Carnivore Diet | How to Start the Carnivore Diet with Doctor & Orthopedic Surgeon Shawn Baker? “When I Just Eat Mostly Better I Feel So Much Better.” – Joe Rogan + Watch The Joe Rogan Experience #2069 / Interview with Doctor Shawn Baker (Nov. 2023)

Audio Transcription

What’s up, John? Good to see you. Good to be back, Joe. You’re still alive. You’ve been eating nothing but meat, and you’re still alive. I am still alive. Doubters be gone. Yeah, yeah. When I just eat mostly meat, I feel so much better. I mean, maybe it’s anecdotal. Maybe it’s just me and you, and many other people that do it. But there’s something to it. But you’re an extreme example, because you have been doing it now for how many years? So I’m starting my eighth year. So just just a year. Yes. When I came to see you last time, it was almost six years ago. So I had just finished seven years now. So yeah, it’s been a while. And people should know that you’re you’re actually a doctor. You’re an orthopedic surgeon. And you didn’t didn’t at one point in time, they took your license away because you were providing medical information, but you got it back. Yeah, it was kind of an interesting thing. So when I was practicing medicine, busy orthopedic surgeon, plugging away, doing the thing, and then I started realizing, hey, I can have people avoid surgery by changing their diet and their pain went away. I was like, you don’t need surgery. Well, that is not what hospitals want you to do. They want you to keep the engines turning, so to speak. And so I said, hey, look, I want to practice some lifestyle stuff.” That ended up leading to a long battle with myself in the hospital. The hospital basically suspended my privileges and went to the state. The state said, hey, you can fight this in our state medical board situation or you can get independently evaluated. I said, well, let me just get independently evaluated because I don’t see eye to eye with the hospital. So that was done. It was like right at the time when I saw you a couple of days before. And they came back and said, there’s nothing wrong with you, go back to work. So I got that. I got that. And then I had to reapply to the board, reapply for a license. They granted my license. And I’ve renewed it three times since then. So I’m a licensed medical, licensed doctor. But right now I’m not actually actively practicing because I got frustrated with the medical system. I think our health care system has some serious, serious problems, some serious conflicts of interest, some serious I think the incentives for providing what I think is appropriate health care is misaligned. And so over the last few years we set up a company which is called Rivero and we’re licensed in all 50 states. We have physicians all across the country and we’re basically set up to provide what I call actual health care, root cause medicine, get people off the medications, actually try and fix their disease and not just medicate everybody because we have such a system where everybody is just like, you go to the doctor, here’s your diagnosis, here’s your drugs, stay on them the rest of your life, which I think is the wrong course. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. What’s the name of the company? So the company is called Revero, R-E-V-E-R-O. We raise a bunch of money from crowdfunding and also a bunch of venture capitalists. We’ve been basically building that. We’ve got thousands of people that are basically on the waiting list. We launch in a couple of weeks. Like I said, it’s going to be something that I think will provide healthcare as it should be. Instead of, like I said, just the symptom management, putting band-aids on stuff, actually getting people healthy. I think a lot of these diseases are reversible. We’ve seen that all the time. We see that pretty frequently. In fact, there was a study done out of Harvard University two years ago. I don’t know if you saw that. So there’s a guy named David Ludwig who is a senior author. And David, I’ve talked to him, he is the most ethical, just like he does not want any money from industry. He refuses to take anything. He’s like, I want to make sure I do pure science. And they did a study and they looked at 2,000 people on a carnivore diet and basically what they saw was 95% of the people, significant improvement across the board. The thing that was interesting to me was that diabetics, we had like 225 diabetics in that population, 92% of them came off all of our insulin. These are all type 2’s. That’s insane. 100% came off all these other injectable drugs. The GLP-1 receptor agonist, which we’ve heard so much about lately, the Ozempex and things like that. Semaglutide. Semaglutide, right. Came off something called the PCSK9 inhibitor, no sorry, the SGLT2 inhibitors. 84% came off their metformin. So it’s just like, this is clearly a, at least at the very least, a therapeutic tool. And that’s how I push this. I don’t tell, like, you know, I wrote a book on this. I didn’t say humans are carnivores. I said humans are opportunistic omnivores. If we were living in the Middle Ages and we came across, we’re out hunting mammoths and all of a sudden, you know, the ice ages were out. And we came across a tree full of Twinkies. I mean, we’d eat that. We’d try to eat it, right? Because you know we would. And you know, there’s obviously people that eat plants that aren’t dead and are doing okay, so we’re omnivores. But from a disease mitigation standpoint, a therapeutic carnivore diet is tremendously effective. It’s one of the more effective things I’ve seen across the board. So at the very least, you’d say, let’s explore that aspect of it. Because like I said, there’s people that are suffering. We’ve got so many people. I know we may talk about vegan, carnivore, everything in between, but I think at the end of the day, everybody’s eating processed garbage. We’re just eating bullshit. And that is really one of the problems. And the one thing, and you said this, Joe, when you eat this meat, you’re like, I don’t want that other bullshit because you’re actually satiated. This is the thing that’s problematic because if you look at, there’s a study that just came out now looking at the financial incentive for ultra-processed food. Why do we have this stuff? So you look at the big asset management groups. You’ve got BlackRock, you’ve got Vanguard, you’ve got State Street and Capital. I can’t remember the full names of these, but those guys collectively own huge portions of Nestle, Pepsico, all these other processed food companies. They also have significant shares in pharmaceutical manufacturers. So you basically sicken the population by feeding them garbage and then you profit on their disease. I think that’s what’s going on. I think it’s really unfortunate. Some people make an argument, is there a net benefit from feeding more people versus how many people are getting sick? I think there’s a point where the line goes, if most people are getting sick from this and only a few people are benefiting, then you’ve kind of crossed that line of is it for the greater good? It becomes the realm of almost evil in my mind. I went to those guys, to the beef checkoff, and I said, hey look, we want to spend a little bit of money to do a study on beef versus diabetes, because we know the results are going to be. The people are going to go on an all meat diet, or close to all meat diet, their diabetes is going to go away. It’s simple, and it takes all the confusion out. Because whenever you do a, you know, you hear all these dietary studies, it’s like, oh, but he was eating hamburgers and french fries, and there’s all this confounders. So it’s like, you can’t really test it. I’m like, the perfect way to test if meat is healthy or not is to just put them on a damn carnivore diet and see what happens. It’s the only way to test it. Right, right. Because if you do an epidemiology study and you don’t account for sugar, sugary tract, Coca-Cola, bread, pasta, lasagna. That’s exactly, that’s what Harvard did recently. They didn’t account for sugar intake when they said beef causes diabetes. I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re not even counting sugar? That’s so crazy. Right, but they get this published and this is really bad science. Guys like John Anaitis, who is one of the most cited scientists in the world, has basically said all this epidemiology we’re doing, we’re just wasting money. It’s not telling us anything. This is all garbage. But they keep doing it over and over again because they generate headlines. The headlines they want. But anyway, back to this beef checkoff thing. So I said, hey look, every year you award money, hundreds of thousands, tens of millions of dollars to promote beef. I said, let’s get a little bit of money to do a research study on diabetes. And they literally said, no, we’re not interested in doing that. And I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. The beef industry is taking a beating right now. You know, you listen to it, it’s like, you know, everybody wants to get rid of beef. The cow farts are boiling in the oceans and, you know, it’s going to kill you, it’s going to give you cancer, which all of this is largely nonsense. In my view, this type of study would clearly, clearly demonstrate that not only does beef not cause diabetes, in fact I talked to the CEO of the NCBA two years ago, I sat down and I presented in front of the California Cattlemen’s Association and literally the President of the Association stood up and said, I went on a carnivore diet and it cured my diabetes. It’s like, yeah, it’s clear. And the guy said, yeah, I get it, we’re going to help you out, we’re going to get this going. I didn’t hear, I heard nothing from these guys. So what I think is going on is the USDA kind of oversees all these checkoffs and they just kind of say, look, you can’t say that because we want to promote, you know, because again, they have all these processed food lobbies and Nabisco and PepsiCo sitting on the, you know, they’re on the board and they’re like, if we promote this one food and people stop eating all this processed food, right, then what are we going to do? We’re going to lose a lot of money. You think about it, you know, not that I’m advocating that everybody going to carnivore die, because I don’t think that’s necessary for one, but if you significantly cut back on all those people consuming all this garbage, what does that do economically to this country? Think about how much money is spent on garbage food, the drugs that are needed for treatment. We spend $4.3 trillion a year on health care in this country, and what do we get for it? We got one of the sickest populations in the world, our life expectancy is going down, everybody’s fat, everybody’s depressed, everybody’s on drugs. It’s crazy. It is crazy and it’s crazy that they don’t look to diet as being the primary cause of that or if they do, they look to these epidemiology studies that don’t take into account exactly what you’re eating with the meat. Why is it meat that’s always demonized? Well, I think for a number of reasons one if you go back to like Dietetics in the beginning like back in 1917 the American Dietetics Association was formed This was formed literally by seventh-day Adventists. So that from the very very beginning the creation of the nutrition science field These seven-day Adventists who are you know, religiously registered vegetarians, you know, you go back to like the Kellogg’s brothers You know, John Harvey Kellogg where he’s out there circumcising females and saying, we can’t eat meat because it’s going to make you have sex and make you have lust and masturbate. This is all like this religious stuff. People don’t know that, but they should know that he developed this cereal, this bland cereal to discourage masturbation, which is one of the wildest things I have ever heard. Yeah, that guy was a wacko, man. He was in there fucking giving himself like high pressure enemas every day. It was like fucking 20 gallons a minute enemas. Because he thought that was something. Really? Yeah, he was a wacko. He was a really nutty guy. You read about some of his stuff. 20 gallon enemas? It was some ridiculous like super high capacity like a soaper soaker on steroids thing. Are enemas bad for you? Because I’ve always wondered if your internal gut flora is important, and it is, isn’t that getting washed out? I think to some degree it is. I don’t know that anybody’s really looked at it from that angle, but I think in some cases, like some people’s got some problems with constipation, it could be helpful, but I don’t think it’s generally a healthy practice for most. I know there’s people that are putting weird stuff up their butt, man, it’s just kind of like a thing. I think it probably feels good. It might, yeah. It might flushed out. It might. But it also makes you see everything come out of you, I guess. I’ve never done it, but apparently there’s a tube and they look at it and go, oh, look, here’s your problems. Yeah, it’s kind of like these, there’s this thing these crazy vegans do where they consume like this charcoal and this jelly and stuff, this kind of gruel mix, and then it kind of like fills up their intestines and they poop it all out and they say, that’s clearing out all my intestines. I can’t remember what they call it, but it’s like there’s these crazy, crazy videos where they’re just pulling all this gelatinous black stuff out of their butt, but it’s like you just ate all that stuff. That’s what’s coming out of you. It’s not like… Oh, look at all the toxins. Exactly. You just ate that, stupid. You just ate the same toxins. People are obsessed with that term, like releasing the toxins. They really think that that’s what’s going on You know what clears your toxins your fucking liver. Yeah, that’s what that thing’s for. Yeah liver kidneys Yeah, we got a pretty good detox system for sure. You don’t need all the smoothie Juice fast detoxes, you know, it’s like somebody people are detoxing when their teeth fall off. They’re detoxing their teeth Well, the other thing is with the smoothie thing is my god You’re getting so much sugar and you’re getting it in a weird form. If you’re eating fruit smoothies, you’re getting sugar in a very unnatural form. Fruit juices, we used to think that fruit juices are really good for you. Most doctors would agree that fruit juices are very high in sugar. And to get it in that sort of liquid dose where it just goes right into your bloodstream and your liver, that’s a lot of sugar, man. Well you think about it, because Joe, you’re out hunting all the time. When you’re going out and you’re like, if I had to get food out here, what would I have available to eat? I can tell you what you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have all this processed food, but particularly like powder. We make powdered sugar, we make powdered flour, and we combine them together, but we’ve changed the nature of the food so much that it’s interesting. I saw Darius Mouzafarian, who’s a researcher at Tuff, too, he’s the guy that put out the study that says, or was part of the study that said, you know, like, lucky charms are healthier than eggs. You saw that last year. That’s total BS, right? Hilarious. But one thing he did point out was that, like, over the last 20 years or so, we haven’t really been eating much more calories than we were. Like, from the 1960s to about 2000, we ate more calories, and maybe that explains why everybody got fat. But since that time, we really haven’t eaten much more. But we’ve eaten so much more ultra-processed food. In fact, right now the U.S. diet is close to 70% ultra-processed. What do you think about that? It’s like crazy. Our kids are getting fat. But one thing that’s interesting is like, because you’re talking about the microbiome, right? Our gut flora. When you eat like whole food, you know, it goes farther down your digestive tract. And then, you know, our microbiome actually consumes them. Up to 22% of our calories can be consumed by our microbiome. But when you’re just eating sugar, it goes straight in you. So those calories, your gut microbiome doesn’t get any of that. It’s like you’re absorbing more calories. So just by changing the quality of the food, you’re changing how many calories you absorb. And that is what some people say is part of what leads to this obesity thing. But we know, for instance, well here’s another thing, USDA came out with a study like three months ago, 91% processed food diet is healthy. You know, this is what they’re pushing, trying to get us, because they’re trying to position us to say. What was this study? This was USDA put it out, it was probably, I think it was the NOVA study, I think I’ve got, I might have that on there, Jamie, but it’s basically because there’s starting to be backlash against ultra-processed fruits. South America is starting to ban this stuff. I’m not for banning food. I think that gets into freedom of choice and things like that. So you shouldn’t ban. Just like you can still smoke if you want to. You know it’s not the best for you, so you don’t want to do that. But at the same point, they’re saying this stuff is, there’s a lot of backlash. People like myself and probably you and others are saying, look, this ultra-processed garbage is literally killing us. It’s making us crazy. It’s making us depressed. All these people with mental health disorders, a lot of that nutrition is part of that and we can talk about that. But what they’re seeing is there’s a backlash against that. Yeah, so that’s the NOVA stuff. Dietary guidelines meet NOVA, developing a menu for a healthy dietary pattern using ultra-processed foods. Yeah, so they’re basically saying, hey, how do we make people eat more processed food and make it quote-unquote healthy? And they showed that they could make a diet that’s like 91% ultra-processed foods and still be quote-unquote healthy. Look at what it says here. It says, the purpose of this proof of concept study was to determine the feasibility of building a menu that aligns with the recommendations for a healthy dietary pattern from the 2020 DGA and includes a over 80%… What is that? K-C-A-L? Kilo calories. Kilo calories from UPF, ultra processed foods as defined by NOVA, designed to accomplish this objective. We first developed a list of foods that fit NOVA criteria for UPF, ultra processed foods, fit within a dietary patterns in the 2020 DGA and are commonly consumed by Americans. We then use these foods to develop a 7-day, 2000 kcal menu modeled on the My Pyramid sample menus and assessed this menu for nutrient content as well as for diet quality using the Healthy Eating Index. The results in the Ultra Process DGA menu that that was created 91 percent of the kilocalories were from ultra-processed food or NOVA category 4. The HEI 215 score was 86 out of a possible 100 points. The sample menu did not achieve a perfect score due primarily to excess sodium and an insufficient amount of whole grains. This menu provided adequate amounts of all macro and micronutrients except vitamin D, vitamin E, and choline. Conclusions, healthy dietary patterns can include most of their energy from ultra-processed foods, still receive a high diet quality score, and contain adequate amounts of most macro and micronutrients. Boy. Right, so remember, USDA, the guys that go there, they leave USDA and they go sit on the board of directors at Nabisco and PepsiCo. So this is really, I think what this is, is positioning us as a society to accept that ultra-processed foods are our food. It’s really human pet food. You see what happens to our pets and everybody’s fat, so we’re going to say, well, it’s okay. It’s okay if you eat your human dog chow or your human chow. Just keep doing that. Don’t ask questions. And oh, by the way, here’s an exemplic shot or a semi-glutide shot, or a semi-agglutide shot we’ll give you to kind of keep you chilled out So it’s really I mean, it’s almost sinister in a way. It’s very bizarre It’s very bizarre This isn’t challenged and that shows you how captured our food industry really is The fact that that’s not challenged the fact that our health guidelines aren’t set on Hey, what you should be eating is what human beings are designed to eat in nature. Which is real food. Well, I mean, my opinion on dietary guidelines, because we have a USDA that meets every five years, and by the way, USDA dietary guidelines, did you see there’s a physician from Harvard named Fatima Stanford, right? She went on 60 Minutes and said, obesity has nothing to do with diet. It has nothing to do with exercise. It’s all disease and genetic and there’s nothing you can literally do. And she’s also sponsored by Nova Nordisk, who makes Ozempic, right? And she’s on there. She’s also a member of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Panel. So 95% of the people that sit on the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Panel today, for this next one when they’re going to come up with 2025 guidelines, all have financial ties to processed food companies. This is crazy. So if you go to Brazil, Brazil’s dietary guidelines, or at least one they released a few years ago, it was like, here’s what you should do. Cook at home, don’t eat processed foods, and eat with people around that you love. That is their recommendation, which I think is better than our guidelines. I mean, if left to our own, you know, I mean, we are now being told we’ve got to eat all this garbage and it’s just making us, it’s just making us sick. this garbage and it’s just making us, it’s just making us sick. It’s crazy.