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00:00

Coming up on today's show. If we take those 300,000 years, we put them on a 24-hour clock. The first 23 hours, we don't see cavities in the fossil record. We don't see periodontal disease in the fossil record. We don't see malocclusion in the fossil record. We don't really see abscesses in the fossil record. But something happens one hour ago on that timeline, and that's the agricultural revolution. And so that's where we move from hunter-gatherers to farmers, more or less, cultivating crops. And we see this dramatic rise in carbohydrates and grains in the diet. What we see with that is

00:26

dramatic increase in cavities in the fossil record. With these changes, the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, technological revolution, we see progressively detriments to our oral health. I look at the evidence in our mouth and our teeth and our jaw and things like that, and it all points towards a meat-based diet. If we were meant to eat a carbohydrate-based diet, high carbs shouldn't be riding all our teeth out.

00:45

Right there's just like natural incongruence there. There's all these cultural anecdotes of liver being treasured and prized and this is a super food. And other ones like, we're throwing this to the dogs and the peasants. What is going on here? So if you eat liver every day, day in and day out, you can bioaccumulate vitamin A. So you're storing it. No fiber. I've done fantastic for years. And so I don't think it's a necessary ingredient. It's a non-essential macronutrient for a reason. We don't need it.

01:14

Kevin, as a dentist, what does it look like to eat for optimal oral health? Well, I appreciate the question because a lot of times, you know, if I'm on a podcast, I'll ask questions about, you know, what kind of toothpaste should you use? What kind of toothbrush, mouthwash, all this stuff. And I'm like, my focus is like,

01:31

you know, that stuff's important, kind of like the icing on the cake layer. But like, I like to focus on like the cake, the prevention, like, why do we need, you know, all these procedures and things like that. And at the core is diet. And so for the mouth, I think it's

01:47

key to understand what causes like oral decay. So you can kind of back your way into like, or oral health problems in general, not only cavities, and then back your way into the answer instead of just taking my word for it. So we know like, it's not disputed how cavities, you know, happen. Bacteria in the mouth ferment carbohydrates, fermentable carbohydrates into acids that eat holes through your enamel and cause

02:12

that cause cavities. So it doesn't happen with proteins, it doesn't happen with fats, it only happens with carbohydrates, fermentable carbohydrates. And it's the worst with sugars, refined grains, things with larger surface areas and things that tend to spike your blood sugar. And we can talk about like why, something called dental fluid transport and how that impacts all kinds of internal tooth factors that leads to decay. But in essence, a lower carbohydrate diet is gonna be better for oral health, as well as a diet that has

02:41

a full kind of compliment of nutrients. What I mean by that is both the macronutrients, it's important to have the proteins and the fats, as well as the micronutrients, the specific vitamins and minerals that are gonna fortify your teeth. - You mentioned there talking about carbohydrates and these bacteria in the mouth, they ferment them, creates acid that erodes the teeth. The way I understand it, there's two different ways to create acidity in the mouth. That's one of them.

03:11

And then if we're having something acidic in and of itself, we can kind of hijack and skip that step of the bacteria fermenting. Is that correct? - That's correct. So basically one of the worst things you can do for your teeth is drink sugar, regular sodas. And so sodas are, they have phosphoric acid. Other drinks have like citric acid. These very, like you said, it's acid inherent in the consumption of the food itself.

03:38

which will drop the pH of the mouth, would make it more acidic and make it more prone to cavities. But these sugar drinks also have the sugar, which is going to be fermented into acids. And then lastly, when you're drinking like a drink, you're not chewing. And chewing stimulates saliva, which helps buffer these acids. So when you're drinking like sugar drinks, it's basically the worst of all possible situations for your teeth.

04:04

You shared a term there early on that I hadn't heard of before, dentin fluid transport. Talk about what that is. Something called dentin fluid flow. So the way to think about this is, well, the gist of it and how it kind of leads to cavities. When you spike your blood sugar, a hormonal system has to cause the parotid gland to work appropriately as well as this fluid flow through your teeth.

04:32

And so the way to think about this is your teeth are composed of these little tubules,

04:37

And a healthy tooth will sweat, if you will. The fluid is moving out. And that's going to keep the bacteria and things that are going to make your teeth sick off the tooth, right? It's going to cause it to not adhere. When you spike your blood sugar, that fluid transport stops and can even reverse. And so that's essentially dehydrating the tooth. And so bacteria and plaque are going to cling to the tooth more tightly. And so you have that with the fermentable bacteria.

05:05

bacteria fermenting the carbohydrates on top of the tooth, and that sets up the table for oral decay. Okay, so just so I'm clear on that, this happens when we spike the blood sugar, and it causes the tooth to not sweat in our simple terms. Exactly. In simple terms, that's what it does. It changes. And so, yeah, the hormonal, the parotid hormone, um,

05:32

normal signal gets disrupted by the elevated insulin signal. And so basically it's that insulin, the spiking of blood glucose and spiking of insulin, which is going to interfere with the parotid hormone that we need to have the proper fluid flowing through the teeth in the right direction to keep your teeth sweating. Well, let's talk about the spectrum of what you'd consider the proper human diet. Obviously, carbohydrates are a factor like you've talked about.

06:02

I'm assuming there's a spectrum there of allowing versus all the way to carnivore. Talk about what that is if we want thriving oral health. Thanks for bringing that back around. I really never even answered like your original question. So I like to look at this in terms of

06:20

I like to zoom out big from an anthropological perspective. And you can look at the human diet over time. And I think this is super important because when you do that, you realize these…

06:35

oral health problems that are so prevalent today. Cavity is the most common disease in the world. Almost 50% of adults in the US have periodontal disease. We can talk more about what that is, but basically it's your bone being eaten away. Like the bone that holds your teeth in is being eaten away. It's happening with 50% of adults in the United States. Like that's like a serious thing that's going on. But these are modern day phenomenon. And

06:56

in the arc of human history, like these things have happened very recently and it's directly attributed to our diet. So that's why I like to, I think understanding of first principles, um,

07:06

ancestral diet is important. And it doesn't mean you have to eat exactly like your ancestors ate, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, but understanding what they did eat that allowed for healthy mouths and healthy bodies and the changes that happened that led to unhealthy mouths and unhealthy bodies. I think that's the important place to start. So that's the caveat to this long answer. So if we zoom out and I,

07:31

We could talk about all of human history. We could talk about just Homo sapien history, but all of human history is basically will ballpark at 3 million years. Homo sapiens about 300,000 years. So 10% of human Homo, the genus is Homo sapiens. Now, if we just look at Homo sapiens, so we zoom into the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, we'll see for the first 90%, excuse me, let's just, let's make this easy. This is an analogy I like to use. If we take those 300,000 years, we put them on a 24 hour clock.

08:00

The first 23 hours on that clock, we don't see cavities in the fossil record. We don't see periodontal disease in the fossil record. We don't see malocclusion in the fossil record. We don't really see abscesses in the fossil record. But something happens one hour ago on that timeline, which is 10,000 years ago, 10,000 to 12,000. And that's the agricultural revolution. And so that's where we move from hunter-gatherers to…

08:22

farmers more or less cultivating crops and we see this dramatic rise in carbohydrates and grains in the diet what we and what we see with that is dramatic increase in cavities in the fossil record now i'll zoom forward a little bit more if we go to the industrial revolution which is basically one minute ago on our 24-hour timeline that's when we start milling and processing foods that's where we get our refined grains and such and then like one second we have the i'll say the technologic revolution that's where we have things like the seed oils and things like that and

08:51

With these changes, the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, technological revolution, we see progressively detriments to our oral health. So with that context in mind, before the agricultural revolution, for 23 hours on that 24-hour timeline, we were hunter-gatherers. And the evidence really supports that we were heavy meat-based. And so we would be eating lots of basically the fattiest animals we can, basically.

09:20

Well, we can dive more into this, like where you like, but basically we hunted down the fat is the biggest, largest animals. And they kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller, which actually drove the need for including more plant-based foods, which I think, uh, underground storage organs, tubers roots, uh, played a significant role, especially with the advent of fire. Um, seasonal fruits would have played a role, but a much smaller role, uh, in my opinion, based on my understanding of the, you know, the anthropological record, uh,

09:48

And so the basic human diet is this, like animal foods, primarily fallback roots and tubers, opportunistic seasonal fruits. And so to me, that's like our baseline. Everything that comes after the agricultural revolution doesn't mean you can't have grains and things like that. For example, dairy, I think is an extremely interesting issue. By issue, I mean like

10:13

learning lesson, meaning that lactase persistence propagated very quickly after the agricultural revolution, which in the various European ancestry. And so people that can drink milk and have lactase persistence, we can talk more about all the details of this, but to me, it's a very important evolutionary signal that that was a very important food. So some people can do well with dairy, but I think

10:38

The basic human diet, the foundation should be the meat primary, fallback, roots, tubers, seasonal fruits. And then after the agricultural revolution, things get more complex.

10:51

detail based on ancestry. So some people can do fine with milk, dairy products. Other people can't do that at all. Some people can do better with rice, for example, versus other people. So I would say that's the gist, if that made sense. I threw a lot at you there. No, that was great. And I think it's important we go all the way back and pick at this and get into the details. One thing I always think of when we start talking about hundreds of thousands of years and hunting and gathering is

11:20

for a lot of carnivores, and I believe including yourself from what I've heard you talk on other podcasts, a big part of the diet is beef from cows. And when we look at that evolutionary timeline, I'm always curious, and I've never gotten a great answer on this, when cows come into the picture versus, say, a couple hundred thousand years ago when I'm assuming that was an animal that's been

11:49

And again, I'm no expert in this, so I don't want to make assumptions, but bred by humans to be, you know, a slow animal that is contained in a food source that is likely a descendant from our original sources. And why that becomes particularly interesting is because a lot of the carnivores, again, including yourself, are relying on that as a food source, such a high portion of the calories they're consuming.

12:18

So do you have any idea when the cow came into the picture and how you feel about that from an evolutionary perspective, being such a major role in today's carnivore community?

12:30

That's a great question. And so I'll back into that answer again, because I just think it helps for people's understanding sake is one reason I focus on beef and not, let's just say chicken and pork. Chicken and pigs are monogastrics. And so if you feed a monogastric a diet of soy and corn, basically a species inappropriate diet, that is translated into their fat. So chicken fat and pork fat is…

12:59

much more unsaturated, has a higher amount of polyunsaturated fats. And there's this whole big anti-seed oil movement, which I'm behind it. I'm with that 100%. But these monogastric fats more resemble that kind of fat than a ruminant who, even if you grain finish a cow, it's going to spend most of its life on grass, but then it's grain finished to fatten it up.

13:23

Because of its particular digestive tract, it's a rumen. Cow has numerous complex stomachs that saturate the fat. So it doesn't get unsaturated. And so that's why I focus on beef myself. Lamb is also a ruminant. Elk is also a ruminant. Just beef is prevalent here in the United States as well as in a lot of other places. So that's why I focus on beef. And then related is…

13:52

that cow, ideally it's, you know, eating a hundred percent grass fed grass finished is a cow eating its appropriate diet, et cetera. Like that's ideal. Um, it's not that much different than if it's finished on grain, nutritionally speaking, there is some differences, but it's not like black and white. It's not nearly as significant of the monogastrics. Um,

14:15

And so a grass-fed, grass-finished cow, ancestrally, even though we've cultivated these cows, right? Like that's part of the agricultural revolution, is very similar, nutritionally speaking, to…

14:29

if we were taking down a woolly mammoth. And the biggest difference there is the, the woolly mammoth would have had a far greater percentage of fat. So when we were hunting down woolly mammoths, uh, we, we were eating very high fat, um, moderate protein, uh, and,

14:47

And the nutrients in that woolly mammoth would have been not that different than a cow grass-fed grass finish today. The biggest difference would have been in the total fat of that animal. So that's why I focus on beef because the relation to an ancestrally appropriate diet is the most consistent. Now, if we look at things like

15:06

I think chicken is a great example. I kind of equate chicken like with fruit. So, and what I mean by that is like chickens have been specially bred, like they're small animals and they've been specially bred and fed to grow fat fast and

15:22

and it's kind of unnatural, like how big they are, these chickens. Similarly, we can kind of do that with fruit. Like we specialty, especially breed them so that they're big, lots of sugar and not so much of the inedible stuff. Or if you look at like wild fruits, you're like, they're small, there's,

15:40

filled with seeds. If you look at a picture of like a wild banana versus like the cultivated banana, they're very different. Like a wild banana is like not even edible. So it's a similar kind of analogy from chicken to like fruits. And so…

15:53

I just think having that in mind doesn't mean you can't eat fruit, but it is different than ancestral fruit. Most fruit is quite different than ancestral fruit. Doesn't mean you can't eat chicken, but like the chicken, like conventional chicken is quite different than like a chicken that would like eat a natural diet. But cows, even if they're grain finished, are closer to an animal nutrition content that we would have gotten ancestrally.

16:22

To me, as you're explaining all that, it sounds like there's two different issues when it comes to animals like pigs and chickens, the diet they're eating, and then the way they've been bred. I just want to make sure we get into the details here before we move on. If we know the pig or the chicken is having its ancestral diet, it sounds like, but I'll have you confirm, to you that's still an inferior food regardless.

16:49

In theory, I'd use very cautiously because when you eat chickens, there's certain nutrients that are higher. Like we said, well, you said if it's a fed, it's an appropriate diet. It's

17:01

I would say it's fine, but a chicken-fed is real diet is small. A pig is a better example. It's still a big animal at least. So it is definitely better, but there's certain nutrients in these animals that are higher than in beef. And so by eating a variety of animals, you more or less

17:20

I don't want to say you could offset, but you get a, there, there might be more nutrients in various things like thiamine, for example, which is a B vitamin. You can get more of that in chicken than you will in beef. Now it's not going to, let's not say not getting enough of you're just eating beef, but I also don't want to just say, Hey, don't ever eat chicken or pork. Like I think these are very, chicken is one of the most nutrient things that most people eat on a daily basis. The other thing that I can say, the most nutritious thing,

17:48

the standard American eats on a given day or week is a hamburger. And it's like, it's 'cause that's like the small piece of like actual nutrition they get throughout the week, like some actual beef. So I'm not sure if I answered that question completely, but going on a tangent on you. - No, that's good. I wanna bring fish and seafood in now. Is that part of your diet? And do you feel like there's anything special

18:17

Omega-3s or otherwise, people get through that. So it's not a significant part of my diet. And for people that live coastal and can get fresh seafood and it's not, there's all kinds of problems with seafood because of human intervention, like all the pollution and the heavy metals that can accumulate in these fish and then pass on to yourself, like

18:42

it's difficult to get high quality seafood. So that's as well as I live in St. Louis, Missouri. I live in the middle of the United States. So I'm not coastal. So things are having to be like shipped in and things like that. So it's not a big part of my diet. It can be a significant part of someone's diet and they can do great. But I think sourcing it plays a big role. But also the like omega-3s,

19:04

You don't, you're going to get all the omega-3 you need and just land animals. You don't have to go out of your way to get fish, in my opinion, to get those. There's conflicting, you know, good and bad things about these unsaturated fats. Like omega-3 fatty acids are extremely unsaturated fats. They go, they oxidize very easily. So that's where we start talking about quality and getting fresh food and things like that, where, you know,

19:29

If you're eating like fish oil supplements, I do not recommend fish oil supplements for almost anyone because omega-3 fats, like we talk about these omega-6 fatty acids, which we want to avoid for sure. But omega-3 fats are even more unsaturated. They have more double bonds between the carbons. And so they oxidize even easier. So you just have to be careful with quality when it comes to seafood. So for somebody not supplementing with the fish oil or omega-3s,

19:55

You said that we could get enough from, it sounded like eating beef and eating a healthy, what we're talking about here, a healthy diet. If somebody is relying on conventional beef as their primary source of protein and fat, will they get enough omega-3s through that or do they need the grass-fed, grass-finished? You'll get enough omega-3s. I think as simple as that. There's two things when it comes to people, when you discuss omega-3 and omega-6, and that is the total amount that you need, which is

20:26

negligible i'm not negligible it's a small small total amount and then it's the ratios so the ratio today with the modern diet is hugely skewed towards omega-6 fatty acids 28 times the amount of omega-6 fatty acids as omega-3s and that imbalance can cause issues uh as well as i would say the quantity i think the quantity of omega-6 is like the real big issue uh even more so than the ratio disturbance all right so when it comes to supplements we know fish oil is out

20:55

You mentioned you lived in Missouri, very seasonal area there. Are you supplementing with vitamin D in the winter? Or how do you feel about vitamin D specifically? It's a super interesting question. It's still something I'm, all this stuff I'm always researching. And so I don't want to say anything is ever final. But I just did an interesting experiment. And I'll tell a little bit about it to highlight some of the vitamin D, my thoughts around vitamin D.

21:24

One is so I was I just finished basically a two year where I did 18 months where I bulked up. So I increased the food I was eating for 18 months. I put on like 35 pounds and I did a six month cut. So I'm pretty skinny right now. People probably see it in my face if they're watching the video. I got lean over the last six months and I did this all in the same three foods, beef, milk and eggs, raw milk. And I got blood work at the end of the 18 month bulk. So that was this past February.

21:54

and my vitamin D was low. And it kind of made sense to me. I was just coming out of a long Missouri winter. I was also fattening up. So as I was fattening up, those larger adipocytes, fat cells, have even more room to sequester vitamin D. And so it kind of made sense that my vitamin D was low. And I hypothesized at the time. I was like, I'm about to do a six-month cut. So we're going into the St. Louis summer. I'm going to lose the fat. I think that alone is going to bring my vitamin D back up. And

22:21

I just got my blood work done, literally got the results last week, and my vitamin D more than doubled. So it went from low to, you know, in the good upper range, it was 50-something when I just took it. And so it brought the question of…

22:36

there's a few interesting things is one is I think the seasonality of lower vitamin D to higher vitamin D is probably physiological norm. I wouldn't worry about vitamin D dropping a little bit in the winter months and then rising in the summer months. Um, I would worry if like someone doesn't ever get out in the sun and it's like, so you go through a winter, your vitamin D is low, but in the summer you don't intentionally get out in the sun and get your vitamin D up. Or if you have excess body fat, things like that, then I would, I would really worry about it. Um,

23:03

But from an ancestral perspective, I don't think necessarily lower levels of vitamin D through the winter is necessarily detriment. Long answer to saying like, I probably will not supplement vitamin D in the winter. One last note on this that I've been thinking about recently is

23:20

I traditionally do like, cause I'm into fit, uh, fitness, like physique stuff, you know, kind of a bodybuilder stuff for just pure vanity reasons and fun. I think it's like the art and science of like body composition stuff. I enjoy it. And I've, I've enjoyed it for 20 years. Uh, but one thing I've always kind of done, which is not ancestrally consistent and I think is probably not ideal is, uh,

23:42

I will bulk through like the fall and the winter. So meaning I'll gain fat through this time. And then during the spring and summer, you know, you cut down because you want to be lean in the summer and bulk up in the winter. It makes sense. But ancestrally, it would be opposite if you think about it. Like during the summer, there would be, you likely have more food, more abundance. And then during the winter cold months, you would probably have more,

24:03

with less access to food where you would actually be leaning out in the winter. And that would make more sense with vitamin D levels. And you'd be losing the fat in the winter in combination with getting less sun, which would regulate that, which could regulate the vitamin D levels. Whereas in the summer, you're getting more sun, but more body fat, which would balance out the vitamin D levels. So I actually, from an ancestral perspective, that's kind of like my thinking around vitamin D

24:28

Is there any reason you wouldn't take a supplement in the winter just to top up? Is it just to be totally natural or any detriment to doing that? It's a combination of things. I have my general stance on supplements is that they do more harm than good in most circumstance. And people just take them haphazardly and don't really know why or when or what's the rationale behind it. Just like take this supplement and that's,

24:56

The body regulates things in a very complex mechanism. For example, you say, why not take vitamin D during the winter? Well, then I'd ask someone, well, are you taking vitamin K2? And they'd be like, what? I got to take vitamin K2 too? I'm like, well, yeah, if you're going to take vitamin D, you need to make sure you got adequate K2. Like, okay, so I'll take vitamin D, vitamin K. I was like, oh, what about vitamin A? Are you getting vitamin A? Because these fat soluble vitamins work in concert together. And taking a bunch of vitamin A can throw your vitamin K off. And so…

25:22

And it's massively complex. And I've written up on vitamin D before where I give my recommendations. If you're taking this much vitamin D, I would take this much K2. And you want to make sure you're getting this much vitamin A, but also like,

25:34

That's my best guess from the research I've done. The body is extremely complex and it's not just these three fat soluble vitamins. It's also minerals at play and a whole bunch of other stuff like just exposure to light plays a huge role because that's going to be our main source of vitamin D. So there's so many complex factors to take into account. And you shouldn't, if you think about it, you shouldn't need supplements regularly.

25:57

unless you're eating, like if you're eating a proper diet and there's some arguments for needing it, like our soil doesn't have as much minerals as it did X, Y, Z. And I get it. So I entertain those conversations and arguments. Um, but my default is to avoid supplementation if you can. And if there is a legit problem, both like subjectively and objectively, like lab results and you feel off, like, yeah, we definitely want to take a look and maybe supplement. Um, but I don't think vitamin D supplement, like people,

26:25

just take 10,000 IU a day, don't even think twice about it. I think there's potential downsides. And that's just based on reading a lot of the literature around multivitamins and vitamin Ds in particular that I think it's better if you don't have to take it. But if you're chronically low and you're not getting sun and you're not feeling good, I would consider supplementing it.

26:49

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28:32

Are you taking any supplements or no? I take electrolyte supplements element. And so, you know, they've been sending me stuff and they got me hooked. So I do drink coffee, which I don't actually don't think is a health food, but I've taken it in and out of my diet. I seem to do okay with it.

28:49

Uh, I see you're drinking an element right there. You got it. The new sparkly. It's so good. See, we got a great sponsorship on element right now. Uh, so I drink coffee in the morning and I put a little bit of the chocolate element in it and there's just no going back after that. First of all, adding a little bit of salt to coffee actually helps improve the taste, like gets rid of the bitterness and things like that. Uh, and then the chocolate element on top of it is just fantastic. And I think actually adding some electrolytes to coffee, if you're a coffee drinker, uh,

29:19

can potentially help, you know, with hydration and things like that. I don't think it's that necessary. I don't want to go to that far, but I do enjoy it. So that is a, I think it's fine. I don't think, I don't think a lot of damage is being done here with that recommendation. What about salting your food on top of that? Are you a big fan of using a lot of salt? Salt is another super interesting topic. I, uh, I am a fan of the

29:43

saying salt to taste which is super vague and i usually hate vague statements like that because you're like give me some direction and some people i know that salt to taste and it's just a huge amount um but my experience especially with carnivore experiences early on getting that salt and those extra electrolytes helps with kind of the electrolyte balancing early on

30:07

I've noticed myself and with just so many people, as they've gone carnivore longer, the salt intake tends to decrease. I also see how much they cook their meat tends to decrease as well. People tend to like their steak more and more rare, less and less salt. It's basically like, hey, I'm just ready to eat it right off the cow. So with the salt, as far as sodium, the research I've done, it seems to exist on a J curve where if you're not getting any sodium,

30:35

That's obviously not good. You need sodium. But if you're getting huge amounts of sodium, that's also not good. But there's a pretty wide…

30:43

standard deviation that seems to be like the body's going to regulate it pretty well at the level of the kidneys. So salt to taste, I recommend airing a little bit on the aggressive side earlier in the carnivore, maybe a little bit less aggressive later on in carnivore. And other macronutrients I think will alter the amount of sodium you need. For example, the more carbohydrates you have, I think probably the more salt you will need in your diet.

31:06

What about other spices when you're cooking up your steak? Are you putting any spices on there? Cutting up some jalapeno, putting it on top like Joe Rogan does. You mentioned that experiment of 18 months, I think it was. Eggs, beef, and dairy, raw dairy. Any other, I just really want to get into the details here. You're having element, you're salting to taste. Anything else going on your food at all? So…

31:34

No to the spices, which is interesting. Before carnivore 10 years ago, I loved like all the different spicy mustards and I was a spice person. I don't even like the smell of spices anymore. The more plain it is, the more I enjoy it. Like just salt.

31:54

Um, so no, I, I only use salt and it's not to say like, I like to clarify differences between like what I do and worst recommendations. Cause it's not always aligned. Cause I think people can do some seasonings and if they enjoy it, that's fantastic. Like, I don't think that's throwing you off the deep end and ruining all ruining all your health and fitness goals. Um, I just prefer just, you know, salt. Um, so yeah, the details, um,

32:17

beef. And the beef, I basically bought it from three different local farmers. So it's like local beef, raw milk, obviously, it's from a local farm. I've done both goat's milk and cow's milk from local people, and eggs. And like I said, coffee and element. And let's see, I know I'm forgetting something. But I

32:45

It's pretty basic. There's something else in there. I do have like, so I'll be traveling this weekend, for example, like I'll have beef jerky when I'm traveling. I have some emergency protein powder, collagen powder that it's like an extreme situation. Hey, let's just get something and go. But everything, mostly it's just outlier. Most of the diet is beef. Even the eggs, I would do three a morning. And then during my bulk, I got it up to nine meals.

33:13

But right now, I'm getting rid of them again. They're fine. I just don't feel like I need them. And beef is much more satiating. The dairy, I'm reducing. I got up to, when I was bulking, up to three gallons a week. So I might eliminate it, but I'm drastically going to reduce it. Because I just kind of keep falling back on the first principles, like

33:36

what's like the most ancestral, ancestrally consistent diet. And it seems like that is where I seem to gravitate and feel the best, which is mostly like

33:45

you know, fatty beef. I've done carbohydrate experiments in the past. And like the one food that consistently I'm okay with is like a white potato that's peeled and well cooked. Like I've tried some fruit and it's like kind of hit or miss digestion wise and things like that. But like potatoes, I seem to be okay. So, and I actually, I would argue that's like the most consistent kind of ancestral human diet is meat, potatoes. Interesting. That saying was like, so people talk about the meat and potatoes of things like the main event. That's like,

34:15

like that's a saying i an ancient wisdom and a saying that is carried through time uh and then you know seasonal local organic fruit small amounts is probably people do will do fine with but some of the usually i'm talking about the carbs like the roots and the fruits uh depending on people's goals and health issues and things like that determines if they should how much when they should eat these things

34:38

What about additional fats? Things like tallow, butter, ghee? That's what I was forgetting, butter. And why I bring that up is two different reasons. One being, you mentioned the mammoth being a fattier meat than our cows. So to hack that, adding fat to the meat, and then secondarily cooking meats. If you use anything in the pan when you're, say, searing a steak.

35:02

Thank you. The one thing I was forgetting, I knew it was butter, which I use in the pan. So I'll put butter in the pan, sear the steak. And that's how I cook almost all my meals on a pan. Butter, sear, sear. The whole thing is done in less than a minute. And I eat it all start to finish in five minutes. I eat fast. So that's how I cook. Regarding the added fats. Now, this is we're going to zoom a little bit further back in the anthropology timeline because we just talked about homo sapiens.

35:33

Now, this is an argument for and against meat, which I think is the most interesting part of this discussion here. Before Homo sapiens, we'll just talk about Homo erectus. And Homo erectus was an extremely successful human species, almost survived for almost 2 million years. Compare that to the 300,000 years right now of Homo sapiens. And the evidence is Homo erectus was killing these big fat animals. And if you imagine killing and really like elephants, right?

36:01

And then decimating the elephant populations in Africa. If you have a whole elephant, are you really digging up that many roots to try and get, you know, 100 calories? You do 200 calories of work to dig up 100 calorie root that is inedible because for a lot of Homo erectus or maybe all of Homo erectus timescale, there was no controlled use of fire. One of the controlled use of fire was roughly 500,000 years ago.

36:31

which coincides shortly after that with the rise of Homo sapiens. And I bring all this up to say that it seems like the adaptations of Homo sapiens, the species we are today from earlier hominins like Homo erectus, is that we decimated large fatty animals. And so we had to invent things to catch faster animals with less fat

36:58

And there's a few things that came with that. So we see the advent of the bow and arrow. We see the advent of controlled use of fire. And we see various things

37:09

That show that humans had to rely a little bit more on plant-based foods, notably these potatoes, these underground storage organs, which are interesting. If you think about it, like the competition for fruits with other animals is pretty intense. The competition for underground storage organs is not intense because like, we're the only ones digging those things up. Uh, and, and so we basically would have a monopoly on those where we wouldn't have a monopoly on fruits. Uh, so, uh,

37:33

What kind of like an argument of what made us homo sapiens was we had to transition from very fat animals to leaner animals. And we had to be smart about it. We had to work together. We had to invent hunting technology and we had to start relying on some more plant-based foods to fill the gap. And the reason we had to do this, because if you catch a small animal with less fat,

37:54

There is a protein ceiling. Like we can only eat so much protein before we get sick because protein has nitrogen. We have to get rid of the nitrogen or it becomes toxic through the urea cycle. There's only so much nitrogen protein that we can eat before getting protein poisoning. So we need either fat or carbohydrates. And since we decimated the fat animals, we had to

38:14

learn how to catch the smaller animals, but then we also needed more energy sources, which kind of pushed us towards some of those underground storage organs. So to your question is about adding fats. Well, I would say, yes, you can. Meaning that kind of leans more towards pre-homo sapiens where, um,

38:33

You're having a grass fed steak, which is a pretty lean, which is a leaner steak. And if you want to get that to be like an elephant, you got to add tallow to it or you got to pull from the roots, you know, eat a potato with it. So I think both are viable options depending on, you know, one's health and goals and ancestry, which one is better. Tying to this theme of our evolution and going way back.

39:00

One of the arguments you often hear from vegans or the plant-based world is the anatomy of our jaw and teeth. So as a dentist, this is an area that falls within your realm specifically. When we look at that, what would your arguments be

39:19

from our evolution, why we've evolved the teeth and jaw the way it is now. Teeth what specifically? That's super interesting because most of the stuff I talk about is how the teeth and the jaw tell us what we should be eating. And it's the argument for a meat-based diet. And I did a presentation last year and it was called Meat Mouth. And it just talks about like,

39:46

I look at the evidence in our mouth and our teeth and our jaw and things like that, and it all points towards a meat-based diet. And the first obvious thing is what we talked about when we started this is cavities. And if we were meant to eat a carbohydrate-based diet, high carbs shouldn't be riding all our teeth out. There's just natural incongruence there. And so that's the first thing that we could look at. The arguments for…

40:16

like in uh evolutionary time scales we see like the teeth and jaw gets smaller and so i think sometimes we're like oh that might i don't know what that what what argument for plants that would be but a lot of times a lot of this has to do with two things one is tools and the other thing is fire so homo habilis like the first human species three million years ago probably wouldn't recognize as a human today unlike homo erectus you'd be like oh that's a human uh

40:47

Homo habilis, it's handyman habilis. That's what it means. So handyman habilis was using tools to cut the meat, break bones open, eat the marrow, things like that. And so that will have a shrinking effect on the jaw because you're not using it to crunch bones. You're using tools to break bones, for example. I think like a lot of times the argument is if we look through this anthropologic timescales,

41:15

we don't see malocclusion until basically the industrial revolution. And we're like, why is that? Well, there's two factors that go into it. One is nutrition and growing your jaws properly. So the reason teeth malocclusion crooked teeth, it's because the mouth is too small. And so teeth are just popping in wherever they need to fit. And the reason is the jaws aren't growing effectively is two things. And it's just like growing a muscle to grow muscle. You need to work it out in the gym. You need to strain it and you need the right nutrition. Growing your jaws is

41:44

perfectly analogous. You need the right nutrition to grow your jaws and you need the stress. You need to be chewing food. And so that, like the vitamins and minerals play a very important role in that fully developing the jaws portion as well. So I think we can go on and on about various pieces of evidence that point to the mouth and jaws and teeth pointing to, you know, meat-based diet and not, I don't know, whatever they would argue,

42:11

plants of some kind, nuts, seeds. It's funny how that can be spun either way, depending on your side. I guess so. But I'd be happy to discuss or you say debate anyone that says… I don't know a dentist that would take the other side of that debate. If you know one, I would be happy to discuss with them. But it would be very hard to argue for a high carbohydrate plant-based diet for

42:38

Your mouth would suggest that's what you eat or that would be good for your mouth. Vegans are dentist's best friends. It's terrible for your oral health. - I wanna come back to supplements, knowing that you're not a fan overall. One of the supplements that has a lot of controversy around it and has somewhat gotten some acceptance in the carnivore world is iodine. And this ties to talking about before eating seafood and fish.

43:10

It sounds like for you, the way I understood when we went through that part, that's not something you're concerned about. But how do you think about iodine? And is that something you're ever supplementing with? Have you thought about it? How do you look at it? To me, this goes exactly back to when we're talking about supplements and complexity of interactions with a complex biological species that is a human being.

43:37

And so I think Ambro Hernd has some very interesting ideas and research around this. And I tend to agree with this perspective is the iodine, when you increase carbohydrate consumption, iodine needs are going to increase with that.

43:54

And so you see goiters like thyroid issues from inadequate iodine in various high carb diets that are not getting adequate amounts of iodine. You just don't see that in a low carb ancestral perspective diet where you're eating plenty of meat. And so, no, I don't think most people need to supplement with iodine, though, fundamentally,

44:21

If someone's having some issues, I also don't think it's necessarily going to, you know, if you have a drop of Lugol's, I think is a supplement that a lot of people are using Lugol's iodine or something like that, a drop of that a day or every other day or whatever it might be. I think your body's probably going to do fine with that as well. So it's not saying just don't do it, but it goes back to the, if you're eating in species kind of inappropriate diet, certain vitamin mineral, um,

44:47

requirements will likely go up. And I think it's similar with vitamin C. Like if you're eating a lot of carbohydrates, like you're going to probably need more vitamin C than if you're not eating carbohydrates. Similar story with iodine. And it's because these things don't interact

45:02

or in a vacuum. These vitamins and minerals are contained in complex food matrices and it goes into a complex organism and we try and micromanage each little vitamin, mineral kind of thing where we're

45:18

we think we're smarter than mother nature and just mother nature just always seems to win so uh that's kind of my thought around iodine it's similar to you know other vitamins minerals where you might be oh it's if you're only eating meat you're gonna be low in this but are you kind of the question like calcium is another one like i didn't do dairy for the first five years of carnivore but there's interesting things about calcium where you're gonna get calcium and meat uh

45:45

And also when you're eating adequate protein, the intestinal absorption of calcium goes up significantly. So it's all part of a complex machine. So I still think like, I don't want to say no one should be supplementing. That's definitely not what I'm saying here, but I just think.

46:03

If you are, there should be a reason for it. Like the idea of a supplement is like topping off. If you think like you should be like the bulk of your vitamins, minerals, nutrition should be in food. And if you have a supplement, it would be should just be like topping off like that supplement. But if you look at most of these supplements, it's like 10,000% of your daily requirement. Like why do you need 10,000% of your daily requirement of vitamin C or what name your nutrient is?

46:27

of choice, like vitamin D is right there with it. Like if you need to supplement vitamin D, why do you have to take so much vitamin D? - You make such a good point. You have to look at the full context and you could even do this within the carnivore realm. We've been talking about prioritizing beef and I wanna get more into that experiment where you had eggs and dairy over 18 months.

46:52

But before we do, in a general sense, are you eating nose to tail? There's a big difference between a carnivore eating just muscle meat versus including the organs and the different nutrition they're going to get.

47:05

You may or may not like this answer. So I buy my cows from local farmers and like, I am not into wasting. It's like, I don't know where I got that, but I think it's also good. Like, so yeah, I get the cow, I eat the whole thing that I get. I wouldn't say it's nose to tail because I mean, they don't give me the brain because of regulations, but everything I get, I eat. That said, I'm strongly considering not eating liver anymore. And

47:35

We can talk about that. Maybe this is probably the time to talk about that. But yeah, so I do eat kind of nose to tail, but I'm considering not eating at least significantly. It's not that I was even eating a lot of liver, but I just think the more I kind of dive into the vitamin A thing, it's like vitamin A is obviously an important vitamin. I'm not in the camp where it says we should totally avoid vitamin A. There is a camp out there that says that.

48:03

Um, but the amount that you get in liver is a lot. And if you're eating that a lot every day and you're eating eggs, which is high in vitamin A and you're eating dairy, for example, also high in vitamin A, you're getting a lot of vitamin A. And this goes back to, uh, our discussion around fat soluble vitamins is like,

48:22

these work synergistically. So if you're getting plenty of vitamin D and you're getting plenty of, you know, vitamin K, you know, eating more liver is probably all right. But if you're not, I have serious kind of hesitations now of high dose vitamin A chronically ingested. Talk more about that. Why would vitamin A become an issue? At what point? What specifically is it doing?

48:47

And then talk more about that camp of people that are totally avoiding it. What's the thinking there? Yes. So vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin. And so unlike vitamin C, for example, or B vitamins are water soluble. You will just basically take a lot of those, you know, urinate them out. These fat soluble vitamins are stored in fat. So you can accumulate them. And so if you, and this is why the question about vitamin D is I'm hesitant when people are taking huge doses of vitamin D for long periods of time. It's a fat soluble vitamin, so it can bioaccumulate it.

49:16

Vitamin A is a similar story. And liver is super high in vitamin A. And this is not like carrots or sweet potatoes that have vitamin A. That's a plant version of vitamin A, which is not even super bioavailable. But liver is…

49:32

retinol, vitamin A that we, like it matches our biology and we absorb it very efficiently. And liver is very high in vitamin A. So if you eat liver every day, day in and day out, you can bioaccumulate vitamin A. So you're storing it. And if you're not getting adequate amounts of other fat soluble vitamins, it can cause an imbalance of these fat soluble vitamins. And so my hypothesis kind of

50:01

is and i was trying to look i've recently looked deeper into this is if you are the reason i was looking into this is back to our our ancestral perspective and i was just never satisfied with you know eat liver if you like it xyz if you don't like it don't eat it and i look at these cultures where especially the work with dr weston a price who's a dentist uh we can definitely talk more about his work as well but what one thing i noticed is he would talk about

50:28

tribes that really you know treasured liver and people like the Hadza in Africa it's known that they kind of like treasure liver as well but then you look at the like these Arctic explorers for example who are known to throw the liver to the dogs and I'm like

50:47

is liver supposed to be treasured or trashed? There's a dish called humble pie and it got its name because it would put like the liver and the organs and serve it to the peasants. Like it was peasant food. And so I'm like, there's all these like cultural anecdotes of like liver being treasured and prized. And like, this is a super food. And the other one's like,

51:07

we're throwing this to the dogs and the peasants. And I'm always like this. I'm like, what is going on here? And the more I kind of looked into these stories, I'm like, I see this association with geography, right?

51:21

So the Hadza, for example, they're under an African sun all day long. They have high amounts of vitamin D potential, whereas the Arctic explorers are in the Arctic where they're getting less sun. And so I'm like, maybe this aversion or prize to liver has to do with where they live,

51:43

and how much sun they're getting and how much vitamin D they're having to either increase the need for vitamin A or at least the tolerance to potential vitamin A toxicity.

51:51

So that's a working hypothesis I have right now. I've done the research. I can't. I haven't seen other people talk about like, hey, eat liver if you're like in Africa or you're in the sun or you're getting lots of sun exposure or if you're taking vitamin D supplements. But if you're not doing those things, maybe like eating liver is just not a good idea. Maybe you should save that for your dog. So there is a camp of people.

52:15

uh that are just they think vitamin a is like the cause of all human disease and so i'm not that extreme uh but i do think there should be maybe some more cautious and definitely more research into this area of thinking like especially like a lot of people saying livers is like superfood so more is better more is better more is better and more is better it tends to be a dangerous statement in nutrition uh so that's just kind of my thoughts about vitamin a whereas i'm

52:44

I'm cautiously kind of limiting it. And if I am eating it, I'm going to make sure it's maybe in the summer when I'm getting lots of vitamin D and not like in the winter when my vitamin D levels were low. And so eating liver could potentially have a more toxic effect. And does this vitamin A piece translate to other organs as well? I know liver is specifically very high in vitamin A.

53:07

but expand out to other organs you're either consuming or not and whether vitamin A is an issue there. I do not believe it. Liver is going to be the main source of vitamin A because that's where the body's going to store it. So if you have a vitamin A toxicity, unfortunately, the one way to confirm that is a liver biopsy, right? That's very invasive. So there's a lot that's not known about this. I read one study though that said

53:33

It looked at cadavers and it was like something like one third of the cadavers had potential toxic levels of vitamin A storage in their liver. I was like, whoa, that's like super interesting. But the other organs, no, I don't believe it to be very high, like muscle meat is very low in vitamin A. So liver is going to be the main source of vitamin A. Other organs that I eat would be heart, which I think

53:59

is fantastic. It has a little bit more diverse nutrient profile than muscle meat. Like you'll get things like, uh, CoQ10 in it, uh, other nutrients as well. Um, like I'll eat the heart. Uh, I'm trying to think of like the tongue, a lot of the organs that, you know, that there's, when they say nose to tail, you're, you're a lot of times you're talking liver, heart, maybe kidneys. If you, uh, my, my farmer's never given me the kidneys. What about bone marrow?

54:27

bone marrow is fantastic i love it it's like called the butter of the gods for a reason uh it has it's more like very high monounsaturated fat so which i think is totally fine for people with like fat loss goals i try and i'd be like hey let's just use caution uh i i prefer saturated fats more more saturated fats uh but yeah bone marrow is fantastic

54:51

I've heard of people eating testes. Is that something you've tried? No, I have not. So I have not. If you get a cow from a local farmer, a lot of times some of these more exotic organs and body parts do not come with it. I think you got to request those specially. And there's a lot of regulations around some of them, like the brain, I said, because I'd like to try cow brain, but because of various risk and regulations, I haven't had that.

55:18

And why this becomes even more important, this conversation about organs, specifically liver, in today's world is the supplement world in this realm seems to have really exploded where you can get different organs that have been desiccated in capsule form and you can take them daily for prolonged periods of time. So we need to, especially given that, because before if it was

55:48

a mammoth or a cow and we were just eating the animal, there would be a limited supply of these organs. But if now we have access to continue to go to Amazon and click and get six bottles delivered to our front door, we really need to know what we're doing with the nutrients in those, in that concentrated form. - Absolutely, 100% agree. The one thing that I'll say like a benefit of these supplements

56:16

would be most people don't eat a very good diet and so we're kind of maybe a lot of the listeners were probably more fringe than the fact that we actually eat a healthy diet like the standard population is just not and so taking a desiccated organ supplement is gonna give you nutrients that they're probably not getting and it's probably net beneficial in the context of like eating a healthy diet i think it's superfluous um

56:42

So with that caveat aside, yeah, I'm not a big supplement person, but

56:48

for a deficient diet, like it's smart for a vegan to take a vitamin B12 supplement. And so that kind of analogy expands. And if you're eating a standard American diet, there's likely you're deficient in various vitamins and minerals. And so taking supplements is probably has a net positive effect. Although the research on multivitamins is woefully, uh,

57:12

how do I say, terrible. Like when it comes to mortality risk, it's like you take a vitamin, it doesn't help. Extrapolating off your point there about B12 in a vegan and even the organ capsules in somebody that's eating a more standard diet, I've heard you talk about the fact that creatine can be helpful for people if they're on a more standard diet. But somebody like you that's taking in large amounts of beef,

57:42

is going to likely hit that five gram threshold, which is commonly supplemented by people that take that. So just to throw that out there and tie that in, for somebody who wants the cognitive benefits or the muscle building benefits, creatine, again, can be something to look at depending on what your diet is. 100%. Creatine is one of those, like the most researched supplement that continuously that actually shows

58:07

benefits, uh, cognitively, cognitively, physically. Um, and it seems to be very safe. And to me, a lot of this research and actually just basically screaming out loud, like this is like, like the best source of creatine is going to be red meat. And it's,

58:24

The research is showing how beneficial creatine is. It's essentially saying like, this is how much you are under eating meat. And if you saturate your creatine stores with red meat, that's probably the amount you need. One to two pounds for, you know, the average adult. And you're going to get close to maximizing your creatine stores. And so you're not going to need a supplement. So supplements are not going to give those benefits. But that research to me is just so profound because it's like one thing that almost everyone

58:52

most people agree on now. It's consensus. That's a dangerous word in health and nutrition. But it's almost consensus around even warring parties that like, yeah, this creatine is beneficial. It is safe. And to me, the whole thing is saying like, yeah, you get those benefits. You need to eat this much meat. It's telling you that in the research more or less. I want to come back to your experiment you did there for a year and a half. Eggs, dairy, two years, okay, and beef.

59:21

You mentioned, I think you gained 30 pounds. Was that just by consuming more of those foods or was it related to the specific foods you chose?

59:33

Um, so a little bit of context about this. So it was two years, 18 months bulking up, put on about 35 pounds, six months I did the cut and I got up to about 19% body fat and my low was about six and a half percent body fat. So it was drastic body composition change. But what spurred it was I've been at a gym. I've loved home away for home for 20 years. I love working out.

59:58

But the gyms, my gym closed in 2020 and I was doing two years of home workouts with resistance bands and resistance bands are great, but I was kind of just going through the motions and I was just doing a lot of work and body composition wasn't a real big focus anymore. And I'd lost muscle. I, I'd shrunk down to 151. I stepped on the scale and said 151 pounds. I'm five foot 11 for reference. And I was like, all right, 151.

01:00:19

I got to get serious about this again. So the gyms had reopened up. I was reluctant to join the gym down the street because it was over 200 bucks a month and I couldn't justify that. I spent just a little iron, but I bit the bullet, joined the gym. And I was like, all right, I set out this two year plan. I was like, I'm gonna do an 18 month bulk and I'm going to cut after that.

01:00:36

And the bulk was going to be three foods, beef, milk, and eggs. And each month I'm just going to progressively eat a little bit more over time over these 18 months. I'm going to put on fat for sure, but I'm going to try and get my muscle back. And then after that, I'm going to lose the fat and try and keep the muscle on the cut. So that's the context of the whole thing. The way I gained the weight was, yes, just eating more of the foods. But the ratios were not consistently, meaning like I'd probably eat roughly two pounds of beef pretty consistently, but

01:01:04

but I increased the eggs from three to six to nine. And then I increased the milk from one gallon a week. Or yeah, maybe it was, I can't remember. I have to look at my notes. Maybe I started at a half gallon, but I increased the milk over time where I peaked at three gallons a week. And then when I cut, kind of did the reverse of that. Okay, let's zoom in on the dairy piece. Earlier, you mentioned goat and cow you would consume. When it comes to cow,

01:01:33

Are you specific about the A1 versus A2 piece? Yeah, I do think now some people, it's very important. Like A1, they just can't do A2. It's the kind of casein. And if people have issues with milking, it can be for a few reasons, but casein is one of the common culprits. And so they can do A2 casein. I just think it's probably just better overall for most people that are doing milk, even if they can do A1, A2 is a little bit better. So goat and the cow milk over both A2 raw.

01:02:04

Okay, raw. So how important is that piece for people yourself and for others that you're, you know, educating? When you say important, it depends on what metrics you are gauging importance on, like importance as far as like, gaining weight and building muscle, less so than if it's like, hey, I'm

01:02:24

you know, the health or the top being able to tolerate dairy. There's some people that like just cannot tolerate pasteurized dairy, but if you, if it's raw because of the bacteria and enzymes help, um, convert the, um, lactase enzyme, which is going to, uh,

01:02:39

digest the lactose, the milk sugar that a lot of people have issues with. So like, like I say, milk can cause issues for a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. Lactose casein, the whey proteins, um, the raw is going to be the way to mitigate most of those issues. Uh, whereas pasteurized is going to, you know, it's going to destroy a lot of all the enzymes. Basically researchers will decrease the nutrition content, like the vitamins and minerals that you can potentially be getting in the raw milk. Um,

01:03:08

So yeah, I prefer raw. And why that's really important is because in the US, you can go to the health food store and you can get organic grass fed milks, you can get different kinds of animals. There's so many much nuance there, A1 versus A2. But from what I've seen, everything's pasteurized. So why it's important to hone in on this is it worth somebody going to find a farmer to get raw? How big of a piece is that if somebody is going to consume dairy?

01:03:40

I think it's important. One of the reasons is it's almost impossible to buy…

01:03:49

commercial milk that's not fortified with vitamin A, which we just talked about, and vitamin D. And we just talked about it. I was like, I don't want to get any more vitamin A than I was getting. And then I look at the store because getting raw milk is super inconvenient. I'm not going to lie. Some people might have a farmer next door that they can get it to, but in general, it's very inconvenient. Because it's something you got to go get it. Unlike a cow, which I can store in a deep freezer, you got to go to this farm every two weeks, basically. It's

01:04:17

And you can freeze milk, but I think a lot that could potentially, you know, actually mess with some of the enzymes and stuff like that as well. So it's very inconvenient. So I've tried to look at the store. It's like, oh, what are my best options here? And there's a couple okay options, but almost everything is pasteurized in the United States. Maybe there's some laws coming out where stores are going to be able to start carrying raw milk. But here it's not in St. Louis, Missouri. I know that for sure.

01:04:45

But yeah, so it's pasteurized, it's fortified with vitamin A, vitamin D. We just talked about that. And I'm like, okay, so they're fortifying the milk with vitamin A and vitamin D. But once again, people are not getting vitamin K2. And then you're fortifying with the other two vitamins, which may even increase the need for more of that vitamin. So yeah, I think raw is important. Let me just take one quick story because I had some buddies over last week for dinner.

01:05:12

And all we have is like a pile of patties and they're not carnivore or anything like that. They try and be healthy, but like more of your just standard normal person. But they know they're coming here. We're just eating patties. But my one friend drinks four gallons of milk a week, pasteurized skim milk, and he's done it for 20 years and he's exceedingly healthy. Like I'm just like, so I want to say it's going to kill you because he's done it for 20 years and that's a

01:05:40

single antidote, but it's just an interesting aside. What about fermented dairy? Fermented dairy tends to be better. Something you can get at the health food store, yogurt, kefir, or actually taking that raw milk that you're getting from the farm and fermenting it. So I don't ever ferment it myself, but at the farm that I'll buy for, they'll ferment some, make some kefir. It's

01:06:02

I don't think it's necessary for health goals, but potentially for people that have some gut issues, it can be, you know, your probiotic potentially helpful there. But yeah, kefir is just fermenting. It's another way to try and eliminate some of the potentially problematic things for people that can't tolerate dairy. Although I'll say like, if you can't tolerate raw milk,

01:06:24

I just don't think you should be doing much dairy outside of maybe some butter or cream where like most of the other compounds besides the dairy fat

01:06:34

are eliminated. And so to me, it goes back to kind of the ancestral perspective where lactase persistence, the enzyme that digests lactose, really propagated rapidly in evolutionary timescales among European populations. To me, it just signals how critical milk was, dairy was, during this agricultural revolution period. Like it was

01:06:57

it wouldn't have done that unless it was a substantial survival advantage and so for those people that do have lactase persistence it's a good sign that your ancestors for the last you know 10 000 years uh may have relied heavily on dairy so you are more predisposed to being able to consume dairy and maybe even you should there's potentially an argument there that you should eat some dairy but for those that are not tolerant like most asian population uh

01:07:21

is lactose intolerant. They don't have this lactase persistence. Instead of fermenting dairy or trying to find the right A2 raw brand, I'm just like, you probably just shouldn't consume it. Expanding out from the fermented piece, the microbiome as a whole, I want to zone in there for a few minutes. Obviously, by the way you answered that question, you're not concerned about getting fermented foods to build up the microbiome. And given what you're eating,

01:07:52

You're not concerned about bringing in plant material and fiber to build up the microbiome. So talk about how you look at that. I'm assuming it's eat the limited foods you're eating and that takes care of itself kind of thing. But I'll have you expand on that. Sure. So microbiome is very complex topic. Um,

01:08:14

we can talk about in two places one is like the oral microbiome uh so a lot of people just think of the gut like the microbiome basically in the large intestines very important aspect of you know human health but you know it starts here in the mouth and so we think about like

01:08:29

what's going to cause a healthy oral microbiome or an unhealthy oral microbiome. And there's two things that will definitely cause an unhealthy oral microbiome, lots of carbohydrates and the sugars. And basically what we talked about is basically feeding the quote unquote bad bacteria, um, and mouth breathing, which will dry out the mouth, lead to dysbiosis and kind of the, the balancing of the microbiome becomes imbalanced in a bad way. So, um,

01:08:57

With regards to the oral microbiome, diet plays a primary role. And so what creates a healthy oral microbiome, you would think, or an unhealthy oral microbiome, it should be consistent with the biome that continues down to the gut. And so I'm not saying… I think some people…

01:09:18

that consume fiber, it can be helpful. It can help with their bowels and things like that. But I don't think like trying to do like a super high fiber diet, I don't think there's like any kind of special recipe there. The one thing that seems to be clear in the microbiome discussions is that it's very adaptive. And so if you're eating a bad diet, it's going to adapt to that and try to do the best it can. If you're eating a good diet, it's going to adapt to that. And it's probably able to

01:09:48

adapt and deal with a broader, a broader range of potential diets. And maybe we give it credit for it, meaning like it can probably handle some fiber. I don't know about the high fiber. Most people, it seems like you start escalating fiber. There's a, there's a limit there. Um, but like no fiber I've done fantastic for years. And so I don't think it's necessary, uh, ingredient. It's a, it's a non-essential macronutrient for a reason. Like we don't need it. Yeah.

01:10:17

I don't want to get too derailed coming into the mouth because I want to finish where we're at and then come back to that at the end. But one piece I'll add while you were discussing carbohydrates and mouth breathing, we can't not talk about mouthwash while we're talking about that and its impact on the oral microbiome. And then that leads to disturbance within NO production and throwing off that whole microbiome. Definitely. So-

01:10:46

I think two out of three US adults use an antibacterial antiseptic mouthwash every day. And so the thought is, hey, we have these bacteria in your mouth that ferment carbohydrates, turn them into acids, eat holes in your teeth and cause the most common disease in the world. So we need to be using these mouthwashes. Now that's akin to like,

01:11:05

You would never take an antibiotic prophylactically every day. That seems ludicrous, right? Like you need those gut micro, those microorganisms in your gut, right? But when it comes to the mouth, it's like, oh no, it's fine. Let's just kill all those. But they do play a very important role. You mentioned one of the most important roles. I mean, they play an important role in keeping your teeth healthy, mineral exchange, but nitric oxide production, which is super important because I,

01:11:32

About 50% of all the nitric oxide production, I believe, in the body stems from the oral cavity. So if you're just nuking these bacteria, you're not creating the nitric oxide. And the nitric oxide has this very important role in vasodilation, basically regulating blood flow dynamics.

01:11:49

And you can see people that have acute rises in blood pressure because they're using antiseptic mouthwash. They're killing the bacteria that's responsible for helping vasodilate the blood vessels. And so when you kill those, you don't get the vasodilation. You have vasoconstriction. You get a high blood pressure. So when it comes to everything from high blood pressure, erectile dysfunction, any of these

01:12:12

issues that have to do with blood flow dynamics like cardiovascular disease, nitric oxide is very important. And so just nuking those bacteria is not a good idea. Coming back to the two-year experiment and beyond, we've talked a lot about what you ate. Let's talk about eating window and fasting. And is that something you incorporate during that two years and beyond?

01:12:36

So when we talk, the short answer is no, I did not. I've done fasting in the past. And I think this topic comes down a lot to someone's goals. Like if you have body composition goals, whether it's to lose fat or build muscle, fasting can have a role when it comes to fat loss. But I tend to think it's more detrimental. Like people tend to do better eating less.

01:13:05

two to three meals versus one meal a day. One meal a day, you're trying to shove a lot of nutrition into your mouth at one time. And then a lot of times that'll be like midday, like 2 p.m. for a lot of people do something like, hey, I'm going to fast till I can't fast any longer. Then you eat a huge meal.

01:13:24

And that's going to trigger a massive parasympathetic, like rest and digest. So I hope you don't have anything like work plan the rest of the day. So when it comes to actually like the, um, like the logistics of it, like you just want to take a nap after that. Well, so like you have to basically fast till dinner, uh, and then it can work logistically. Um, but when it comes to body composition, I'm really not a fan because there's two parts to it. One is

01:13:48

When you're losing fat, the risk is losing muscle, right? Because the kind of metabolism is more or less in catabolism. Catabolism is the breakdown mode. And then anabolism is the buildup mode. So catabolism will break down fat, but it'll break down muscle too. Anabolism will build up muscle, but it will build up fat too. And so when you have body composition goals, we want to be like, hey, we want to build muscle. We want to lose fat. But how do we not lose muscle and…

01:14:17

the other contra one that goes with that. And basically what's going to help us is consistent kind of muscle protein synthesis. And so, um,

01:14:27

Eating three meals with protein bolsters in it will stimulate muscle protein synthesis, which tends to go on this bell curve arc of three to four hours. So traditionally, bodybuilders, they weren't dumb. Some of this was considered bro science, but they figured it out through just doing it, where they're like, hey, if I eat every three to four hours, I build more muscle, X, Y, Z. Right?

01:14:54

But muscle protein synthesis tends to go up and then come back down through three to four hours. So if you are fasting and you're not getting any muscle protein synthesis,

01:15:04

um spikes you're in catabolism but you're risking muscle now the risk is much greater the leaner you get so someone's 35 body fat they can fast and not really worry too much about losing muscle someone that's 15 body fat and they want to get to 10 fasting is going to really put that muscle at risk and so one way to keep the muscle from the body breaking down fat with not breaking down muscle is to

01:15:32

have those protein boluses throughout the day to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. That way you stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And even though you're overall in a catabolism metabolism, meaning like breaking down energy deficit, you're giving the body reason to keep the muscle. And when you're trying to hit a certain threshold with that protein bolus to stimulate MPS, what is the number of grams of protein you're looking to hit?

01:16:00

Roughly 30 grams for men, slightly less for women. My general rule of thumb, just for like men and women, and this is overly simplistic, but sometimes overly simplistic is good. It's like men should like three, if you're doing three meals a day, shoot for 50 grams of protein each meal. That's a half a pound of beef each meal. Like if men shoot for that women, a little bit less 30 grams of protein each meal, uh,

01:16:24

You got a great baseline to your start to your diet, to hitting your protein needs, to getting tons of nutrition. And even if you're throwing fluff junk on top of that, you at least got a solid foundation. And so for a lot of people, I'm like, let's, why not start there? Why not eat a half pound of beef three times a day? Do nothing else. Just do that. And a lot of people just see it like,

01:16:47

easy kind of results because they're getting real nutrition. They're satiated and a lot, it sets them up like on a positive spiral. Uh, especially if you have a good breakfast and you're feeling good, you have more energy and you're like, Hey, I have less likely to eat junk at lunch. So let's do that. You know, another half pound of beef and, um,

01:17:03

A lot of times it just sets people up on success spiral. You don't do everything right out of the get-go. A lot of times one good habit can spiral to success, and that's just one of the easy ones. I got all kinds of super simple kind of heuristics, like do this, and then they'll put you on one of these positive spirals, but that's one of them. - Well, there was a lot of nuance to what you just explained there when somebody wants to maintain muscle and change their body composition in a really simple sense,

01:17:32

And obviously you can't give a 100% clear answer. You mentioned the fact that when somebody has extra fat, they're gonna be more muscle sparing if they're doing something like fasting. But for somebody who is on the end of the spectrum, type two diabetic, extra body fat, a metabolic mess right now, and we wanna get them back to being insulin sensitive, healthy body weight, regain their metabolic health,

01:18:03

Let's give that example, the detail, in a simple sense, the protocol you put them on to get them there quickest.

01:18:12

So a huge part of this is compliance. Any healthcare provider you will talk to will say like, that's the number one issue. If it comes to taking a drug, like all you gotta do is take a pill. Compliance tends to be bad. Uh, so number one thing is going to be compliance. And this person, if they like eating one meal a day, like, and they're like, Hey, I can get behind that by, by all means. Like I would definitely be like that a hundred percent. Um, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

01:18:37

So that's where fasting could really be beneficial. I was like, they like it. They feel good. They can do it. A hundred percent. Don't worry about like the minutia of trying to do bodybuilding type diet and let's do three meals and get all the protein right. No, for this kind of person you described, that's where fasting could be beneficial. But what I would prescribe would be more of

01:19:03

like an understanding of what their goals are. That's always where you got to start. Like, what are your goals? How long does he, how long are you okay with it taking? And what are you willing to do? And once you kind of understand these things, then you can make a plan. Like, okay, if you're willing to do anything, okay, let me get that plan out the window for you. But if you're like, Hey, I can only take baby steps, which is a lot of times the truth, because I mean, they got into a pretty bad health situation. A lot of times, like just throwing a

01:19:29

everything at them all at once is a recipe for failure. So a baby step, like I just said, might be one of the things like, hey, let's just have beef with three meals a day, half a pound of beef and three meals a day. And then in three months, we will do the next step. The first step I would probably say, let's take out the seed oils too and do, so remove one thing, add one thing, and then maybe stepwise improve the plan as success comes. Because that's one of the things like,

01:19:57

Success builds momentum. And a personal example that I just experienced, and I've done this so many times now, is when I'm ever doing fat loss, like I was up at 19% body fat. And when starting that diet, I'm always like, I just want to just keep building. It's easy. I like eating a lot. It's great. And so starting the diet is like the hardest part. But like once I get going,

01:20:18

and you start seeing results, it's like, oh man, I can do 20 minutes of cardio too. So then you do 20 minutes of cardio and then you start seeing more results. You're like, hey, I'm like, so kind of like the dopamine of results kind of spirals on itself versus if you're like, all right, Kevin, you got to drop your calories to 2000. You got to do an hour of cardio every day. You got to do weights every day. I'd be like, oh my God, it's way too much. I was just used to eating 4,000 calories a day and doing no cardio. So yeah, I like to take a

01:20:45

a progressive approach with myself and then i think that's probably what works best with most people as well and for somebody that wants to take a slower approach to what we just talked about they're regaining metabolic health or they're in a maintenance phase and they don't want to take it as extreme as you've done you mentioned before how you can handle a skinned potato and what i'm getting at here somebody that's going to include some plants

01:21:16

in the realm with say a more animal-based diet, what are the safer options to include for a mixed diet? - Yep, I kind of think of it on as like a plant pyramid, like a rung approach. On the bottom rung would be

01:21:32

The roots and tubers, underground storage organs is what they were traditionally called. I think those are the most ancestrally consistent for the reasons we've discussed in this podcast. We would have had a monopoly on those. And as we decimated the large animals, we really probably went towards those. I think seasonal local fruit, organic ideally, would be on that bottom rung as well.

01:21:56

And then depending on one's metabolic state would be potentially some honey. So those are things that most people can eat without like worrying about the plant toxins. And like, they're more or less congruent with human biology. Then, you know, you got things like on the next run, which would be more of the traditional green vegetables, which like I never eat. I used to eat them. I would call them like the fillers, like the leaves and the broccoli. And the reason I would eat them is particularly because they don't have

01:22:22

and much nutrition. And what I mean by that is I can eat a pound of broccoli and it's not going to give you very many calories. And so when it comes to like body composition stuff, you'd be eating like lean chicken breast. You don't want to be starving. So you eat a pound of broccoli and the proud of broccoli is going to help you on your body composition goals because it's going to fill your stomach up, but it's not giving you lots of energy. So in the, uh,

01:22:43

context of like human evolution, like we kind of essentially been talking about, we would never try and load up on foods that provided little amounts of energy that just load your gut up. But in today's modern world with someone that's like you just mentioned, the, the metabolically sick person that can be beneficial if it keeps them from overeating and helps them with lose fat. Um, so like these had, these had become health foods when really it's like they provide little energy, often low nutrition,

01:23:11

Usually not super bioavailable nutrition, that's what's in it. So anyways, that would kind of be on the tier above where it's like, you can eat some of these. It's not really going to do much good for you. Maybe if you're eating a lot of them, it can do bad things like bioaccumulating oxalates and things like that. So that'd kind of be on the next tier. The third tier would be more of the seeds.

01:23:30

And seeds confuse people because people don't even don't know what seeds are. And usually they say seeds, they think like chia seeds, but seeds are the grains. So grains are seeds of grasses, nuts, seeds of trees. So the seeds are grains. I recommend people really limit those. Like those are the ones that are most offended by the plant. And it makes sense. These are the plant's offspring that…

01:23:55

since a plant can't run away like if you know it has to defend itself from just being eaten so in the evolutionary arms race it has various kinds of um plant compounds to protect animals from eating them or humans from eating them uh and the grains tend to be are the grasses and seeds tend to be the seeds tend to be the ones that are most highly defended so that that's the thing that's wheat rice um these are by the way the most common foods of the diet worldwide

01:24:23

wheat, rice, corn, three grains that make up over 50% of calories. You'll get soybeans, which that's also a seed. And then if you throw sugar in there, which is not a seed, but that's like,

01:24:36

the standard american diet that's like 70 of what the world eats but has no congruence with evolutionary history or biology those are the things i'd be like we want to limit those so seed oil is also a seed so the seeds are kind of the third tier and then i'd say the fourth tier like things that are just more like um more artificial like things like are made in the lab and that would be things like you know artificial sweeteners things like that that are

01:25:01

just like it's not food really i would i would put seed oils up in that category like those are seeds that are then super processed and industrialized to make them even semi-edible so uh yeah that's kind of how i think about like a plant pyramid from a tier structure tiered structure

01:25:19

You share quite a bit about how you eat and how you think about food. Let's just go right through a typical day and what you might eat. So some of it does depend. Like I do pediatric dentistry on Fridays. And so on a day like that, I'm just giving this an example because this is the one day of the week where I have a semi-normal life. The rest of my life is

01:25:37

is atypical. Uh, so on that day, like I eat breakfast early cause I got to leave for work on my regular day. I don't, I I'll get up, I'll get, have coffee. And then when I'm hungry two hours later or an hour and a half later, an hour later, whenever like hunger hits, that's when I'll eat my first meal. Um, but if I'm going to do dentistry and I got to go travel, I got to go to work. I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Uh, but the day is, you know,

01:26:02

I'll wake up, I'll have the coffee and element, I'll work, I'll eat breakfast, beef mostly. If I'm doing eggs, that's why I'll have eggs. Recently, it's also been a little bit of milk. I will work throughout the morning and then before lunch, I walk around my neighborhood without a shirt on. It's really weird, but I mentioned this because I think getting sun exposure is super important. But most people…

01:26:29

They go outside, but they're wearing all their clothes. They have a very small amount of skin actually exposed to the sun. And for someone that's kind of pale and white like me, it only takes…

01:26:41

15 minutes 20 minutes out in the sun at noon or around you know when the sun's highest that's when uh uvb is the highest as well people tell you that's bad but that's when you're going to maximize vitamin d um synthesis so i'll go outside before lunch 15 minutes walk around the neighborhood less than a mile um but i'm going to get that 15 20 minutes of sun i'm gonna get my blood flowing and then i eat lunch after that a lot of people eat after or walk after they eat which never made sense to me after you eat body goes into parasympathetic which is rest and digest um

01:27:11

So I always like to not walk after I eat. So I walk, then I eat lunch. The most typical thing is beef three times a day. So mostly beef for lunch, work, I'll work out before dinner, which will be at the gym. I do kind of standard resistance training, dinner, beef. And I'm just trying to think I'm leaving anything out. Some of the details around the meals would be

01:27:41

Recently, it's been a little bit of milk with each meal, but that's kind of temporary. Eggs, usually only with breakfast, not with other meals. If I were to be eating the potatoes that we talked about, more of the hyper carnivore, which basically this is what I do recommend to most people. I recommend a lot of times people do a 90-day carnivore challenge, then finding their place on the hyper carnivore spectrum, which means 70% of your diets can be animal foods, but 30% can be kind of our lower tier wrong plant foods that we just discussed.

01:28:09

And if I was gonna do that, I would usually put, I would put the carbs, I would backload 'em, carb backloading, it's a bodybuilding term, but it just means like after your workout in the evening, you have carbohydrates in that meal. You've just replenished muscle glycogen in the gym, you replenish that glycogen with the most appropriate kind of plant food, which I think, you know, like a steak and potato is a fantastic dinner for most people. So that's it, I go to bed early, I wake up early. I don't know, did I leave out any details there? - Well, I'm just curious, given the amount of beef you eat,

01:28:39

Are you a big fan of different cuts, different ways of that meat being prepared, like a ground beef versus steak? How do you create diversity or do you? Is that important to you? I don't. The diversity comes to me in the form of the cow, meaning because I just buy a full cow and I store it in a deep freezer, I'll pull cuts. By the nature of that, about 50% of that is ground beef. So I will say probably…

01:29:09

30 to 40% of my diet is ground beef. And I say that because I will go buy some steaks at the store when they're on sale to supplement. So I don't have half my diet ground beef. The diversity comes. Sometimes I'll cook ground beef and cook it like as ground beef. But a lot of times I'll just make smashed burger patties. Like that way I don't render out so much of the fat. And then the different cuts come with like the cow. Like, so,

01:29:32

I'll generally do like a steak for breakfast, a fattier steak for breakfast. And then as the day goes on, I'll usually eat leaner cuts if I have the choice. And sometimes it's just like whatever's in the freezer and thawed. But that's just and it's just more of like a bodybuilding mindset. Yeah.

01:29:50

fat and protein in the morning and that's really going to sustain me throughout the day. And as I get later into the day, I don't need as much fat because I have less day than I'm even trying to get through. If that makes sense. The fat meal at the beginning is kind of like putting the logs down on the fire. And I need fewer logs as the day is running out. But yeah, and I don't really cook. The cooking, like I mentioned, is just all stovetop

01:30:13

Sears, not a ton of diversity. I mean, I eat beef, milk, and eggs. The one thing I was doing, we talked about liver

01:30:22

So one of the things I was doing, and this was during the cut mostly, but it was also earlier than that. So I'll take the liver and I know it's high in vitamin A and all that, that we talked about. So I, I cut it up into, let's just call it one ounce, probably half ounce bites. I call them liver bites, cut them up. I store them in the freezer and I would have a liver bite in the morning, each meal. So I don't eat a pound of liver with one meal. I'll spread it out throughout the month. And I definitely did that during the cut because one of the things when I'm eating less food, it's,

01:30:49

by nature, less nutrients. And so I was like, I'll have more liver during this time to kind of increase the nutrient load, if you will. So I definitely did that during the cut. Um, but like I mentioned, I'm probably be weaning liver out of the diet now, but yeah, not a lot of diversity. I know it's, it sounds boring, but I look forward to all my meals. I enjoy all my meals. Uh, there's, I have no like cravings of things that are

01:31:16

I don't see meals and I'm like, oh man, I wish I could eat that. On special occasions, this is like kind of maybe the last detail regarding that would be like ice cream. I think I love ice cream. Luckily, I think it is one of the healthiest, unhealthy foods you could choose. Like if you had to choose like a dessert food, like especially you can get ice cream with good ingredients, meaning like you can buy ice cream that is like just milk, eggs,

01:31:45

honey like like real ingredients like there's only like three or four ingredients in it so more or less it's a of the desserts that's a one to steer i don't do much of it but like if i were to do that a bit hey ice cream's more or less fine how often would you have that it's usually dictated in social circumstances like when i'm by myself into my own devices i'll never buy this stuff but if you know if if there's a special occasion and

01:32:12

And I'm tasked to go buy something. Maybe I'll, I'll, I'll buy something with like the better ingredients so I can partake. And the liver, you mentioned little pieces frozen. When you consume that, are you putting it on the pan with whatever you're cooking and cooking it? Are you thawing it and eating it raw? Do you eat it frozen? What do you do there? Frozen, frozen, just eat it frozen. Um, I actually do the same thing with the heart, uh,

01:32:38

Like, like we talked about like the liver, the heart, these are kind of like nutrient packed and different nutrient profiles. So instead of just eating like a whole cow heart in one meal or, you know, in one day or whatever, uh, I do the same thing with the heart. I'll cut it up, make heart bites. Um, and I, I eat them frozen, raw and frozen. I know it sounds kind of weird, but it doesn't taste bad or anything like that. What about barbecuing? Do you grill at all? Or it sounds like the majority is on a pan in the house, but do you mix it up with that?

01:33:06

My grill broke a few years ago and I don't miss it at all. So I have not grilled much lately. I'm not against grilling. My parents, I'll go over there with my brothers and we'll have Sunday dinners occasionally and they'll grill. No problem with grilling. The only thing I would mention about grilling, if people like grilling, is that's great. I don't worry about…

01:33:29

people worry about various carcinogens from grilling meat. I wouldn't eat char meat on purpose all the time. Definitely wouldn't do that. I wouldn't try and char stuff. Um, but I also wouldn't worry about the carcinogens from grilling your steak either. So when it comes to that smash burger, you talked about, you would just put butter in the pan, ground beef kind of form into a patty, maybe add a bit of sea salt and that's it.

01:33:54

So I will make a little ball, right? So I'll take the ground beef package, make little balls, put them in the pan, smash them down with a silicone spatula. Sometimes you put butter in the pan, but sometimes you don't even need that. And I smash it, flip it, smash it.

01:34:18

I try not to smash it after it's kind of heated up or you're just going to render more and more fat out. So if you want to render the fat out, that's it. Smash it more. If you don't, don't smash it as much. Yeah. And the reason I kind of like the smash burgers is I'll even eat those pretty darn people would say raw, but I say rare. But it's it cooks, you know, you're done in like no time.

01:34:40

And just to get an idea how much beef you'd eat in a serving, would you eat basically a whole package of a typical size serving of ground beef?

01:34:51

first day breakfast, lunch, and then dinner, if you're going to have three meals that. So it depends on if I'm doing anything weird with like bulking or cutting physique wise. And it depends if I'm eating eggs or anything else with it. But just left to my own devices and red meat, I would go to basically about one pound three times a day. That's kind of like my, my sweet spot of just if I'm doing just a beef day. All right. I want to move into oral health now.

01:35:19

and you talked about your day, typical day of what you eat. Let's open that up talking about what you do typically in the morning, at night, anything in the middle too, to keep up with your oral health. So the biggest thing I do is two things. One, we've already just spent like over an hour talking about, and that's the diet. If you eat the right food, a lot of this other stuff doesn't even matter.

01:35:44

The second biggest thing I do, which takes some training, is besides when I'm talking, I keep my mouth shut all day long. I keep my tongue on the palate and I breathe through my nose. Like it's called proper oral posture. Those are going to do more for you than any dental product there is. So if you're at your desk working and you catch your mouth hanging open and breathing out of your mouth,

01:36:09

close that jaw, put the tongue on the palate, breathe through your nose. It's super important. We could spend an hour, two hours talking about this. But it's very important to proper oral posture, everything from like development to just overall health. So those two things are the main things. Now, I think to answer your question is more like what are my routines around preventative care? Well, we'll get there. I want to talk about the mouth breathing piece a bit before we get to that. Would you recommend for somebody who this is a new practice,

01:36:39

whether it be at night when they're sleeping or if they're working at their desk, using tape to hold the lips together? Yes, with caveat. So when I graduated dental school, I did a weird thing. I'm not sure this was ever even done before, but I had fallen down a rabbit hole of dental sleep medicine, which is treating obstructive sleep apnea with oral devices. So dentists can make these custom fit devices that'll hold the jaw in a position that opens up the airway to treat sleep apnea.

01:37:08

And I learned how serious of a condition this sleep disordered breathing was specifically sleep apnea and how people are traditionally given a CPAP machine. They can't stand it over 50% of people diagnosed with it, that they're just going untreated and dental and dentists have this novel way to treat these patients. And I was just like enthralled. I was like, this is like, this is what I want to do. I, so after I graduated, I opened up a practice exclusively dedicated to treating sleep disordered breathing. And so, uh,

01:37:36

I give all this kind of preamble because if you have sleep apnea, just taping your mouth shut, not going to, it could, it can definitely help. You want to be breathing through your nose, but it's not a treatment for sleep apnea. And so the one thing that gives me pause when people just mouth tape is sometimes people

01:37:53

Maybe more than sometimes, like often, there's an underlying problem, an airway obstruction that needs to be treated. Mouth tape is literally masking the problem. So that's what the caveat with the mouth tape. If you don't have an obstructive airway and your jaw has just fallen open while you're sleeping and you need to train nasal breathing, fantastic. Highly recommend it. Well, let's get to the root of the problem. For somebody that truly has sleep apnea, what's happening there is

01:38:20

And you mentioned the problem with people in compliance of the CPAP, which is the typical way, at least the way I understand it, people would be treated for that. What would you recommend instead? So the root of the problem, we'll start there and we'll talk about treatments. There's two causes to the root of this problem. And

01:38:42

The first one is the development of the jaws, which we talked briefly about already, where our jaws aren't growing adequately. And that's why teeth are, that's why we have malocclusion today. Teeth, our mouths are too small. So teeth are just erupting wherever they can fit. Well, that's because our jaws aren't growing adequately. But if your jaws aren't growing adequately, they're too small, right?

01:39:02

Well, we have this muscle in the mouth that does not shrink with it. In fact, when you're gaining weight and getting obese, it will deposit fat there. And that's your tongue. So you have this, I call it a shrinking cage and a growing prisoner. And so that prisoner has only two escape routes and it can go forward. Like you stick your tongue out to get that tongue out of the airway. And we just talked about like, you don't want to be breathing through your mouth. You don't want to have an open mouth.

01:39:27

open oral posture. So the other escape route is backwards. So the tongue will fall backwards and it'll obstruct the airway. And so that's why the oral appliances that a dentist will make will be used to treat this. And it's kind of like if they've ever been taught CPR, they'll tell you to lift the chin to open the airway. Well, these oral appliances will position the jaw, the bottom jaw in a forward position that helps open the airway. Now the tongue can still fall back. So it's not a foolproof like treatment, but it's a good option for people that, especially those that cannot tolerate CPAP machine.

01:39:56

The CPAP machine, for anyone that's known, it's like a mask, and it basically just pumps air down your throat. It's a pneumatic splinting of the airway that forces your airway open. And that will more or less work because they will just crank that pressure up to as high as it has to go to open up the airway. But as you can imagine, it's not well tolerated or desired by most people. I can tell you from my experience, when I was treating patients…

01:40:21

They fell in two camps. One is they're giving up on CPAP. And the other one is like they use it, but they hate it. And they really want to try something else. Now, obviously, I probably had to buy a sample because that's what I was doing. I was seeing patients for this treatment. But that's the root cause. And the two standard treatments now are PAP. Now there's AutoPAP, CPAP, EPAP and oral appliances. OK, it sounds like both of those may not be perfect solutions.

01:40:51

Is there something else that you'd recommend or would you lean towards one of those? Well, so part of it is if it's a weight problem, like losing weight, very beneficial. Physitional therapy where it's like you're sleeping on your side. If you can imagine gravity, if you're on your back, gravity's working against you. The tongue's falling back, your jaw's falling back. So sleeping on your side, positional therapy, losing weight. But a lot of it is also structural. So you can get a surgery called MMA, maxillomandibular advancement, which

01:41:19

where the oral surgeon will basically move your jaws. Kind of like if you imagine like you had actual full proper jaw development, they're gonna force that. They break your jaw and they move both of them forward and it'll create more space in the back of your throat. But beyond surgeries, weight loss, positional therapy,

01:41:40

Various kind of PAP, CPAP, APAP, AutoPAP, which APAP is AutoPAP, EPAP, which we can talk more about. That's the device I developed as an EPAP device. Oral devices,

01:41:53

There's tongue retaining devices. So a tongue retaining device, if you imagine a pacifier and you stick your tongue into it, well, it's literally like just pulling your tongue out of your throat. And those were, those are pretty effective. But as you can imagine, no one wants like very, very bad compliance with those. So those are kind of the options when it comes to, you know, sleep apnea. So weight loss first, if you get your weight to a good place and you're assuming your tongue isn't fat at that point.

01:42:22

Then you can turn to what you just suggested. You also mentioned your device, Ned. Talk more about that and how it works. Sure. And one quick note is sometimes weight loss is not always first. And what I mean by that is one of the most gratifying things treating sleep disorder breathing, sleep apnea, is you treat a patient and their life changes almost overnight. And that's because sleep apnea is the airway shutting down at night and then

01:42:50

that's what apnea means, cessation of breath. And then every, it's 30 times, 30 times in more than hours, severe apnea. So we'll do that 30 times an hour. And every time it closes down, the body doesn't want to die. So it basically injects itself with like a, like an adrenaline shot to wake itself up. And so you don't necessarily consciously wake up, but the stress response gets the body to open the airway and then it closes down and open the bed. All this to say is you haven't slept a good night's sleep often five to 10 years before someone gets a diagnosis of sleep apnea.

01:43:17

And so weight loss is very difficult if you haven't slept for a week, nonetheless, a decade. So sometimes getting the sleep right is the path to fat loss. And so I, yes, as you mentioned, I developed a device. So I'm treating patients.

01:43:34

And these oral devices, basically, I'm seeing people that are CPAP intolerant. They can't stand it. And so I'm treating with oral devices. And if you move the jaw slightly forward, it stabilizes the jaw position so it doesn't fall back. And the patient's comfortable. And it does a decent job of treating sleep apnea. And it often decreases the severity in half. So you take someone from 30 events an hour to 15. And

01:43:58

that's good. But to me, someone having 15 events an hour is still just like, they're not, it's not good. And I, it never sat well with me. So I was like, what else can I do? And so I did research and I came up with this idea for a nasal EPAP dilator. And basically what it is, is it's a nasal dilator. So basically,

01:44:18

It's crucial. Like you have to breathe through your nose or this, or you're not going to have success. So that's why it's a nasal dilator. It's gonna make it easy for anyone to breathe through their nose, even if they have like constrictions or deviated septum or anything like that. So you can breathe through your nose and it has an EPAP valve on it. And EPAP is stands for expiratory positive air pressure, but it's basically when you breathe out, it slows your exhalation, creating kind of a back pressure that keeps your airway from collapsing. Um,

01:44:43

And so my idea was, I'm like, all right, I'm treating patients with this oral device and we're just getting them to this comfortable position. Sometimes they'll be like, oh, you didn't treat sleep apnea. Move the jaw more forward. You can only move the jaw so far forward and then you start getting all kinds of problems. So like pain, TMJ problems. So the idea was, hey, you just move the jaw a little bit forward and you use this to augment the results.

01:45:04

And so I got the patent on that, which was very exciting. And the product is actually officially launching in about six months. So Q1 next year. But it's not going to be for sleep apnea, just for snoring. So that's the caveat because we're not getting FDA cleared for sleep apnea. It requires more money and time than I have. So the indication is just going to be for snoring. But that's basically how it works. And from the way you explained it there, this is addressing the nose problem.

01:45:33

And if somebody is getting a classic type treatment with the job being moved forward, this has been a missing piece. Although you can't say it's, you have to say it's for snoring and not sleep apnea, from reading between the lines, this is helping out with sleep apnea, a missing hole that hasn't been addressed till now. Yes. So…

01:46:01

There was an EPAP product called Provent that was the first EPAP product on the market. Uh, I mean, it's relatively new invention, like 20 years ago, let's say, um, and the, and the realm of medicine, that's pretty new. Uh,

01:46:14

And it was an EPAP product that was FDA cleared for sleep apnea treatment. And they went bankrupt for a number of different reasons. And there's really been like a hole in the EPAP market. Now there is another product that is FDA approved for sleep apnea. But there's basically no EPAP product for snoring. And so that's the indication we're going after. And my original thought was like, hey, use this in combination with this oral device. And yes.

01:46:40

As we tested this product, it works fantastic, like on its own without an oral device for snoring. And so it makes perfect sense to kind of go to market for that, you know, and if a doctor is going to prescribe it off a label, you know, that's their prerogative. And what's the connection between sleep apnea and snoring? And why I want to go here is somebody who is waking up feeling unrested. If their partner is saying they're snoring, how do they begin to piece this together and realize they have a problem?

01:47:08

So there's a technical definition, but it's generally on a continuum. You have upper airway resistance syndrome, which is basically snoring on this side where the airway is narrowing, but your airflow is still going through. You're not like not breathing, which apnea is a cessation of breath. Like the airflow stops. So with snoring, you hear the noise because there is airflow. When you hear that airflow stop,

01:47:32

And then you'll often hear like a gasp for air. That's an apnea. So if your partner does that, it's very common. So people listening to this, there will be many people like, oh, yeah, that's exactly. They're snoring and then it stops and then there's a gasp. That's apnea. So it's really a continuum. Continuum snoring, upper airway resistance syndrome, air still going through.

01:47:54

There's forms of mild apnea where you have hypopneas, which is not a full apnea, but airflow is restricted such to the degree that the oxygen in your blood drops by 4% or more. So if you're breathing so difficult that it's causing your oxygen to really kind of plummet, they count that as a hypopnea. And so that's more of your mild forms of apnea. And then once you get to more severe, you're getting full apneas. That's cessation of breath generally for 10 seconds.

01:48:22

also causes 4% or more decrease in oxygen saturation. And so this is an AHI index, apnea hypopnea index, where if you are 30 or more, you're severe, 15 to 30 is moderate, five to 15 is mild. And a huge amount of people are like in this mild range. And like my device, not FDA cleared for sleep apnea, but the problem I see is

01:48:51

A lot of people need like they have mild apnea. You want to treat that, but like

01:48:55

A CPAP is like a bazooka for that, right? So you got this whole big machine and you got mild apnea. Oral appliances can be a great option for those people, but they're not… People are… You have to be a right candidate for an oral appliance. You have to have healthy teeth. You have to not have TMJ issues. Like no periodontal disease. We talked about 50% of people have periodontal disease. So like that's already kind of getting rid of half the population and they're not well covered by insurance. So they can be very expensive. And so it's like, hey,

01:49:23

What's a low cost option for this massive population of people with mild forms of sleep disordered breathing? And so that's kind of what the niche I hope my product fits. Somebody right now who is suffering from snoring, either themselves or partner, both of them, likely the latter. Until your product comes to market, is there anything else people can use? Like those nasal strips, anything out there

01:49:56

before your device hits market that people can try? - Well, kind of things that we've talked about that like nasal breathing is like job number one. So if you're gonna use an oral device, you're gonna use my device, you need to be breathing through your nose. So my device is a nasal dilator, so it's gonna help you facilitate nasal breathing.

01:50:12

But if you put a nasal strip on and you start breathing through your nose, that's a fantastic start mouth tape to help, to help facilitate that as well. Um, that's a great starting place. Uh, we mentioned some of the other stuff is positional therapy where you sleep on your side and there's different kinds of products. Like the classic positional therapy device was you sew a tennis ball into the back of a t-shirt and you go to bed with that. So anytime you'd roll over onto your back, like you,

01:50:35

you don't, right? They'll wake you up and get you back onto your side. There's other more elegant ones that aren't so, that won't wake you up so drastically. But I also always recommend people, like, if you can, get a sleep study. They can be done at home. You don't have to go into a lab, PSG, where they hook you up to all those wires and sleep in a foreign environment. They still do that, but now they do more and more home sleep tests. So you can sleep in your own bed. I just think it's important because it's like,

01:51:03

sleep disorder breathing is perhaps the most serious undiagnosed untreated medical condition in the western world like it is so prevalent and its effect on quality of life and how it exacerbates basically all comorbidities uh super important area so i do recommend sleep test even though i know a lot of people are hesitant to to do those they can be pricey and if you work for the dot uh

01:51:27

If you get a sleep test and you test positive, well, then you have to be using your CPAP machine, clocking in. So obviously it's important because people with sleep apnea are prone to, if it's untreated, you're prone to accidents like falling asleep at the wheel. How do you feel about some of these consumer devices like the Oura Ring and using that to determine…

01:51:49

some of what we're talking about today if somebody is snoring or has sleep apnea? I think the future, like, I think it is the future. So that's the caveat meaning, like, I think the data…

01:52:01

Up to this point, historically, it's been very suspect. And sometimes I think it does more harm than good. Some of these things where someone looks at their tracker and they're like, oh, I only slept four hours last night. I have to be tired today. So it kind of like psychologically like a negative. But I think it brings awareness to sleep health, which like I was just mentioning is so important. I don't probably not enough attention put on sleep health. I saw just this week Apple's new watch.

01:52:29

got approved for… Now, it can't diagnose sleep apnea, but it got approved for…

01:52:37

basically saying yes you are high risk for sleep apnea which i think is a huge like that's what it should do like it said hey we noticed like your blood oxygen like because some of these can also do uh pulse oximetry which is basically monitoring how much oxygen in the blood so if they're doing snoring they're like oh we heard you stop snoring and then we saw your blood your heart rate spike which happens after an apnea to get you to wake up and we saw your pulse oximetry drop like that's

01:53:03

All the data you need to be like, that's high risk. That was probably an apnea. So we got a lot of this technology, which will probably be a boom for the sleeping industry. Everyone will realize like, oh my God, we all, none of us are sleeping very well. So I think it's good to bring awareness, but also cautious about some of the technology up to this point. I found it to be,

01:53:24

you know, so-so. - All right, I know I gotta let you go here in a couple minutes. Let's end on your oral care routine. So we'll start with you waking up. - This is where I gotta lose my license if people hear what I do. - Let's talk about what you do to start the day and then move right through. - So, yes, we talked about the two most important things, diet, nasal breathing, not breathing through your mouth. But when it comes to like my oral care routine,

01:53:48

I wake up, I do brush my teeth with an electric toothbrush in the, in the morning, just with water. And I'll explain why. Uh, but let me just go throughout the day and then we'll come back around to the morning. Uh, throughout the day, I don't do anything in particular. No, uh, just make it verifying. Like if I got some stuff stuck in my teeth, I'd floss it out. But like, there's nothing I'm doing on a daily basis. Uh,

01:54:11

Before I go to bed, I brush my teeth with an electric toothbrush. I have recently been used. I've used different brands. I recommend a hydroxy appetite toothpaste. I use rise well because they have micro nano hydrox and excuse me, micro hydroxy appetite. And it's a huge rabbit hole, but there's nano hydroxy appetite is another kind of hydroxy appetite, which is probably safe. Definitely effective.

01:54:37

I'm just have, I'm not a hundred percent sold on the nano yet. Uh, once I am, I'll, I'll probably just be like, yeah, everyone should be using nano hydroxyapatite. I'm not sold on the nano. I think there's potential issues. I'm 95% sure that it's probably fine. Uh, 5% of me still is like, Hey, I'm not, I don't need anything special. So hydroxyapatite is going to be, uh, the substance to remineralize teeth. So if you had some, um, demineralization of your teeth, whether from your diet, you know, mouth breathing, uh,

01:55:07

this is going to help re kind of fortify your teeth at the end of the day fluoride is what's traditionally used i don't recommend fluoride definitely don't recommend fluoridated water that's a massive discussion but if you're pregnant or have children i would filter the fluoride out of your water that's

01:55:22

With a par for the course. If you're using a toothpaste and you're an adult and you're spitting it out, I'm less concerned. But I still would just go with hydroxyapatite anyways because it's safer. So mine is I've been using Risewell. It's a good quality brand. Legit ingredients. They have micro nano hydroxyapatite.

01:55:39

they also have nano. So you can choose if you want. Nano is probably more effective. Uh, if you need that more effective because they're smaller particles are going to fill basically in the holes of your teeth better. Uh, I don't feel like I need that. So I like why risk it if you don't need it. I probably don't even need the toothpaste at all, but, uh,

01:55:55

I do use some toothpaste. I floss. I use floss that is PFA free. That's the one thing you want to be sure. I do recommend flossing. Like why not clean out in between your teeth? But floss is like the glide. What makes it glide? Like Teflon, PFA, polyfluoroalkyl substances. Floss with PFAs, is it the end of the world? Probably not. But PFAs are like ubiquitous in your life. So why not get rid of them where you can and just choose a floss that's PFA free?

01:56:24

And there's lots of, a lot of pluses have been phasing it out because I guess awareness is growing around PFAs, which is great. That's the extent of it. I don't use mouthwash. I don't chew gum. I know a lot of people are on the xylitol, which can be fine. The therapeutic dose of xylitol chewing gum is extremely high. So you have to be chewing xylitol all the time. I know xylitol, if I consume it like as an artificial sweetener, so good.

01:56:52

so disturbing to my gut and it is for many other people too so it's not something I would swallow a lot of but it can be okay it seems to be beneficial as far as how it interacts with the oral microbiome so it seems to

01:57:09

be a positive there, but I don't, I don't think it's necessary. I mean, I would, I'd focus on the major things that we talked about is diet, not mouth breathing. Uh, some of these basic oral care, like electric toothbrush, I recommend because manual toothbrush with hard bristles and bad technique can cause recession and things like that. So electric toothbrush gets rid of a lot of the user error. And the last thing I wanted to conclude with, I was like, well, after I brush my teeth at night, I go to bed. I wake up the next morning. All I've been doing is breathing through my nose all night. So it's not like

01:57:37

I know a lot of people are like, brush your teeth with toothpaste in the morning. There's no demineralization that was happening. So it makes no sense beyond just like, hey, let me just get the saliva production, rinse everything out and go. So it's pretty basic oral hygiene. And how do you know you're breathing through your nose throughout the night?

01:57:58

The biggest, well, there's a few ways you can. So if you wake up, it's better to, it's almost more clear like when you know you're not. If you have to sleep with water by your bedside, clear sign you're breathing through your mouth. If you wake up with a dry mouth, likely breathing through your mouth. Snoring can or cannot. So you can snore with your mouth closed, you can snore with your mouth open. So that's not a true sign, but there's some other warning signs like, those are three kind of the classic ones, but oh, the last one, like a bedtime partner.

01:58:28

Saying like, hey, yeah, your jaw is hanging open. All right, Kevin, really enjoyed the conversation. I feel like we covered a lot. Maybe we can plan for around two and six months when the NED device comes out. But this was great. And thank you for the work you're doing. Well, thank you for having me on. We're going to link up your website, your social media, everything in the show notes. Thanks again. Appreciate it. Now that you're finished with the episode, head on over to ultimatehealthpodcast.com for detailed show notes, including links to everything we discussed.

01:58:57

Thanks for listening and have a great day.

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D:2025.07.09<markdown>

我是一名牙医，专注于通过肉类营养和睡眠期间的气道管理来改善口腔全身健康。多年来，我深入研究了饮食与口腔健康之间的关系，并得出了一些重要的结论。

农业革命与口腔健康的恶化

我认为，农业革命是口腔健康恶化转折点。农业革命导致饮食中碳水化合物和谷物急剧增加，从而导致龋齿化石记录的急剧增加。此后，工业革命和技术革命进一步加剧了这一趋势，精制谷物、加工食品和种子油等对口腔健康造成了渐进式的损害。

以肉类为主的饮食：回归人类饮食的本质

所有证据都指向以肉类为主的饮食。如果我们的身体是为了适应以碳水化合物为主的饮食，那么高碳水化合物不应该腐蚀我们的牙齿。这种天然的不一致性，以及对祖先饮食的深入研究，让我坚信肉类在人类饮食中占据核心地位。

在农业革命前的漫长岁月里，人类是猎人-采集者，主要以肉类为食，特别是高脂肪的动物。基本的人类饮食模式包括动物性食物、作为补充的根茎类植物和少量季节性水果。乳糖酶耐受性的快速传播，也佐证了乳制品在农业革命后作为重要食物来源的地位。

口腔健康的核心：饮食与口腔微生物组

我更关注预防，以及饮食对口腔健康的核心作用。蛀牙的成因在于口腔中的细菌将可发酵的碳水化合物发酵成酸，从而侵蚀牙釉质。因此，低碳水化合物饮食，特别是减少糖和精制谷物的摄入，对口腔健康至关重要。同时，均衡的营养，包括蛋白质、脂肪以及各种维生素和矿物质，对于强化牙齿也至关重要。

酸性食物本身也会增加口腔酸度，加剧蛀牙风险。含糖饮料则更是糟糕，因为它们既含有可发酵的糖分，饮用时又不会刺激唾液分泌，从而无法有效中和酸性物质。

健康的牙齿会“出汗”，即排出液体以防止细菌附着。然而，血糖升高会干扰这一过程，导致牙齿脱水，增加细菌附着和龋齿的风险。这与胰岛素升高对甲状旁腺激素的干扰有关。

关于肉类选择的思考：反刍动物与非反刍动物

我个人更倾向于选择牛肉，而非鸡肉和猪肉。鸡肉和猪肉属于单胃动物，如果饲喂不当，其脂肪中会含有较多不饱和脂肪酸，这与现代人应尽量避免的种子油类似。而反刍动物，如牛，即使是谷物饲养，其脂肪也更饱和，营养成分与祖先时代食用的动物更接近。

理想情况下，草饲、草养的牛肉营养成分与史前人类食用的猛犸象等动物最为接近，最大的区别在于脂肪含量。虽然鸡肉和猪肉也具有营养价值，但其营养成分与祖先时代的食物差异较大，而且现代养殖方式也对其营养价值造成了一定影响。

关于补充剂的谨慎态度

我个人对补充剂持谨慎态度。人体是一个复杂的系统，各种维生素和矿物质之间存在复杂的相互作用。盲目补充，反而可能造成不必要的损害。除非存在客观和主观的证据表明缺乏某种营养素，否则我建议优先从食物中获取营养。

维生素D的补充就是一个很好的例子。我的研究表明，维生素D水平的季节性波动可能是生理常态，无需刻意补充。然而，如果长期缺乏日照或存在肥胖等问题，则需要考虑补充。

碘的补充也类似。高碳水化合物饮食会增加对碘的需求，而以肉类为主的饮食通常能够满足碘的需求。因此，除非存在碘缺乏的症状，否则无需额外补充。

关于器官肉的食用建议

我提倡尽可能地食用动物的各个部位，但对肝脏的食用持谨慎态度。肝脏富含维生素A，过量摄入可能导致维生素A蓄积，从而引发健康问题。我建议根据自身情况和维生素D水平等因素来决定是否食用肝脏，并在夏季日照充足时适量食用。

口腔护理建议：饮食、呼吸和简单的口腔清洁

良好的口腔健康始于健康的饮食和正确的呼吸方式。保持鼻呼吸，避免张口呼吸，对于口腔健康至关重要。此外，我建议使用电动牙刷，选择不含全氟烷基物质的牙线，并使用含羟基磷灰石的牙膏来帮助牙齿再矿化。我不建议使用含氟牙膏或漱口水，因为它们可能会破坏口腔微生物组的平衡。

睡眠呼吸暂停的治疗：从根本原因入手

睡眠呼吸暂停是一个严重的问题，它会影响睡眠质量，并加剧各种慢性疾病的风险。治疗睡眠呼吸暂停的关键在于解决根本原因，即下颌发育不良和舌体肥大。

我开发了一种名为NED的鼻腔EPAP扩张器，旨在通过增加鼻腔气流和控制呼气压力来改善睡眠呼吸暂停和打鼾。虽然目前该产品仅获批用于治疗打鼾，但它有潜力与其他治疗方法结合使用，以更有效地治疗睡眠呼吸暂停。

结语

总而言之，我坚信以肉类为主的饮食，结合正确的呼吸方式和简单的口腔清洁，是维护口腔和全身健康的关键。 对祖先饮食模式的理解，以及对现代饮食习惯的反思，将帮助我们更好地维护自身健康。 同时，对于睡眠呼吸暂停等问题，我们也需要从根本原因入手，选择合适的治疗方案。

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演讲者以人类30万年的历史为时间轴，将其比作一天24小时。在最初的23小时里，即农业革命前，化石记录中几乎没有蛀牙、牙周病、错颌畸形和脓肿等口腔问题。而在最后1小时，也就是约1万到1.2万年前的农业革命时期，人类从狩猎采集者转变为农民，开始大量种植作物，饮食中碳水和谷物的占比大幅上升，随之而来的是化石记录中蛀牙数量的急剧增加。

之后的工业革命（相当于一天中的1分钟）带来了食品的碾磨和加工，出现了精制谷物；技术革命（相当于1秒）则带来了种子油等。随着这些变革，口腔健康状况持续恶化。演讲者认为，从口腔、牙齿和颌骨的证据来看，人类更适合以肉类为主的饮食。如果人类本应适合高碳水饮食，那么高碳水就不会对牙齿造成如此大的损害，这之间存在自然的不协调。

作为牙医，凯文认为口腔健康的核心在于饮食。要理解如何通过饮食实现最佳口腔健康，首先需要了解口腔疾病的成因。

蛀牙的形成机制是明确的：口腔中的细菌会将碳水（尤其是可发酵碳水）发酵成酸，这些酸会腐蚀牙釉质，导致蛀牙。蛋白质和脂肪不会引发这一过程，而糖、精制谷物等表面积较大且易使血糖飙升的食物，对牙齿的危害最大。此外，还有另一种导致口腔酸性增加的方式，即直接摄入酸性食物或饮料，如含磷酸的普通苏打水、含柠檬酸的其他饮料等，它们会直接降低口腔pH值，增加蛀牙风险。而含糖饮料更是“集大成者”，既含酸性物质，又含会被发酵成酸的糖，且饮用时不咀嚼，无法刺激唾液分泌来缓冲酸性，对牙齿危害极大。

牙本质液流动（或称牙本质液运输）对牙齿健康至关重要。健康的牙齿中，牙本质小管内的液体会向外“渗出”，就像“出汗”一样，能阻止细菌等有害物质附着在牙齿上。但当血糖飙升时，会影响激素系统，干扰腮腺的正常工作以及牙齿内的液流方向，液流可能停止甚至反向，这相当于使牙齿“脱水”，导致细菌和牙菌斑更容易附着在牙齿上，再加上细菌对碳水的发酵作用，就为口腔 decay 创造了条件。而血糖和胰岛素的飙升会干扰腮腺激素，进而影响牙齿内液体的正常流动方向。

从人类学角度看，人类历史约300万年，农业革命后的饮食变化对口腔健康产生了负面影响，而此前狩猎采集者的饮食更有利于口腔健康。人类祖先的饮食以动物食品为主，辅以块茎、根茎等地下储藏器官和季节性水果。这可以视为人类饮食的基线。

农业革命后，饮食变得复杂，比如乳制品。在欧洲血统人群中，乳糖耐受性的快速传播表明乳制品是重要的食物，有些人能很好地适应乳制品，但这因祖先而异，比如有些人适合米饭，有些人则不然。总体而言，饮食应以肉类为主，辅以块茎、根茎和季节性水果，再根据自身祖先背景适当调整。

演讲者倾向于选择牛肉，原因与反刍动物的消化系统有关。鸡、猪等单胃动物若食用不当饲料（如大豆、玉米），其脂肪不饱和程度高，类似种子油；而牛等反刍动物，即使谷饲，因其复杂的胃结构，脂肪会被饱和，更接近祖先食用的猛犸象等动物的营养成分，只是猛犸象脂肪含量更高。

羊肉、麋鹿等反刍动物肉类也不错，只是牛肉在多地更易获取。草饲草育的牛肉在营养上与祖先食用的动物更接近，谷饲牛肉虽有差异，但不像单胃动物那样明显。鸡则类似于水果，经过特殊培育和喂养，生长迅速，与野生鸡差异大；野生水果小、多籽，与人工培育的高糖水果不同。即使猪、鸡食用祖先饮食，其营养也与牛肉有差异，但适量食用也无妨，且不同肉类营养各有侧重，多样化食用可获取更全面营养。

鱼类和海鲜并非演讲者饮食的重要部分。沿海地区的人若能获取新鲜、无污染的海鲜，可将其作为饮食的一部分，但需注意海鲜可能受污染，积累重金属等有害物质。对于内陆地区的人来说，获取高质量海鲜较困难。

Omega-3脂肪酸虽重要，但从陆地动物中也能获取足够量。且Omega-3不饱和程度高，易氧化，需注意海鲜品质，不推荐鱼油补充剂。常规牛肉和草饲草育牛肉都能提供足够的Omega-3，无需额外补充。现代人饮食中Omega-6与Omega-3比例失衡（高达28:1），Omega-6的过量摄入是更大问题。

演讲者通过自身实验发现，身体会根据季节和体脂变化调节维生素D水平。冬季体脂增加时维生素D可能较低，夏季体脂减少且日晒增多时维生素D水平会上升。从祖先角度看，冬季维生素D水平较低可能是正常生理现象，不必过于担心，但若冬季不晒太阳、夏季也不刻意晒太阳或体脂过高，则需关注。

演讲者不打算在冬季补充维生素D，因为补充剂可能带来危害，且人体调节机制复杂，脂溶性维生素（如D、K2、A）相互作用，补充不当可能失衡。除非有明确的主观和客观问题（如检测结果异常、身体不适），否则不建议随意补充。

演讲者认为多数补充剂弊大于利，人们常随意服用，不了解背后的原理。人体调节机制复杂，多种营养素需协同作用，单独补充某一种可能带来问题。例如补充维生素D需考虑维生素K2和A的摄入，它们相互影响。

补充剂应是“锦上添花”，而非营养的主要来源，但很多补充剂的剂量远超日常需求，这是不合理的。不过，对于饮食不均衡的人，某些补充剂可能有一定益处，如素食者补充维生素B12，但需有明确理由，不能盲目服用。

演讲者服用Element电解质补充剂，常将其加入咖啡中，认为这样可改善咖啡口感，或许有助于补水（虽非必需）。对于食物加盐，演讲者主张“按口味加盐”，初期食肉时可能需要较多盐来平衡电解质，长期食肉后盐的摄入量可能会减少。

钠的摄入量存在“J曲线”，过少或过多都不好，但人体肾脏能较好地调节钠的平衡。一般来说，食肉初期可适当多盐，后期可减少，且碳水摄入越多，可能需要的盐也越多。

演讲者的饮食很简单，主要包括当地农场的牛肉、生牛奶（有山羊奶和牛奶，均为A2型）和鸡蛋，偶尔喝咖啡并加入Element电解质。不使用香料，只加盐，认为适量香料不会影响健康目标，只是个人偏好。

旅行时会携带牛肉干，有应急用的胶原蛋白粉等，但主要还是牛肉。在增肌期会增加鸡蛋和牛奶的摄入量，减脂期则减少。演讲者认为最符合祖先饮食的是高脂肪牛肉，也曾尝试碳水，发现去皮且煮熟的白土豆较易接受，水果则因消化问题时好时坏。而“肉和土豆”的搭配可能是一种古老而合理的饮食模式，水果可适量食用，但需考虑其与祖先食用的野生水果的差异。

从人类进化史看，能人使用工具处理肉类，减少了对颌部的使用，导致颌部缩小。直立人成功生存近200万年，主要捕食大型脂肪丰富的动物，无需大量挖掘低热量的块根。随着大型动物减少，人类不得不转向脂肪较少的小型动物，于是发明了弓箭、控制火的使用，并更多依赖植物性食物（如土豆等地下储藏器官）。

因为小型动物脂肪少，而蛋白质摄入有上限（过量会导致氮中毒），所以需要脂肪或碳水来补充能量。因此，在食用较瘦的草饲牛排时，可添加牛油等脂肪，或搭配土豆等碳水。

演讲者从口腔、牙齿和颌骨的证据出发，支持以肉类为主的饮食。蛀牙的存在表明高碳水饮食与人类牙齿不匹配。在进化过程中，颌骨变小与工具使用和火的使用有关，工具减少了颌部的工作量。

错颌畸形在工业革命后才常见，原因在于颌骨发育需要适当的营养和咀嚼刺激（如同肌肉锻炼需要运动和营养），营养不足或咀嚼不够会导致颌骨发育不良，进而使牙齿排列不齐。这些证据都指向肉类为主的饮食更适合人类。

碘的需求与碳水摄入有关，高碳水饮食可能需要更多碘，而低碳水的祖先饮食中，从肉类获取的碘可能足够。像钙的吸收，当蛋白质摄入充足时，肠道对钙的吸收会显著增加，这体现了人体营养吸收的复杂性。

演讲者认为，不应假设只吃肉会缺乏某种营养素，补充剂应是“补充”而非主要来源，且很多补充剂剂量过高，不合理。

演讲者会尽量食用所购买的整头牛（除因规定无法获得的部分，如大脑），但正考虑不再吃肝脏，因为肝脏富含维生素A（视黄醇，生物利用率高），若每天食用，可能导致维生素A在体内积累（脂溶性维生素易储存于脂肪中）。

若其他脂溶性维生素摄入不足，会造成脂溶性维生素失衡。不同文化对肝脏的态度差异可能与日照（影响维生素D水平）有关，高日照地区的人可能更能耐受肝脏中的维生素A，而低日照地区的人需谨慎。其他器官（如心脏、舌头等）的维生素A含量不高，肌肉 meat 中维生素A含量很低，骨髓则富含单不饱和脂肪，对健康有益。

对于市面上的器官胶囊补充剂，演讲者认为，饮食不佳的人服用可能获取一些缺失的营养素，有一定益处；但对于饮食健康的人，这属于多余。这些补充剂是浓缩形式，需了解其中营养素的作用，避免过量摄入。

肌酸是研究较多的补充剂，对认知和身体都有好处，且安全。红肉是肌酸的最佳来源，研究表明肌酸的益处也暗示了肉类摄入的重要性。大量食用牛肉（如成人1-2磅）可接近肌酸储存的最大值，无需额外补充。

演讲者进行了为期18个月的增肌和6个月的减脂实验，增肌期间只吃牛肉、牛奶和鸡蛋，通过逐渐增加食物摄入量（如鸡蛋从3个增至9个，牛奶最多达每周3加仑）来增加体重，减脂期则减少摄入量。

选择A2型牛奶是因为部分人对A1型酪蛋白不耐受，A2型更适合多数人，且演讲者饮用的是生牛奶，认为生牛奶中的细菌和酶有助于消化乳糖，营养成分保留更好，而巴氏杀菌奶会破坏酶，降低营养，还可能添加维生素A和D，带来潜在问题。

发酵乳制品（如酸奶、开菲尔）对有肠道问题的人可能有益（提供益生菌），但非健康必需。若不能耐受生牛奶，可能也难以耐受其他乳制品，此时可选择黄油或奶油（去除了大部分可能引起问题的成分）。

乳糖耐受性在欧洲人群中的快速传播表明乳制品在农业革命后的重要性，能耐受乳制品的人可适当食用，不能耐受的人（如多数亚洲人）则不建议食用。对于肠道微生物组，演讲者认为其很复杂，口腔微生物组的健康与否与饮食（尤其是碳水和糖）及用嘴呼吸有关。

膳食纤维并非必需，无纤维饮食也能保持健康，高纤维饮食可能有上限，过量可能带来问题。人体微生物组具有适应性，能适应不同饮食，但不必刻意追求高纤维。

约三分之二的美国成年人每天使用抗菌漱口水，但其会破坏口腔微生物组。口腔细菌在 nitric oxide 生成中起重要作用（约占人体 nitric oxide 生成量的50%），而 nitric oxide 对血管舒张、调节血流至关重要。使用抗菌漱口水可能导致血压升高、勃起功能障碍等与血流相关的问题，因此不建议频繁使用。

演讲者在实验期间没有禁食，认为禁食对减脂可能有一定作用，但从身体成分角度看，每日2-3餐比一餐更有利，一餐难以摄入足够营养，还会引发强烈的副交感神经反应（休息和消化），影响日常活动。

保持肌肉量需要持续刺激肌肉蛋白质合成，其在摄入蛋白质后3-4小时达到峰值后下降。禁食可能导致肌肉分解（尤其是体脂较低时），而分次摄入蛋白质（如男性每餐约50克，女性约30克）可刺激肌肉蛋白质合成，在减脂期（分解代谢状态）有助于保留肌肉。

对于二型糖尿病、体脂过高、代谢紊乱的人，改善代谢健康的关键是依从性。若适合并喜欢禁食，可采用；若不能，则从简单步骤开始，如三餐都吃牛肉（每餐半磅），逐步调整。

可先去除种子油，逐步改善饮食，利用成功带来的动力推动进一步改变，避免一次性进行过多改变而导致失败。

演讲者将植物性食物分为几个层级：最底层是块茎、根茎等地下储藏器官和季节性本地水果（最符合祖先饮食，植物毒素少，与人体生物学较匹配）；上一层是绿叶蔬菜等，营养少且生物利用率低，主要作用是增加饱腹感（适合减脂期，但过量可能积累草酸等有害物质）；再上一层是种子（包括谷物、坚果等），含有较多植物防御化合物，应尽量限制，因为它们是植物的后代，进化出多种化合物来抵御被食用，且是全球饮食中占比很高但与人类进化和生物学不匹配的食物；最上层是人工合成物（如人造甜味剂）和种子油等，不属于真正的食物。

演讲者通常早起后喝咖啡并加入Element电解质，感到饥饿时吃早餐（多为牛肉，有时有鸡蛋）。午餐前会进行15-20分钟的户外活动（晒太阳、散步），促进血液循环，之后吃午餐（多为牛肉）。晚餐前会进行常规力量训练，晚餐多为牛肉，有时会喝少量牛奶。

若摄入碳水（如土豆），会放在训练后的晚餐（即“碳水后置”），补充肌肉糖原。作息规律，早睡早起。饮食中的牛肉来源多样（因购买整头牛），约30%-40%是绞碎的牛肉，会做汉堡等，早餐可能吃较肥的牛排，之后选择较瘦的部位（受健身思维影响）。曾将肝脏和心脏切成小块冷冻后直接食用，不常烧烤，认为烧烤虽可行，但应避免过度烤焦。

保持口腔健康的两大关键是饮食和正确的口腔姿势（除说话外，保持嘴巴闭合，舌头贴 palate，用鼻子呼吸）。对于用嘴呼吸的人，若没有睡眠呼吸暂停，可用嘴贴训练鼻呼吸；若有睡眠呼吸暂停，嘴贴不能治疗，需处理潜在的气道阻塞问题。

演讲者的口腔护理 routine 很简单：早上用电动牙刷蘸水刷牙；白天若有食物嵌塞会用牙线清理；晚上用含羟基磷灰石的牙膏（如Risewell，选择微羟基磷灰石，对纳米羟基磷灰石持谨慎态度）刷牙，使用无全氟辛酸（PFA）的牙线。不使用漱口水和口香糖，认为木糖醇口香糖虽可能对口腔微生物组有益，但摄入过多可能扰乱肠道，且达到治疗剂量需频繁咀嚼，并非必需。

睡眠呼吸暂停的根源有两方面：一是颌骨发育不足，口腔空间小，舌头这一“囚徒”在“缩小的笼子”里易向后阻塞气道；二是肥胖，会使舌头等部位脂肪堆积。

常见治疗方法有持续气道正压通气（CPAP等）和口腔矫正器。CPAP通过气压打开气道，效果较好但依从性差；口腔矫正器将下颌前移打开气道，舒适度较高但效果可能有限。此外，减重、侧睡（体位疗法）对改善睡眠呼吸暂停有帮助，严重者可进行正颌手术（将颌骨前移）。

演讲者研发了一种 nasal EPAP 扩张器，结合了 nasal 扩张器（帮助鼻呼吸）和 EPAP 瓣膜（呼气时产生背压防止气道塌陷），可辅助口腔矫正器使用，目前主要用于缓解打鼾（尚未获得治疗睡眠呼吸暂停的FDA批准）。

打鼾和睡眠呼吸暂停处于同一连续体，打鼾时仍有气流，而睡眠呼吸暂停会出现呼吸暂停（气流停止），随后常伴有喘息。伴侣若观察到这些现象，可能提示存在睡眠呼吸暂停。轻度睡眠呼吸暂停可能表现为低通气（气流受限导致血氧下降4%以上）。

在演讲者的产品上市前，有一些方法可尝试改善打鼾和睡眠呼吸暂停，如使用 nasal 扩张器（如 nasal strips）、嘴贴促进鼻呼吸、侧睡（体位疗法）、减重等，也建议进行睡眠检测（可在家进行）以明确情况。消费级设备（如Oura Ring、Apple Watch）虽不能诊断睡眠呼吸暂停，但可提示高风险，有助于提高对睡眠健康的关注。

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D:2025.07.09

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