Sep 6, 2019
Alright everyone, we’re back,
Brian Sanders here with another episode of Peak Human where I talk
to the leading experts around the world about health, nutrition,
exercise, and how to live a long and healthy life. I’m a bit behind
this week due to the holiday and filming a couple more awesome
interviews for the Food Lies documentary. Every time I think we’re
done, I get a new opportunity to talk to an amazing
expert.
Yesterday we filmed with
Professor Craig Stanford a USC anthropologist and world-renowned
authority on primates who walked us through how savage our chimp
ancestors were and still are. It’s no vegan utopia out there with
them quietly munching on leaves and twigs. They hunt monkeys and
rip them apart and eat them with their bare hands. He also
explained the changes our bodies, brains, and digestive systems
went through as we began eating more and more nutrient dense animal
foods and became human.
Then today we hit my alma mater
UCLA completing the cross-town rivalry professor square-off and
talked to Dr. Aaron Blaisdell. He’s a powerful force in the
ancestral health space and actually co-founded the Ancestral Health
Society which puts on the Ancestral Health Symposium each year.
They bridge the gap between the science and researchers in academia
with the rest of the world. They’re basically undoing all the weak
correlations and bad epidemiology that’s been done in the last 60
years that gave red meat and saturated fat a bad name using actual
hard science. It’s a little sad that we need this group of “crazy
rebels” to show us simple facts of human evolution and animal foods
being the foundation of how we became human and continue to be the
foundation of health.
So check them out and support
the Food Lies film at http://FoodLies.org We’re on Indiegogo and you can help us finish
the film by clicking through - one more time FoodLies.org - and
pre-ordering a copy. It’s seriously the only way we can fight this
battle - which is crazy that it is turning into an actual battle
for our right to eat the healthiest foods on the planet.
Speaking of eating animal foods,
Nose to tail is going strong and it’s hard to keep all the meat in
stock. By the time you’re hearing this we should be back with some
of our signature products such as the primal ground beef with
liver, heart, kidney, and spleen mixed in. We’ve got a ton of nose
to tail cuts of beef, buffalo, lamb, pork, and chicken as well
on http://NoseToTail.org
Quick thank you to supporters on
Patreon - help the tribe survive with a few dollars there and help
us continue to stay afloat. Get the extended show notes and Slack
invite link on http://patreon.com/peakhuman
So onto the guest this week,
Chris Masterjohn, PhD. If you haven't heard of him, you should have
because he’s a force of nature when it comes to nutritional
research. He’s got a PhD in nutritional sciences and knows more
than just about anyone concerning how fat, carbs, protein,
vitamins, and minerals work in our body. He’s publishing papers,
putting out tons of great content on his site and youtube, has a
masterclass series, and is a great guy for putting up with all my
questions. I hope he wasn’t put off by this interview that I pushed
to the very last minute before his next meeting. I wanted to bring
up a lot of points that went against the standard nutritional
narrative. I think a strict carnivore diet (or victus I should say
- which is a better word than diet that I think we should be using)
is super interesting and wanted to see what he thought about it. It
gets technical in the beginning, but hold on and wait for the end,
because that’s when it really gets good. So here’s the interview, I
hope you enjoy it.
SHOW NOTES
- Chris
Masterjohn has his PhD in Nutritional Sciences
- He
runs his own online blog and programs at
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com
- Chris’ definition of nutrient density and
selecting nutrient dense foods
- The
importance of nutrient balance when considering nutrient
density
- Why
looking at nutrients per calorie isn’t that useful, for example if
you compared protein per calorie for broccoli it would be very high
but no one is going to eat that amount of calories of broccoli to
ever reach a sufficient amount of protein
- He
has a 5 tier ranking system that helps you figure out which foods
help you hit your nutrient targets for the day and which
don’t
- You
can either choose to eat foods super dense in nutrients or you can
choose to eat a lot of different foods that are moderately dense in
nutrients
- Why
he is strongly against Joel Fuhrman’s nutrient density
score
- You
want to consume all the essential nutrients well over the point of
being deficient without being near the point of having too
much
- Reaching riboflavin toxicity is unheard
of
- The
role of vitamin D in preventing leaching calcium from your
bones
- The
interactions of vitamin D with vitamin K and vitamin A in
preventing calcification in soft-tissues (ie. anything but bones
and teeth)
- If
you don’t balance vitamin D with vitamins A and K you may be at
risk for soft-tissue calcification (e.g. kidney stones) and this is
a danger of having too much vitamin D
- You
can read about is theory here:
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition/from-seafood-to-sunshine-a-new-understanding-of-vitamin-d-safety/
- Animal foods with vitamins A and K: 4-8oz of
liver per week, cod liver oil, egg yolks, full-fat dairy products
(you won’t get enough vitamin A and K with dairy and egg yolks
alone)
- Plant
foods with vitamin A: red/orange/yellow/green vegetables have
vitamin A in the form of carotenoids that needs to be converted
into the form in animal foods which is retinol, these are good
sources of vitamin A but many people have poor conversion rates,
there are also other factors that can interfere with the
conversion
- Two
main forms of vitamin K: K1 (in plants - fermented foods like
sauerkraut or natto) and K2 (in animals - fermented dairy (cheese,
yogurt), liver, egg yolks, meat, etc.)
- Non-fermented animal foods have MK4 that
appears to have unique and essential roles in humans
- Most
people are bad at converting vitamin K to MK4 therefore it’s a good
insurance policy to get vitamin K from animal foods
- The
dropout rate of vegans is very high
- Carnivore shares a lot in common with veganism
by cutting out a whole group of foods and the risks are the same
because you are cutting out certain nutrient
profiles
- You
are vulnerable to getting too much of something on the carnivore
diet
- Why
eating too much protein could be bad
- Carnivores are also vulnerable to not getting
enough manganese and vitamin C
- There’s no longitudinal data on carnivore diets
and the life-long effects and there is no human population that
traditionally eats a carnivore diets
- Weston Price looked for vegans and only found
cannibals:
https://www.westonaprice.org/weston-price-looked-for-vegans-but-found-only-cannibals/
- All
traditional diets emphasize animal products for health but they
also all eat plants
- Even
at the extremes of the arctic where plants barely grow, they try
very hard to get plants
- Theoretically, if you insist on being carnivore
then the best way to avoid nutrient deficiencies you would need to
eat nose to tail, there are no nutrients you can’t
get
- What
is in an animal’s tissues is a snapshot of what that animal needed
in that tissue at the time it died
- Eating nose to tail and shellfish (especially
mussels for manganese) and eating fish is probably going to prevent
you from nutrient deficiencies if carnivore
- Risk
of not getting enough vitamin C
- Solutions to acid-base issues on
carnivore
- There
are no populations that were chronically keto
- If
you look at the anthropological spread of traditional diets across
the globe correlates strongly with latitude, the maximum plant
consumption is at the equator and the further you go from the
equator the more animal products are consumed
- Plant
foods availability goes down and down as you move from the equator
and Chris believes this is the main thing that has driven more
animal foods in the diet
- Even
when plant foods are maximally abundant, no one has chosen to eat
all plants
- Calorie availability was probably the driver of
food choices
- Canadian Natives prevented scurvy by eating the
adrenal glands of moose
- All
cultures were either seeking plant foods or obscure parts of the
animal that were more nutrient dense that you could usually get
from plants like vitamin C
- The
default for humans is neither vegan or carnivore
- We
have protein needs and you can choose carbs and fats in a way that
provides micronutrients, fits your lifestyle, and in a way you
won’t overeat
- The
physiological requirements for glucose are only low if you are
keto-adapted
- Chris
does not believe you need less vitamin C if you aren’t eating
carbohydrates (i.e. the theory that glucose and vitamin C compete
for the same transporter)
- Carbs
are generally going to improve vitamin C
recycling
- Plant
polyphenols are toxins that we have co-evolved throughout animal
evolution and we are adapted to them and learned how to exploit
them to increase our defences without allowing them to cause
toxicity - it increases our defences enough to make it a net
positive
- Anything that’s hormetic is only hormetic in
the hormetic range and then it’s toxic
- People that react to plants and go carnivore
probably have genetic problems with their defense
mechanisms
- For
most of us, plants and vegetables are hormetic
- We
know mechanistically what molecules in plants do and how they
benefit us
- Chris' site http://chrismasterjohnphd.com