How the Carnivore Diet Destroys Your Microbiome

0:00 Intro

0:44 Mike and Ethan’s Experience on the Carnivore Diet

8:27 Dr. Ken Berry Vs. Danny Roddy On Frequency of Bowel Movements

15:50 Reacting to Fibers Coming Off the Carnivore Diet

19:48 How to Reintroduce Fibers/ Carbs Coming Off Carnivore

22:53 Benefits of Polyphenols

32:40 Dr. Shawn Baker On Fat Digestion on Carnivore

41:35 Pros & Cons Carnivore Diet

46:58 The Case for Fiber

51:14 Best Fiber Sources to Start With After Carnivore

55:21 Thoughts On Orange Juice

57:46 Dr. Jordan Peterson on Carnivore as an Elimination Diet

1:06:44 Dr. Jordan Peterson on Adding Foods Back In After Carnivore

Ethan
Welcome to the Mike Faith podcast. I’m your host, Ethan Wright, joined by Mike Faith on this podcast. Mike, can I help you make sense of the online health chaos while answering your individual health questions along the way? So if you have any health trends, topics, or questions you’d like to see us cover, please leave them in the comments below and we’d be happy to get them answered on future episodes.

Ethan
In today’s episode, we are going to dive into the carnivore diet and discuss the ways in which the carnivore diet can negatively impact your gut health and what you can do about it. What Doctor Ken Barry gets wrong about bowel movement frequency on the carnivore diet? The potential problem with Doctor Sean Baker’s thoughts on GI issues during the carnivore diet.

Ethan
And lastly, the flaws in Doctor Jordan Peterson’s perspective on the risks of the carnivore diet. So to kick things off, let’s start by sharing our personal experiences with the carnivore diet, which Mike and I both tried. So I know I have my reasons for why I jumped into the carnivore, but I’m curious to hear, what the back story was for you, Mike.

Mike
I think it’s similar as for most people that you tend to go like low carb and then keto and then carnivore. So it’s like this, this trajectory is you just like one the next and the next and the next. And I started with I actually start with intermittent fasting because I found Martin Birkin’s lean gain stuff when I was in high school and I was working out and I was trying to, you know, he was basically saying, like, he’s eating a whole cheesecake and then he’s super clean and all over stuff.

Mike
So I was I was pretty, interested in it based on that as, like, pretty exciting as, like a new dietary strategy different from what, you know, I had heard before because I was into all the bodybuilding stuff at that point. But then from intermittent fasting, I went right in to low carb and, low carb and I guess like a ketosis or paleo ish approach.

Mike
And it went like full keto and then it went like autoimmune paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, and then it went like autoimmune. And then when like carnivore, intermittent fasting and keto all together and that was like the final stage, like that was the final boss of the, of the dietary tier. So I got into it because I initially felt better when I switched over to the if and when I switch over to lower carb eating.

Mike
You get into this, this, this thought process, right. That that it’s the fibers the problem the like the the FODMAPs is the problem. It’s a plant toxins the selecting it’s the oxalates. It’s the the fighting acid. All this type of stuff. Up until I got into the carnivore stuff, which didn’t last very long for me. And I’ll tell you talk about why.

Mike
But I basically was still doing greens for a while because the only way I could get potassium and calcium and components like this. So I wasn’t tolerating dairy at all. So I was doing the keto, autoimmune paleo intermittent fasting setup, and I was basically just doing that with like meats, seafood, eggs, greens. And then from there, I transitioned all the way into carnivore, with intermittent fasting and basically keto to some extent.

Mike
There’s there’s a couple things in there we’ll talk about along the way that got a little adjusted. But yeah, for me it was like I went low carb. I started feeling better and then I just went straight down the rabbit hole until I made my way to carnivore.

Ethan
Yeah. And then with the carnivore did you get like, did you get benefit digestive from from it?

Mike
Carnivore was a mixed bag. I would say the biggest noticeable benefits I got digested week were when I first went low carb. Well, every time I eat white rice, I go into a food coma. So, like, I digest the white rice, but then it affects my cognitive function. And so I’m just like, I can’t really do too much white rice.

Mike
And then I was like, okay, what if I do all fruits and vegetables as my carb sources? Cause I found that they didn’t make me sleepy? You know, the first thing that I did was apples and pears, which is like a hard no, because a very high, like, imbalanced glucose fructose ratio, high in FODMAPs. And so I felt better, but I wasn’t bloated and gassy and stuff like this was the rice.

Mike
I wasn’t bloating and gassy. I was just, I was I was just sleepy. So then I basically was like, okay, well, maybe if I just do all like low carb, like, no, no carbs at all. And I started doing butter and and, beef tallow and egg yolks and olive oil, and I wasn’t getting sleepy and I wasn’t getting bloated.

Mike
And so that was a huge change for me. I felt significantly better. Well, I wasn’t trying to do this. I got exceptionally lean, like there’s a whole timeline in there. I don’t want to go through the whole thing. But the first thing is, when I came into low carb, I felt better. And then I was I ran into some issues, like I was getting cold very like pretty frequently cold.

Mike
And I was having I was having some cravings, and my workout performance wasn’t as good and stuff like this. And then so I kept going down the rabbit hole. So I was like, looking for answers. And I think a lot of people do this as well, looking like, what’s going to be the best thing, what’s going to be the next thing.

Mike
And so I like double down multiple times on it’s the fibers. It’s the it’s the carbohydrate. I need to get less and less and less and less. I need more fat. I need more protein, whatever the deal was. And when I got to carnivore, I started having like straight diarrhea every day. Tons of like, like bile acid problems.

Mike
I didn’t have a gallbladder at this point. And then I was, I was just like cold hands and cold feet. Like severely cold hands and cold feet. My mood was like, super lay by all, all over the place. My libido, like, just went completely into the toilet on carnivore after a while. So I realized that, okay, like that, like I didn’t stay that long because it only took a couple months for me to really have a problem.

Mike
And I and then I had switched out. Like the flow car was a was a boon for my digestion and cognition. And then carnivore, kind of like I took it all the way to that level, but it didn’t necessarily create the benefit I was looking for.

Ethan
I feel like that’s the similar trajectory we see most people go on is starting with the low carb and keto, and then you move all the way over to carnivore when you’re kind of experiencing the problems with the keto. That’s how it was, for me at least. And then I just wasn’t even physically able to stay like, carnivore, for that long.

Ethan
I mean, it was maybe four to, like, six months. I was losing weight, like, so rapidly that, people, like, around me. I think we’re we’re a little concerned, like my roommates and stuff. What really put the nail in the coffin for me? In carnivore was the last week of college. We had to move out of the apartment, and I needed to, like, clean everything and whatever.

Ethan
And I was doing. I was going to help my roommates. But I was eating raw beef liver, and I got some sort of infection or food poisoning or something from the raw beef liver. And like the days leading up to us having to clean the apartment and everything, and it just I couldn’t help whatsoever. I was just like, incapacitated.

Ethan
So I still feel bad about that. But, that was really when I was like, you know, I’m done. I’m done with this. Like, I got to start looking at other ways. But yeah, that was that was, kind of my experience. Like, I feel like a lot of people to do find the carnivore stuff does become unsustainable at a certain point.

Mike
It could be even part of our confirmation bias. We see so many people just trying to transition out of carnivore. I think there’s perhaps a, portion of people who do well with it for, for some particular reason, maybe digestive or or they like it, they can kind of tolerate it. But I see a lot of people, I think it winds up becoming unsustainable for a variety of reason.

Mike
What we’re going to talk about that here today, specifically the digestive components, it’s not that carnivore, at least from my perspective, doesn’t give people benefits. And like same thing with low carb. Like as I mentioned, there is some downsides to to carnivore dieting in general. Even though there is some benefits. And I think that there is a way to minimize the downsides with a diet while maximizing the benefits without and basically means like not being potentially or potentially not being full carnivore, maybe doing some other components or adding some other components into the diet that is animal based.

Mike
I think there’s also a variety of people who are getting benefits from the diet for different reasons. So if you are a vegan and say you have a bunch of, I don’t know, genetic predispositions for issues with, MT4 or, or, choline synthesis or something like this. And you’re a vegan, well, you’re gonna have problems for coming out of the vegan diet.

Mike
And then you go on carnivore and you start smashing high clean foods. You start bumping up folate, like animal based folate intakes. You start increasing B12 intakes, and it’s like, wow, I feel so much better. And it’s not necessarily because there’s magic to not having any plant foods, it’s that you may have had specific deficiencies in a particular area that you just corrected.

Mike
You have dysbiosis in the colon, like for example, like MyKayla Peterson. And then all of a sudden you don’t feed it with these like rain based starches and things like this that are a problem. Yeah. You’re going to feel better and say your diet was crap before. If you had a bunch of micronutrient deficiencies and you come to an animal based diet that’s super nutrient dense now compared to what you’re doing, like you will feel better.

Mike
And if you’re avoiding a bunch of problematic components going to colon, you will feel better. And if you have metabolic dysfunction, all of a sudden you have high satiety with a high protein intake and you lose weight, you will feel better. But it doesn’t mean that there are still aren’t downside to that diet. So we’re going to talk about some of the big ones today.

Ethan
There are people who maybe had some success accomplishing whatever their goals were when they initially initially came into carnivore, whether it was weight loss or an autoimmune autoimmune disease or gut issues, whatever the case may be. But now that they’ve kind of gone to a certain place, they want to start adding things back in. They run into problems when they try to add back things.

Ethan
And for a variety of reasons that that, we’ll discuss. So hopefully like later on in this podcast, we’ll talk about maybe some of the more, systematic and intelligent ways to add the foods back in to provide some context for everybody. For one of the things you hear in the carnivore sphere in general is around them like, frequency of bowel movement.

Ethan
So some people find when they come to carnivore, they stop having as many bowel movements and what you can hear from the carnivore proponents and we’ll hear from, from Ken Berry, is that that’s because your body is becoming so efficient at absorbing nutrients and everything that you’re putting in it, that there’s just zero waste and it’s adjusting to everything that was, you know, coming up before, it was just all, sort of a waste product.

Ethan
And one thing I want to highlight was on Twitter for the bio energetic people on Twitter. You may find this interesting, but there was a back and forth between Danny Roddy and Ken Barry. If you’re deep into various health rabbit holes but lack three solid, easy to pass bowel movements daily, simplify and focus on that. And then, as you can see underneath can be can Barry responds with a lot.

Ethan
So, that may give you an idea where Ken Barry stands on that, take. But just to provide some more context, we’ll jump into this clip from Ken Barry and then get your thoughts afterwards.

Youtube Clip
Now, when you’re eating purely a carnivore diet, this freaks a lot of people out there, like, oh, pooping every fifth day. That cannot be healthy. All that meat just sitting there rotting in your colon. No, that what happens is meat is pure nutrition. There’s no garbage that you have to poop out. You absorb every bit of the meat.

Youtube Clip
So for a carnivore, like, all they’re pooping out is they’re bacteria that die by the billions every day in your large intestine. And they’re epithelial cells that are sloughed off somewhere along the gastrointestinal tract. There’s no waste in a carnivore diet. Very, very little waste. And so that’s all you’re pooping out to. More so every day is completely and totally fine.

Mike
Oh, boy.

Ethan
I don’t know what your thoughts are around the frequency of bowel movements in in that take, but I’m very interested to see.

Mike
We actually just had a question in the the revive community about this yesterday. And then the question is like what’s the optimal number of bowel movements per day? I’d say at least one bowel movement per day would be what we’d be shooting for up to, like, you know, one bowel movement after each meal. And then on the Bristol stool chart anywhere from like a three to maybe a five would be considered normal, and then one into would be more constipation, and then a six and seven would be considered more diarrhea.

Mike
So or like loose stools and both those are one is the food is transiting. The diarrhea or loose stools would be transit food transiting too fast to the colon. And then you’re not absorbing the water. And then on the flip side, a 1 or 2 is that food is not transiting that fast at all. It’s backing up. And then it’s like really dry.

Mike
You really dry and all the water is being absorbed out. And so you kind of want somewhere in the middle. And, and that’s at least one bowel movement per day, up to like one after each meal or like, you know, up to three bowel movements per day would be, I think, what I would personally recommend shooting for. Now, there’s a variety of reasons why you could have either slow or super fast.

Mike
For me, with carnivore, it was like especially because I don’t have a gallbladder, but I was having a terrible time, terrible time with with carnivore. Now, part of that, to be fair, is because I don’t have a gallbladder, which is a specific situation, but I’ve also seen other people have this same circumstance, I think for you is relatively similar.

Mike
I eat and you’re like, run into the bathroom with a carnivore set up. But then you also have on the flip side where what Doctor Ken Barry is saying, where you have like a bowel movement once every fifth day or seventh day. So I’ve also had clients who come from that with carnivore Diet. Now there’s some problems with what he’s saying.

Mike
First things first, there is waste on a carnivore diet. So the research is pretty clear that the carnivore diet or the carnivore diet, only about 95% of protein and only about 95% of bile acids are absorbed. And they say even 80% of protein is absorbed and depends on the protein. But animal protein is more absorbable, some say up to 90, 95%.

Mike
So while you do have less waste going into the colon, less waste, we’ll say that in air quotes here. Going into the colon during carnivore, you still have protein, bile acids, potentially some fats, and then things like heme iron making it to the colon. On a carnivore diet. And this is really not a good thing like this is this is potentially why bowel movements are so slow.

Mike
Because one you have less waste. But some of these components are pretty irritating and problematic for the colon and for the microbiome. And that could be slowing transit time down, as well as having as well as having like the minimal waste as well. So the other thing I want to frame this here with is it’s actually not a good thing to like to not have the fiber what you’d say waste be like be transiting through the digestive tract for a variety of reasons, the major ones being that the fiber binds up the bile acids and proteins and heme iron in the colon, and protects the colon from those components because they’re extremely irritating to the

Mike
colon. We’ll talk about that in just a second. And then the fiber also helps to pull out the helps to detoxify components from the body by binding to those bile acid. Pulling it out in the liver is secreting toxins into the bile. So basically we have a quote here. And what they say say dietary fiber can increase your volume and decrease stool transit time.

Mike
This diluting the concentration of carcinogens in the colon and reducing the time of intestinal exposure to carcinogens. So this is super important because basically what you’re seeing is the fiber, what you which Doctor Barry is saying is more waste actually helps. So even though it’s technically waste, we’re not absorbing it. It, it actually helps to decrease the amount of time that things transit through the colon.

Mike
So you’re having less of these metabolites. These waste products sit inside the colon. And then it also is diluting them so that they’re not directly interacting with the colon. So you don’t have irritation. And overall reducing the exposure of the colonic epithelium to the heme iron, the protein, the bile acids, fatty acids, things like this, they further go on to say say indeed, dietary fiber binds bile acids and alters the entero paddock access, which can reduce cholesterol levels involved in the etiology of colon cancer.

Mike
In contrast, secondary bile acid produced by bile acid metabolism are thought to be promoters of colorectal cancer, which can cause significant damage to the colon mucosa, such as oxidative stress, inflammation, dietary fibers broken down by intestinal flaw in the short chain. Fatty acids such as acetate. Propionate butyrate, which can decrease intestinal lumen. Luminal pH, which helps reduce the conversion of proto bile acids to carcinogen carcinogenic secondary bias.

Mike
So basically what you’re seeing here is again, the fiber helps. Actually there’s increased waste helps to protect the colon. And from some of the toxic components that the carnivore diet even has, less waste is allowing them to sit in the colon for a longer period of time and create more toxic components. And what we’re going to get into this in specific detail on just a second and create more, irritation to colon and more potential problems inside the colon.

Mike
So even though you have less waste, it’s sitting there longer, it’s producing more toxic metabolites and it’s having more exposure to the colon. And if you had fiber and you had a faster transit time. So the idea of like it’s less waste or more waste actually is irrelevant here. The fundamental question is like, what is that waste that’s being produced, which there is a percentage of waste being produced on a carnivore diet actually doing to the colon.

Mike
And it’s not great things. And I’m going to explain why in just a second.

Ethan
So one of the big things for me when I started, like watching your content and, and, and everything like that was on your microwave science channel. You break down the study that’s kind of outlining this stuff. And I know you’ve worked with a lot of carnivores as well, and for me, included, like coming out of that space when you try to tolerate different sources of fiber and stuff like that, you may find that you’re reacting to more things than you were before.

Ethan
Or at least that’s my experience for me. And I think what you’re describing there is that, yes, when you’re on the carnivore diet, like if someone is experiencing alleviation from symptoms, it could be because the food isn’t making it. There is no waste, right? So there’s nothing for the bacteria to get Ahold of in the colon. But then when.

Mike
You can, the less waste.

Ethan
What you are kind of creating an environment potentially that could, so that when you do try to feed yourself like different fibers and foods and everything, that now you’ve set up sort of a bad ecosystem there, right? That’s the idea.

Mike
Yeah. So I guess that’s good for the overarching picture. So basically what happens is if you have problems in the colon, you have dysbiosis. The ecosystem, the bacterial ecosystem or microbial ecosystem is off when you throw fiber in there. Then you like depending on the type of fiber and depending on how much you don’t know what’s going to ferment, what metabolites are going to be produced.

Mike
And so you can upload and you can get gas, you can get like different types of rashes or things like this. And so when you go on a carnivore diet or a low carb diet, you minimize the amount of fermentable substrate going to the colon. So you oftentimes will feel better. You’re not bloated, you’re not gassy. There’s also other benefits of the diet.

Mike
You increase nutrient density a lot of times depending on which dietary background you’re coming from. You also, you also can improve the the amount of proteins you’re having, your shifting fatty acid, you’re minimizing additives in the foods that would be irritating, like gums and stuff like this, because there’s no guns and steaks, at least, at least not right now.

Mike
And so basically what ends up happening is you eliminate a lot of problems. And but the problem is, is like now that you, you don’t have any fibers at all, and then you’re just dumping protein or amino acids and you’re peptides and bile acids and fats into the colon and also heme iron. All of these components can start to really irritate the intestine over time and do things like deplete the mucus layer and change the colonic microenvironment so there’s more oxygen present, which will shift the microbiome.

Mike
And so all of these things, well, you feel better initially. And for a while, while you limit some of these other problematic components, you start to create new problems because you don’t have fibers present. So it’s not that all fiber is bad. It’s not that all carbs are bad. It’s that like black beans versus something like a banana may have a massive like a ripe banana, may have a massively different effect inside your microbiome because of the different fibers and components present inside these different foods.

Mike
And so you have to figure out which carb source you’re going to tolerate. Carnivore. Just like nukes everything out. And so it’s like, yeah, I’m just going to not I’m only going to eat meat. I’m only going to eat animal foods. I’m gonna have two ribeyes and salt, bro. Whatever. The thing is, like, you’re just going to get your you’re going to get that like just new, like get rid of all the potential problems.

Mike
But not everything could have been a problem. And and again, doing that also creates new problems. Right. And so the new problems are from these specific mechanisms. It’s from the bile acids. It’s from the entire it’s from protein getting into the colon. It’s in the lack of fiber and the which leads to a lack of short chain fatty acid production which changes the metabolism of the of sites.

Mike
And then that’s when you come to the back end of carnivore. You’re like, oh crap, I can’t eat a single thing. Like there is a risk to doing this diet, even if it does fix some things and eliminate some problems. That’s what we need to be aware of. The pros versus cons. When you first start.

Ethan
There’s less waste, but there is a certain amount of waste and we can see that in the research and in particular, that waste can cause long term problems.

Mike
Is like super irritating to the colon. Right. And then and then the lack of certain components, plus the irritation from that waste damages the colon over time and lead to long term problems.

Ethan
And I remember watching your video breaking down the study and you mentioning the different compounds that help with that. And some like some of them being polyphenols, right. Which don’t necessarily have to come from high fiber foods. Right. So for example, like I think you mentioned like tannins and like pomegranate juice, potentially your grape juice or something like that as having a beneficial effect.

Ethan
And that’s a food that doesn’t have any fiber. Right. So if you are reacting to fiber in, you’re deciding to add back in carbohydrates like you can you can do it in a stepwise fashion. And would it be maybe ideal to start more so on the lines of something like a juice that has some of these, protective compounds and then step like then go to fiber fibrous foods and whatnot?

Mike
Yes. Because the problem is, is like there’s multiple issues going on with a carnivore diet. So while we’re talking specifically about the microbiome, you also have the metabolic problems as well. And then you have micronutrient problems that develop on the diet because you’re so limited in your food choices. And so when you’re transitioning, like you don’t only have to transition your gut, you have to transition your metabolism, you have to transition your hormones.

Mike
And you also have to fix some of the micronutrient problems that you develop inside these diets. And so there’s like so many things happening at once besides like am I? Oh, I’m just adding in carbs. So that’s why people like when they’re transitioning out of carnivore, they’re like, oh, well, my sleeps better and my energy’s better. But I’m like, my digestion is like, I don’t know what is going on with my digestion since I was like, are you eating?

Mike
I’m trying to eat foods that like six months ago, I had no problem eating and now I can’t eat them at all after this carnivore diet. And it’s because of this effect, like this depleting the mucus layer and all these changes, which again, we can get into then like sequentially. So that is clear. But it’s because of those, those effects with the gut.

Mike
And that’s the gut is the hardest part to transition.

Ethan
That’s a good disclaimer at that point is like before you consider the carbohydrate like we’ve talked about in previous videos, you have to take into consideration the metabolic side of things too. And then hopefully, like as you add in the juices and you start to the poly, the polyphenols and the other compounds that are helping to, curate the microbiome there, you can start to create a better ecosystem today.

Ethan
Like your tolerance can just hopefully increase, you know, over time, like as everything starts to starts to shift because I think the microbiome, it has a pretty like rapid adjustment to the diet. Right. Like that is the, the biggest lever to pull as opposed like first before you start going down the the other gut modulatory protocols and everything.

Mike
Yeah. And it depends on the person. Like if you went into the carnivore diet and your gut was already wrecked and then you tried to, then you like use that as a way to manage gut symptoms, then you come out. You may have a harder time than somebody. You just want the carnivore diet to lose weight and then like developed gut issues after because your gut was already unstable to some extent, and then you potentially worsened it with carnivore, even though symptomatically some things got better.

Mike
And then when you come out of it, like trying to add things back in can be a real a really difficult time. On average, the vast majority of people, like, wind up developing worse gut symptoms when they try to come out of carnivore, even though it fixes some other problems, like it does fix some other problems. People. So I’m not I don’t want to gaslight anybody to say like it doesn’t work because it does, but it creates new problems.

Mike
And you have to be aware of these, especially if you’re looking to transition out.

Ethan
And, the other thing I just want to mention, like real quick, when I was going back and watching your video on the study break down that I thought was really interesting was the difference in the polyphenols that intake from like the US versus Spain, or I think it was Spain, right? It was like 450 times like the HML.

Ethan
And then I think you cited in there like maybe that’s some of the benefits that people see from like the Mediterranean diet. Right. That’s studied for longevity and things like this.

Mike
Yeah, I think the polyphenol compounds in general are beneficial. Like overall, I’d say that they’re pretty beneficial. And I think largely their benefit is through modulating the gut. It’s not even through really absorbing them that much. It’s through their shift inside the microbiome. And then like that lowering of bunch of variety or variety of toxic metabolites coming out of the colon.

Mike
And then it’s like, okay, yeah, like you will feel better when you decrease that overall as you start to add in more foods like this, the microbiome ecosystem starts to shift. And you have all this cross feeding going on. So like this bacteria like Bifidobacterium breve will produce this metabolite. And then you’ll have like if you go back to your in prison to produce this metabolite.

Mike
And then you’ll have like Acker Mancilla will take that and make this metabolite. And so they’re cross feeding. So when you start adding in basic stuff kind of like when a baby comes off breastfeeding, it starts to slowly expand the ecosystem. And then you start to tolerate more things because you have a whole bunch of bacterial populations that are breaking down and you shift away from the toxic endotoxin, a bacteria that are producing a bunch of negative metabolites.

Mike
Us and then you can also start to increase butyrate production, Nicole, in which the colon cells and suck the oxygen out of the gut. And that shifts the microbiome. But this takes time. Like it doesn’t just happen like this. It has the as the it’s like a progressive thing. And each step that you take, you’re not going to immediately be like, oh yeah, I feel a hundred times better, guys.

Mike
It’s like, maybe it’s going to be a 6 or 7 out of ten on the white rice for the first couple days, and then after that it’s like, okay, I feel like this is fine. Like I actually feel better and I’m not really having as much digestive issues. So sometimes you have to give it a little bit, push through, let the gut adapt, and then you start to go to the next food.

Mike
So it’s best to do it systematically. But most people, they get carbs again after being carnivore and keto for however long and like Pandora’s Box is opening and it’s like it’s just like all the carbohydrates that they can have because their body is also been like to some extent, like in a starvation mode for so long.

Ethan
That reminds me. I mean, I talked to somebody, the other day who is just coming out of carnivore, like within a few days, right? And then he book the call with me and we’re talking about the symptoms he’s experiencing on carnivore, and he’s telling me, yeah, I just started adding backing cards. He’s like that. Had a glass of milk last night.

Ethan
Bad idea. Like, really bad idea. And then I’m thinking, okay, this is this is good though, because we’re at like, you haven’t gone full bore into like, I’m adding in every carbohydrate, like, all at once, which I think was the trajectory that you was going to head down, like, okay, this is perfect. We can take a deep breath and we can start to do some of the things like intelligently, that we caught you at this moment because there’s a lot of people that, don’t that go the opposite route and they just jump right into things like you’re saying, and then another thing I wanted to bring up to you, just in regards

Ethan
to like, practicality and what you can do, like when we started working together, one of the cool things, I started doing, as per your recommendation, was to cut the different juices in different amounts. So like a pomegranate juice, for example, is like, really like trying to drink 16oz of pomegranate juices is one super expensive and two, like, really strongly hard to get down.

Ethan
But if you cut pomegranate juice, like 2oz or 4oz with eight ounces of pineapple or orange or something like that, it’s delicious. Plus, you get the benefits of more polyphenols, right? To potentially help modulate things there. And the other thing that we did, for I did for your advice was to add maybe some of the fruit powder extracts, like an elderberry powder was something that you had cited in that study as being protective against the sulfur producing bacteria.

Ethan
So if you do like two ounces of pomegranate juice, eight ounces of pineapple juice, a little bit of like elderberry fruit extract powder, or as a rollup powder extract, and you mix it into the juices. Now you have like not only a carbohydrate source, but you have like, this sort of, super power, polyphenol like drink. And then maybe you have like, like a just a small little thing of blueberries as well for the anthocyanins.

Ethan
But you also cited in that study as being a good curator of the microbiome, and maybe you don’t go overboard on it right away, because that could be like an abundance of fiber. And there’s the skins and everything like that. But now you have a set up there that you can pair with your giant rib eye, that’s going to protect against the, the, the waist, you know, that is in the, in the colon.

Ethan
So those are some, like, really good strategies that I know that you use with, that people, your clients are one on that use for me. That made a big difference. So maybe people give that one a try.

Mike
The goal in that circumstance is to slowly bump up high phenolic intake with, juices and like the different sources so that you can so you can essentially start to slowly shift the microbiome before you try to run a gut protocol or anything like this. So but always the caveat there is just if you have like diabetes or like blood glucose stuff, you got to be careful with the juices.

Mike
And that’s where it’s like, maybe you want to try a little bit more whole fruit. So it’s really a person to person dynamic. Like when where when I’m like when I’m working with somebody like, and they come in, I’m going to gauge do they have metabolic dysfunction. Is it mostly a gut problem or is it a combination of both.

Mike
And I’m going to try to adjust from those different dynamics. Like I’m going to if it’s somebody who just as a gut problem, maybe I’ll start with juices and powders. And if it’s somebody who’s metabolic dysfunction, maybe I’ll do like whole foods, or if they do better with starches, the starches, and then run from there and start to slowly expand the diet first and also correct micronutrients.

Mike
Because the intestine is very, very metabolic, or it has a high metabolic activity, one of the highest in the body. It’s like the central nervous system and GI tract. Or to have like, take most of the caloric intake of the body or some of the, the largest sources of, of of energy requirements. And so they also have huge requirements for micronutrients.

Mike
And so if you run carnivore there’s some micronutrients that you can cause problems with. And a lot of times repeating those micronutrients can make a massive difference in intestinal function. And so I usually correct that change of the diet. Do you like I call the polyphenol stuff like the chronic gut stack because you can just do that perpetually like you do blueberries.

Mike
You can do elderberry. You could do, pomegranate extract. You could do astrolabe, camu camu. You tolerate those things like you just perpetually do them. It’s not going to be a huge issue. The gut protocol stuff, which is separate, like, that’s like down the road, that is like an acute thing to do. And I only do that for a short period of time to try to clear the gut out.

Mike
The person’s still having a problem, so that that would be the that would be like some of the steps to come out. It’s like move through. And and also another thing that we did that was helpful, which may seem like heresy to some of the bioenergetics crowd into some of the carbon workout, but we also switch the meat source so that there’s seafood and that there’s there’s chicken like chicken breast and even chicken thigh, like four ounces of chicken thigh is not really that big of a deal in terms of polyunsaturated fat intake.

Mike
But we switched it because he iron is one of the big things that can really irritate the colon, like terribly. And if you’re on a carnivore diet and you’re just like the iron, the the absorption of heme iron is only like 25 to 30%. And that’s from organ meat to be like the best source team iron. So you have the rest of the heme iron is going to be left into the colon.

Mike
And the GM iron causes oxidative stress and causes irritation to the colon. And it’s like a that’s why red meat is classified as a carcinogen, because a heme iron goes in and irritates the colonic epithelium. So if you’re coming, it’s not that you’d never eat red meat again, but it’s that if you are doing tons of red meat and your colon is super irritated and the microbiome is really shifted in a bad way, what you want to do is you want to maybe shift towards some of these other protein sources way chicken, seafood options, cod, soul, flounder, shrimp, stuff like this so that you’re not continuing that irritation process.

Mike
You let it heal. And then once things get back under control and you start having some, you know, have a ribeye for dinner again, whatever the deal is. But it’s just in the meantime, when it’s irritated, you want to remove some of the potential irritating triggers. And then and then you can bring them back in once the gut is okay.

Mike
Like if you’re putting like lotion on your skin and your skin is completely fine, like it doesn’t have any problems and okay, fine, like I’ll put this lotion on. Right. It’s good for my skin. It has like vitamins and cocoa butter or whatever. But say you had a cut you wouldn’t, like start rubbing that lotion in the cut.

Mike
Even though the lotion is technically good for your skin, you would let the cut heal and then you put it back on after. It’s like kind of healed up. So you’re not like, don’t start stinging and burning the area. It’s kind of the same thing with the colon. Like if you have a bunch of irritation in the colon, you want to minimize any possible irritants just for a period of time.

Mike
So you can got your gut can recover and it will be. There may not be the problem, but it’s like a potential. And like for me that was one like I was realizing like every time it’s how do you read me like the left lower quadrant pain I was having was worse. And so I was like, all right, what if I do check in and it’s like, oh, well, I actually feel significantly better with the chicken.

Mike
And then that’s when I was like, okay, maybe the heme iron in the red meat does cause some irritation to somebody who’s already having irritation.

Ethan
And another point, that I’ve heard you make, too, in regards to the heme iron. And this is just a testament to the plant compounds being protective is that doesn’t the chlorophyl like block some of the, effects of heme iron in the gut?

Mike
Yes. Chlorophyl and calcium and calcium.

Ethan
Okay. So like if you do decide that I’m going to start, if you go switch to chicken and fish and whey and all this and then you decide you want to come back to having the rib eye, you know, a couple times a week or for one meal or something like that. You have this strategy where you’re like, I know when I do that, I’m gonna, you know, eat something with Chlorophyl or, or whatever some plant retains.

Mike
Or something that doesn’t bother you.

Ethan
And then I think what you mentioned there at the end with the, with the fats and getting the pain in the lower left quadrant, is a pretty good transition into our next clip that we hear, that we have here from Sean Baker. So I know carnivores and I think people in general, one of the macronutrients that trip them up and give them some of the most trouble, with digestion is fat for for me, I think for you probably as well.

Ethan
And figuring out that situation with the fats can really make a difference. And there are, some things on carnivore with, with a high saturated fat intake that in talking to people that they don’t really think about that potentially being a problem. So, yeah, I think we can jump into the clip from Sean Baker and then sort of like, get your thoughts after after that around the fats and digestion and everything.

Youtube Clip
Let’s talk a little bit about gut issues on carnivore diet. The most common reason I see people still continue to have gut issues on a carnivore diet are primarily, fat consumption, and it’s usually excessive fat consumption relative to what you can safely or naturally absorb. And so that often comes more often in the context of rendered fat.

Youtube Clip
Rendered fast would be things like grease, bacon grease, hamburger grease, concentrated fats like butters and creams. Those often overwhelm our capacity to absorb and remember our. The justice system is not designed set up to. It’s not set up to digest concentrated nutrients, whether that be powdered flour, powdered sugar, protein powders, concentrated fats and oils. That’s not what we’re designed to do.

Youtube Clip
Now we can yeah, we can do it. Capacity and all those things, but it’s not optimal or ideal. And so if you’re having a lot of, reflux.

Youtube Clip
Bloating, gas, diarrhea, look at the amount of fat you’re eating per meal, and perhaps you might want to cut that back.

Mike
The nice thing about these clips is like just had Doctor Ken Barry talking about people having transit time of like five days and saying, and it’s a difficult spot. To put people in with this with this clip, like with this, with this setup. Because if you don’t eat that on this diet, what do you eat? You see protein, there’s nothing left to eat.

Mike
And we’re talking about like, you actually have to eat a ridiculous amount of fat on this diet if you’re going to make it work because you don’t have any carbs or else you’re going to cause significant problems. So there’s like, I don’t know, like it’s like a straight jacket. It’s like, well, you’re eating too much fat, but you but you still need to eat a certain amount of calories.

Mike
Like, what do I do? I’ll eat more protein. It’s like, we’ll talk about it. There’s huge problems with doing that. And it and it will make things worse. So like if most and this is known in the research. Right. So even the people that they cite for the carnivore diet like what’s it Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, basically he got rabbit starvation, which is basically protein intoxication when he tried to recreate his diet, in the in a hospital setting after he came out of the Arctic.

Mike
And then the way they fixed it was adding more fat. Because if you have too much protein, if you get too much protein in the diet, why ends up happening is you can create a hyper amino acid, hyper ammonia and, basically like you’re getting an overproduction of ammonia and too many amino acids that you’re overwhelming the liver’s capacity to actually, metabolize those things.

Mike
And it creates an energetic problem directly at the liver, and it creates an overexposure to ammonia, which is toxic, as well as amino acids that become problematic. So the ideal what the researchers basically what the research basically discusses, like you probably don’t want greater than 35% of your calories as protein for your total energy intake. So what does that leave you with?

Mike
You have six, I mean, 65% of your caloric intake has to be fat. And so like, I don’t know what other way you’re going to get that fat on this diet unless it’s butter cream, tallow, something like this. Unless you’re just smart, like eating suet and like, even if you’re going to have bone marrow, it’s like it’s still not that far away.

Mike
It has maybe a small minor amount of like different connective tissue components in it, but it’s not that far away from just like eating straight up fat, or even if you’re like chewing the fat out of the sections of the ribeye. Like there’s a reason the fat drippings come out like it’s making the oil because the fat is cooking out.

Mike
It’s like you’re going to have to eat fat and there’s you can’t eat too much protein because you’ll cause problems at the liver or cause problems with ammonia. And you also drive stress, like one of the reasons, one of the things you see in the research is high protein intakes in relation to carbohydrate intakes drive up, drive up cortisol levels to help improve urea, the urea cycle, to help improve the clearance of ammonia.

Mike
It’s like you’re going to drive. This diet is like the worst for driving stress, which is like super high protein and then fat and carb and take is it there’s zero carbs and like you have some amount left over for fats. Like that’s even worse. So I don’t know what the recommendation would be. Here is and from like in this context.

Mike
Right. Because the context you’re gonna be on a carnivore diets like, well, if you’re having digestive issues, eat less fat. And like, if you’re already eating a ridiculous amount of protein, like, you probably don’t want to push that further. So it’s like, stop doing the carnivore diet. If you’re still having those those problems, it’s probably not going to work for you long term.

Ethan
It would just be a pain to eat that much protein, too, if that was all you could eat to get calories. Are you before like you would get to a point. I said for me, I know I would get to a point where I just couldn’t eat any more protein, like I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. Well, that’s.

Mike
Why people lose weight.

Ethan
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we talked about that on the weight loss episode that it has more to do with, just like the satiety rate is satiety, from the keto and all the protein and everything.

Mike
Yeah. Basically the research they showed in these studies that if you overeat protein, what happens is your body starts to drastically slow down gastric emptying and keep you full so that you don’t keep over eating the protein. Like they directly mentioned this in the study. It was like a protective way so that you don’t. One of the ways the body’s trying to trying to protect against like getting too much ammonia, like it takes an excessive amount of of of ammonia production and like tapping the liver.

Mike
So yeah, if you just eat a bunch of protein, you’re not going to be hungry and you’re going to start losing weight because you’re not able to eat enough. Plus, whatever the burden is on the body to process the ridiculous amounts of protein, I’m pretty sure I’m pretty sure that Doctor Sean Baker’s protein intake is ridiculously high. Yeah, it’s not based on some of the things that he’s described, at least when he’s doing the carnivore stuff and he’s not off carnivore.

Ethan
The other points I want to, I want to touch on is like with even if you were just eating ribeyes right, you could still get in like not butter and olive oil and cream and everything. With the added facts, you could still get digestive issues from that alone, right? Because of maybe the the more saturated stearic acid type of fat content that tends to give, people that runs.

Ethan
So I don’t know what you’re if, if you think that that’s possible and like again, that would just be you could maybe prevent that from happening by including some fiber sources and other things along with the ribeye.

Mike
Number one, even the high protein intake can cause digestive issues for people. So just like massively high protein intake, like rabbit starvation, which again, is basically protein intoxication or protein toxicity is characterized eventually by diarrhea. You’re dumping protein in the colon. And then the the metabolites that are produced in the colon start to irritate the colon and then cause problems.

Mike
So I think there’s that. Also the bile acids that get released when you have the higher fat intake. Those bile acids can really irritate the colon. They basically like have a detergent effect on the lining of the colon, which will cause diarrhea, will cause diarrhea. It causes releases of serotonin. It causes negative effects in the microbiome, like all types of issues.

Mike
And so the high fat will be a problem. And the high protein could be a problem in the colon. So it could be both. That’s why I’m saying it’s kind of a straight jacket. If you’re having problems with too high protein intake, like say it’s even physiologic problems and you have to bump up that. And if you bump up that and and now you’re just getting the straight runs all the time, it’s like time to consider a different diet because it’s like the both things are a huge problem.

Mike
Now after 35, you could probably handle, depending on how many calories you’re adding, potentially more than 35% of calories as as protein. But I would probably assume that you would be in a debt caloric deficit. And then and then and there you would still be heavily driving stress is arguably worse than running a keto diet is just like eating super high protein intake and like not having adequate amounts of of of fat intake, like carnivore diet, like you’re eating enough protein, depending on how it’s set up that you can run gluconeogenesis.

Mike
And then that’s going to really drive stress, cause you’re gonna have to pump up cortisol to drive that gluconeogenesis. And then you have all the problems like excessive amounts of protein intake, putting pressure on the liver and also potentially the kidneys. So we’re trying to find the Goldilocks zone where it’s not too much protein that’s taxing kidney and liver and creating metabolic issues and stress.

Mike
But it’s not so little protein. It’s strong enough for your lean muscle tissue and stuff like this, like you would potentially have on a vegan diet and things along these lines. So there’s there’s a balance, cause they’re both on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Ethan
And you with an excess of protein intake, don’t you drive production of ammonia, right.

Mike
Yes, exactly. And that’s the monia production. The ammonia is toxic. And then cortisol has to raise to increase the urea cycle, to help increase urea cycle and help with gluconeogenesis, to process all of those, all of those amino acids. So it directly drives stress through glucagon, through cortisol, all this type of stuff.

Ethan
And the reason I ask that is because I know for myself, and I’ve heard from other people who are eating excessive amounts of protein, is that if they start to sweat, their sweat will actually smell like ammonia.

Mike
That is possible for some people.

Ethan
When people are having problems, it’s like the eventually you just kind of run out of tools, right? Like this person’s on a carnivore diet and they’re having digestive issues. And now it’s like, I cannot eat fats that aren’t paired with my ribeye or like, that’s the problem. And it’s just you’re at the end of the road. And I think the problem is you don’t have enough tools and you have to start like, you know, like assessing whether or not this is the the correct dietary path to be on.

Ethan
Right.

Mike
What are the potential risk versus reward if you’re considering this type of diet? A lot of people eating a standard American diet are running into problems, I think largely because a portion of the foods that they’re choosing are problematic, like highly problematic. When you go to the carnivore diet, you eliminate those. And I think a lot of people start to feel better in a lot of ways.

Mike
But now there’s new problems that can be created on the carnivore diet. Those problems can easily like, the digestive ones at least will save the hormonal component and stuff for another episode. I’ll be kind of touched on them, but if you have a couple things that will get into the colon and this and will create problems in the microbiome and in the gut, and this is why I think people will have a hard time reintroducing foods when they come off their carnivore diet.

Mike
So as an example, there’s a couple things. You have protein, you have bile acids, you have heme iron. These three components we’ve touched on is they are not good to get high amounts of in the colon. So the bile acids in the colon Da convert it to secondary bile acids. The secondary bile acids are known carcinogens that can irritate the colon and increase permeability of the colon so that you absorb more bacterial toxins.

Mike
Endotoxin from the colon, which you don’t want to do. The second thing is the secondary bile acids can create reactive oxygen stress and reactive nitrogen. Nitrogen starts at the clonic epithelium and cause damage by causing damage to the mitochondria of the sites, the cells of the colon. So this creates another problem where you’re basically, you’re damaging the mitochondrial function of the cells of the colon.

Mike
And then you’re also causing issues. As far as like the colon colons, permeability, you’re making it more permeable. The next thing is bile acids in high amounts, which a high fat diet, can, can increase the production of, particularly a high saturated fat diet can lead to the overgrowth. A certain bacteria like Bill Ophelia was worth you or Alice types.

Mike
And the Alice types pictured in in this. But the Alice types group in general, these bacteria are endotoxin and hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria, and the hydrogen sulfide can further cause a variety of problems, especially in high concentrations. And that includes impairing mitochondrial function. So like that can also directly damage gut function as well. And and then different studies, they show that like these animal based diets not necessarily like how PulseAudio describes animal based, but like a high protein high fat diet can cause these issues.

Mike
So that’s what we see with the bile acids. Now the next thing is protein. Only about 95% of proteins absorb. So you have 5% of protein that actually makes its way into the gut. And then so basically the problem with this is that when protein is fermented by the bacteria in the gut, it produces a bunch of toxic metabolites.

Mike
So you have branch chain fatty acids, you have ammonia, you have hydrogen sulfide. And then you have poly amines, tyramine phenol methylamine, histamine, future scene and cadaver ING. These components cause a variety of problematic, elements in the gut. By stimulating serotonin by the ammonia, directly damaging mitochondrial function, hydrogen sulfide as well damaging mitochondrial function, and then also the branch chain fatty acids can actually increase the leakiness of the colon and allow for endotoxin to get across the gut.

Mike
So long term, bumping up protein fermentation in the gut, even though if there’s less waste, is still really not a good idea overall. And then when we get to the heme iron, what we start to see is only 25 to 30% of they say the iron. They say the absorption of iron is reported as 25 to 30% in the consumption of organ meats, 7 to 9% in green leafy vegetables, 4% of grains, 2% of dried legumes.

Mike
So the iron absorption is highest in organ meats, but it’s still only 25 to 30%, so you’re still getting another 70 to 75% of the heme iron making to the gut. And basically, what they say in the research is that the heme iron can actually cause damage to the gut. It cause hyper proliferation of the colonic epithelium, and it predispose towards whole colon cancer or colon tumors.

Mike
And so it’s directly irritating the colon. That’s basically irritates colon over time it causes that damage. So you have these three components which are all induced by this high fat carnivore based diet, particularly on beef. And so you run into these issues. Now there’s a couple other things I want to mention really quickly. Those things also change the microbiome so that you have a bunch of endotoxin producing bacteria.

Mike
So as an example, bunch of amino acids going into the gut can increase the overgrowth or of, of bacteria and particularly in Clostridium groups. And then you have bacteria, for example, the hydrogen sulfide that are in the interactor group salmonella, Klebsiella, Staphylococcus etc.. So these are all like I’ve seen multiple clients who’s got product profiles coming off carnivore look terrible, look absolutely terrible.

Mike
And the a variety of inflammatory markers are bumped up. Their permeability looks terrible as far as anyone goes. They have a bunch of disappear, reappear. They’ll fill you as worthless. Bumped up. They have some gram negative bacterial species are high and they have a lot of digestive issues. So these are all things that that are driven by this diet.

Mike
So those are things that you take in from the diet that cause problems. But what are the things that you’re removing? If you take out the fiber you create a variety of problems. One, the fiber produces not branched chain fatty acids, but short chain fatty acids like butyrate. Butyrate is used by the colon cells as an energy source.

Mike
It’s like the gasoline for their engines. And so what happens is if you don’t have the butyrate present, you start to create the the cells in the colon. We’ll start to use other fuel, particularly carbohydrates. And things like this coming from potentially from the bloodstream. And then and then run glycolysis. And then they don’t use oxygen. They don’t use the oxygen to burn the butyrate.

Mike
And that leaves more oxygen in the gut. That oxygen in the gut allows for the overgrowth. The bacteria that can tolerate oxygen, those bacteria that tolerate oxygen are generally pathogenic bacteria. You don’t want to really have a high amount of oxygen in the gut. So not having fiber and having these other components that I mentioned is like a quadruple whammy on your gut long term.

Mike
And that’s why I think people are like Jordan Peterson, like, man, I had salmon last month and then I had terrible anxiety. It’s like, yeah, because you have a, you have a microbiome in your colon that really produces tons of Amin. So when you start having fish that have a decent amount of histidine, which is the amino acid gets converted to histamine, you get a high histamine level and potentially high polymer means, which can drive serotonin production and drive different neurotransmitters.

Mike
That will create an anxiety response. That’s a hypothetical pathway that could be explained by changes inside the gut. Now, the last one I want to talk about here, and I guess it’s mostly interesting to potentially mostly interesting to me, but I think it’ll be pretty helpful for for a lot of people. But essentially, inside your gut, you have a mucus lining and your mucus lining is really important for protecting you from having the bacteria reach the colon.

Mike
And if the bacteria reach the colon, your immune system goes, oh, crap. And it’s creates a bunch of the especially depending on the type of bacteria creates an inflammatory stimulus. Basically, in this study, what they show is that if you put animals on a low carbohydrate diet or a low fiber diet, not even low carbohydrate, just low fiber diet, well, winds up happening.

Mike
And I have a picture here so we can show it, but winds up happening is you actually degrade the mucus layer in a really negative way. So on the left hand side here, what we can see is the mucus. As we can see a mucus layer on a high fiber diet. This green line here is the mucus on the high fiber diet.

Mike
And you can see it’s pretty thick. When you go to the low fiber diet, you can barely see the mucus layer like it’s just this little green line over here. And so that means is that the gut intestinal barrier function is is gets being degraded. Now why do I think that this occurs? Well, in the research, if you don’t have fiber present you, the bacteria start feeding on your mucus lining.

Mike
So they start feeding on your colonic mucus lining. And then that starts to create the more problems for you over time. And then on top of that, if you don’t have a lot of carbohydrate present, what makes that mucus lining is carbohydrate. So it’s like a double effect I think the very low carbohydrate intake plus and then the rest of the cells being shifted towards fatty acid oxidation, except the colon cells which are not oxidizing butyrate because there there’s not really much being produced.

Mike
But what ends up happening is you don’t you deplete that mucus lining and then now you’re in a circumstance where the bacteria start to adhere to the colonic epithelium, and now you now you have inflammatory signaling, inflammatory stimulus. And that’s where people start to get colitis. And all this type of stuff is when the, the gut and the immune system say, hey, like we’re being invaded.

Mike
Like there’s some like the bacteria are trying to get like they don’t have anything to eat and they’re knocking on the castle door here and we don’t know what to do. And then you start getting the inflammatory response. And so that’s so it’s like all of these things together can create a recipe for terrible digestive symptoms when trying to come off the carnivore diet.

Mike
And I think that’s what we’re seeing with people is you’re solving some problems by cleaning up your diet, getting rid of all the junk, not eating things that are irritating. But then since you don’t have fiber, you have heme iron, you have a bunch of bile acid, you have a bunch of protein making it to the colon. And also you don’t have the the fiber binding up the bile acids to detox the liver.

Mike
And then you have the endotoxin leak. Your liver and your colon are getting shot from this diet long term. And it’s starting to create digestive problems for people. So I want to set that stage. I know it’s kind of a lot, but it’s important because it’ll it’ll set the stage. When we talk about Jordan Peterson, I know you you want to I.

Ethan
Mean I was that was that was just awesome. Like I’ve yet to see that on the picture and everything too. Like that was such a solid case for for fiber right there. The I think that’s that’s awesome. The natural question that kind of comes after that is like, okay, Mike, what do you think are the best tolerated fiber sources that someone can start to dip their toes in and see their response?

Ethan
Like, based off anecdotally working with all these people, and whatnot.

Mike
So it’s basically, again, like what we said is starting with the fruit juices and some of the, the polyphenol rich powders, we use those or even just doing the fruit juices and then some tolerated fruit sources, berries, maybe bananas, maybe melons, potentially pineapple. If you some people may react to the bromelain like I know you react to bromelain.

Mike
And then you can do squashes, you can do carrots and then like rice and potatoes. They’re not super rich in fiber, but they will have some degree of resistant starches. And even the non resistant starch is a portion of them will make it to the colon and will serve as substrate for the, for the the butyrate producing bacteria.

Mike
They like to they feed on starch like some of the room in a cork species or fecal bacterium species. And also lowering your protein intake is a huge thing. Like some of the one of the guys I was working with, he’s he was one of my, one of my clients coming up carnivore. He’s actually a friend now, but he, he went on carnivore to help deal with one of his autoimmune conditions.

Mike
And when we first started to work together using like 3 pounds of steak a day, and then the first thing we did was just lower the steak intake down to a reasonable amount so that he’s hitting the target of 22g per pound per day of protein, and then and even .2.7 two grams per pound per day of protein, to be really having some digestive issues or irritation, we shift to the protein source a little bit.

Mike
So some steak he was doing some eggs. He was doing some he was doing some fish, some seafood options. And then we started to just add in some juices to start that he tolerated. And then we added in a little bit of rice and potato and then we then we added in, like some from some fruits that he could tolerate.

Mike
And we also it took me a while because kind of fought me on the nutrient relation stuff with supplements, but when we started to replete the nutrients with supplementation, he started to feel a whole lot better as well. And then he started to tolerate much more things. But it took some time because again, like we we were shifting the microbiome.

Mike
We were trying to eliminate all that protein being dumped in. And so some of those sources that he tolerated for fibers were like potatoes and carrots up front and then squashes upfront. Those things weren’t too big of a deal. And then the fruit sources that a lot of people do tend to do all right with our berries. So those would be the first starting areas.

Mike
I would go to. And, and then just start to like slowly introduce them and lower that protein intake. And also this is a huge one. You have to moderate your fat intake. When you bump your carbon take up, you can’t do 200g of fat a day and 400g of carbs. Like it’s going to be a recipe for weight gain.

Mike
You have to figure out your total caloric intake, which again, I have the nutrition blueprint on my website. It walks through all this stuff, so I’m not going to go through every single step here. But you figure your total caloric intake, get your protein intake dialed in, and then throttle your carbs and fats based on the caloric intake.

Mike
Don’t just add carbs on top of the fats you have to add the carbs in and then slowly bring the fats down as you add the carbs in as so that the calories are equated so you don’t start gaining weight. Another option that can be helpful is if you’re doing tons of saturated fats and you’re getting the runs because you’re right.

Mike
Like as you asked me about before, Ethan, about the high stearic acid content, if you’re getting the runs from all this type of stuff, what you want to then do is maybe shift a little bit towards monounsaturated fats and maybe shift towards whole fat sources like avocado, or like some of the egg yolks or potentially mac nuts or something like this so that you’re not getting like a very refined oil source coming in, causing the issues.

Mike
And then the modern saturated fat sources actually are relatively neutral in the gut and a little more soothing overall because they help to minimize, the amount of taurine conjugated bile acids that can drive hydrogen sulfide producing bacterial overgrowth like Bill Ophelia, Wadsworth, yada sulfur tiger. These species that produce hydrogen sulfide from by using amino acids like taurine or cysteine or something like this.

Mike
So lower protein add in the fiber source, as I mentioned slowly start to bring in carbohydrates and do it systematically. Don’t just like open the floodgates and like, you know, go ham on everything because then you may get digestive like issues doing that because your body isn’t ready to deal with all of that type of stuff. Again, like your mucus layers, extremely thin when you first come off this diet.

Ethan
As a side note, from what I’ve experienced myself, and even just joining the community and hopping on group calls and stuff like that, I know orange juice is like the greatest thing in the world, but it seems like some, like, more people than you would expect. Don’t do as well with orange juice. Then maybe something like pineapple, grape, pomegranate stuff.

Ethan
Right? Is that.

Mike
Yeah. The the orange juice. Seems, especially people who are having histamine issues seems to be a trigger. There, there’s, they say orange juice, a histamine liberator, but it’s not really clear from the research data that it is a histamine liberator. Like, I couldn’t find the studies that directly support that, like showing that with an experiment. But I think some of the polyphenol compounds in orange juice may be a trigger for people.

Mike
And then also you you may have the the polyphenol compounds can affect liver metabolism like the phase one, phase two detox pathways. And so you have to be careful because if you have certain polymorphisms in those pathways, which may have even led you to want to go carnivore in the first place because you don’t detox certain things well, like certain plant compounds, there’s there are certain components.

Mike
Then the orange juice, you know, depending on what the thing is good, depending on what the polyphenol is or what the source is, could modulate things in a way that gives you an issue. But pineapple juice, pomegranate juice, grape juice, white grape juice, as well as even more tolerated than purple. But those ones seem to be overall better tolerated for people coming out of the diet.

Mike
And as you over time, depending on what the issue is as things start to as you start to improve, your digestion starts, you start to tolerate potentially more things. While you may still not tolerate certain things, they may still be an issue for you.

Ethan
Also, the strategies we talked about earlier with maybe cutting the juices and adding in fruit extract powders as like another boost. And then the next thing you mentioned after that was a micronutrient replenishing. After that you can maybe fiber. So berries, carrot, squash, melon, pineapple. Be careful with the bromelain and maybe green beans to start with.

Mike
Yeah. And then like potatoes and rice if you do potatoes rice.

Ethan
Gotcha. And then the last thing to do also as well is moderate. Total fat intake. And you can get those numbers for the amount of protein fat and carbohydrates. You can check out the Nutrition blueprint link below if you want to see that. And then maybe switch fat sources to more monounsaturated fats because of the bile acid situation, and maybe even go towards more whole fat sources like avocado, macadamia nuts, chocolate, and things like this.

Ethan
Exactly. Yes. Okay. All right. Perfect. I think that will be, a good four step, timeline for people to, to try, try out. So let’s jump into the last one here. The granddaddy of them all, Jordan Peterson. He was the one who kind of convinced me, to do The Carnivore. You didn’t speak personally, but I was watching his content.

Ethan
So, we’ll jump in to him. But, yeah, I think a lot of people kind of heard the story from Mikayla, his daughter Mikayla Peterson, and Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan. And that kind of led them to try out the carnivore diet. And then since then, Jordan’s kind of done doctor Peterson’s done the media rounds and been somewhat advocating for the carnivore diet with different people such as Elon Musk.

Ethan
And then as we talked about before, carnivores touted as like the ultimate elimination diet and, I think there’s some maybe problems with that that we discussed earlier.

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But if you are suffering from chronic health conditions, especially if you’re also overweight, an elimination diet is worth trying on the off chance that something you’re eating is causing your symptoms, because who knows? And the simplest elimination diet is obviously just beef. Yeah, right. So why not go down to one variable and if it doesn’t work like we’ve talked to many people and I know people say, well, anecdotes aren’t data.

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It’s like no, but they’re hypotheses. Yeah. And many of the same anecdotes start to look a lot like data. So anyways, we’ve talked to many people who’ve reported remission of their diabetic or arthritic symptoms within two weeks of an only beef diet. And so we are thinking that it’s more like three months is a good trial. And if it doesn’t work, well, okay, the loss is some restriction for three months.

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And that’s about it. And it’s not like it’s easy. I’m not saying that. And you may suffer some complications in the transition to the new and more restrictive diet, but you can live on just beef. So like what the hell if you’re half dead and radically overweight?

Mike
Okay, so the first thing is I agree with like the first point, if you are suffering with chronic health conditions, focusing in on diet as the first step, I think is absolutely essential, like absolutely extremely important. And I see that like people do not do this, they go, I gotta go hormones, I’m going to go supplements. I’m going to go like $10,000 worth of testing, like things like this is like, look at your diet.

Mike
Just throw it in chronometers, see what you’re doing. Like, I can’t tell you how many calls I do. It’s like I didn’t know I was eating 200g of fat a day. No wonder I can’t lose weight. And it’s like it’s there’s things like this that are like low hanging fruit that can make a massive difference to how you’re feeling, how you’re functioning, your energy levels, your digestion, if your diet isn’t dialed in.

Mike
And this is why, like, even with the, the course I built out and all this type of stuff, it’s centered primarily for the first step on diet because the number one most important thing to get down first, I know that Jack Cruz says it’s light, but I completely disagree that that is the number. Like number one thing and diet is number six.

Mike
Diet is extremely important for a lot of people, and I wouldn’t even rank them one, two, three, four, five, six. But like if you’re going to start somewhere, you have a lot of agency with diet and it can make huge differences right off the bat. How you feel, how you function with how you’re feeling yourself. So I think doing, going and trying to figure out an elimination diet is actually really helpful.

Mike
And something I do with many clients just doing only beef just because it’s the simplest, I don’t think means that it’s the best. And as we just talked about, it creates a variety of new concerns and new issues that we could that we would have to look at if it’s just beef, but from a hormonal perspective, but also from a gut perspective, as I laid out in detail that I would say, like, well, maybe you don’t need to go all the way down to just beef.

Mike
Maybe you can still have some carbohydrate, maybe you could still keep some certain fiber sources in your diet and start there and then start to expand out so you don’t create new issues that you then have to solve later on. And so just because beef is the simplest one variable thing doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to go down to.

Mike
And also doesn’t mean it’s necessary to have to go down to just one variable for your diet to have the elimination diet. But a lot of my clients, they have more than one variable, because you can sit down with somebody looking chronometer and say, hey, you know, do you do all of this? Yeah, I do pretty good with this.

Mike
You do all that? Yeah, I do okay with that. Do all that. Yeah, I do okay with that. All right. Let’s use these things that you’ve been using that you do relatively okay with for your current set of the diet. Set that up, run that for two weeks, see how you feel and then start to make adjustments based on the feedback we get.

Mike
Instead of saying, hey, let’s go all the way down to just beef and then get stuck, it just be for the next three years and then be like, wow, I don’t know how to transition on this diet. Like I think that because you create new problems when you do that diet and that’s that’s where I think Jordan Peterson is, and also potentially where Michael Peterson is.

Mike
And they’re actually starting to talk about some of the stuff in Jordan, talks about a.

Ethan
Year for somebody who doesn’t necessarily have the an idea of what they tolerate and don’t tolerate. What do you suggest for them? Like you’re looking at the economy like, I don’t really know if I’m doing well with this or not, because maybe they do have a lot of variables in their diet. So do you strip it down to I don’t I think when most people think of an elimination diet, the last thing they would consider pairing like the beef with is like, oh, pineapple juice, you know, so I mean, but that maybe isn’t the worst option, right?

Ethan
You know, so I don’t know. What are your thoughts.

Mike
On that one? You have the nutrition blueprint on the website which has a food guide with it, plus a calculator to help you figure out your calories and your macros for maintenance, not for like deficit or bulking or whatever your goal is just to figure out, like where you need to be to maintain your weight. And so and there’s also food sources there.

Mike
So I’d recommend checking that out because like it’s going to it’s like you could print it out like all the stuff is right there. But essentially you’re going to want to look for a protein source, animal protein source, beef, chicken, fish, which any, any of those you tolerate, dairy could be hit or miss or maybe hold on in the beginning.

Mike
Then carb sources figure out what you do. Well. Is it starch? Is it sugar? Is it fruits? Is it juices? Is it rice? Is it potatoes? Is it some combination of those? Maybe it’s oats. Maybe you do fine with oats like just some of those things. And then after that then you need to figure out your fiber source is going to be the fruits is going to be some of the starch sources.

Mike
Do you do some cook veg, some cook carrot, some cooked squash. Just like these very basic things, they don’t have a lot of FODMAPs. They don’t have like super irritating fibers. A lot of people tend to do well with them. They’re pretty benign for most. They don’t have a lot of potentially irritating plant compounds or toxic components like nitrogen, things like this.

Mike
You start there, and then after that you have your fat sources. Is it going to be olive oil? Is it going to be maybe you do okay with beef fat. Maybe you have fatty six. Is it going to be dairy fat? Maybe you do okay with dairy fat. Maybe it’s mac nuts, maybe it’s avocados. These types of things are all great options to start with.

Mike
The avocado may have some Fodmap, but in general a lot of people tend to tolerate these things. Okay. And then I would I would start there with those sources so that you have a protein, a carb, a fat and a fiber in each meal, 3 or 4 meals a day. And then you run from there and then you can start to systematically test one thing out at a time, instead of getting all the way down to beef.

Mike
Then when you try to reintroduce something, you have a bad response and then you don’t know why. And then you stay at beef and you try and you steer beef and you try and you stay a beef because you’re not because again, the beef is great, but just the carnivore set up, it’s not beef is problematic, but the whole setup can create certain problems.

Mike
So I think beef is fine incorporating the die. I’m not antibiotic all the time. Many people I work with eat it all the time. It’s just only beef by itself, as your only food source creates unique problems because of what goes on in the GI tract, and what because of the lack of certain things in the diet. Not necessary, because beef by itself is just the problem.

Mike
So it’s it’s it. I would get to that as a starting point and then test things out kind of systematically and go from there. So it’s a great idea if you have chronic health conditions to try the elimination diet. But I think going down to just beef, even because it’s the simplest, can actually create some new problems for people, and they may still solve their issues even if they don’t go down to only just beef.

Ethan
I think the best with an elimination to. So say when you’re saying test things out systematically, like let’s say someone decides, okay, the foods I’m going to start with pineapple juice, white rice, some chicken, some fish. I don’t want to touch the red meat right now. And for my fat source, I’m going to do all of olive oil.

Ethan
Now I’m oh, I’m okay with all those things. I’ve run them for this particular amount of time. Is there a particular amount of time that you suggest before someone adds in a new food? What is the protocol like that?

Mike
I would just give the person like one, like 1 to 2 weeks on the set up with the diet, see how you run it like and use the foods that you already are doing decently well with. And then from there and then within the categories, I recommend it and then start trying to add foods or play with the foods that you’re that you’re currently eating.

Mike
If you are still running into some issues and then do it, test out those foods individually. I do like a 3 or 4 day time frame. The only other things for the last three points. I don’t think you need three months to see a change in something with. But with diet, I think like a couple weeks. You’ll know if you’re starting to feel better and things are starting to change.

Mike
And also, this is not to gaslight people who actually got benefits and health improvements on carnivore or low carb because like it’s happens. It’s legit. Like it legit occurs. So we’re not saying it doesn’t. We’re just talking about some of the potential pitfalls and but some of the potential workarounds because people also have gone pretty significant changes in their health following diets that weren’t just steak.

Mike
So it’s the question is like what is the specific problems? And then how are we going to solve those. And so yeah, let’s jump into the next clip here.

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And this contradicts to some degree something I said earlier, you know, that you could reduce to a carnivore diet and then add back. It’s very complicated to add back. Right. You really have to think like a scientist and you have to be very disciplined, you know, to experiment with one thing at a time. In addition, and then also to figure out, well, how do you know if it’s helping, like what’s your measure and over what time frame, you know, so like I’ve tried to add things back to my I added salmon back to my diet.

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And it turned out that it made me anxious and I have no idea why. And it’s a pretty robust effect. And it took a fair while to manifest itself. And so you have these terrible, complex problems with adding things back, which is, well, maybe if you added phytonutrients, for example, of the sort that you were describing, it would take a month to see a difference and it would be hard to measure except in certain circumstances.

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So like, how do you know? You know, and that’s the problem with any scientific investigation. And the advantage to just eating beef is that it’s really it’s it’s simple. Right. It’s like, no, just do this. And I’m I it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there would be ways of it might surprise me, but I could imagine that there would be ways of improving your diet beyond what you would get with merely meat.

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But man, it really it’s a conundrum to figure out how to go about doing that.

Mike
So this is exactly what we were talking about. The first question that Jordan asked for the first clip is like the you know, if it doesn’t work, like you just rest some some restriction, it’s like, no, if it doesn’t work after the three month time frame, and then you run into new problems and then now you’re stuck on the diet, like that is a risk, and now you’re just stuck on this carnivore die because you can’t tolerate these different foods.

Mike
I think a lot of people are hitting that spot. And, you know, I hit that spot for a period of time. Like I got down to just the beef in the steak, the beef in the towel. And I was like, man, like, I have no idea what my next step is. I do not know what to eat, because every single thing I put in my mouth is a problem.

Mike
Besides the steak and the fat and even the steak and the fat is a problem right now. Like I’m running to the bathroom and I’m having tons of irritation. Other people having other issues as well, like insomnia, anxiety, constipation, cold hands, cold feet. I had one client who was like, she’s like, I was literally getting on the carnivore diet, like black dots on my toes from the vasoconstriction that I was having on the carnivore diet.

Mike
So things like this, like you and it, it solves some things for her, but it made other things worse. So this is a risk to the carnivore diet. And I think that’s why I say you don’t need to go all the way down to absolutely just steak. And it’s also why we talked about like, why is Jordan Peterson having this experience where he can’t even eat a piece of salmon beside, without getting anxiety.

Mike
And it’s because I think of what’s going on inside the gut with the diet. I think he’s in a circumstance where his microbiome, the gut function, all this type of stuff. Perhaps liver function is impaired because he, he doesn’t have the fiber. He’s dumping him iron. He’s dumping potentially set bile acids. He’s dumping protein in the colon.

Mike
He doesn’t have the fiber to bind up the bile acids to pull out toxins in the liver. So now has some of these pathways are overloaded and potentially as far as detox. And then his ability to metabolize certain things in the colon are problematic. Maybe as a bunch of histamine producing or, or Pollyanna and producing bacteria inside the gut because he’s feeding them mostly meat, which we’ll select for those, which will then lead to an overproduction of things like histamine cultures, the entire, I mean, things like this that can give, that can change neurotransmitters and give you, anxiety or fast heart rate or some of them hypertension to be careful.

Mike
Things like tyramine. So these are the I think it’s that’s why he’s in the circumstance is because of these specific problems. And then on top of that the carnivore diet has some issues depending on how it’s set up with nutrient density. So maybe he’s iron overloaded as well. Maybe he’s running a copper deficiency because he doesn’t incorporate any organ meats in the diet.

Mike
Maybe he has electrolyte issues because he’s not eating any carbohydrates. Plus he doesn’t have a poor sodium, the potassium balance, and then maybe a poor calcium. The phosphorus balance, plus potentially certain B vitamins, maybe missing like folate and maybe as of our mutations or things like this. So all of these things can create problems by themselves from this diet.

Mike
Even though carnivore initially solve some of them. And then if you run it for a while, you can start to dig into those pathways and dig into those problems. And then now you can’t add anything back into the diet. So you have to digest this stuff. We talked about allowing oxygen to get into the gut because there’s no short chain fatty acids and colonic metabolisms off from the lack of fiber.

Mike
You’re the protein metabolites, the bile acids, the heme iron irritating the colon, the lack of the mucus layer lack of bile acids, pulling out the the, lack of fiber, pulling out the bile acids from the colon so the detox pathways can get overloaded in the liver. And you also have the whole hormonal state, if you’re counting the phosphorus ratios off parathyroid hormone pumps, if you are eating no carbohydrates, really high protein, you’re probably gonna have low T3 values and thyroid hormones going to be crossed.

Mike
Maybe your sex hormone binding globulin levels are going to be through the roof, so you’re not going to have adequate amounts of testosterone and things. And sex steroids, maybe cortisol to DHEA ratios are going to be destroyed. You’re going to be under stress because you have so much protein intake, no carbohydrate intake. And then maybe you’re going to have altered values for glucose gluconeogenesis, bumped alt, bumped AST pumps, glucagon levels because you have so much protein intake and it’s tapping the liver.

Mike
So all of these things all together I think are creating a perfect storm. It’s like, well, I can’t I can’t add anything in. It’s like you have to you’re going to have to add things in to get out of this whole it’s just not going to be like a really fun transition when you’re adding some of these components in, because so many things could have gone awry, depending on your specific predisposition and what’s going on with the diet.

Mike
And that’s why, like there is a risk to just going down to be even though it’s the easiest, most simplest thing cause it’s just one variable. It’s like you can create new problems. And that’s why I think it’s important to understand what is your risk and versus reward. When you embark on a particular experiment, dietary supplements, etc. and know like, okay, is this risk worth a reward and can I get the benefit without having to do this super extreme thing?

Mike
And again, like I was super gung ho about carnivore at one point, but I had to I like backed off of it after I had a really terrible time and I and I was like, well, why am I having a terrible time and how can I mitigate this? And I think these are some of the ways we talked about to mitigate that and avoid people going into this mean like, well, now I can only beef and also avoid people or help people who are in that state and say like, well, how can I transition out of this?

Mike
And that’s that was the point of the budget.

Ethan
I think it’s just a really tough spot to be in for someone like Jordan Peterson or anybody else who’s kind of run into this issue now where they can’t really tolerate foods without having some problematic symptoms. So, I mean, we tried in the podcast, right, to get some of the best strategies to, like, reintroduce things and, implement stuff in a stepwise ashes fashion versus going full bore into the carbohydrate arts and everything.

Ethan
Like we see a lot of people do. So I encourage everyone to maybe try some of the things we talked about. And here this was a really interesting podcast for me to do, just because of how invested I am into this, topic. So I don’t know if there’s anything you want to say before we before we hop off.

Mike
Yeah, I just I’m going to make a YouTube video going through like, the specific mechanisms and studies that I discussed that with the research behind it. And also like lay out the steps for a potential, like recovery out of the carnivore hole for people. So stay tuned for that. And then with that, you know, if anybody wants to find me, they can find me here on the Mike babe YouTube.

Mike
Or they can find me at my website, mike.com. And then what about you, Ethan? Where can people find you?

Ethan
I’m on Twitter and Instagram at Ethan Underscore. Right. That’s where I’ll be. And then obviously you’ll find me here, every single week doing the podcast with Mike. So we will catch you next week.

Mike
That’s everybody next week.

Ethan
All right.