Mark Hyman – Meat Is The New Ketchup: #288

Why you should listen –

Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician, a New York Times bestselling author, and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and his latest book is titled Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health. On this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave and Mark talk about how to get thin by eating fat, red meats, Omega 3s, stress management, structural fats, hypercholesterolemia, MCT oils and more. Enjoy the show!

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Speaking of Mark, this is non other than Mark Hyman. A good friend, a family physician, a 9 times New York Times Bestselling author, the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, medical director of The UltraWellness Center, and star of the movie “Fed Up,” if you saw that in 2014, addressing childhood obesity, and all around just amazing guy,

Dave: Mark, you and I, we see each other at conferences all the time and we’ve gotten to be friends and I was about to just jump up and down when you told me about your latest book, when you gave me a chance to read it. It’s called, and this is a brilliant title, “Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health.” You know about Bulletproof Coffee, everyone in this thing knows that I’m a cheerleader for fat and I was like, “Okay,” it’s one thing when a crazy biohacker says, “Now you got to eat more fat.” It’s quite another thing when a guy with your credibility and credentials is like, “Okay, let’s talk about fat,” and by the way, you’ve worked with a surgeon general on diabetes prevention, like you have the power to make the mainstream towers of low fat propaganda just tip right over.

Mark: It’s unbelievable, Dave. The tide is shifting in a dramatic way. I wrote this book and I really dug into thousands of papers of science of fat because even I was confused. I understood sugar really well. Fat, I had a sort of good but not really deep understanding and I really wanted to know what the story was, so I dug into a thousand papers and I analyzed all the controversial issues about total fat, saturated fat, fat and weight loss, fat and heart disease and so on. I was going to take this book to the Cleveland Clinic’s chief of cardiology. The guy was the chairman of cardiology department, the number 1 heart hospital in the world, and I was a little sheepish and I’m like, “Can I better go, give me a heads up because I’m counting for now with his book,” and I thought I better just politically kind of just touch base with him.

Steve Ness, an amazing guy. One of the top guys in cardiology, and I sit down with him and I say, “Steve, I’m writing this book, I’m wanting to give you a heads up,” and he’s like, “Mark, stop right there.” He says, “I just have to tell you, we got the whole story wrong on fat and I think we even got the story wrong on saturated fat and I’m writing an editorial for the Annals of Internal Medicine on this,” and which, by the way, came out subsequently and he wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal with Nina Teicholz about the dietary guidelines challenging this whole dogma of low fat, and I think we still in America believe that fat is the enemy, that fat’s a 4 letter word that low fat is the way to go if you want to lose weight. Even dietitians are saying it, the government is saying it even though they’re sort of not saying it in one hand and the other hand, they’re saying it, and that fat causes heart disease, but these 2 ideas that fat makes you fat and that fat causes heart attacks have really been discredited by the science and yet the consumers and the media and most physicians and registered dietitians still don’t believe that.

Dave: Mark, one of the most incredible things that’s actually happened to me in all the time that I’ve been at Bulletproof relates to some of those people you just talked about. I was at a conference, I think it was Paleo Effects with Nyna, and we were having a private conversation and wondering back and forth whether it was going to take a class action lawsuit against someone like American Heart Association and like we’re literally talking about what it’s going to take to drive this change. I flew from there to a TV executive’s home where I was giving a talk to a group of influential Hollywood people about fat and about willpower and food, and there was a cardiothoracic surgeon in the room and I kind of bagged on the American Heart Association, and at the end of this, she stands up and it turns out she’s one of the very senior people within the American Heart Association and I’m like, “Oh my god, I told like all these Hollywood elites to eat butter and here’s someone’s who’s just going throw me to the meat grinder,” and I go, “Look, I really want to know what you have to say and I’m listening, I’m open minded to this,” and instead of kicking me in the nuts like I expected, she looked and she said, “I agree with everything he said.” It’s just like you said, Mark, we got it wrong and now, people aren’t listening to us, and I swear, I almost fell over, I almost like teared up because I was like, “I’m going to have to fight these-“

They also removed any restrictions on dietary cholesterol, saying “We got it wrong. It’s no longer a quote of nutrient concern.” I’m giving a presentation in New York in February about statins, about cholesterol, about heart disease, and about saturated fat, and when I looked at all the data on fat, it was really pretty stunning. Saturated fat, we looked at different kinds of studies. There’s observational studies, there’s interventional studies. I want to see, when you do an experiment, what happens? There was, for example, a small control trial, about 264 men, who had heart attacks and there was no benefit in reducing heart attacks or death when you actually reduce saturated fat.

There was no benefit and then the other thing is that when you look at heart disease, there was a recent review, a meta analysis of over 72 studies, 600,000 people, 19 countries, they looked at blood levels of fats, they looked at experimental interventions around fat, and they found that there was no evidence that total fat or saturated fat caused heart disease but trans fats did and Omega-3 fats were protective, and the conclusion of the … It does not clearly support the cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total or saturated fats, so they basically exonerated it, and then Ronald Krauss who was in our Fat Summit, we had a Fat Summit of 150,000 people attended.

Dave, you were in the Fat Summit. With 30 experts, we looked at this whole story of fat, and Ronald Krauss was there who’s one of the leading researchers from Oakland, he’s in the 70s now, maybe older, I don’t know, but he’s done so many published papers, I know you’ve probably seen them. They did a meta analysis of 21 studies, 350,000 people over 23 years. Not a small study, there was no connection to saturated fat and heart disease at all, and also the only thing I found was that if you gave saturated fat in combination with refined carbs or starch, I call that “Sweet fat,” so think of doughnut, french fries, bagel and butter, right? It’s not the butter, it’s the bagel, right? When you eat sweet fat, that’s a problem. That causes more harm than good, so I think if people are eating saturated fats and fat and general, it has to be in the context of a very low carb diet because-

Mark: I think the problem is the weight of this combination of fat and sweet in your body work, so saturated fat in the absence of refined carbs and sugar, carbohydrates are fine, it could be with sweet potatoes or other starches, but refined carbs and sugar and in the presence of Omega-3 fats, there seem to be very little harm in all the later trial, and I looked at like hundreds of studies, everything, and also can inflammation, because people say, “What about saturated fat inflammation?” I think that people are confused about that as well. In the context of a high carb diet, yes, but in feeding studies, and this is fascinating, 12% carbs, very high fat, up to 86 grams of saturated fat, that’s almost 50% of your diet not from fat but from saturated fat. That’s a lot, okay? That’s a lot.

Butter’s only 60% of saturated fat, so it’s just a lot of grams of saturated, and they looked at cholesterol, they looked at inflammation and they found there was no difference at all in terms of harm. In fact, the lowest inflammation was found in the high saturated fat group and had lower oxidative stress, they had lower insulin, they had lower triglycerides, and they had more large HDL particles and more large LDL protective particles and more HDL’s, so on these feeding intervention studies, it’s just both the population studies, the scientific experimental studies, all of it together gives me confidence that I’m not really so worried about saturated fat, but I would say this. I don’t know how much you’ve covered this, the genetics matter.

I’m actually not just sitting in my lab doing stuff. I don’t even have a lab, actually, although we’re doing research at Cleveland Clinic. I’m seeing patients. That’s what I do for a living. I’m a doctor and I still see patients and when you do stuff with patients, you see not everybody’s the same, so some people genetically respond better to fat, some people don’t, and I see real variation in the population. I even talked to Dr. Krauss about this. There’s really a heterogeneity genetically in how people respond to sugar, to fat, so I think that’s clear. We know for example with sugar and carbs that if your certain ethnicities, if you’re Samoan or from South Pacific, Native American, African or African American, Asian, or you’re even Indian from India, you’re much more likely to be a prediabetic or diabetic, tend to be more carbohydrate intolerant.

Dave: I found this a lot and find this like, look, I don’t eat things that aren’t compatible with my biology, I don’t eat things that make me weak, and there’s a long list of things that I’ve determined don’t work for me and some work okay, and some where it’s like, “Look, if I eat that, I’m going to feel like crap tomorrow and I’m just unwilling to do it,” and it’s not that what they’re eating is bad or what I’m eating is good, it’s that I’ve cracked that code and some has to do with fat, some doesn’t.

Mark: I would say the best doctor in the room is you in your body. You need to listen to it because it will tell you and give you feedback and you will know how you feel, how your body functions, what your numbers look like, so I always say, “Let’s experiment” with my patients. “Let’s try this and see what happens.” I had this one patient who was so resistant to weight loss and her cholesterol was way over 300. Her triglycerides were off the chart, like 300, and I was worried about her and she was struggling and trying to do the right thing and they had the whole foods diet and was following a really good basic diet and it was very low in refined sugars, refined carbs which wasn’t working, so I said, “Look, let’s do something crazy. Let’s just try and experiment for 6 weeks and we’ll put you on a very high fat diet, like 70% fat. Let’s just try that, okay?”

Butter, grass fed butter, coconut oil, olive oil, nuts and seeds, avocados, just go for it and cut out all the starches and sugars, no grains, no beans, just see what happens. She’s like, calls me back 6 weeks later, we had an appointment and she lost 20 pounds and never been able to lose weight, and her cholesterol dropped 100 points, her triglycerides dropped 200 points. It was just stunning to me and I

Mark: 50% fat and this guy was sitting at a conference with Toby Cosgrove, this is when I first got my job at Cleveland Clinic, we’re sitting at this very exclusive meeting of very high net worth individuals and this guy sits down in this dinner table and on one side of me is Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos and Toby Cosgrove, the CEO, that kind of crowd, and he goes, “Oh, Dr. Hyman, I can’t believe it’s you. I just did your 10 day detox and not only did I lose 10 pounds in 10 days, but my cholesterol dropped 100 points and my triglycerides dropped 200 points and my asthma reflux went away,” and I’m like, “Yeah.”

Dave: It went up a little bit but it was already north of 300 so he’s hovering on 3, 400 no matter what he does, and on Statins and the low fat diet that ruins his life, he can get it down to 1909, but then he hates his life. I have a few other people who’ve reached out to me, clients or just people on the Bulletproof forums, and I don’t really have an answer to them, like you have to start hacking, you need to try which carbohydrates are ruinous for you, which ones aren’t. You know a lot more in this. You’re a doctor, I’m a hacker, so what do you do with people like that?

Mark: Like I said before, I customize and teach patients. With those patients, I might be a little cautious about saturated fat and might work on other kinds of fat, right? I might do more monounsaturated, more Omega-3 fats, more nuts and seeds, more avocados, and I might pull back on the saturated because it does raise HDL a lot, so I think you have to see the sensitivity of people, and there’s no such thing as familial … The homozygous dominant form is like one in a million, right? It’s very rare unless you breed with your sister, then it’s more common, but if you don’t-

Mark: Bruce Jenkins had a great study. He used whole soy foods, he used fiber, viscous fiber, soluble fiber, and he used I think almonds and plant sterols, which are plant compounds that are fats that help reduce cholesterol, and he compared that to Statins and there was this much of a reduction in a complex intervention components as Statins, so I tend to use all these things in combination. I’ll use aggressive fiber and I use, for example, PGX which is a form of fiber that’s made from cognac root. Not the cognac you drink but it’s a Japanese fiber, it’s very viscous if there’s lot of water and can dramatically reduce cholesterol and the bad cholesterol, and it can also help reduce blood sugar, and I think that I use plant sterols, I use all sets of herbs like Berberine-

Mark: Yeah. I think this is the real problem, Dave, and I think it’s really been underappreciated, but if we look at how toxins are stored, there’s something called “Persistent organic plutons” and these are the 80,000 plus chemicals in the environment, their pesticides, their fertilizers, their herbicides, their Phthalates, PCB’s, BPA, dioxin, you name it, it’s everywhere, and the average person is just full of them. In fact, there was a fat biopsy registry that was done in cadavers and the average human, high levels of most of the common toxins out there, so basically, if we were food, we wouldn’t be safe to eat, right? “Do not eat less because-

Mark: I actually read a report of the New England Journal that this woman thought Bok Choy was healthy so she decided 2 pounds of raw Bok Choy everyday. A little crazy but she ended up in a hypothyroid coma. You can drink too much, you can eat too much Bok Choy, and so I think I make sure I eat those. Garlic is a great detoxifier and then I make sure I do thing to help my body excrete, so I make sure I have plenty of fiber so I’m excreting, my bowels are moving really frequently, make sure I drink lots of water to flush my system, I make sure I sweat, I have a steam and a sauna I go in regularly, I exercise which helps me detoxify, and then I use a whole host of, I know this is more than 3 but anyway-

Mark: Then I use a whole host of nutrients to help me support my liver detoxification, so methylation support’s really important. That’s B6, Folate, B12. I use also things to help me boost Glutathione, whether it’s green tea, whether it’s catechins in green tea, whether it’s things like N-Acetyl Cysteine or Alpha-Lipoic Acid or milk thistle, I make sure I do things to upregulate Selenium, and I make sure I have all the collard nutrients to help my liver detoxify, and so I’ve written a lot about detoxification, living clean and green in many of my books and I think I explained how do you make sure you get your liver working and your whole detox system working because it’s critical. Sometimes I even use IV Glutathione as a way to just keep myself going.

Mark: Number 1 is your mind. Your mind is your worst enemy, or it could be your best friend, and it all has to do with how you … Your life, and if you perceive your life as stressful, it’s stressful. If you perceive the life as fun and adventure, so I think there are objective things that are traumas for sure. For sure, those were real, but most of the things that we suffer from is our own monkey mind causing a lot of sufferings. I learned over the years to basically tell to shut up, leave me alone, I’m busy, and I got things to do, just don’t bother me, and I actually believed that I’m here to do good work and I’m here to have fun and I’m here to be engaged and bring love and intelligence and healing to the world, and that’s what I do everyday, so that sort of inspires me.

Then I make sure I take care of this machine, right? I exercise, I sweat, I get enough sleep, I eat great food, and I take my supplements, and I make sure I spend time with friends and connect, and sometimes I go hard, sometimes I want to sprint, sometimes I can just do a nice stroll. I just try to figure out how to fit those things in my life that create balance, and sometimes it’s not perfect, and then sometimes my days are just too long when I’m in Cleveland and I’m working from 6 in the morning until 10 at night, that just puts a number on me but then I recharge. I came back home and I went to yoga and I took a sauna and took a beautiful walk for 3 hours in the woods with some friends, and I just figure out how to put it all together.

Mark: It’s true. The one thing that really kind of got me was the definition of stress which is stress is the perception, it’s a perception of a real or an imagined threat to your body or your ego, so it could be a real threat to your body like someone having a gun to your head, that’s stressful, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife’s cheating on you but she’s actually not, she’s just at work and you create this supposed story in your head, it creates a stress response, and it’s not even true. That’s where you can have a lot of control because most of us don’t have real danger anymore. I was in the office in Cleveland the other day and I had been working, it was a long day, I was in the office in 6:30 and with patients all day and I’m like, “I got to go give a presentation today. I need to do some exercise. I need to do something.”

I said to some of the workers in my office, “Let’s go do the 7 minute workout.” It’s like 7 minute high intensity, in full training, we’d put on some music, and they’re like, “Oh, we’re working.” I’m like, “Listen, nobody’s dying. We’re not in the ICU. Let’s just go here. 7 minutes. Let’s do it,” and so we put on some music and it was like everybody started coming in the room, we all started working out, it was just so fun, and people can just take that minute to stop and just be in its great …

Mark: I wake up in the morning and I’d have my MCT oil and my coffee and I would just like sit down, I would write, and they’ll be like, “How do you write so many books?” I’m like, “Well,” and I just found my mind was alert, I was focused, and it just helps me, and my body has changed. I looked back at my pictures of my body when I was, and I’ve never been fatter, but I was probably 15 pounds heavier, little love handles, and my body wasn’t muscular even though I ran like 5 miles a day, I was a vegetarian, like I thought I wasn’t really out of shape, I was just not in a nice shape, and then I’m 56 now and I take my shirt off and look at the mirror and I’m like, “Wow.” I’ve got a six pack and I don’t work out that much. I work out less than I used to and I’m more fit, it’s just a strange phenomena, like it’s really powerful.

Dave: He also kind of fell in love with Bulletproof to my great surprise and delight, just with the coffee, and the first time I went on, he didn’t say something, but the second time I went on, I’ve been doing this for like 8 years now with this amounts of butter that I was a little afraid of but I’m like, “The studies support me, I’m just going to do this,” and he’s like, “Dave, you look like someone who was never fat because when I first met you, you look like someone who lost 100 pounds, but now like …” I think over time, something’s happening, and I’ve seen the study that said that the half life of fat in our cell membranes is some hundred days. Can you talk a little bit about how long it takes to like get rid of all the fat, like that structural fat in the body without the bad fat?

Mark: There’s 2 kind of fat, right? There’s storage fat which is like your fat cells, but there’s also fat that’s just part of who you are. Your brain for example is 60% fat and most of it’s Omega-3 fats. Your cell membranes, you have 10 trillion cells and every single one of them has a bag around it, the cell membrane, it’s made of fat, and it has to be made on the right fat. If it’s made of Crisco and not fish oil, that’s a big problem. It’s a very big problem and it takes a long time for you to rebuild your membranes, rebuild your cells, and it could take years, really, so I always say, “People need an oil change.”

We need an oil change because we got the wrong oil, we got to rinse out the old oil and put in the new oil and by putting them the good oils, you literally change the structure of your body, you change the structure of your tissues and how they functions because your cells are like the ears that listen to messages from everywhere in your body in order for you to receive those message and the cells to communicate, things that function, you’re going to have a happy immune system, happy brain function, all of it depends on this great communication, and if your cell membranes aren’t functioning right because they’re stiff or they’re inflamed or they have the wrong combinations of fats in the membranes, you can’t function very well, and we see this.

There was Hibbeln, and I talk about this in the book, you might know Hibbeln from the NIH, while the research on Omega-6 fats and Omega-3 fats and we found that when we started eating like 20% of our calories as soybean oil, right? It’s crazy, right? It’s a thousand fold increase since 1900s. We actually found that there was an increase in homicide, suicides, violence from those countries that increased the Omega-6 and decreased the Omega-3’s, and when you switch that up, the opposite happens, and I’ve seen these studies where you give Omega-3’s to prisoners, violent crime goes down in the prison. It’s amazing.

Mark: It’s like anything, right? If you eat too much Bok Choy, you’re going to go on a coma. If you drink too much water, you’re going hyponatremic, if you have too much anything, oxygen, you’ll die, oxygen toxicity, so all these things that are good for us goes to have a dark side if you take an excess amount. The Inuit have I think 19 grams a day of Omega-3 fat, which is a lot. That’s like 19 times more than I usually recommend or 10 times more than I usually recommend, so that’s a lot and yet they were fine, so I think our bodies have some capacity to handle things when in a range but I think it’s just as it needs you to be drink, and it’s hard. The only way to get that much fish oil is to drink it and if you drink a lot of it, and I don’t recommend that.

The Omega-6 to 3 ratio, depending on where you live, if you were a coastal, like an Inuit, and all you’re eating is Omega-3 fats from fish, you’d have a higher amount, but it was probably 1:1 to 2:3:1, and so 1:1 Omega-6 to Omega-3, 2 or 3:1 for Omega-6 to Omega-3, and so we actually test people in our clinic and we look at the Omega-3’s, Omega-6’s, the ratio, Arachidonic too, EFA ratios, and we look at all these patterns and we can see the people who don’t consume a lot of fish are typically very Omega-3 deficient and if you’re vegan and you don’t take fish oil or you don’t take a lot of the precursors which are ALA, although they don’t convert very well for most people.

Mark: What causes Lipogenesis? Sugar, fructose, refined carbs, they all drive this process of producing Lipogenesis. They produce saturated fat, they produce Palmitic Acids, Stearic Acid, they increase triglycerides, lower HDL, they create inflammation, they cause fatty liver, this is a nasty thing that happens, so when you increase insulin, you’re actually increasing this activity called Lipogenesis, so when you eat fat, it inhibits Lipogenesis. In fact, I don’t know if you know this study, but there was a fasting study where they were giving alcohol to rats to give them fatty liver and then they gave them MCT oil.

Dave: There’s a strange thing. Back in 1994, when DSHEA was being made, this was the regulation that allows us to take supplements without treating them like drugs, some of the pharmaceutical industry is still trying to overturn so they make basically lots more money and restrict our access to supplements, but back around that time, they were categorizing fats as saturated fats and medium chain triglycerides, which are technically saturated, they got lumped in with long chain fats even though biologically, they have entirely different effects on the body. They’re metabolized differently. Can you walk through some of the differences there because when I put my quote, my recommendations are at least 50% of your calories from fat, up to 70 or even 80, and of that at least half of it should be saturated, but I also pour brain octane which is one of the 4 medium chains.

Mark: Right. The other thing that, and first, I’ll answer your question which is they’re absorbed differently. They don’t have to go through the Lymphatic System. They’re not metabolized in the same way. They actually are super fuel for your mitochondria that produce energy, they help improve your fat metabolism, they help to reduce your fat store, and they actually shown to do that in many, many trials when they’re done experimentally comparing corn oil and say an MCT oil, their metabolism’s faster, their calorie burning is faster, their visceral fat goes down, their triglyceride go down. Everything gets better when you use higher levels of MCT oil, so the data’s pretty impressive on that.

Dave: What do you say to the … It’s usually the hyper exercise like the fitness crowd, I get a lot of these young kind of “I’ll use double blind placebos to discredit whatever,” but they’re going to look at a high fat diet and go “There’s too many calories in there,” and my favorite is “There’s 460 calories in a large cup of Bulletproof coffee. Therefore, it makes you fat,” and I’m like, “Okay, but you don’t drink the whole cup if you don’t want to,” and it’s like … What do you say if you will say, “Well, high fat diet makes you fat?”

Mark: Let’s talk about that. That’s the whole thesis, right, of the book? It’s eating fat just make you fat. David Leather is a friend of mine and he’s one of the top researchers, Harvard, Stanford, MD, PhD, brilliant guy, and he said, “Mark, think about it this way. If you have a type 1 diabetic, before they get diagnosed, they’re starving, they’re eating like crazy. One of the … Polyphagia which means hungry all the time and they’re eating all the time. They could be eating 10,000 calories a day and they’re losing weight, so how does that work if weight is a math problem, right? What’s missing in that equation is insulin. Insulin, because their pancreas pooped out, so they have no insulin, they can’t store fat, right?

Even if they’re eating … Whatever they’re eating, it doesn’t matter, so in the absence of food that spikes insulin, the protein will, right? Fat won’t, so fat doesn’t do that and so it’s not just a math problem. You can eat actually more calories and you won’t gain weight if you’re eating the right calories because your body will burn them and not store them, and then fat actually induces the release of fat from your fat cells. Fat actually cuts your hunger so you end up eating less anyway. You’re not going to eat so much in the course of a day and it actually helps with fat burning, so it speeds your metabolism, releases fat from the fat cells, and cuts your hunger, which carbs do all the opposite.

When you go increase in insulin, it’s an anabolic hormone and pushes fat into the fat cells, it reduces the available metabolic fuel in your bloodstream so you’re all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh my god, where did all the food go?” Your body kicks in hunger, it reduces your metabolism, it’s like a starvation response, so you could be eating a ton of food and your body thinks you’re starving … Driving away from your bloodstream into your cells, into your fat cells which are like hungry fat cells soaking up all these food because of the insulin, so if you eat fat, and even if it’s a Bulletproof, you don’t. You just won’t.

Mark: For breakfast, I have 2 options, my favorite 2 options. I have a fat shake which is typically nuts and seeds, so I have chia seeds, hem seeds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and I’ll put in almond butter, coconut butter, and usually blueberries, wild small blueberries, some coconut milk and I blend it up and it’s delicious. Very dense, high protein, high fat, very low sugar. I’ll have avocados and some greens and then I’ll pour olive oil on it, so fat on fat on fat. For lunch, I would have, my favorite is Arugula, that’s one of my favorite lettuces, which is also in a sort of detox family, and I put on, let’s say pumpkin seeds or pie nuts and I put on olives and I’ll put on avocados and I’ll put on olive oil, so it’s fat on fat on fat on fat, and a salad, right? I’ll put even a can of salmon, wild salmon on there so there’s more Omega-3 fats or sardines.

That’s the typical lunch and dinner. I could throw a piece of protein. It’s mostly plant foods until dinner. Mark then I’ll have either grass fed lamb, grass fed beef, but I don’t eat that that much, bison I like. Sometimes I’ll have fish, shrimps, scallops, fish, and low mercury fish, and I’ll have a ton of vegetables, so probably 50% of my plate will be vegetables and I get unlimited refills on that side, and then occasionally, I’ll have a half sweet potato and then maybe for dessert, I’ll whip up some blackberries with a can of coconut milk in the frozen blackberries and have dessert.

Mark: I know. It’s really fun, and I said, “Okay, look, I’m just going to step back. I’m going to try to suspend all my predisposed beliefs, all my points of view and I’m just going to look at the science and see what I could find, and I’m going to, at the end of the day, try to figure it out.” I really want to realize that there are 3 main issues around me. First is moral, second is environmental, and the third is health, and they’re separate and they get conflated, right? They get conflated, so I think let’s just take moral quickly. Moral, I’m good with that. People have a religious or moral issue. I have Buddhist monks as patients. I’m not going to say, “You need to eat meat,” right?

Mark: I’m like, “You can’t eat this.” He’s like, “It’s my traditional food.” I’m like, “No, no, no. It’s your traditional food if you’re in 17,000 feet hurling the ax all day, now you’re sitting on a meditation cushion and you’re 80 years old,” so we got him on a high fat, good quality protein, lots of vegetables, nuts and seeds, got him off a lot of starch and grains, and he did great. He lost 35 pounds, worst is diabetes, so I’m not opposed to moral reasons. Environmental reasons, absolutely. This is a big issue. I think feedlot farming, factory farming, industrial agriculture has to stop.

Mark: It has to stop both for health reasons and for environmental reasons. We are degrading our environment dramatically. Climate change is impacted through methane from the cows in a dramatic way, we’re seeing that 1/5 of all the fossil fuels used on the planet is used for growing animals for human consumption, industrial agriculture, we see degradation of our waters through depletion of aquifers, we see depletion of the soil and the soil is being damaged so that were losing acres and acres everyday of edible land, we are actually seeing dramatic changes in the toxicity in the water as well, it’s affecting plant life, animal life, pesticides, fertilizers, all of that’s real, so I think from an environmental point of view, we should immediately stop factory farming, and that’s going to limit meat consumption dramatically, and I think then there’s the health issues.

Mark: We’ll meet over a couple of Bulletproof. The meat thing, here’s the deal with the meat research. There’s a lot of epidemiologic research populations that it has showed meat actually is harmful, but then you look at what that means, so let’s look at what these studies … They do full frequency questionnaires, they ask what you ate last week, last month, whatever, yesterday, you kind of have to remember, and then depending on what the fat of the day is your answer might be a little biased anyway, so it’s not great research but it’s the best we have, and then they try to control for the confounding factors. Now there is no way in my view to control for confounding factors when …

Here’s what the meat eaters were like. They eat in 800 calories a day, they eat far fewer fruits and vegetables, they eat more fried foods, more processed food, more sugar and refined carbs, they drink more, they smoke more, they exercise less, they never took vitamins. Guess what? They were a sicker bunch. They had more heart disease, more cancer, more diabetes, and it was bad, right? Was it the meat or was it all the rest of the crap? I vote for the rest of the crap. Second is, so they actually took people who were eating meat who were actually shopping at health food stores comparing to vegetarians who shop at the health food stores, and when they looked at 11,000 people over many, many years, they found there was absolutely no difference because guess what? The meat eaters were eating meat in the context of a healthy diet, they probably weren’t eating feedlot meat.

All these factors matter, and by the way, the meat in those studies that I just talked about that showed it was harmful were all feedlot factory farm meats with high levels of Omega-6, with inflammatory components, low levels of Omega-3’s, hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, you name it, so really a problem, and then I look at the interventional studies, right? Not just the population studies, but let’s look at what happens when you actually feed people meat. What happens? These studies show that on the whole, people do way better. They have less inflammation, their cholesterol gets better, their insulin gets better, their triglycerides get better, they lose weight, they had more body muscle, less body fat.

I’ve looked at all these studies in concert, all together, and my conclusion is having animal protein as part of your diet is okay if it’s the right kind and that if you don’t have a moral obligation to not eat it, then that’s fine, and it shouldn’t be huge amounts, I don’t think that people should be eating 72 ounce T-bone steaks, it should be the palm of your hand, and it’s the palm of your hand, not Shaquille O’Neal’s hand, right? Not Shaquille O’Neal’s hand, right? I also have to realize that we can think of meat more as a condiment. I call it “Condi-meat,” right? Condi-meat.

Dave: All right. Bulletproof listeners, now you know why Mark is on the show today. You need to go out there. Pick up a copy of Eat Fat, Get Thin. If you liked the Bulletproof diet, if you’re paleo, even if you’re vegan and you listen to this just so I can make you mad when I tell you that you should eat some meat, whatever the deal is, there is a wealth of knowledge in this. It’s very well researched. If you listen to this conversation, you know Mark is a good guy, he knows what he’s talking about, he’s also incredibly well credentialed, like Cleveland Clinic is one of the top clinics in the country, so if you’re going to read books like this, read Mark’s book. Read Always Hungry by David Ludwig who’s one of Mark’s friends who’s just on Bulletproof radio .

Mark: It’s so true, David, it’s so true. I think that the key thing people don’t realize, it’s not just about weight loss, right? When I did the thousand people in beta test, not only did they obviously lose weight and their blood pressure dropped dramatically, their blood sugar dropped 23 points, but we had them fill what I call “The FLC quiz,” so just when you feel like crap quiz. People are like, “Do I have a sinus problem,” joint pain, headaches, insomnia, bloating, fatigue, whatever it is, and we give them a score, it’s like a quantitative quiz and at the end of the day, they take the score after the 21 days and they had a 68% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. There’s no drug on the planet that can reduce your chronic disease symptoms by 68% in 10 or 21 days, which both of my programs have done. It’s pretty amazing.

Dave: If you appreciated this episode, you know what to do. Head on over to eatfatgetthin.com, head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of Mark Hyman’s book, Eat Fat, Get Thin. It’s got my full endorsement. It’s a wonderful book and it’s full of science that tells you why you ought to be doing these things, and if you have concerns, if you have questions, they’ll probably be addressed in the book, and if not, head on over to the Bulletproof forums, head on over to Mark’s website. You can ask questions there. The point there is it’s not just a lone voice in the wilderness, it’s not just the paleo community, it’s not just vegan community, there’s all kinds of evidence putting this out.

What You Will Hear

0:00 – Cool Fact of the Day
0:55 – Ting
2:20 – Introducing Mark Hyman
13:10 – Listening to your body
16:08 – Hypercholesterolemia
20:35 – Clean fat
26:05 – Managing stress
31:58 – Getting rid of structural fat
37:50 – Omega 3s vs. Omega 6s
44:06 – MCT Oils
51:00 – Mark’s diet tips
55:30 – CondiMEAT!
1:05:42– Top 3 recommendations for kicking more ass and being Bulletproof

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Source: Bulletproof

Mark Hyman – Meat Is The New Ketchup: #288

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