Hello, everyone, and welcome to Healthy Living interviews. I’m your host, Doctor Andrew Kaufman. I’m very excited about today’s guest, Doctor Ken Berry, who is a family physician and more well known as a carnivore and Ketivore doctor who has a very large presence on social media, especially YouTube, and has put out some very high quality information. And today we’re going to talk a bit about some of his work and his opinions on men’s health issues. So welcome to the stage, Doctor Barry. Hey, thank you, Andy. Good to be on with you. Appreciate you having me. Oh, my pleasure.

I’m glad you could be available. I know you have been around talking about this material for quite a while, and I know based on my own experience, what the mainstream allopathic medical system is like with respect to nutrition and a lot of misinformation. So I was curious, how have you been affected speaking out largely against the mainstream? Well, in the first few years, when I started to kind of go against the standard of care, I got several visits from my state medical board and got a few slaps on the wrist from them, which I was happy to take because I felt what I was doing was helping my population of patients.

And these days, you know, I get kickback from vegan influencers and people like that, but I haven’t heard from anybody that’s meaningful. I resigned my membership in the American Medical association because I don’t feel like they help patients or doctors in any meaningful way. And so I don’t really care what they think or any of the other organizations or associations that are involved with medical care. So I really, at this point, I don’t care. I have a small practice where I still see patients, but that’s the smallest part of my income stream. I actually see patients for free now, my small patient panel, I have some homebound patients who I see.

I just go to their house and see them for free. I don’t file any insurance or anything because it’s just not worth it. But I do that to keep my skills. And also there’s just some people who need me to be their doctor. Not taking new patients before anybody. Well, I’m sure there’s plenty of demand out there for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t want to create a pipeline here. Exactly. And so I care less and less as the years go by, what the American Diabetes association or the American Medical association say care or think, because they’ve obviously sold out to organizations with deeper pockets than me or most of your viewers, they could care less what we say or think they’ve got their own agenda, and I’m not interested in that.

Well, I really appreciate your candid reporting about the ADA and about dialysis and various other criticisms, because if we really look at some of the nutritional concepts that you and others have been talking about, we can see that there are probably no need for many of those services or interest groups because all of this illness can be reversed. Exactly. The vast majority of chronic medical disease in modern society, 80% of that comes from diets, if not 85 or 90%. And so just by helping people correct their diet, and it’s not complicated, it’s very simple. Once they get the core concepts of what I call a proper human diet, once they get those core concepts and they apply them for just a few weeks, they don’t need to be sold anything else.

But they’re like, oh, man, I feel better already. After just a few weeks of this, my chronic medical conditions are starting to lessen. My lab work is starting to improve. There’s nothing else to sell them. There’s nothing else that needs to be done. They just need to stop eating junk. And that’s actually, mainstream media goes out of their way to conflate that and to muddy that water, because for many people, they get, oh, okay, so I need to stop drinking Pepsi, stop eating cheetos and ding dongs. Yes. Everybody agrees with that, except for the Tufts school of nutrition.

They give the cheetos a green light because they don’t have any cheese in them. I don’t know. You know? But. And so. But most people, they’re like, okay. So then they fall into the trap of the false solution. And for most people, that they’re like, okay, I’m going to stop the Pepsi and the ding dongs and the Cheetos. I’m going to replace that with lots of whole grain bread and lots of fruit smoothies, lots of fruit juice and a plant based diet. And they want. For some people, they get a little bit less sick, right? Less uncomfortable, less miserable.

But it’s not the watershed moment that they were looking for. And some people, including me, I used to have suffered from severe obesity and pre diabetes. And when I adopted the American Diabetes association dietary guidelines, I actually became more pre diabetic and gained a few more pounds. And so you can see. You can see that most people are like, okay, I stopped the Pepsi and Cheetos and ding dongs, and I started this stuff that all these gurus are saying, it’s healthy. I’m drinking a gallon of fruit juice smoothie, a day, and I’m eating a loaf of whole grain bread a day, but I’m not getting any better.

Well, that you’ve been tricked. You’ve been given this false solution. That’s not the solution. And so in my journey to kind of rediscover what the heck is a proper human diet anyway, it took, you know, for a while I focused on the nutrition research, but I quickly realized nutrition research is a joke to every other branch of science. Indeed, many physicists and mathematicians and people in the harder biological sciences, when they develop diabetes and they’re like, crap, I can’t have this. I got to reverse this. And they start looking at the nutrition research. They say things like, nutrition research is a joke.

It’s worse than a joke because it’s not funny because it’s actually causing harm. That’s. That’s. And so I quickly started looking in, into the fields of archaeology, anthropology, paleoanthropology, and in those fields, it’s. It’s very clear what human beings have eaten for the longest period of time in our existence on this planet. And it ain’t fruit juice, smoothies and whole grain bread. That’s not the solution. And so that’s a big part of what I’m trying to do, is say, yeah, put down the Pepsi and ding dongs and cheetos. Yes, stop eating that and also stop smoking.

Duh. But then I try to help walk people through the avoiding that false solution where they’re like, no, I’m eating, you know, real organic, non gmo food, and I’m not getting any better. Well, that’s because you’re still eating a diet that’s far, far, far too high in carbohydrates. You got to cut the carbohydrates because human beings are, by design, low carbohydrate mammals. If you feed us too many carbohydrates, we will gain fat, we will start to develop hyperinsulinemia, chronic inflammation, and all the chronic diseases of modern society. Right. And don’t forget tooth decay, which is a very significant window.

Right. Right into the body. So you made, you know, a number of really important and excellent points here about, you know, especially about your macronutrients. I wanted to, in our limited time, talk about one of the basic diets that you’ve put out there into the space, the so called b, b and e diet. Right. Which is beef, butter, bacon and eggs. Yes. And I’m actually currently on this diet myself. I’m into the third week, and I’ve done other forms of carnivore and meat and fruit diets over the last year and a half. But I’m just curious.

And also I have a group of members who are all doing this diet, maybe close to 100 of them, and they have a lot of questions. So maybe we can start off, how did you formulate this and what was your intention? So my wife Nisha and I actually came up with this. What we wanted was something that was easy to remember, rolled off the tongue very easily, but also had the macronutrients and also had the micronutrients that your body would need. And keep in mind that the yolk of an egg contains every single thing needed to make a complete chicken.

And so when you eat the yolk of an egg, you’re eating nose to tail chicken, right. You’re eating everything that’s going to make the brain, the liver, the kidneys, everything. And so especially pastured eggs that are truly pastured and allowed to eat bugs and worms and whatever they want to eat. That, that’s, that’s a literal multivitamin. And so if you, if you can get pastured eggs, along with the beef and the butter and the bacon and then all those, you want to be as pastured as much as you can afford, because the price starts to go up very quickly, but you’re not going to develop any vitamin or mineral deficiencies.

And let me just add that it’s cheaper if you buy from a local producer of the egg. 100%. 100%. And I highly encourage everybody, find a local rancher, find a local person that’s got 20 hens in the backyard, buy your food from them, because that’s actually the best quality food that you can buy on the planet for you personally. And so beef, butter, bacon and eggs, obviously, it, you know, it’s sing song. You can remember that. It’s easy. And the, what I was trying to fight against was all of the keto products, because I think a proper human diet, depending on where you are in life, what your age is, your metabolic health, your hormonal status, your gut microbiome, perhaps you can eat a whole food, low carb diet in the grain for some people.

Other people need to cut the carbs even more and be ketogenic, right? But it still needs to be whole food ketogenic. Same for keto vore, which is even lower in carbs. And then carnivore is the ultimate. That’s as low carb as you can go. So many people, they’re like, okay, I’ve heard so many success stories about keto. I’m going to try this. And so they proceed to go to the supermarket and buy keto bread and keto cookies and keto cake and keto pie and keto pancakes and keto shakes and keto bars. None of that’s. None of that’s what I’m talking about.

And so it’s hard to fake beef, butter, bacon and eggs. Right? It’s hard to fake that. Nobody’s going to try to pretend like they’ve created a fake egg and nobody’s going to fall for that. Right? But a lot of people fall for keto bars. They’re like, okay, says keto on the package. And so we were trying to fight against that because I think that most keto treats are hyper palatable. They’re going to cause you to eat too much food. You’re going to eat past your point of satiety. And especially if you’re trying to lose weight, that’s going to, that’s going to slow down your results.

Even if it’s the macros or keto, you’re still going to eat too much food, too many molecules, too many atoms, because that’s when, you know, when you get on the bathroom scale, you’re not weighing energy, you’re weighing atoms. That’s what you’re weighing is your mass, and that’s made up of atoms. And so this way, beef, butter, bacon and eggs, you can eat to satiety. You can eat as many times a day as you want, you can eat as much as you want, and you’re still going to improve your health. And I’ve actually had people take me up on this as a challenge.

One guy bet me a $1,000 that he could gain weight eating nothing but beef, butter, bacon and eggs. And I said, okay, if you can sustain a weight gain over 90 days, I’ll give you $1,000. Couldn’t do it. He lost 20 pounds. He’s like, I hate you, Ben. But he also says that, I hate you, but I also love you. Thank you. And so that’s the beauty of beef butter, bacon and eggs. It’s so simple. It’s so easy. You don’t have to portion control or calorie count. You just eat meat and eggs until you can’t eat another bite.

And then you go outside and play. That’s as simple as it gets. So this begs the question then, why bacon? Yeah. So bacon’s got a perfect fat to protein ratio, so usually one to one. And if many people, when they eat beef, they’re going to buy the lean cut, right? And so we kind of threw bacon in there so you could be getting that healthy animal fat. And plus, people love bacon and they’re very happy when they’re given liberty to eat as much bacon as they want. They’re like, so I can eat all the bacon I want? Yes, yes, absolutely.

But that’s been, my go to has been leftover bacon in the fridge. There’s nothing better than cold bacon. I’m sorry. There’s just nothing better. So what about the sugar in bacon? Yeah. So the two things, if you, you’re going to always look at the total carbohydrate count of anything you buy at the supermarket, right? If it’s less than 1 gram of total carbs, number one. And number two, it’s a rational serving size because not one strip. That’s exactly right. Because that’s how a lot of keto food manufacturers trick you. They’re like, only. And they’ll count net carbs, right.

Only two net net carbs. And then the serving sizes is a mic, you know, a micrometer amount. It’s like, come on, dude, I’m a grown human. I want to eat until I’m full. And so if it’s three strips of bacon and it’s less than 1 gram of total carb, that what that means is they use some sugar in the curing process, but there’s not a meaningful amount of sugar in the bacon. Does that. Now, if it’s one slice of bacon and it’s less than 1 gram of carb, it’s too much sugar in that. But if it’s a rational portion and it’s less than 1 gram total carbs, that’s, that’s not going to matter to the health improvement of 99% of the adult population.

And I suppose, too, if it’s too difficult to find that you can buy a pork belly and just salt cure your own bacon, right? That’s pretty simple. Or you can even use the celery powder or the nitrites. I’ve heard you talk and debunk about some of the safety concerns with those preservatives. Do you want to say anything about that? Yeah, sure. So the nitrates and the nitrites that we have been using to preserve and cure meat, we’ve been doing that for over a thousand years. Okay, so first of all, doesn’t make a lot of sense that all of a sudden our cancer epidemics and our obesity, type two diabetes epidemics, kidney failure, liver failure, those things just started a few decades ago.

So it’s probably not the nitrites and nitrates. We’ve been using that for a long damn time. Right. Number two, there actually, there are pharmaceutical companies that are trying to. They’re doing experiments with nitrates because it’s converted to nitric oxide in your body. Your salivary glands actually secrete nitrates that you then swallow. Like, we make these things. These are not dangerous things that the human body would make them. But there are pharmaceutical companies that would love to get an FDA approved patented pill that’s pure nitrate because it would lower your blood pressure. And they’re studying that right now.

But then. And so then the question is, well, what if it’s nitrates from celery powder versus just nitrates? Is that magically better? Well, it’s the same damn molecule, so that doesn’t make any sense. Your body can’t tell the difference where the nitrate came from. It’s good for you. It’s gonna. It’s gonna increase the levels of nitric oxide in your body, which is a good thing. It lowers your blood pressure and does many other beneficial things. It doesn’t matter. And so. And then also in the United States, companies can use celery powder full of nitrates, cure the bacon with it, and then put on the label nitrate free legally.

So it’s just as bad as Cheerios. Putting cholesterol free when they. It doesn’t contain any animal products. Exactly. It’s like, well, duh. Yeah, but. But a lot of people, they believe the nitrate free, and they believe nitrates are dangerous. The celery cured bacon actually has a higher nitrate content than traditionally cured bacon. And so if you’re truly afraid of nitrates, which you shouldn’t be, then don’t. Definitely don’t eat the bacon cured with celery powder. And, you know, possibly one of the reasons that we use celery in certain situations could even be partly related to that property of it, like using it to stuff a chicken or a turkey, for example.

Sure, sure. And celery, you know, celery, 15,000 years ago, looked. Looked nothing like the celery we have today. It’s been cross bred and selectively bred for generations to be this huge stalk that some people find tasty. I don’t really like it myself, but, yeah. And so we’re going to incorporate that because it’s. It’s cheap and easy. Calories, not many, but you can get a few in there, and it gives a great distinctive flavor to the food. I don’t think celery is bad for you. Also, don’t think that traditionally cured bacon is bad for you. I just think that there’s a lot of obfuscation going on there trying to pretend like it’s nitrate free when it’s actually nitrate rich.

Right. So why not include other cuts of pork in the diet? Is it because they’re too lean or. Yeah, they’re too lean. And so when I say bacon, pork belly is fine, hog jowl is fine. Any, any one to one fat to protein ratio is fine. The, my biggest problem, although some carnivores gurus will, will say that pork is bad because it’s got, it does have a higher omega six to omega three ratio. That’s absolutely true. But if you’ve eliminated the vegetable seed oils from your diet, you’ve eliminated 90% of your omega three or omega six intake.

Right. So for the vast majority of people, having occasional chicken and pork is totally fine. It’s not going to slow down your health improvement in any way. But most pork is not, doesn’t have enough fat. It’s very, very lean meat. Now, I’m not sure if you’ve heard Paul Mason on this subject. He pointed out also that the omega six in meats is generally not oxidized, whereas once it’s expelled from the seeds into the seed oil and it hits the air, it becomes oxidized, and that’s really the toxic form of it. So would you agree? Yeah, and I think he’s very close to correct on that.

There may be more nuance to that than we currently understand, because back in the early 20th century, we stopped doing any meaningful nutrition research. It literally is meaningless now. And so there are a lot of questions that we just don’t know the answer to because we stopped doing the research. But I don’t think for the vast majority of your followers that if you include some pork and some chicken, it’s not going to have any detrimental impact on your health as long as you’ve stopped all the vegetable seed oils. And what about your opinion on seafood? I know that you do advocate for sardines, but I haven’t heard you talk about shellfish or fish at large.

I think any seafood is completely fine. Keep in mind, we were trying to come up with something people could remember easily that was affordable for most people. That was something you would see at any supermarket. I’m a big fan of seafood as long as it’s unbreaded and not fried in vegetables, seed oils, every. We’re about to go to London to speak at a conference and we’re going to eat a bunch of sashimi while we’re there. We love it. So I hope they have the fatty tuna, because that’s brilliant. But I love ro and caviar. All the seafood, I think is fine.

That’s awesome. Because if I can’t have bread, the best way I like to get my butter is with crab legs. Absolutely. Yeah, crab legs are fine. That’s fantastic. So, really, there is a lot of variety that you can incorporate and still keep this extremely low carbohydrate diet. But it is, like you said, key to make sure that you get a substantial amount of fat. Are there any ruminant beef or lamb cuts, maybe besides ribeye that you especially recommend to get a good, fatty piece of meat? Oh, yeah. And it’s actually very affordable. Just get ground beef or minced beef and try to, try to buy the 70 30 if you can get it.

80 20 is not fatty enough for most people, 70 30 is great. And then after you’ve, after you’ve cooked the beef, a lot of people are like, well, you’re draining off all the grease. Well, maybe you are, but I’m not because I’ll take a couple of eggs and put in there and scramble in the grease and capture a lot of that grease. And so people think grease is a dirty word. They think, oh, that’s unhealthy. But if it’s grease, for God’s sake, why would you eat that? No, it’s healthy animal fat. That’s what grease is. So you want to eat that as well? Well, I’ll give you a little culinary tip, that if you make bone broth from beef bones and put a couple of marrow bones in there.

Yes. You get a fat in the refrigerator. Right. And if you cook with that, it’s some of the best tasting animal fat that you can cook with. Like, almost as good as bacon grease. Yep. Love it. Love bone broth. I actually raise sheep here on the farm, and we’re about to send some to market. I used to think that just meant the sheep were going shopping back when I was a kid. Now, I know differently, but we’re gonna. We’re gonna have them keep every bones and they pack them up in one pound pack. They call them soup bones, but we’re gonna make broth out of them.

And it’s some of the most amazing fat that you can get your hands on. Yes. Sounds incredible. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk a bit about men’s health with respect to nutrition, or you’re free to actually talk about anything with respect to the condition that we face as men in our society. So maybe start off. What do you think are the biggest issues that we face in our health or in a larger sense at the present time? Well, there are many, but we’ll just. We’ll keep it today in our discussion to the physiological.

We won’t get into the societal or the mental. The main problem is men are not eating a diet that optimizes their testosterone, that optimizes their muscle mass, that optimizes their bone strength, and that optimizes their prostate and testicular health. They’re following a plant based diet. And when I say that, people think that’s something that people are doing on purpose. But, you know, Andy, that’s not true. That if you just go to the average fast food restaurant and order one of their value meals, right, that’s plant based. You’re gonna have. You’re gonna have fries, you’re gonna have a bun, you’re gonna have sugar filled ketchup.

You’re gonna have a soft drink. All that stuff’s plant based. You’ve got just a little tiny piece of meat in there, and people will say, oh, that’s not. Yeah, that’s 70 or 80% plants that you’re eating. And just because there happens to be a tiny little slug of meat, that doesn’t mean it’s a meat based diet. The average American is already eating a plant based diet. 70% of their food energy comes from plant sources. And so they’re trying to tell us that the solution is to eat more plant based. Really? What it. Where’s the cutoff? Is it 85, 90% plants? Where do we get the benefit? Because Americans are already eating plant based.

And so for most men, if they just cut the majority of the carbohydrates out, start eating lots of lots, lots more fatty red meat and egg yolks, their health is going to improve by every measurable metric, not including sexual function, sexual desire, sperm count, if that. You know, if you want to have a higher sperm count, start eating meat. I promise. More and more fertility specialists are starting to recommend this to their patients, both men and women who are trying to get pregnant. You got to eat the fatty red meat. You got to eat the egg yolks.

That’s where fertility is at. And if you think about this anthropologically, most cultures called plants fallback food, poverty food, starvation food. That’s what they literally called it. And so if you could get fatty meat and eggs, that was what you ate. But when you, when you couldn’t get that, you ate fallback foods, poverty foods, which was plants. And so our body has evolved knowing that if you’re eating a diet that’s mostly plants, that’s not a good sign that you’re in a place where you could actually procreate and raise a young one to maturity. And so that’s why so many women have problems with fertility and so many men as well, when they’re eating a plant based diet, is because that’s a literal signal to your body that we’re in.

This is a poverty time. This is a scarcity time. This is not the time to be procreating, but that signal from ready, uh, fatty red meat, all the fatty cuts of meat and the. The egg yolks, that is a signal to your body. We’re in a time of plenty. This is a great time to get pregnant. This is a great time to try to breastfeed and raise an InfAnT, because food is, there’s. It’s plentiful. We got all the micronutrients and macronutrients that we need. LeT’s get knocked up. Well, that’s quite a big revelation. And there’s a lot to unpack there, right.

Because, one, you’re talking about getting enough fat, right? Because fat is what becomes testosterone. And of course, it’s nutrient rich, and the fat soluble vitamins are the ones that support, really, the main growth. Right. Of children and us for bone density, muscle development, all just the structure of tissues. Right. Obviously, the proteins are the building blocks, but then we also have, right, the assault from all the processed carbohydrates that are leading to these metabolic issues and health issues that interfere with some of the higher level of functioning and, of course, don’t provide the correct nutrition. Are there particular plant foods? And I’m kind of baiting the question here, which may specifically assault our masculinity.

And just talk about natural foods here. I know there’s also processed ingredients, but. Sure. So you definitely, if you’re trying to be a fertile male and procreate, you need to be eating a low carb diet full of fatty red meat and egg yolks. No doubt about that. Are there specific plants that have a specific detrimental effect on your fertility? Probably. I don’t think we know for sure because, as I said, we stopped doing meaningful nutrition research decades ago. Number two, if you’re eating too many carbohydrates, that, and they put you in a state of hyperinsulinemia, that’s going to lead to chronic inappropriate inflammation which is going to lead to immune system activation unnecessarily.

And in many cases, your immune system is going to wind up attacking a part of your body. And very often this is the sperm that you’re trying to rep, trying to produce, or it could be the prostate. And so the two biggest things, just talking primarily about prostate health, men are eating too many plants, too many carbohydrates, and they’re eating something else that, that this triggers many carnivores that we should not be eating as human adults. And that’s dairy, okay? Dairy is for baby mammals. It is not for adult mammals. And you can see, I was, I was an animal biologist before I was a doctor.

There’s not a single case of a mammal as an adult seeking out dairy. They never try to nurse from a, from a lactating female. They never sneak into the, you know, the prairie and try to nurse from a buffalo. Milk is so nutrient dense that life always finds a way. There would be a possum or a raccoon or some kind of weasel or some kind of skunk that would be trying to sneak into the herd and get milk. Milk if it were good for adult mammals. And so for many men, they go carnivore and they’re like, yeah, my prostate’s maybe a little better, but not much.

I’m like, dude, you got to cut out the dairy. They cut out all the dairy except for butter or ghee, which is just pure fat. It doesn’t have the potential inflammatory caseins and ways. All of a sudden, the prostate’s back to normal. And so eliminating foods that are not ancestrally appropriate going to make everything better. And for the vast majority of people, dairy as an adult is. It should be off the menu. I know it’s delicious. I love cheese, but it’s not ancestrally appropriate. And for many men, they get better when they eliminate most of the carbs and plants, but they don’t get to where they want to be until they eliminate the cheese and the cream.

That’s very interesting. And you, you feel that it’s, the casein is one of the big constituents and the whey protein. Yeah. And there’s actually multiple caseins in multiple ways in dairy. But we talk about them like they’re just one thing, but, yeah, for many guys, that’s inflammatory enough and that it just keeps the prostate inflamed and boggy, which is going to lead to the BPH and lead to the, to the ED and the other problems that they may be suffering from having prostate inflammation and for some guys, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. For many guys, it’s a big problem.

And I talk about all the time the normal distribution curve because I think that’s very important to understand. Some people call it a bell curve, but that’s a bit inflammatory because of a book that was written a few decades ago. The normal distribution curve basically says that for every biological function, every physiological human thing, there’s a normal distribution. So for some people, the caseins in whey and dairy are exquisitely inflammatory. For others, if they eat too much, it’s a problem. For some people, it seems like they can live on case anyway, and it’s not a big deal.

This is the normal variability in human beings. And so if you’re currently doing keto keto or carnivore, and you’re including lots of cheese and cream and other dairy products, and you’re doing great, keep doing it. I think it’s fine. But if you’re doing keto keto or carnivore and you’re like, no, dude, I still have this main problem, or this thing’s not getting better, it’s time to try 90 days with no, no dairy except for the butter and ghee, because they don’t contain the lactose or the caseins or the whey. I think you might be surprised at the benefits.

Wow. So do you think, or is there any difference if it’s raw dairy or if it’s a two versus a one? I think raw a two is the least bad option. That doesn’t make it good, folks. I’m sorry, but that does matter. I think it’s absolutely. If it’s. If it’s properly handled, trustworthy raw dairy, I think that’s. That’s less bad. And if it’s a two, a two, I think that’s less bad for the vast majority of people. I still don’t think that makes it good, but it does make it less bad, which is in and of itself a small victory.

Right. And I actually have raw a two butter that I use to come by. But it’s, it’s delicious and it’s, you know, it’s way more orange. And it’s also, you know, purely grass fed. Right. Because of the vitamin a in it. Yep. It actually contains a lot of polyphenols and beta carotenoids that you wouldn’t expect to even be in milk, but it actually is. It’s also in. In the flesh of properly fed and pastured animals. There’s all kinds of polyphenol that we would typically think would only come from plants when the animals properly raised and properly fed, they’re actually great sources of most of the polyphenols that the plant based people are always crowing about.

You don’t have to eat plants to get those. Now, when I asked you that question, I think perhaps I could have phrased it better, but I was getting at things like soy that perhaps have phytoestrogens in them. There are a lot of phytonutrients. Now, that’s a synonym for phytochemicals. I think that’s more rational, technical, and honest thing to call them. Phytochemicals, it’s neutral, it’s different from man made chemicals. That’s exactly right. But remember that normal distribution curve? I think some people are much more sensitive to the phytochemicals than other people. Now, plants do not want you to eat them.

That seems self evident. They definitely don’t want you to eat their babies. Also seems self evident. We know that all poisons that we use to kill other humans come from plants. Unless you’re milking the poison glands of a rattlesnake. If you’re going to try to accumulate some degree of poison, it comes from plants. Right, right. Even ricin. Exactly. And so that’s a biological principle. There’s a normal distribution curve for the toxicity of the toxins that come from plants. Also, there’s the other normal distribution curve. Some people are more sensitive. And so when you overlay those two curves, you’re left with, okay, definitely avoid hemlock and nightshade and ricin.

Definitely avoid those, because those kill everybody. But then also for some of us, some of the phytochemicals that even some of the big influencers out there, like Doctor Rhonda Patrick, who I have a great deal of respect for, she talks about them as hormetic stressors. Well, if you take out the hormetic part, it’s a stressor, which means it causes inflammation in your body. Right. She agrees with that, but she thinks it’s hormetic, meaning that it’s somehow good for you to stress with that a little bit. Now, I think cold plunges and getting out in the sun and getting hot and sweaty, those are great hormetic stressors for humans.

But when it comes to ingesting lots of phytochemicals, I’m not so sure that’s a good strategy for long term health. Right. You could make an argument that you could do this with beer to increase your tolerance. Right, exactly. Are you familiar with homeopathy? I am, quite a bit, yes. So I think that hormetic argument may be partly based on the philosophy of homeopathy, where you specifically take a plant that has a certain toxic effect, usually on the body. That toxic effect mimics an illness, but then you give the preparation of that plant, but you dilute it to the point where there’s actually no substance of the plant left in the water, only, like, the imprint.

Right. So in that way, you’re not introducing any direct toxicity, but in this explanation, it’s kind of like, take a little bit of poison, so you’re more resistant to the poison. Yeah. And that. We’ve actually seen that in multiple episodes in history, where you can develop a tolerance to, in some cases of pure poison, you can do that. But in order to develop that tolerance, there actually has to be some of the poison in what you’re ingesting. I don’t think that that water memory of the poison having the toxin having been in the water at one point, but now it’s longer there.

I can’t find any scientific support for that. And I’ve looked diligently, because when I started to put away the allopathic model, one of the other biggest models out there is homeopathy. Right. Homeopathic medicine. I’m like, okay, let me look into this. But the backbone of homeopathy is this water memory. A thousand or a million dilutions, I can’t make that make scientific sense to me. I’ve never found any research that shows any. Any meaningful thing there. And so I don’t talk about it a lot, but I do think that. That there is an argument to be made for ingesting small amounts of actual toxin to build up a resistance to it.

But that. That implies that you’re going to be hit with a big insult of that toxin at some point in the future. And if you don’t ever plan on being poisoned by ricin, then I don’t think there’s really any point in building up a tolerance to. So maybe it’s good for those special forces folks out there. Exactly. Yeah. If you’re a spy, you probably need to build up your tolerance. So lots of toxins, but if you’re just a regular dude or dick walking the street, living your life, you probably don’t need to worry about that. And you probably don’t need to eat an unnecessary amount of plants, either.

Now, I strongly agree with you about looking for incontrovertible evidence that a, you know, type of therapy, even if it’s natural or traditional. Right. That it has to have some benefit that we can ascertain. Have you found some things like that outside of just straight nutrition? Not. Well. There are definitely aspects of a proper human life that, you know, the number one, the sun is not bad for you. The sun is good for you. You need to go out and play in the sun. Human beings have been breathing air, drinking water, playing in the sun, and eating fatty red meat for exactly the same length of time.

And so don’t come at me saying red meat’s bad for me or that getting a tan in the sun is bad for me, unless you also want to propose that breathing air and drinking water is bad for me because we’ve been doing all four for the same exact number of days as a species. How dare you use common sense as a doctor. I know, right? What am I thinking? But I think that’s the years ago, decades ago, when we were first starting to discover antibiotics. Before that, the terrain hypothesis kind of reigned supreme. And I think you may talk about this some.

There were a lot. There was a lot of foolishness in the terrain hypothesis. A lot of foolishness. But also there were many, many nuggets of truth in the terrain hypothesis. So, in other words, if you have healthy terrain, it’s much harder to get infected, to get sick, to get a problem, right? And so then when we found out, oh, penicillin, hey, okay, then everybody whose opinion mattered shifted to the germ model, right? It’s all about the germs. The terrain is foolish. It’s dead, it’s gone. We don’t talk about that anymore. And I think that did a huge disservice to human health when we stopped considering terrain in the overall equation, because I think if you’re not a healthy person, if you’re chronically inflamed and hyperinsulinemic and hyperglycemic, your immune system’s confused because you’re eating this junk diet.

You’re much more likely to develop an infection. You’re much more likely to develop a chronic disease, to develop cancer. That seems self evident to me. But the terrain theory was so thoroughly debunked back then, and the powers that be, the billion dollar corporations, of course, all they want to talk about is the germ theory. The germ model, because you can get an FDA, a patented drug and make a billion dollars if you can get everybody to buy into the germ theory. And so I really see a resurgence of the, the terrain theory way of thinking about human health.

But that’s not to say that I’m whole hog on the terrain theory and completely discount the germ theory. I think the rational middle ground here is to say, yeah, we do have antibiotics that can save your life, and there are pharmaceuticals that can save your life in specific situations. But to completely discount which many registered dietitians do, they’re like, it doesn’t matter what you eat, you can eat whatever you want to eat the rainbow. Eat whatever makes you happy. Eat that. That’s terrible advice. That’s completely ignoring the nuggets of truth in the terrain theory. The terrain model.

You gotta respect the obvious truths in both of those models. If we’re going to reach a point where every human on earth is healthy and happy and also has mental health, you’ve got to have nuggets of truth from both those models. Yeah, well, I mean, absolutely. And, you know, I just realized as you’re describing, that, that really this whole intervention about having a proper diet is all about changing the terrain of your body, because there’s nothing else our body can be made of except what we put in it. Right? So when we, of course, change what we put in it, we change everything else.

And, and we hear about the modern version of this, which is the microbiome, for example. And now it’s widely acknowledged the importance of that in your health, although it’s not, you know, described in the context of the terrain model of medicine, of course. And it is another area where there’s not a business model that lends itself to large corporate interests like you and I as individuals, of course, we can always make a living by teaching people, by helping them with health problems, no matter what, you know, if we tell them to just eat differently, or if we tell them to, you know, grow an herb in their backyard and take it twice a day.

But those big corporate interests, including the food industry, which, you know, has a huge part in this with the cholesterol misinformation and many, many other types of issues. So I think we’re about at the close to the end of your availability. Do you have time for one more question, or do you want to wrap up two to one? So, with respect to healing, I know you’ve heard a lot of success stories of people doing the BBB challenge, doing carnivore in general. So one is, what are the. The biggest surprises you had that someone could reverse a disease? And then do you think that fasting plays an important role in healing as well? Or what’s your take on fasting? Yeah, I’m a huge proponent of fasting.

I’ve got an entire playlist on my YouTube channel about fasting. There’s tons of research showing the beneficial effects of fasting. Now, for some people, a 16 or an 18 hours daily fast, that’s all the fasting they ever need to do. Some people benefit greatly from a 48 day once a week to 72 hours fast every other week. I’m not opposed to any of those. I think if you’re going to fast after 72 hours, you might want to touch base with your doctor, maybe especially if you’ve got diagnoses right, or you’re on medications, you might need to touch base with a dog.

But saying a 48 hours fastest is dangerous, that’s foolishness. Humans have been doing. I fasted for 26 days, two years. Exactly right. We’ve got multiple, multiple documents that humans can do that, that there’s no overt danger. But if you’ve got a list of medical diagnoses and you’re on a list of pharmaceuticals, you might want to check with your doctor before doing longer fasts. There is a 72 hours. That’s not dangerous at all. Doctor Justin. Right. No, there is a real danger if you’re taking like diabetes medications or blood pressure medications that because those problems will reverse if you do a long fast and then you could bottom your pressure or your sugar out.

So that’s the most important risk? Yeah, the most. Well, let’s just say that the healing events that when I was initially seeing them, I didn’t expect were several different body systems. One is bone on bone arthritis. So somebody has had arthritis for so many years that all the cartilage is gone. It’s literally bone rubbing against bone. I never, as years ago, when I was first recommending this to patients, I never anticipated that their pain would go completely away or get better to the point where they would, they had knee replacement, schedule, hip replacement, shoulder replacement. They would call and cancel the appointment.

They’re like, I’m not going to have my joint chopped out if it doesn’t hurt. Why would I? I’m like, diet makes sense to me, but I don’t understand how this diet’s doing that. Another is mental health. The number of people who have reversed decades of depression, anxiety, OCD, schizophrenia. Now there’s actually research showing that a very low carbohydrate diet, if it’s low carb enough, strictly enough, for long enough, there, there are case reports of people who have been institutionalized for a decade. They’re out now living in free society. They’ve got a job and a boyfriend or a girlfriend.

Like, I never would have predicted that you would see that autoimmune conditions, multiple sclerosis, things like that, that you’re like, God, diet, surely there’s no way diet can help that. Now. We’re starting to see case reports now that that low carb is becoming more popular, we’re starting to see case reports of people putting their MS in complete remission. And then I just read a case report where the lesions, the white matter lesions in the brain, are now invisible to the MRI, which I would. I would have bet $1,000. No, this diet does not do that. What I think we’re being faced with is the near miraculous ability of the human body, aka the terrain, to heal and rejuvenate and regenerate and regrow when we stop poisoning it, what is the poison? Obviously, it’s the ultra processed, high sugar, high carb foods that’s obvious poison at this point.

But for many of us, it’s just too many plants in general, because the plants don’t want to be eaten. And they put phytochemicals in their tissue, especially in their seeds, to discourage other animals, aka us, from eating those. They don’t want us to eat their babies or they won’t be able to reproduce. And so I think those are probably the three areas where I’ve seen just virtually miraculous healing. And I’m like, I initially, I couldn’t explain that. But as I continue to dig into the basic human physiology and biochemistry, molecular biology, at that level, when you start to look at glycosylation, not glycation, but glycosylation, when you start to look at deuterium depletion, when you start to look almost at the atomic level, maybe, maybe molecular water, there’s all these things that start to come into play that might explain all this, that might explain why a ketogenic diet, a whole food keto, not the treats or whole food, carnivore keto, or how they’re able to cause these seemingly miraculous healings, I don’t think it’s a miracle.

I think it’s just our body has an innate ability to heal that we never appreciate it. And again, we go back to the discovery of penicillin and the. Now the predominance of the germ theory. The germ theory is kind of rested on the principles that you’re weak, you’re broken, you need pharmaceuticals, you can never get healthy without our help. Big pharma, it’s just impossible. Obviously, that’s not true, or we’d be extinct as a species because we’ve only had big pharma for a few decades, so that can’t be true. And so when you start to look at all this through an ancestral lens, what about 50,000 years ago? What about a hundred thousand years ago? We didn’t have Pfizer or Merck, Eli Lilly.

We didn’t have any of those guys. How did we not become extinct? I think it’s because of this seemingly miraculous ability of the human body to heal. When you stop slowly poisoning it. I think that’s how. That’s how we were not extinct. And I think that’s how all of us are going to reclaim our best possible health, is when we realize this terrain is very resilient, unless you’re poisoning it on a daily basis with the foods that you’re eating or the liquids that you’re drinking. Well, I couldn’t agree more, Ken, and I think that’s a. A perfect way to wrap up this very interesting and insightful discussion.

So you mentioned that you’re going to be speaking at a conference. Is that available virtually, or are there any other announcements? It’s the PHC conference in London. There are virtual tickets available, although I think sales are going to close here in the next day or two. I’ve got thousands of YouTube videos that I’ve been making for about the last eight years now trying to help people understand this. If I’m feeling especially snarky, people can find me on Twitter. If I’m feeling loving and helpful, you’ll find me on Facebook and Instagram. I’ve got a book called lies my doctor told me.

I’ve got another book called Kicking Ass after 50. And I’ve got a book that I think a lot of your people might be interested in called common sense labs. They’re all available on Amazon, and I’m working on three other books right now. I’m always trying to work to either give away the knowledge like I do on YouTube, or to sell it for as cheaply as I possibly can, because everybody deserves good health. But, you know, not everybody’s got enough money to just be throwing it away. Absolutely. No, it’s important. Education is my main mission, so I really resonate with that.

And I appreciate all the effort and information you put out. Certainly helped me learn a bit and get, get on this path as well. So my gratitude, Dr. Berry, for coming and spending this time educating the audience out there like you’re always. Oh, it’s been a pleasure, Andy. Thanks so much for having me. All right, well, we’ll see you, everybody, next time on healthy living interviews.
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