real milk on their carnivore diet.
Jonathan: (26:35)
I guess you could also drink yogurt kind of.
Joané: (26:37)
Yeah. If you had like a thin yogurt. If it’s not a thick yogurt, it’s like a drinking yogurt, but not the sugary stuff you get in the store.
Jonathan: (26:46)
Yeah. Don’t get the fake processed Yogi sip or whatever.
Joané: (26:51)
You can get like plain yogurt. If you’re having honey, you can add some honey to it, maybe?
Jonathan: (26:56)
Yeah. And I guess another thing you can drink is blood, but I don’t think that’s for everyone. It’s got quite a metallic taste.
Joané: (27:06)
I was wondering, you know, you get that blood sausage? I wonder what that’s like, I’ve never had it.
Jonathan: (27:12)
Oh, I’m willing to try it.
Joané: (27:13)
Yeah. It seems interesting. Okay. How much meat do you eat on the carnivore diet per day? It really depends on the individual. How hungry you are and what you can afford.
Jonathan: (27:26)
Yeah. It’s one of those questions where it depends. I mean, if you want to be keto, you can’t have too much meat because if you overdo your protein, it will kick you out of ketosis, like we said earlier. But a lot of carnivores don’t really care about ketosis. So you’ve got to take it on with what your individual goals are. Are you trying to lose weight? Are you trying to gain weight? Are you trying to maintain? Or, you know, what are you doing this for? Like, is the thing that’s going to influence how much meat you have and what your macros are. And you know, if you’re trying to do it just as an elimination, having steak and eggs for a month is fine. But if you want to do it as a longterm thing, then you got to start incorporating the organ meats and the nose to tail approach. So you can’t say how much meat a carnivore should eat.
Joané: (28:28)
Yes. A lot of carnivores will tell people how much they eat in terms of weight. I eat about a pound of me today. I eat two pounds of me today. We use the metric system, so I’ll eat a kilo of meat a day or half a kilo a day. So a lot of people calculate it on that and that could be a nice way for you to figure out how much meat you should eat in a day to feel satiated. So you can go by weight and then see, Oh, I can’t eat more than half a kilo of meat a day without feeling sick or without feeling overfull.
Jonathan: (29:11)
Yeah. You got to try and add as much fat to that meat as you can. If you’re trying to get a more optimal diet, where you are not trying to lose too much weight.
Joané: (29:22)
Yes and one more thing. I heard two women talk about this with the carnivore diet is, in the beginning, they recommend that you eat until you’re satisfied. You don’t worry about calories. You don’t worry about how much you’re eating, because you’re trying to give your body all of the nutrients that has been missing. You’re trying to eat until satiety. So they say that for a few months, just eat as much as you want, even if you gain weight. I think it’s also called the all in principle, where you eat to satiety and yes, you might gain weight, but at some point your body will be satiated and your appetite can start going down. So I’ve heard a few women say when they started carnivore, they did that principle. They gained a lot of weight or they gained some weight, but then eventually their appetite decreased.
Joané: (30:23)
They lost the weight again. And then they were at a healthy weight from there on. Because what happens is, and yes, it can happen to a lot of men as well, but I’ve heard a lot of women, you start dieting when you’re a teenager and you go on all these diets and a lot of women who’ve yo-yo dieted, their metabolism does get messed up. It gets slowed down. Then you need to start eating fewer calories every day, just to maintain your weight. Because if you eat at a calorie deficit for an extended period of time, your metabolism will slow down and your leptin levels can drop. It can be harder for you to feel satiated from eating. So in order to get your leptin levels back up, a lot of people suggest eating a high carb meal, having a cheat day or something, but you can also increase your fat intake a lot and increase your calorie intake for a few days or a few weeks just to reset your leptin levels.
Joané: (31:31)
And what the goal is for a lot of people, is to get in touch with their natural hunger cues again. Because it becomes harder for people to recognize when they’ve eaten enough. But if they, for the first few months of doing the carnivore diet, they eat as much as they want. It becomes a lot easier for people to manage their hunger levels and to manage their weight. And they don’t need to eat 1,200 calories to maintain their weight. They can eat 1,800 or 2,000 calories to maintain their weight and they are at a healthy weight. So how much you eat on the carnivore diet really depends on your goal. If you’ve been struggling with a sluggish metabolism, if you’ve been dieting for very long and you would like to reset your metabolism, I do think it can be a good idea to just eat till satiety and not to worry about the calories as much when you’re first starting out.
Jonathan: (32:34)
Yeah. I do agree that especially when you get all the benefits from cutting out the majority of inflammatory plant foods, you shouldn’t be worried about the calories that your getting in because your actually trying to find your natural sort of level where like you just described, where you’ll eat to satiation, but you’ll still maintain a healthy weight. And I think that is the easiest to find on a carnivore diet. Especially eating nose to tail, because a lot of times you have cravings and hunger because you’re lacking something in your diet and by including the liver, the kidney, the bone marrow, the bone broth, and those things. And eggs and mussels and clams. We didn’t mention earlier that seafood counts because it’s kind of obvious that sea creatures are animals. So you can have prawns if you’re not allergic and fish and mussels and stuff.
Jonathan: (33:38)
So if you’re eating a lot of those kinds of foods where you’re getting a large variety of animal foods, you’re getting all the nutrients that your body needs in a very easy to absorb form. You probably are going to end up being less hungry because you’re not deficient in something. And often those deficiencies can cause excessive hunger on a standard diet where you’re lacking in things and you’re eating a whole bunch of bread or whatever. And your body’s almost like, nope, we still didn’t get what we needed. So you still need to be hungry.
Joané: (34:15)
Yep. One thing that people might find interesting is people asking, but what about all the vitamins and minerals that you need? And you’re going to miss out on all these things on a carnivore diet. But, if you take every individual vitamin and mineral and you go and search for what foods, you can find these in, in the highest concentration, most of the nutrients, I found the highest concentrations were actually in organ meats and seafood and meat, you know? Vitamin A, you get the most of it in liver and people are always saying, but you need to eat carrots and all these yellow and orange vegetables for your vitamin A, but you’re not actually getting vitamin A from them. You’re getting the carotinoid beta carotene that your body has to convert into vitamin A where with liver, you’re getting pure vitamin A.
Joané: (35:11)
And the two most nutrient dense foods you can get, are liver and egg yolks. People are throwing away their egg yolks because they think that’s unhealthy for us, but you’re throwing away most of the nutrients. And yes, you can get your nutrients from a lot of these plant foods, but you know how much spinach you need to eat to absorb the same amount of iron that you would get from one steak? That amount of spinach might even kill you. I’m just saying, because you get leafy green toxicity. If you eat too many leafy green vegetables, it can really mess your body up. If you get too many oxalates in, it can mess your body up. So we’re not saying you can’t have these foods at all, but don’t expect to get the majority of your nutrients from vegetables.
Jonathan: (36:00)
It is very difficult to get them from vegetables. Like you said, often, it’s like a precursor molecule found in a plant and it’s not actually the thing you need. And the simple way to look at it, is that animals contain all the essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients for other animals. Like they had to make all of those things to be a living being themselves. So if you need something, they will contain it. Yes, it might not be in the muscle meat only. And that’s why we say go nose to tail because it might be in their liver or in the bone marrow, or yes, maybe you don’t want to eat the spleen of a cow. So then you can get that in a muscle or a clam or whatever, but all the essential things you need are contained in the whole animal package, because they also have a very similar requirement for those vitamins and minerals and they have it contained in their bodies. So all the things you need to function as a human is contained in animals.
Joané: (37:09)
Yeah. And another great example is Omega three. A lot of people say you need to get more omega threes in your diet, eat more chia seeds have flax seeds. Yes, but that is a different type of Omega three than you get in the animal foods. Because you need EPA and DHA and that you get in your seafood and animal foods, but the type of Omega three that you get in the plant foods is ALA and your body has to convert that into EPA and DHA. And you’re getting a much lower concentration.
Jonathan: (37:45)
Yeah. And if your body’s not good at the conversion, then you kind of screwed. And I think that’s why a lot of people might not do well on a purely plant based diet. Because they might not be good at converting the precursor into the thing you actually need and where people who are good at converting the precursor molecules into the things they need will do better. And then I think that’s often why you see such a stark difference when some people say, no, the vegan diet was terrible and some people would be like no, the vegan diet is awesome. That could be part of the reason why. Like you were saying with the carrots, eight ounces of steak has more vitamin A than like eight pounds of carrots. That’s crazy. And that’s even saying the beta carotene and not actual vitamin A.
Joané: (38:36)
Is it steak or liver that you need?
Jonathan: (38:37)
Steak.
Joané: (38:38)
Oh wow. Okay, the last question for today’s Q&A Carnivore episode, is how do you cook meat on a carnivore diet? Well, definitely not in vegetable and seed oils.
Jonathan: (38:51)
You definitely don’t deep fry it in vegetable.
Joané: (38:54)
No. You can really cook it any way you want. A lot of people will warn you against charring, your meat because that can have carcinogens in it. You really need to find the best way of cooking the food for you. If you like eggs, you can have them hard boiled, scrambled, poached, or fried. Just use animal fat to cook the meat in.
Jonathan: (39:20)
Butter, lard, or tallow.
Joané: (39:22)
You can use butter to cook your food in. So don’t use oil, use butter, tallow, or use lard. What we like to do is when we make bone broth and you let the bone broth cool down the fat rises to the top, and then we will use that fat to cook our food in. We like using the slow cooker, the pressure cooker. You can be very creative with how you cook your meat on the carnivore diet.The key is to find the way that you enjoy it most.
Jonathan: (39:53)
Yeah. That’s actually what you should be doing. You shouldn’t be saying, I’m going to now boil all my meat because I feel like that’s the safest way. I feel like the jury’s still out on whether having charred meat is bad or not, because I think there were thousands and thousands of years of our ancestors cooking over an open fire. So it’s a tricky situation because there’s some evidence to support that you don’t want to have charred meat, but I’d say the jury’s still out and maybe new information will come about, that’ll clarify the situation. But I think you should be more focused on cooking meat in the way you enjoy. If you like frying your steak on a skillet and that’s the way you enjoy it the most, I’d say go for it.
Joané: (40:45)
Yeah. Just use butter or fat to cook it in. In one thing about the charring the meats and people being worried about carcinogens. Do you know how many different carcinogens you get? So if someone okay, you are charring, all your meat, you’re getting a lot of chemical exposure because you’re using these really strong cleaning products. The shampoo you’re using has these chemicals that seep into your body because your skin does absorb some of what you put on it. You have all of these other sources of chemicals and carcinogens in your diet, and you’re a smoker, then yeah, if you’re doing all of these things, then it might not be the best idea to char your food. But if you are making sure that the products that you are using are better for your body, that you’re not getting, um, a negative effect from that.
Joané: (41:42)
If the rest of your diet and your lifestyle is supporting your health, then having a bit of charred meat isn’t necessarily bad. But if you are the type of person, you’re not exercising, you’re not living a very healthy lifestyle. Yes, now you’re going carnivore, but the rest of your lifestyle is not very healthy and you’re only eating charred meat, then it might not be the best thing. So it’s all relative. If you’re having a bit of charred meat, but the rest of your lifestyle and your diet is very low in carcinogens, then it might not be the worst thing.
Jonathan: (42:16)
So I don’t think that you can say things are carcinogenic because these are all based on a mouse model that has been proven to be incorrect. So if you want to see where I got this information from, it’s with Joe Rogan and Eric Weinstein. His brother, Brett, actually found out that all the mice that they using for studies like, finding out if something’s carcinogenic or not, have extremely long telomeres, which basically is the cause that the mice almost always get cancer. And if you’re now testing a whole bunch of chemicals and charred meat and whatever you name it, sunscreen, whatever it is, you can almost always find that the mice will get cancer.
Joané: (43:17)
and you’re blaming whatever you were giving them. But by that logic, you can say, we gave the rat water and it got cancer because of the water. Now nobody’s allowed to drink water anymore, but they’ rat or the mouse was going to get cancer anyways. So I think maybe in the future, if they come up with better ways of testing these things, we might get more clarity. But like you said, right now, the jury is still out on carcinogens. We do think that you shouldn’t have a lot of processed meats like Vienna sausages. You don’t even know what meat is in there. It’s like a mystery meat, sausage or ham. Is it really meat? And it’s probably packed full of preservatives and other things. Maybe don’t have that, but I don’t think you should be worried about charring your meats a little bit, especially like you said, for thousands of years, man has cooked his meat over fire and if that is a way that you really like your meat, you can do that a few times a week.
Joané: (44:19)
You can do it every day. The bottom line is, find a way to cook the food in a way that you really enjoy. Whatever diet you do, if it’s carnivore diet or not, you want to make it as pleasurable and as sustainable as possible. And if you’re boiling all your food, which sounds like it really sucks, and your diet is quite bland, you’re not going to enjoy it that much. You’re not going to stick to it. You’re not going to get all the benefits from it. So the key is to really make it work for you.
Jonathan: (44:51)
Yeah. And don’t be afraid to experiment with new animal products like liver, and you might find that you actually really enjoy those things
Joané: (45:00)
And different ways of cooking food. So if you don’t like liver in some way, maybe cooking it in a different way might be more enjoyable for you. Like you recommended with mixing it with ground beef or mince or making it into a sausage.
Jonathan: (45:15)
So hopefully that answered a few of your questions about the carnivore diet. And if you have any more questions, feel free to contact us.
Joané: (45:26)
Please let us know if you do have some questions and then hopefully we’ll do another Q&A video next month or at some point.
Joané & Jonathan: (45:35)
And yeah, enjoy the rest of your day. Bye!